Last night I watched a Taiwanese movie called Campus Confidential on TV. It's so ridiculous I have to tell you guys about it.
The movie starts out like your typical young-people romcom. There's a girl who's the most beautiful girl at her university, dating the captain of the basketball team, and hates otaku and thinks they're disgusting. One night she's walking along the lake on campus, and suddenly she notices the lake's water drains away. She slips on the mud and falls into the dry lake. An otaku passes by, notices she fell into the muddy lake bottom, and goes down to help her, but in the dark she mistakes him for an attacker and runs away.
The next morning, the whole campus is rife with rumors that the lake drained last night, and that there's a campus legend about the lake, namely that if a boy and a girl encounter each other at the lake when the water has mysteriously disappeared, then the two of them will be bound for life. The legend is well documented in books, in photographs, on the web, etc. The girl starts encountering the otaku guy all over campus, at first being repelled by him, but gradually realizing he's a good guy underneath his unattractive exterior.
So far so good, it's your typical "girl learns to overcome prejudices and will end up with the Hollywood-homely but otherwise nice guy" story. Nothing groundbreaking. The movie doesn't even take itself seriously, with increasingly unlikely and coincidental incidents leading to the girl and the otaku encountering each other. For example, in one scene, the girl finds her trash can in her dorm room on fire. She rushes out of her dorm room and grabs a fire extinguisher, accidentally knocking over two other girls' architectural models in the process. While helping these other two girls put their projects back together, a bird flies in through a window and flutters over her head, startling her. She stands up, trips over a bucket of water that the cleaning lady had placed nearby, and tumbles out a window, only to land on the otaku. What a funny series of coincidences, right?
However, at the end of the movie, the girl does end up with the otaku guy, when she suddenly realizes she never really thought about why the lake would drain itself. She goes down to the lake again, and realizes the water smells like chlorine, ie it's from a swimming pool. She goes to the university swimming pool and examines the inner workings with the custodian, who finds that someone's reconfigured all the pipes that fill and drain the pool.
The girl then heads to the library again to re-examine the books on the legend of the lake, and finds that all the books are fake. She then goes to find some of the people she'd talked to about the legend, only to realize that they were all actors hired from the same company. Not only that, many of the incidents that had taken place over the movie were all made possible by actors, eg the two architecture girls and the cleaning lady had all been arranged to be there, to engineer her fall out the window.
The girl rushes to the otaku's dorm room, and finds it's basically a giant shrine to her. There's also detailed plans and models for draining the lake's water into a nearby river and refilling the lake with the swimming pool, as well as a self-built mechanical remote controlled bird (ie, the bird from the window incident). The otaku appears, and tells the girl that he made up the story of the legend of the lake, hired actors to play the necessary parts, created corroborating websites and books, installed a GPS tracking device in the girl's phone so he'd always be at the right place at the right time, and engineered the lake's draining (including repiping the freaking swimming pool and building a remote control bird), just so he'd be able to convince the girl to be with him.
And then they live happily ever after. No, seriously.
Still a better love story than Twilight.
