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Berlinale 2014, Day 4 (Ninjo kamifusen)

The little one is sleeping, and so I am trying to write a few more Berlinale postings. I want to take these reviews seriously, but I have the distinct fear that it will take me another month to finish them all. There are 20 more to go after all.

Day 4 was Shii’s last Berlinale day, and that is unfortunate because he missed out on quite a few masterpieces. However, generally I would say that the first 4 days had a higher ratio of good movies as opposed to disappointments, of which there really were only two: “We come as friends” and “Ninjo kamifusen”.

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Ninjo kamifusen (Humanity and Paper Balloon)
Japan 1937, Sadao Yamanaka, 86′

Setting: A ghetto in Tokyo. Mori, an evil samurai, forces the daughter of a pawn shop owner into marriage with a man she does not love. At the same time, he tries to get rid of the barber Shinza who is secretly organizing casino games at his place. In order to humiliate him, Shinza kidnaps the girl with the help of his neighbor, who is living in poverty and who has been trying to get Mori’s help in vain.
Death count: 5.

I wasn’t really interested in the story in the first place. I am not a big fan of stories set in the samurai times, both from an optical standpoint (boy those outfits are ugly) and when it comes to characters and stories (I just don’t care for samurai, or prostitutes, or yakuza). But this film fit into our schedule well, and there wasn’t really anything else to see at this time slot. For some reason, I was also drawn to the title of the film – “Humanity and paper balloon” sounds like a great movie, no?

While the paper balloons featured in the film are beautiful and make for a nice mood shot at the end, I didn’t see much “humanity” in the film. In my book, everybody in the film was acting like an idiot, Shinza, that neighbor, the pawnshop’s daughter… were they all having a death wish? Besides a few nice touches, the camera work is mostly shoddy, the quality of the acting is sub-par and the story took a turn to the worse with that kidnapping. It’s even impossible to feel sorry for the characters because I always feel like they could just have acted differently.

To be honest this film made me a little scared of old Japanese films. Perhaps only the great masters used to make good movies after all.

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Berlinale 2014, Day 3 (Ship bun)

All in all, this day 3 was the best day of the Berlinale. I would like to say it was the best by far, but since “The Midnight After” is so amazing, this day is only a little bit ahead. Except for “Calvary”, all of our day 3 films are rather unknown titles, and boy are they awesome and underrated. The better a film is, the more it is difficult to blog about it because of the immense pressure to do the film justice. It’s especially hard for “Ship bun”.

At first, the screening of “Ship bun” did not start in a very promising matter. There were some technical issues delaying the beginning of the screening, which is not nice at a 10pm time slot. Then they made the director give a speech to bridge the waiting time, the film being his first feature film right after graduation you can imagine how awkward and terrible the speech was.

With that said, I want an accreditation and a job in which I can watch as many movies as Mr. Förster here. Even if you only count the new films only, there are 60 of them on this list, so that’s 6 movies per day. O.o Even so, he hasn’t seen “We come as friends”, nor “Tui na”, nor “Arrete ou je continue”, nor “Velvet terrorists”, nor “Praia do futuro”, nor “Nymphomaniac” – the Berlinale just has way too many movies. From my day 3 films, he’s only seen “Ship bun” and didn’t like it. Strange. Maybe he’s too old to understand Generation Praktikum’s struggle with getting a proper job?

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Ship bun (10 Minutes)
South Korea 2013, Lee Young-seung, 93’

Ho-chan is studying to become a program director for TV, which in Korea has a three-stage examination process for most entertainment companies. He is rather seriously minded and aims to produce educational and meaningful content. Unfortunately, as the oldest son in his family, he also has to take care of his younger brother in school, a mother who gets herself into debt and a father who is jobless. To that end, he starts an internship at a public service office and quickly gets an offer to become full-time due to his diligent nature. However, things go awry when someone else gets the job instead and his work life becomes hell.
Death count: 0.

