Three Films Make A Post: From Embryo To Woman in 4 1/2 Weeks

One Million Yen Girl aka One Million Yen And The Nigamushi Woman (2008): Yuki Tanada's indie drama/comedy (you know the type) with the fantastic Yu Aoi is at its best when it's just calmly and with inconspicuous elegance watching its characters and letting the audience sort out for themselves what to think about what they see. That method kept me pretty happy for about ninety minutes of the two hour running time. Then, the director suddenly seems to remember that she actually wants to make a specific, moral point and calmly and inelegantly begins to just tell the audience what that point is and what they are supposed to think and feel about it in the most mawkish way imaginable.

It's not enough to ruin the film for me (especially since there's a well-meant attempt at breaking up the mood of moral pedantry again at the movie's end), but it drags a film that up to that point was silently brilliant into the realm of the merely good.

Gantz (2011): Somehow, director Shinsuke Sato takes a manga and anime that's so testosterone-driven, sexist and gory that I'm pretty sure it's not written by a human being but by a penis, surgically removes about half the sexism, all the nudity, a lot of the gore and two thirds of the dumbness, and turns it into a pretty entertaining, even clever(!) bit of big budget mainstream action/science fiction.

Sato keeps the story's ruthlessness, as well as the elements that can be read as critical of the juvenile power fantasies that are the basis of Gantz's violence, so that one might at times get the impression that he's just about to really mess with the genre he's working in.

It's still a very mainstream affair though, and so the more deconstructive side of the film has too make room for some J-drama inspired melodrama and rather unconvincing character development for much of the film's last act. I didn't mind, though, because the action's pretty awesome and Gantz still is much cleverer than it needs to be, which is more than you can expect from this sort of affair.

The Task (2010): A bunch of clichés takes part in a reality show where they have to do stupid tasks in a haunted prison. As you'd expect, there's more going on in the prison than the TV crew (who, by the way, are so hard up financially they're making a reality show without having security personnel or a paramedic in place) expected, and the ghost of the prison's warden (trademark: does not like to wear shirts though he really, really should) gets stabby. It all ends in the usual dumb double twist ending. Of course.

If you're burning to see a movie where a total absence of originality and interesting ideas meet overly broad acting and vague technical competence, this will be just the thing for you. Not bad enough to deserve at actual derision, The Task is horror cinema so mediocre it's not even exciting enough to bore properly. Watch this, watch nothing, watch anything - it's pretty much all the same.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,american movies,drama,comedy,sf,action,horror,in short,yuki tanada,yu aoi,shinsuke sato

In short: Moon & Cherry (2004)

College freshman Tadokoro (Tasuku Nagaoka), soft-spoken and shy virgin, joins his new school's club for writers of erotic literature. We are very obviously in Japan.

Learning of the shy guy's virginity, Mayama (Noriko Eguchi), the club's only female member, decides to use him as the real-life-inspiration for her new novel. Seducing our hero isn't too difficult, and keeping his interest isn't either, but Mayama's increasingly strange wishes when it comes to Tadokoro's sexual education begin to make him uncomfortable. It doesn't help his case that Mayama's only interest in him seems to lie in using him where he expects sweet, sweet romance.

After a while, even someone as mild-mannered and inexperienced as Tadokoro starts to feel uncomfortable about the relationship (such as it is), but ending it is quite difficult, for he has fallen in love.

During part-time work, Tadokoro meets perky Akane (Misako Hirata). It seems that Akane and he could have a somewhat more healthy relationship than whatever the thing between him and Mayama is, but Akane's incessant perkiness, niceness and superficiality and the fact that the young man isn't actually in love with her, soon lead nowhere.

Leave it to the Japanese to make a watchable sex comedy. Moon & Cherry isn't "only" a sex comedy, though, it's also a romantic comedy about difficult people without much of an ability to express their emotions to each other without the need of voyeurism and prostitutes.

Although I don't think the film is as good as some of the reviews I read make it out to be, it has a lot of things going for it.

Firstly, there's the film's confident matter-of-factness, the way it seems to look its viewer in the eye and shrug laconically whenever something bizarre happens. This doesn't only amplify the comical effect, but also helps Moon & Cherry avoid the drift-off into the plague zone of erotic comedy, the realm of zaniness.

Most of the film's humour is very dry, and director Yuki Tanada is never trying too hard to be funny. The film also lacks the meanness that makes other specimens of the sex comedy so unpleasant to watch. Sure, Tadokoro's inexperience is the basis for a lot of jokes, but this isn't the sort of film that's pointing and laughing at its characters from a position of supposed superiority. Tanada shows a lot of sympathy for the characters' feelings and their plights.

The only character getting short thrift in this respect is Akane, and she's not so much mocked as viewed with puzzlement. This comes as a bit of a surprise when you keep the love of Japanese pop culture (and fetish culture) for exactly her type of (supposedly endearing) shallowness in mind, yet I believe she's mostly there to demonstrate the film's emotional politics. The emotional point is that complicated people with emotional problems (aka the weird ones) are the ones worth to spend one's life/time with, while the people going through life with easiness just aren't all that interesting once you get to know them. And of course, the good old "follow your heart". Cliché as that might be, I'd wager this is actually a rather good idea when it comes to love.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,yuki tanada,in short,comedy,drama,noriko eguchi,tasuku nagaoka