Review: Our Times (2015)

de Greenlemon, iulie 7, 2018

44 55

Memories, Our Times brings back so many memories...
whether you lived it or…not

It's reminiscent of the 90s:

No mobile phones
No computers
No social media
No music streaming
No downloads
No iPods
No online friends
No internet...

... of the days where things were more organic, more simple…

When your mother told you off for spending too much time on the phone with your friends
When you wrote letters to your idols and posted them hoping to get a reply
When you read girly magazines all the time and dreamed about the gorgeous idols you saw on your TV
When you recorded your favourite videos of theirs on VHS and kept pressing the rewind/play buttons incessantly
When you exercised your vocal cords after relentlessly screaming at the TV because the image started to break down as the tape started to erode from the millions of times you watch that recording.
When you cried because the tape got ruined and the video wasn't airing anymore. Why was the tape ruined? Why? Why???

Those were the times where you listened to music on a walkman,
tape after tape after tape

Those were the times where you spoke to your friends on your landline and met up with them after school to go out and your parents didn’t call you to find out where you were because they knew where you were and it was safe to play outdoors and hang out with your friends...

Yeah, the popular kid would always exist, fun, cool, amazingly gorgeous and the bad boy, the epitome of an outcast, exuding this charm one didn’t quite know how to define... Our times....

Those who experienced the 90s one way or another will relate to this movie a lot.

It’s all there!

The wish to go to a concert and not finding tickets
The favourite singer or the favourite band one will always remember with fondness... Andy Lau, yet it could have been Savage Garden, Bryan Adams, Bon Jovi...
The guy you had a crush on in school, that one guy that made your heart beat so fast it seemed like it had a life of its own and would come out of your chest straight into his to show him just how much you cared...

Lee Dino and Chien Dewi

The guy that defended and protected you, the guy, that guy...

Sung Vivian and Darren Wang

Who doesn't have memories like that? Except back then, people didn't normally travel long distances to go to concerts as no one really knew how or where to buy tickets for international music events.

It's pretty hard and challenging to buy a ticket for a BTS concert anywhere, but it's possible. If fans want to go to their concerts in multiple countries, it's possible, back then this would be nearly impossible unless you knew someone who could physically go to a Point of Sale or a Point of Purchase and buy it for you. Plus flights were way more expensive than they are now.

Past & Present... so many things have changed... too many...

The guy you liked became a vintage memory...

The school became work...

The job you worked hard to achieve
The long hours you put in to be hated by your colleagues or envied...
The gorgeous boyfriend that becomes like a "comforting sofa" for you to lay on, instead of the man you’re with... your man instead of a "piece of furniture".
The routine
...and the looking back...
- To the days when you were happy
- When you fought for something that mattered
- When you were with people that mattered
- When you longed for the guy that mattered, realizing that your life resembles nothing to what you then thought it would be, that your adult days are filled with...

A whole lot of emptiness... you look back and see

What you were and what you have become
What you wanted and what you’ve got

You realize that you’re not happy so you decide to take control of your life and start living it the way you were meant to live it all along but life... life that has given you everything had actually not given anything worth to fight for and keep until now.

Our Times was a nostalgic watch and full of cries, although not in a Nicholas Sparks 90 minute tissue box consumption kind of way but more in an evocative memories of younger yesterday years.

Our times were not their times, it was our times, it was not their story, it was our story, our, mine, yours, our story, our times. Maybe if the storyline was set in 2018, maybe if it was set in the early to mid 2000s it might have been different. Different generation cohorts have different experiences i.e. Generation X, Y or Z teenage years were distinct yet, they share some common ground i.e. liking a boy who didn't like you; the rebel boy, grades are some of the things that are identical despite the era.

Our Times is a fantastic homage to a decade that meant a lot to so many girls and still means a lot to so many women. Yes, they might be water way under the bridge but some things still remain pretty much the same nowadays with social media and phones and streaming and the lot... well, the gist of it at least, the idols, the pop culture, the friends, the hot guy, the troublemaker...so you wonder…if our times are really over or if they will never be over, deep inside the heart… in all the amazing fun memories.

Our Times will always be ours, regardless.

It will always be special and will always be part of us whether you’re 20, 30, 40, 50, 50, 70 or 80 years old and that binding friendship that starts when you are young, that love that fills your heart with innocent giggles and those dreams of happiness, those no one can take away from you.