Both Pixelmatsch and Shii wanted to see this film, and I thought it was the most promising sounding South Korean entry this year. Even so, the film absolutely exceeded my expectations. Rarely have I seen a film with so much truth. It hit home more than any other film I have ever seen at a Berlinale, and that is amazing because it’s not a love story and we all know love stories are my life. So many young people start out with dreams but then end up in a hellish office, so many are stuck in internships in which they have to do everything but never get acclaimed for their good work but blamed for mistakes. Shii aptly observed that there are few films on normal people’s workplace drama, and luckily this rare gem does justice to its topic masterfully The film subtly shows the shift of Ho-chan’s co-workers from nice but silly colleagues who want to help him to betraying bitches who humiliate him to save themselves. In fact, while Ho-chan doesn’t have much choice in what he does, the depiction of the colleagues really make the film interesting. While they are by no means likable people, you can easily see that they are not bullying for fun or just for the sake of it, but they actually try to do things in what they think is the right way and all they want is to save their own positions – at the expense of others. It’s despicable because it’s so human.

If you can read German and are OK with being spoilered, this is a surprisingly good review on the film. Most notably, I thought the analysis of the film’s cinematography was totally spot-on. Indeed the film mostly uses very sparing effects or rather almost no effects at all, but that completely changes at the very end, when Ho-chan makes the decision to quit. Ever since that crucial moment until the open end of the film, Lee Young-seung uses over-dramatized, almost action-movie-like camera angles and slow motion shots, suggesting that Ho-chan’s opinion on this place has changed for good. In my interpretation, I take this as a sign that he is leaving the place for good. The only aspect I do not agree with the review is the reference to the Berliner Schule – in my book, “Ship bun” is nothing like it, and it’s not like the Berliner Schule monopolizes scarce camera effects. I have doubts that Lee Young-seung even knows about the Berliner Schule, it seems like a purely German thing without much international impact.

I came out of the film thinking: “Thank goodness I don’t have to work in an environment like that anymore”. But for most people my age, this is reality, and that makes this movie so awesome. I will definitely follow what Lee Young-seung does in the future.

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Berlinale 2014, Day 3 (Calvary)

This movie was something special. Originally, I completely overlooked this film. Without Shii, I would never have realized that this was the new McDonagh. Then, we arrived way too late at the Zoo Palast to get tickets for this film, but then Pixelmatsch randomly realized that there was another open ticket booth with virtually no line. And thus, we saw the international premiere of “Calvary”.

The director was present, and was made to go onto the stage, so he said: “It’s boring to listen to a director talking about his movie for 5 minutes. I think it’s a good movie, and I hope you do too. Enjoy.” Actually his first comment about the huge Zoo Palast theater was “I love these curtains. These are the best curtains I’ve ever had. They’re like Vincente Minnelli curtains.” Brendan Gleeson was also there and virtually refused to say anything about the film at all. He sat in the front row of the second part of the theater, and I mustered up my courage to walk to him to ask for an autograph. According to Shii and Pixelmatsch, the whole audience behind us was staring at me while I did that… uh oh.

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It says: To Felicia, Best wishes, B… G…

To be honest, this was my first autograph experience ever, and such a brazen one since it was not an autograph session, instead I probably surprised the poor guy with it. He looked quite grumpy (not just towards me but the entire time, in fact) and I got quite giddy when he looked me in the eye saying things like “What’s your name?” before writing a dedication into the copy of “The Master and Margarita” that I handed to him. A part of my brain melted and I acted like a 14-year-old, which surprised me; despite my adoration for Mr. Gleeson and his work, he’s an old man and not exactly “my type”. So my reaction was a little intense. What would have happened if I had asked Wagner Moura for an autograph instead? Would I have dripped from between my legs? *insert sarcastic smile here*

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Calvary
Ireland/UK 2014, John Michael McDonagh, 100’

James is a Catholic priest in a small Irish town by the sea. One day, a regular of his church comes to confession and declares that he had been repeatedly raped by a priest when he was 7 years old. In order to seek revenge, he will kill a good priest, namely Father James, and announces that he will leave him a week to sort out his life. Over the course of these seven days, we see how James interacts with the villagers as well as his daughter who comes to visit from Dublin, while he contemplates what to do with the death threat.
Death count: 2, plus 1 dog.

