Japanese cinema leaves me unimpressed.
I have never been much of an Anime fan. I love animation, I just never really digged on the Japanime. I did like Dragonball Z when I was a kid, and I had the original 150 Pokemon memorized, like all 13 year olds did back in the day, but I wasn't a crazy man about it.
That's not to say I was one of those assholes who completely disregarded anything cartoony and from Japan on the grounds that "they were for nerds". I just never really saw the appeal. I did enjoy several of the more famous Japanime series, as I got older, Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, and I think I may have even delved into some of the weirder stuff, I remember a show called Coyote Ragtime Show that I thought was pretty good mostly because I like space cowboys (they're my fetish).
I have always been of the opinion, however, that Japanese animation was of inferior quality to western animation, in that it lacked creativity and lacked effort. For example, animation was never intended to be a "style". That bastardizes what animation is, as a completely different method for artistic and creative works. Saying that something is drawn "anime style" is like saying "I sculpted this Claymation style". That doesn't make a lick of sense.
But I digress, as if I wrote an article about how Anime is "okay sometimes" it wouldn't be very interesting.
I have limited experience with Japanese films that are live action. What I have seen has been terrible, I'll admit. I saw that god-forsaken action flick with the high-schoolers that had to kill each other or have their heads exploded off by magic necklaces and it was amazingly uninspired. I don't have a single issue with the premise, mind you, I just have a problem with the fact that it was hard to make any sense of it. In short, it was a terrible movie with a horrible plot and awful characters. More recently however, I saw a movie called "A Long Walk", and in Japanese called "Nagai Sanpo". It started out as all bad and sad movies should, an old man staring at a river alone while a single piano note plays every few seconds.
If the movie stopped there I would have felt better about giving it a terrible review but the fact is someone actually probably put at least a little effort into this movie. Pity it turned out so badly for them.
It turns out this guy was some sort of abusive school principle and he slapped his daughter once for shoplifting. I think the director could have done more to establish that this guy was an abusive father. Slapping a daughter for shoplifting seems perfectly reasonable, I gotta admit. Anyway, things happen and now he is on his own. The director lets us sort of guess what happened to make him live on his own in a run down apartment complex, but not in an interesting "two people at a bar talking about elephant-shaped hills" sort of way, more like a "I'm too lazy to fill in plot holes" sort of way.
His neighbors are pretty fucking white trash, I gotta admit. Although it's spread a little thick, the mom being a complete whore, a bartender, having a boyfriend that is an unemployed child-molesting thief, both of whome have alcohol problems, the idea is spread early in the movie that this is a movie about bad people. The parents have sex loudly in the same room as the daughter. The daughter is 4 and steals shit regularly from the store. The old guy, even though he knows some bad shit goes on here, does nothing about it for a long time. Maybe Japan doesn't have child protective services, who knows?
Eventually the father trains up to beat up the boyfriend, kidnaps the girl, kills a baby bird, and they travel together in an attempt to find a blue sky. The old man is doing that, I'd assume, because he feels bad about slapping his kid around (even though the only scene in the movie where he does, she definitely deserves it). They meet up with a teenage boy who was raised in Africa, though racially Japanese. He has a gun. This freaks the old guy out. I found out recently that all fire-arms are illegal in Japan. For no reason whatsoever other than "I don't fit in", the boy kills himself in full view of the girl and the old man. The police are searching for the old man because he is a kidnapper.
The old man is watching the news while a guy is giving him a ride (In Japan, they have TVs in the front of trucks! This fact simultaneously wowed and terrified me). The news tells him that he is wanted, he calls the police and tells them he is turning in the girl in 3 days, they just have to find a blue sky first.
This brings me to the only two even remotely likable characters in the movie, the investigators. Most movies have a character the viewer can relate to and like. Movies that only have pissy characters you despise are bad because we don't like watching people we hate. The investigators don't get much camera time though.
