"Winds of September" Review

I woke up extra early from my post-Lindsay Lohan sleep to run (literally) to a screening of 'Winds of September',  a Taiwanese film produced by Eric Tsang,  the first of three 'coming of age' dramas produced together.  (the second is Heiward Mak's  "High Noon",  which we are helping to promote here on alivenotdead.com).  One from Taiwan, one from HK, one from the Mainland.


By the way, I don't think its inaccurate to give the following definition:
Coming of age drama = a bunch of high schoolers have a series of difficult experiences and then the movie ends.

Thats pretty much what happened here...     set in suburban Taiwan in the mid 90's,  a group of seven boys struggling not to get kicked out of school have various arguments, difficult decisions and competing temptations...    

its filmed well and acted pretty well, so it never gets boring.   I guess since the story is a bit low key,  the more interesting thing to me was seeing the attempt to recreate 90's taiwan (I have a bit of nostalgia for pagers and cassette tapes I guess...)  :-P


Only complaint would be the fact that apparently only one of these kids have parents...  (rather I should say only one of their parents is ever shown or mentioned...)

I'll give it a solid 6/10.  if I was a high school student I may give it a 7 or 8. :-P