Before the film, the announcing lady mentioned how “The Guard” was a Panorama success when it premiered at the Berlinale. After the film, McDonagh commented how “Calvary” was totally not “The Guard”, but he hoped that was alright. Well, in essence, “Calvary” is about the exact opposite of “The Guard”. The former is a tragedy with comedic undertones featuring a gloomy but serious and good-hearted Brendan Gleeson character, the latter is a comedy with sad undertones featuring a jovial and cynical Brendan Gleeson character. “The Guard” is a crowd pleaser and money maker, while “Calvary” looks like a very meaningful, personal work which the director has probably thought about a whole lot. Shii always says that I need to stop comparing works of a director with his previous works, but I can’t help it, especially when these strong opposites between “The Guard” and “Calvary” call for it. As a result, despite having read the Berlinale description of the film beforehand, I was surprised at how different it really was.

To be honest, the longer I watched the film, the more I was confused. I loved its humor, which was much like “The Guard” and “In Bruges” (and gives me the impression that the McDonagh brothers share many, many insider jokes together), but I was rather confused by the characters. Why was everybody so hateful and mean? Why did the main character care about them? Why did he never get anything done and open up to his daughter for instance? Why did he not just run away? Why was there so much despair in the film in the first place? What for? Well, it didn’t take me long to understand it because both Shii and Pixelmatsch were quick to explain it. Perhaps I just have a hard time understanding the social structures in small villages, always having lived in rather anonymous cities, and I especially do not have anything like a church in my life, where people turn to the church with their life problems. In fact, it was totally lost on me that James’s goal in life was to help people, and that the villagers just didn’t want to be helped.

The premise – a man seeks revenge by killing another innocent man – is rather absurd if you think about it, because it is not likely to happen in real life, yet it feels real and human, which in turn makes the film one a hypothetical comment on humanity. A big part of it is about how people view the Catholic church, but more generally, the film contemplates faith itself through questions on life and death, and of course I loved that. I was touched by how personal this film felt, and how intensely it was written and acted out.

It was also great to see this mix of actors we kind of see here and there: Brendan Gleeson is the only old McDonagh actor, I knew Aidan Gillen from Game of Thrones (of course), Chris O’Dowd from Bridesmaids, Kelly Reilly from Sherlock Holmes and Isaach de Bankolé from a bunch of films.
Did I ever mention that I love “Aidan” as a name but it annoys me that the name is a current fad?

Even without having anything to do with the Catholic church, I loved the film to pieces. And that was certainly not due to Brendan Gleeson’s autograph although that certainly enhanced the experience.

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Berlinale 2014, Day 3 (Einstein and Einstein)

The Generation i.e. children’s section of the Berlinale is so worthwhile because they are only 4 euros (and 2 euros when you have a student ID or something else that gives you half price). Last Berlinale, we also saw a Generation film (Mary and Max) and it was so great that I saw the film again at some point. This year, it seems that we are also following the tradition of seeing one marvelous Generation film.

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Einstein and Einstein
China 2013, Cao Baoping, 119’

Li Wan (her given name is the sign for “play”) is a rather introspective girl who talks about parallel universes and astrophysics all day. She even draws her life philosophy out of this theory – if a parallel universe exists in which we do the opposite thing of what we did, then there is no reason to regret any decision we have made. She lives with her grandparents because her father re-married and essentially cannot be bothered with raising her. Her entire family even hides from her that her stepmother gave birth to a little brother. When her father gives her a puppy to appease her, she responds angrily at this display of bought love. Over time, she gets close to the dog and names him Einstein. Then Einstein disappears, and that event reveals Wan’s frustration of being neglected by her family.
Death count: 1 dog.

“Einstein and Einstein” is a brilliant tale of abuse. Everything depicted in the film is true, and almost everything they do in that family looks exactly the same in mine (with the difference that Li Wan’s family is horribly low class). The most poignant scene was the one with the father’s boss, who is spouting the biggest nonsense in the world and calls Hawking’s books “child’s play”, but because he is the boss, everybody just sits there and nods or even praise his utterings. These nonsensical, seemingly wise but actually empty aphorisms are the pinnacle of the depravity of Chinese culture, and I heard them throughout my childhood over and over again.

