bruce-samuelson

5 stars. The movie makes it clear from the outset that it's a screwball romantic comedy. The male lead must soon pay $10K to some bad guys who threaten him. The female lead, a wealthy spoiled brat, is running away from an engagement she broke. They meet, and her father hires the man for $10K to return his daughter.

Thus starts a series of adventures and misadventures that follow the standard romcom formula: they start out quarrelling, their personalities clash, and she traipses around with him through the countryside in high heels - de rigueur for this genre.

The outline is very similar to the Mother of All Romcoms, It Happened One Night (1934), which deservedly gets an IMDb rating of 8.2. If the current movie had an IMDb rating, it would be much lower. It's kind of cute, kind of fun, watchable, and clearly low budget, but the romantic chemistry is weak, the characters are poorly developed, and the dialog is superficial even for this genre. I watched it to the end but couldn't give it more than five stars. You're taking a chance when you select these low cost productions without IMDb rating that your movie streaming provider licenses.

6 stars. This is the first IMDb review, and is essentially the same as my review on Amazon Prime, which currently offers Tokyo Girl for streaming in the USA. You can read many reviews there, all of which but mine assign four or five stars out of five, with many positive comments.

I looked forward to Tokyo Girl as a TV series that shows a slice of life I haven't seen before or personally experienced. It is entertaining enough, but what put me off was the shallow, materialistic pursuit of prestige and wealth over those values that give dignity to the human soul such as compassion, integrity, sacrificial love, patience, kindness, honesty, and courage. The actors portrayed their characters well enough, but I just couldn't relate to them. Their lives and struggles are a pale shadow compared to those in the great Japanese cinema from the late 1940s to early 1960s from directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Masahiro Shinoda.

2 stars. The film starts with a torrent of profanity from little kids. It jumps repetitively and monotonously from one dysfunctional scene to another. After half an hour, I hardly knew the main characters any better than at the beginning. There was no plot arch, character development, or anything else to draw me in. There was a lot to drive me away. It's a 92 Metascore, 7.6 IMDb film, so clearly I missed something. The ten star reviewers found beauty where I couldn't. "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."