Eventually the girl gets turned in, the police arrest the old man, and all is exactly how one could have predicted it about 30 minutes previous without any interesting deviations from expectation. Yup. Game over man. Swell.
The movie was awful. It seemed to try and shove as much sad and depressing and morbid events as possible into a movie, and made the rest of the movie just an explanation for how the next series of depressing events happened. In the end you felt nothing for any of the characters as they go out of their way to make everyone, including the main two characters, as despicable as possible. I know using an old man and a small child is intended to pull at the two major heartstrings of an audience, however our great and glorious reviewer is immune to the cuteness of children in cinema, especially if those children are as awful as this one was. I swear to god, every time it screamed like some sort of dying rat on fire I just wanted to drive a nail through my eye as quickly as possible, just to make it stop. Also, the fact that the kid was going to the supermarket and crushing snacks and fruits and stuff didn't scream adorable to me, it screamed "problem child". Yeah, I know that it was supposed to be a problem child due to its mom being some sort of slut and her only male role-model being a molestor and thief but christ, the director could have tried harder to make use relate to it in some sort of way. Maybe the directing was more effective at making people cry in Japan, but in America, that's the usual white-trash toodaloo, so you really gotta go out of your way to connect with audiences in a significant way.
The old man pissed me off early in the film for being the neighbor that does nothing, and even when he did do something he did the wrong thing. Just so ya'll know, and I really want to stress this: If you know a child is being the victim of abuse contact the proper authorities, seriously, don't take it on a tour of Japan in search of a Blue Sky. That's just one more thing the kid is going to tell the psych about when it's working through this shit as it gets older. He also apologizes to the little girl every 4 to 5 seconds, which just reinforces bad habits with the girl. It tells the girl that by yelling and being a brat overall it can get its way.
Anyway, far be it from me to judge Japanese cinema as a whole based on this movie. And, if the rest of Japanese cinema is as bad as this, well, then it's just about as terrible as American cinema is anyway. I'll just go ahead and give this movie a solid 2 out of 10, 10 being good 5 being average and 0 being "stock footage with subtitles". If you're into this sort of movie, your own life must be terrible. That is all.
.........................
I own this site. That means I am cool. Do what I say.
That's not to say I was one of those assholes who completely disregarded anything cartoony and from Japan on the grounds that "they were for nerds". I just never really saw the appeal. I did enjoy several of the more famous Japanime series, as I got older, Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, and I think I may have even delved into some of the weirder stuff, I remember a show called Coyote Ragtime Show that I thought was pretty good mostly because I like space cowboys (they're my fetish).
I have always been of the opinion, however, that Japanese animation was of inferior quality to western animation, in that it lacked creativity and lacked effort. For example, animation was never intended to be a "style". That bastardizes what animation is, as a completely different method for artistic and creative works. Saying that something is drawn "anime style" is like saying "I sculpted this Claymation style". That doesn't make a lick of sense.
But I digress, as if I wrote an article about how Anime is "okay sometimes" it wouldn't be very interesting.
I have limited experience with Japanese films that are live action. What I have seen has been terrible, I'll admit. I saw that god-forsaken action flick with the high-schoolers that had to kill each other or have their heads exploded off by magic necklaces and it was amazingly uninspired. I don't have a single issue with the premise, mind you, I just have a problem with the fact that it was hard to make any sense of it. In short, it was a terrible movie with a horrible plot and awful characters. More recently however, I saw a movie called "A Long Walk", and in Japanese called "Nagai Sanpo". It started out as all bad and sad movies should, an old man staring at a river alone while a single piano note plays every few seconds.
If the movie stopped there I would have felt better about giving it a terrible review but the fact is someone actually probably put at least a little effort into this movie. Pity it turned out so badly for them.
It turns out this guy was some sort of abusive school principle and he slapped his daughter once for shoplifting. I think the director could have done more to establish that this guy was an abusive father. Slapping a daughter for shoplifting seems perfectly reasonable, I gotta admit. Anyway, things happen and now he is on his own. The director lets us sort of guess what happened to make him live on his own in a run down apartment complex, but not in an interesting "two people at a bar talking about elephant-shaped hills" sort of way, more like a "I'm too lazy to fill in plot holes" sort of way.