Just for its incredible realism, “Einstein and Einstein” deserves more attention than it gets. Even the topic itself – gender roles in China – is an unusual one and its problem manifest themselves only subtly, as it is shown in this film. The only thing I did not quite like about the film was the way it ended. All of a sudden, Wan is depicted as this genius kid who is able to win province-wide competitions. The “main character is a genius” trope kind of ruined the story of Wan as one which could have happened to any girl in China. The truth is that most girls in China experience something like that, but not everyone is able to get out of it like Wan did at the end of the film.
It may be of interest to note that I have never experienced any sort of neglect, or been subjected to your average girl’s upbringing. But my parents made a point saying that they raised me “like a boy”, as if only boys deserve to be the center of attention and are allowed to seek self-fulfillment and speak out their minds.

The director of “The equation of love and death” made another great film, and I will certainly continue to monitor what he does.

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Berlinale 2014, Day 2 (Doshaburi)

Originally our plan was to see 4 movies today (yes, that’s right), but we didn’t get into “The Docks of New York” because we were too convinced we’d get a ticket for an old, obscure film at the Zeughauskino. Well, we were wrong. Incidentally this was the only time we didn’t get a ticket for something, and so “Doshaburi” was our last film for the day.

The director’s son was present with his wife, all dressed up in a kimono. He seemed extremely proud of his father’s work and delighted to present it at the Berlinale. It was rather cute how they were standing at the exit bowing at the audience passing by, so I bowed as well.

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Doshaburi (When it rains, it pours)
Japan 1957, Noboru Nakamura, 105’

Because her family runs a love hotel, the main character’s boyfriend dumps her. On top of all that, her mother and father are not married but they hide that from the children – the older daughter and (mostly) protagonist of the story, a younger brother who takes his rather miserable social position with a grain of salt, and a younger daughter, who starts out being a very cheerful girl. After the protagonist runs away from home to work in a cabaret and that man finds her there, the family crumbles slowly.
Death count: 2.

On the one hand, the film is a somewhat cheap melodrama. The storyline is rather over the top, and at times you feel like watching a soap opera. I also have a personal disliking for the ending, because it suggests that the parents are carrying some sort of guilt, when (from today’s standards) they absolutely did nothing wrong. They were in love but an unfortunate situation made him marry somebody else. That doesn’t make the family “bad”. Apart from this personal reservation, the strangest thing about the film was how un-Japanese everybody was acting. For some reason, everybody always spoke their mind! Especially that youngest daughter did, which shocked me the most. In what society can children tell their parents “Mom, dad, please break up”? I couldn’t say such a thing in my fairly open family from 2014, let alone in the 50s in Japan. Of course this kind of openness is necessary for the melodrama to take place, and one could of course also argue that the family in the story is far from normal, hence their relative openness to each other. Even so, a little suspense of disbelief is necessary here.

If you can ignore how incredibly in-your-face this movie is, then it’s a masterpiece. The story is told in a very gripping manner, all the actors are pros and well-cast, but most importantly the story made me care for its characters. I am fascinated by the family’s struggle with its problematic social situation and subsequent downward spiral. It’s a film about how everybody in this family loves each other, but society’s judgement on them weighs so heavily that they cannot be happy despite that. I thought that was beautiful.

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Berlinale 2014, Day 2 (We come as friends)

Today I have been to the Haus der Berliner Festspiele for the very first time. While it looks rather lovely from the outside, with the Berlinale decoration and all, the venue itself is just incredibly ugly and you are damned to neck pain for most seats. It’s almost as bad as the Friedrichstadtpalast, where the problem is a different one – most seats are too far to the side. After this one time, we actively avoided this venue and if possible, I would like to never return.

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We come as friends
France/Austria 2013, Hubert Sauper, 109′

Hubert Sauper makes a documentary on South Sudan, mostly depicting how the world’s bigger forces such as China and the US are colonizing the country in a modern way while at the same time large parts of the population are suffering under malnutrition and soiled water sources.
Death count: Uncountable.

