Did you get a face job?

Golden Slumber

Sometimes you can feel the cheapness of a film. No doubt this film was not actually that cheap – I am sure they needed quite a lot of people for the action scenes and there was quite a lot of firework involved as well. What I am talking about is the relative badness of the actors, the holes in the scriptwriting and ultimately the lack of anything that you’d expect from an “indie film”. There are no smart dialogues, no deep or psychologically troubled characters and nothing about the direction or the cinematography suggests anything grand.

All this is not what “Golden Slumber” is about. The premise is simple – our innocent and naive anti-hero is being framed for having killed the prime minister of Japan. While police forces are working against him and trying to catch him, he is getting help from his friends, new and old: His ex-girlfriend, the friend who was coerced into framing him, another common friend a pop star, a co-worker, a serial killer (no joke!), an old hospitalized yakuza etc. etc. Of course it’s not surprisingly that this film is highly unrealistic and most characters except for the main character and his ex-girlfriend are rather crappily characterized, but again, this is not what the film is about. What’s left is a beautiful action story. It’s a little fairytale of friendship, and, unlike so many other films, was able to move my heart. (I almost cried when the lovely serial killer died – that was so sudden and sad!) In many ways, I think this film is a little like Ai no Mukidashi with its sort of bad characters, very energetic yet unrealistic storyline and extreme love for weird characters.

The worst thing about the film is how incredibly unknown it is. It doesn’t even have an English Wikipedia article! None of the actors are particularly known and the director also didn’t really do anything of note. It didn’t seem to have gotten anything like a release within the English speaking world. Nobody knows this movie! I think that’s extremely sad, and I get the impression that there are so incredibly many more movies out there which deserve greater attention but would never get it. It also makes me wonder how I should find these kinds of films if I don’t want to dig myself through the myriads of crappy films at festivals.

Ultimately I cannot help but to a) point out this film’s weaknesses and b) emphasize on how much I liked it personally. Maybe, once in a while, we all love our fairytales and the mystery of friendship is perhaps the one we nourish the most. So, with low enough expectations, this film is a beautiful little gem and a sweet way to spend 2 hours of your life.