His neighbors are pretty fucking white trash, I gotta admit. Although it's spread a little thick, the mom being a complete whore, a bartender, having a boyfriend that is an unemployed child-molesting thief, both of whome have alcohol problems, the idea is spread early in the movie that this is a movie about bad people. The parents have sex loudly in the same room as the daughter. The daughter is 4 and steals shit regularly from the store. The old guy, even though he knows some bad shit goes on here, does nothing about it for a long time. Maybe Japan doesn't have child protective services, who knows?
Eventually the father trains up to beat up the boyfriend, kidnaps the girl, kills a baby bird, and they travel together in an attempt to find a blue sky. The old man is doing that, I'd assume, because he feels bad about slapping his kid around (even though the only scene in the movie where he does, she definitely deserves it). They meet up with a teenage boy who was raised in Africa, though racially Japanese. He has a gun. This freaks the old guy out. I found out recently that all fire-arms are illegal in Japan. For no reason whatsoever other than "I don't fit in", the boy kills himself in full view of the girl and the old man. The police are searching for the old man because he is a kidnapper.
The old man is watching the news while a guy is giving him a ride (In Japan, they have TVs in the front of trucks! This fact simultaneously wowed and terrified me). The news tells him that he is wanted, he calls the police and tells them he is turning in the girl in 3 days, they just have to find a blue sky first.
This brings me to the only two even remotely likable characters in the movie, the investigators. Most movies have a character the viewer can relate to and like. Movies that only have pissy characters you despise are bad because we don't like watching people we hate. The investigators don't get much camera time though.
Eventually the girl gets turned in, the police arrest the old man, and all is exactly how one could have predicted it about 30 minutes previous without any interesting deviations from expectation. Yup. Game over man. Swell.
The movie was awful. It seemed to try and shove as much sad and depressing and morbid events as possible into a movie, and made the rest of the movie just an explanation for how the next series of depressing events happened. In the end you felt nothing for any of the characters as they go out of their way to make everyone, including the main two characters, as despicable as possible. I know using an old man and a small child is intended to pull at the two major heartstrings of an audience, however our great and glorious reviewer is immune to the cuteness of children in cinema, especially if those children are as awful as this one was. I swear to god, every time it screamed like some sort of dying rat on fire I just wanted to drive a nail through my eye as quickly as possible, just to make it stop. Also, the fact that the kid was going to the supermarket and crushing snacks and fruits and stuff didn't scream adorable to me, it screamed "problem child". Yeah, I know that it was supposed to be a problem child due to its mom being some sort of slut and her only male role-model being a molestor and thief but christ, the director could have tried harder to make use relate to it in some sort of way. Maybe the directing was more effective at making people cry in Japan, but in America, that's the usual white-trash toodaloo, so you really gotta go out of your way to connect with audiences in a significant way.
The old man pissed me off early in the film for being the neighbor that does nothing, and even when he did do something he did the wrong thing. Just so ya'll know, and I really want to stress this: If you know a child is being the victim of abuse contact the proper authorities, seriously, don't take it on a tour of Japan in search of a Blue Sky. That's just one more thing the kid is going to tell the psych about when it's working through this shit as it gets older. He also apologizes to the little girl every 4 to 5 seconds, which just reinforces bad habits with the girl. It tells the girl that by yelling and being a brat overall it can get its way.
Anyway, far be it from me to judge Japanese cinema as a whole based on this movie. And, if the rest of Japanese cinema is as bad as this, well, then it's just about as terrible as American cinema is anyway. I'll just go ahead and give this movie a solid 2 out of 10, 10 being good 5 being average and 0 being "stock footage with subtitles". If you're into this sort of movie, your own life must be terrible. That is all.
.........................
I own this site. That means I am cool. Do what I say.
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