Shii and Pixelmatsch predicted that the film may be the worst one we would be seeing at the Berlinale. To be honest, I knew from the beginning that this would not be the case for me. This is not because I liked the film so much, but rather that the film managed to do what it should – transport information on the political situation in South Sudan and provoke my ire against its colonizers. Especially the part with the American missionaries was positively painful. When they call South Sudan “New Texas” and say “oh yeah, they didn’t like it when we took the land and put a fence around it, but at some point they got over it”, I wanted to throw up and trash the seats around me. In certain parts, the film is pushing all the right buttons with me, and I think that has some merit.

On the other hand, “We come as friends” is just so, so superficial. For the most part, it’s essentially a ploy from the French and Austrian governments to say: “Look at the US and China and how evil they are. They are colonizing African countries like we did 100 years ago!” Hey, France, the war in Algeria was merely 50 years ago. A lot of people involved with it are still alive, but somehow it’s fine to point the finger to others now. The other thing that bothered me with the film was how the majority of the film was spent showing the atrocities the Chinese and Americans are committing, the ones by destroying their land with industrialization and the others by destroying their culture by forcing them to throw it away. But the film never shows this culture, and rarely even shows the people besides the traditional “Look at how poor they are and how primitive it all is” shots. There are some hints at a rich culture in Sudan, but the way the film almost brushes over them only creates pity but never respect with the Sudanese people. The film does not seem to depict them in a good manner, rather as these primitive, poor people who need help.

All in all, I thought the film was worthwhile. I have never cared much for what happens in Africa and know almost nothing, so the way the film analyzes modern colonialism was worth a look for me. Other than that, this is an unpleasantly politically loaded film where way too many people from the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung were sitting in the audience wallowing in self-adulation.

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Berlinale 2014, Day 2 (Love is strange)

Pixelmatsch usually blogs the Berlinale by days, putting all the films of one day into one posting. But now that we are blogging them separately, and considering the fact that my blog posts are so much longer, I will stick to my old one-post-one-film habit. I think this is a little easier to read but of course there will be no funny movie-mixing posting titles.

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Love is Strange
USA 2014, Ira Sachs, 98’

Alfred Molina and John Lithgow play an old gay couple (George and Ben) living in New York City, where one is retired and the other one lost his job after the catholic school he was working out found out that they married. Now they have to move out of their apartment, Ben moves in with his nephew and George moves in with a younger gay couple. Unfortunately Ben and his nephew’s family have a hard time adjusting to each other and George’s friends have loud parties every day.
Death count: 1.

This movie is essentially “Make way for tomorrow” in a modern, intellectual, gay setting. I was immediately reminded of the film in the way Ben and George suffer under their separation, and how they have trouble adjusting to living with other people. It was very moving to see how Ben was being a nuisance to his nephew’s family, but without really doing anything wrong at all. If anything, his nephew’s son is immensely immature in his latent homophobia and irrational emoness. Besides the obvious tear-jerkers and the beautifully crafted characters (to be honest, Marisa Tomei’s character was my favorite), another thing I really liked about the film was its blatant intellectualism. The film itself wasn’t all that intellectual, it was straight-forward and told in an unpretentious, simple way. It was fighting homophobia without the annoying activist touch. But the characters were living in a little dream world in which everybody goes to concerts and art galleries, the characters teach music or write novels and kids steal old French books from school. To be honest I loved that little dream world.
The film’s only weakness was that it was a little bit too much at times. Was it really necessary for someone to die in this movie to put its point across?

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Berlinale 2014, Day 1 (Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro)

The Berlinale begins! Okay, technically the Berlinale is over, but for this blog, it is the beginning. This time, I will be covering it myself, just like the 2009 version, while Pixelmatsch will blog only the films that I didn’t see. Overall, the beginning of the Berlinale was very tedious; we couldn’t get tickets for some of the films we really wanted to see (namely “Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Snowpiercer”), but as soon as it began, we saw the promise of an exceptionally good Berlinale, which it was until today.

