Maciamo
Decommissioned ex-admin
Registered: July 2002
Location: Austrasia
Posts: 6647
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Review Date: March 28, 2004
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: None indicated
| Rating: 8
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Pros:
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realistic Tokyo, relaxing atmosphere, good acting
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Cons:
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nothing spectacular, but it's normal for a romance.
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Living in Tokyo myself, I had a feeling of intimacy while watching the movie. The city really is as it is in the movie. I have heard people speaking of Japanese stereotypes, but there are hardly any.
The story being a kind of romance in a realistically set Tokyo, there is no spectualar graphics or effetcs, but the atmosphere is relaxing and pleasant enough to make you forget about time completely. The good thing with the story, is that it could happen to anyobody, not just a famous Hollywood actor.
Watch it without big expectations a day you are bored and you won't be disappointed.
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yukio_michael
Koyaniskatsi
Registered: March 2005
Location: Pittsburgh, Penn.
Posts: 1990
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Review Date: May 2, 2006
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: None indicated
| Rating: 9
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Pros:
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Touching, & honest view of being LOST in Japan.
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Cons:
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A bit too much like a music video or fashion shoot.
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Forget all the blather by the so-called defenders of the Asian community, people like the now defunct, lostinracism.org, or Kiku Day, a woman so daft that for all her ardor and uproar levied against the film, she is so zealotrous as to miss the overall point of it the first place.
For anyone who has been anywhere, but especially Japan, feeling outside of the country you are in, while you are in it, this film captivates and touches your want for connection. I've not met a Japanese friend who didn't find the film entertaining and engaging, though I can't speak for everyone...
The film is not an Asian film at all, it is definitively an American film, cut with an almost too-cool soundtrack, from Squarepusher, to Phoenix, to The Jesus & Mary Chain & Kevin Sheilds, it plays almost as small vignettes of music-video, rather than the slow panning dramas of those like Ang Lee, or Edward Yang. But this is exactly the point. The characters realise throughout the film, and with different levels of comprehension, acceptance, and feeling that even in a country as modern and new and seemingly limitless in possibility as Japan, that, to coin a phrase from Edna St. Vincent Millay, that they are locked out, quite possibly as much as they are locked in.
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(flickr: pgh, japan & korea, santa cruz ) (blog: eyesonthewires) (j-rock)
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
-Eric Hoffer.
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