Jmovie review: The Last Ronin / Saigo no Chuushingura

The Last Ronin is about the aftermath of the 47 Ronin incident. I've not seen a movie about the 47 Ronin but its such a famous story that I've heard of it. Basically, 47 ronin took revenge for their lord who was forced to seppuku and in turn the 47 did seppuku after the succeeded in their revenge. Its one of those tales that romanticise the whole live and die for your lord and honour thing.

The Last Ronin is not another Twilight Samurai clone nor is it another 100 minions running at our protagonist with katanas in the air so that he can chop them up. Not only is it a continuation of the 47 ronin story but it also subscribes to the same themes. One's enjoyment of The Last Ronin will depend on how much you can buy into these romanticised samurai ideals.

For me, the main enjoyment is that this is another variation of the 'Hikaru Genji Kaikaku'. The Hikaru Genji Plan which I learned from watching City Hunter is from Tales of Genji, which if I'm not mistaken is from Japan's first and most famous novel. Basically this dude, Hikaru Genji kidnaps this kidnaps this girl and raises her with the sole purpose of marrying her when she comes of age. The intentions are a lot more pure in The Last Ronin but you get my drift.

In The Last Ronin, this girl Kane is played by Sakuraba Nanami. (Kane as in Japanese for money no the Undertaker's brother) Sato Koichi plays Kichiemon who is the sole survivor of the 47 and Yakusho Koji plays Magozaemon, a samurai who abandoned his post the night before the 47's attack and who is Kane's guardian. Mixed in the story is a former oiran, merchants and lots of talk about duty and what a warrior must say and do but during most of the movie, there was only one thing in my mind: Sakuraba Nanani is so utsukushii!

Beautiful is too rough a word for Kane. Sakuraba Nanami's performance makes her the yamato nadeshiko of all yamato nadeshikos. Grace, beauty, purity, class and some moe scenes. :) I was just transfixed. Yes, I admit it. I am a goddamn shallow jmovie watcher. The screencaps don't do her justice. It felt like its been ages since I last saw her in Futatsu no Spica and she showed so much promise and then I looked up her wiki and realised she was in that 99s days crap dorama which I had banished from my memory. She definitely has mastered the Hirosue Ryoko art of gazing longingly at something in a distance.

The acting is great and Yakusho Koji is one of my favourite actors but its hard to give The Last Ronin a must watch without being able to view the movie objectively. After watching I just couldn't decide whether it was a must watch cause I kept seeing Sakuraba Nanami's face. By the gods, I love typing her name.

Classic Hirosue Ryoko sad look. Someone cast here in Summer Snow remake!

On an unrelated note, Jadefrost wrote a nice preview of the Gaiji Keisatsu movie which you can find here. Does it happen before the dorama series?

Jmovie review: Sword of Desperation/Hisshiken torisashi

Another movie based on another book by the same dude who wrote Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade, I think. If you have not watched the above mentioned too movies, I strongly recommend you do. If you have seen them and Hana no Ato didn't do much for you then don't expect too much from Sword of Desperation.

Sword of Desperation has all the elements that made Twilight Samurai and Hidden Blade so good. Our humble stoic hero Sanzaemon who is a widower and is faced with difficult choices. The dedicated heroine Rio, who is sweet and kind and in this movie happens to be Sanzaemon's niece. Of course to makes things more kosher, Rio was previously betrothed and her marriage annulled. Clan members and their political schemes. A secret move that we get to see at the end ala Hidden Blade. Finally, its a samurai movie with Toyokawa Etsushi and Ikewaki Chizuru, two of my favourite actors!

Someone needs to do a website called 'Kita Yoshio is everywhere!'

Watching Sword of Desperation, there is a sense that something is dragging this movie down. It dots the i's and cross the t's of everything I enjoy in samurai movies including plenty of build up and one great final battle but the movie felt it was plodding.