As always, the first days started slowly and there was a huge run on the tickets, so we only saw one older film on the first day. It seems to be a pattern: Every Berlinale (out of two) I have been to started with a fantastic Japanese film, incidentally my favorite of the entire festival.

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Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro
Japan 1938, Mikio Naruse, 88’

Jiro and Toyo are a popular artist couple who who grew together, Jiro studied shinnai singing with Toyo’s mother and Toyo is an expert shamisen player. Not only are they made for each other on stage, of course they are also in love. However, true to any romantic comedy, they have a hard time showing this love and misunderstandings pile up. He feels insecure about her love for him and lashes out on her, while she refuses to put up with his jealousy. Even though everybody is trying to help them get together, the two cannot stop getting into humorous arguments.
Death count: 0.

The film made me go onto Hulu as soon as I got home to see what Naruse movies they have to offer. Luckily, there is a whole 15 of them, but Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro is not amongst them. In fact, I am surprised how underrated this movie is. There are virtually no screenings of the film in the world, no way to get to it on home video (unless I am mistaken) and almost no reviews of the film out there. It appears nobody knows about the film.

I think this film is a masterpiece of repetitive humor. After the third time Jiro said “I think you played badly today”, a big part of the audience was laughing. Furthermore, the characters develop over the years shown, and the bittersweet ending was heart-wrenching, because we see Jiro finally maturing and making a thoroughly selfless decision. It’s so beautiful. This is an unpretentious little film, a perfect romantic comedy with sad undertones and an ultimately tragic ending. Words cannot describe how much this film was able to hit all the right buttons with me, but it certainly helped was the Jiro and Toyo were equals. They were of similar age, they had the same profession and finally, they fought on equal footing, with Toyo saying “no” and insisting on her own style whenever she wanted. For a Japanese film from the 1930s, that is quite something! The secret feminist in me is very happy with this film.

On a side note, you can see “Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro” on Youtube, albeit in absolutely terrible quality. Sadly it does not do justice to Naruse’s soft touch at all, so I am hoping for better copies to show up.

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Loris and the dreaded piece of blank paper

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Only Lovers Left Alive

Recently I have been marking everything I do into my calendar, which shows that I saw “Only Lovers Left Alive” on January 25… and still haven’t written a single word about the film. Loris said that he needs time to think about the film, but I think I gave myself a little bit too much time.

Seeing this from a more positive perspective, I think the most memorable scene to me was the one where Eve packs her bags. Being an old vampire, she needs absolutely nothing, seems to have endless amounts of money and is thus able to afford a life in which love, self-fulfillment and all that stuff we lie to ourselves about are the only things that matter. So Eve packs nothing but books, from all times and written in all kinds of languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish?, Arabic, Russian? and Japanese are those I think I remember), fondly going throw some of these books and looking at them with sparkles in her eyes. I don’t think I need to explain how beautiful that was to me, it’s essentally mind porn. I would love to know a few more languages to understand the subtleties of certain works in their original (Russian, ladies and gentlemen!), after all, perhaps this is even why I have a tendency to favor the libretto of operas where I understand the languages (La Damnation de Faust, Salome).
Another thing I loved about this scene (and generally, this movie) is Jim Jarmusch’s display of love for other cultures. He’s just not a weeaboo (though his japanophilia is apparent), but delves rather deeply into many cultures with what looks to me like tender observation. Jarmusch captures things about cultures that other people cannot, and does so with a unique authenticity. After encountering so many cases of cultural narrow-mindedness, I think Jarmusch is the real thing. I have never perceived his films under this aspect before, but this is just another reason confirming Mr. Jarmusch as my favorite director of all times.

Besides living the dream, i.e. a life in material goods don’t matter, the other appealing aspect of “Only Lovers Left Alive” was the main characters’ love for one other. Without any material needs, they can also afford the luxury of having a love relationship in which their love depends on nothing but their feelings for each other, and these are genuinely harmonious and caring. (It’s a “l’amour pour l’amour” relationship.) The film does not provide a single second of doubt of their love, and this is almost as enviable as having all the time in the world to learn 20 languages. At the same time, I think any relationship which has stood the test of so, so, so much time will naturally become comfortable with each other. The portrayal of these two is not that idealistic but feels absolutely realistic to me, and as far as I remember it’s also the only time where Jarmusch shows a relationship which is not dysfunctional. Perhaps he is growing old himself.

