People like to put themselves in various categories, be it occupation, hometown, star sign, income, physical traits and so forth. Yet the most popular and widely accepted taxonomy in China is by age and year of birth.

Now a low-budgeted Chinese movie Old Boys, targeting the "post-70s and -80s generation" audience, is spreading wildly on the internet. It won millions of hits in only a few days and has aroused enormous nostalgia among Chinese young people.

Directed by 30-year-old Xiao Yang, the first half of the movie portrays high school campus life about twenty years ago. Xiao Dabao and Wang Xiaoshuai are good buddies at school. But one is a dreadful bully and the other is a popular school singer. Yet the two influential figures don't carry their lucky traits into later life. In the latter half when the duo move into middle-age, they find themselves down and out. Life is not easy for them but it might take a turn for the better after a chance meeting with their old school mate, now a Simon-Cowell style TV producer who advises them to audition for his singing contest.

Sponsored by the China Movie Corporation and a leading video sharing website, Old Boys hit the internet together with another ten movies, all of which are directed by young Chinese film directors. Obviously, Old Boys has received the highest acclaim among the eleven works.

But in a strict sense, the 40-minute movie is not a real movie. I would rather call it a good quality virus video in view of its length, distribution medium, and more importantly its style. Not unlike a good student's homework at the film academy, the movie demonstrates adept camerawork and editing skills and also packs in a lot of sarcasm and fun. As most amateurish DIY video enthusiasts would do, the director also upholds the post-modernist sprit and connects the whole movie with ironic dialogue, overly dramatized acting and laughing-to-tears parody and mockery.

But what pushes Old Boys one step further is that the story turns to a depressive and sad tone after all this fun and laughter in the first 20 minutes, and begins to examine the times we live in. It's no exaggeration to say that the movie stands side by side with the history of the past three decades in China. In the 1980s, people only saw the bright side of life with hopeful eyes, since the sluggish economy finally took off. However, when materialism and consumerism take hold of the trends of social thought, it just marks the beginning of people's soul searching and mental distress.

And such a transition in social ethos also synchronizes with the growth of the post-70s and -80s generation from young to mature, which is boiled down into this short movie. Meanwhile, the movie selects such collective memories as pop icon Michael Jackson, Japanese cartoon hero Doraemon, campus pranks, and loose and outmoded school uniforms. No wonder it immediately evoked wide sympathy and massive support from netizens.

Nevertheless, it comes as a bigger challenge to stretch a video to the length of a movie. If Boy Brothers signifies a good starting point for young Chinese directors, we should hope that their real movies to come out soon and break the gerontocracy in domestic movie industry.

On my one to ten movie scale, I give Big Boys a SEVEN as encouragement.