luxury, criminal decadence, martial-arts cops and profiling on the streets of the people's republic of china: WHEN A SNAIL FALLS IN LOVE

it's mainly set in in "lin city" which i think is lin'an near hangzhou

https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/53d0/3459/c07a/805a/9000/003c/large_jpg/owen.jpg?1406153814

^^above info dependent on translations in the subtitles

top marks for writing up their links and theories on normal whiteboard not fancy CSI see-through screens

five episodes and the first time we're in an ordinary housing block: the specific apartment is super-rough but i don't think it's a family home or anything, it's a minor villain's pad/lock-up

my main complaint abt this otherwise extremely absorbing show is that it's VERY SLOW

(i suppose given the series title this may be a deliberate directorial choice)

(this is the first chinese TV series i've ever watched so i have no comparison)

it just struck me that i don't think there's been the slightest hint so far that such a thing as the CPC exists and would presumably in some sense be part of this story* (i have no idea how, it's a thing i'd like to find out)

*the Ye corporation, round which the various crimes in this show to date have been centred, has among other things recently lost 1.7 billion yuan in overseas trading (= c.£1.9 billion i think, so an appreciable amount even in so vast a country)

capt ji: "i'm an officer of the law. i only believe in evidence, not stories" (this is vey grissom: "evidence doesn't lie")

lol xu xu gets stabbed every other episode

oh no wait it's capt ji this time

excellent cokehead (coke is not mentioned)

capt ji to xu xu: "you may be small but you've got lots of flaws. monsters don't have a gender"

(he is beginning to fall for her hard)

drugs and trafficking have now become a storyline btw: we've seen the coke but no one has called it coke

i’m reaching around for something to watching after trying and failing almost immediately to watch mcmafia, and find myself gradually falling into the idea of the snail’s web...

\o/

e11: in which shit gets very real :0

(also crystallised my feeling that the makers are keen fans of the cumberbatch sherlock -- this is not at all as tricksy and glib as that but the way it framed the new villain…)

mcmafia is trash and not in a good way - apart from some really outstanding acting from russians i'll most likely never see in anything ever again :/

i will hit this

\o/ \o/

i caught the first ep and this seemed like any other chinese drama lol. i'll keep at it though

i have watched seen no other chinese dramas ever!

(except jackie chan films and ZU WARRIORS OF THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, which were mostly made in pre-handover hong kong)

e12 is the slowest yet: ALL FOUR OF YOU JUST FUCK ALREADY, OMIGOD

love 2 see multiple burmese guards with machine guns overcome with good old-fashioned unarmed martial arts skills

(myanmar is portrayed as a corrupt third-world wild-west kind of a country: picturesque and with good put-upon people pushed around by its military -- or at least by corrupt elements in the military)

fake blood is very orange in this show

ji bai n xu xu love interlude scored by (eng lang, mild-mannered country) cover version of tim mcgraw's "where the green grass grows"

and that's it