I have mostly gotten over my distaste of Tilda Swinton with this film. I still find her face a little bit too special, and in most of her roles, I see Tilda Swinton no matter what role she plays despite her obvious talent to play different characters. It’s this face that has trouble to change into something else. Tom Hiddleston however is the exact opposite. Even though his face also is a little special, somehow he manages to look different with every film, and it appears that he completely internalized his role of the somewhat androgynous vampire. His hide-out is beautiful and hideous at the same time, and his suicidal thoughts all too understandable when you have trouble finding enjoyment with the things you do. Of course the music was gloomy, but I didn’t dislike it. Every single one of Jarmusch’s films features brilliant music, although “Broken Flowers” (ironically a film I did not like) tops it all.

My favorite part of the film probably was the one featuring the sister. She was amazingly annoying and I kept wanting to jump at her and rip her eyes out, but that’s exactly what was so good about this part. The sister was portrayed in such a realistic way and her annoying character was so true to life, I thought to myself: “This is exactly how relatives are like.” Scary.

Loris, I think when you asked me what I thought about the film, I said exactly what I wrote in this post. My impression of the film probably hasn’t changed nor developed much, so there probably wasn’t anything new for you to discover here. I liked the film in general but I wasn’t very happy with the visuals and the plot development. Well, a comparably bad Jarmusch movie is still a masterpiece and this one is also a must-see.

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Just ignore the panty shots

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Wake up, Girls! Seven Idols

Sometimes I wonder what counts as a movie I should blog. Most easily, I could say anything feature-length that regularly opened in theaters (in this case, this movie counts). In general, TV movies should count too, and in the past I have blogged TV versions of movies sometimes. Another possible “definition” would be anything that feels like a movie to me, which includes many TV movies but typically no anime (The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is a rare exception). In the case of “Wake up, Girls! Seven Idols”, even though it fulfills every definition for a movie, but honestly it looks and feels like a TV show. Considering how expensive movie theater tickets are in Japan, I have absolutely no idea why anyone would want to see this 52 minute movie in theaters.

Apart from the potential lack of budget compared to your average blockbuster, or the lack of quality and insight compared to your average artsy indie or old film, I actually enjoyed the “Wake up, Girls!” movie. It had a consistent storyline (perhaps a little bit too centered on Mayu) and the kind of uplifting spirit I have hoped from this show. (The final concert scene shows them flashing their panties, so “uplifting” is technically a terrible pun.) If this was merely, say, an OVA to preview the show, then it’s absolutely spot-on, setting the mood and the tone of the TV show.

When it comes to that, I cannot stop stressing how much I like the fact that the girls look so realistic. Maybe they are not very flashy and don’t stand out very much so far, but the truth is that idols and generally people don’t stand out as much as your average blue-yellow-green-pink haired anime character. I like that the girls start out being simply normal, and that they are shown as mostly powerless. To some degree, I also like that there is a little bit more realism in their struggle, in comparison to any other idol show which is either a crazy sci-fi genre mix (AKB0048) or features silly, unrealistic school children (Love Live) or appears overly optimistic where game characters have bogus problems at best (The Idolmaster). As much as I love The Idolmaster (still the only really good idol show out there), I think that Wake up, Girls! is a refreshingly down to earth show, and that makes me want to root for its characters and – surprise surprise – also makes me susceptible for their main cause, sympathy for Sendai.

You could make a drinking game out of it – sip whenever they say “Sendai”, drink when they say “Sendai-based idol group”, empty your glass when you see something of Sendai in the background. The movie is not shy to get its message across, and the idol group’s only song is a very open earthquake relief song. As for me, I find it rather cute and perhaps next time I see an episode of the sequel TV show, I’ll actually drink something.