The only answer I can come up with is that it was lack of on screen chemistry and the Sanzaemon and Rio story felt tacked on instead of being central to the story. The central story was rather the politics of it all and Sanzaemon's role in it. The best things in Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade was not the fights at the end but rather the build up and what the main characters fought for. Sword of Desperation has those small moments including some back washing but it felt cold compared to Twilight Samurai's beautiful scene of Tomoe helps Seibei dress up.

I think in the end, there just weren't enough scenes between Sanzaemon and Rio. Even in the flashbacks there was hardly any interaction between them. Maybe Ikewaki Chizuru was too loli for Toyokawa Etsushi. Could Yamada Yoji directing have made a difference? Perhaps. His camera work is more close up and personal which the cinematography in Sword of Desperation is more distant. Doesn't change the fact that it is a disappointing movie. Its still watchable and has the ingredients to be great but just falls short of even being a good movie.

Jmovie review: Norwegian Wood

I had read many good things about this movie long time ago but for some reason its taken me so long to get to watching it. Norwegian Wood tells the story about Toru (Matsuyama Kenichi) whose best friend commits suicide in high school. He changes school and while in university in Tokyo he runs into Naoko (Kikuchi Rinko), the girlfriend of Toru's deceased best friend and they start hanging out together. While Toru and Naoko are bound by the act of suicide, it seems like Naoka has yet to get over the past.

First of, the acting in Norwegian Wood is godlike. Kikuchi Rinko is awesome and should be the highest paid actress in Japan. There is a 5 minute one shot scene with her walking back and forth in the early morning which is one par with the hallway fight scene in Old Boy except there's no violence in it but heart wrenching emotional pain. Matsuyama Kenichi is good as well but he's not on that Abe Hiroshi able to elevate anything level. I'm not to hot on the story but the acting just kept me glued to the screen. Props to Hatsune Eriko as well as the suffering girlfriend of the playboy Nagasawa.

There was something about the directing that went above the usual jmovie stuff and surprise, it was directed by a French director of Vietnamese descent. What was shocking was it was the same director of 'I come with the rain', a pretentious arthouse style movie with some big names that tried to be something above convention but turned into a jumbled mess of nothing. Before I get to the spoiler stuff about why I didn't really get the story, I must reiterate that if you are a Jmovie fan, its worth watching for the acting alone.

SPOILERS DO NOT READ FURTHER ON

Norwegian Wood is basically guy (Toru) and girl (Naoko) have a traumatic experience, meet up later, fall in love but girl is mentally unstable from trauma. Guy is compelled to not abandon girl like his best friend did and at the same time is discovering sexuality. Guy meets another girl, Midori who like him has a lover she is unable to have sex with though for different reasons and they both hook up. Naoko reveals her guilt over Kizuki's suicide and in the end commits suicide herself. Toru in the end decides to hook up with Midori.

The storyline of course is not that simple. There are a lot of issues explored in the movie like what is love and what is devotion to a person to the point of disregarding self? The relationship between sex and love and all that stuff. Interesting stuff to be sure but somehow I felt that there was something missing in the narrative. Looked up the wiki for the novel it is based on and immediately saw what was missing.

According to the wiki, Midori is 'everything that Naoko is not — outgoing, vivacious, supremely self-confident.' Watching the movie, I never saw Midori as the opposite of Naoko. She was to me a distraction and a mirror image of Toru. Even more is missing from the movie: 'Reiko talks about her search for sexual identity, and Naoko talks about the unexpected suicide of her older sister several years ago.' WTF isn't this in the movie? I can think of lots of things to cut out or they could have added 10 minutes to the running time.

Here's more: 'Now back in Tokyo, Toru unintentionally alienates Midori through both his lack of consideration of her wants and needs, and his continuing thoughts about Naoko. He writes a letter to Reiko, asking for her advice about his conflicted affections for both Naoko and Midori. He doesn't want to hurt Naoko, but he doesn't want to lose Midori either. Reiko counsels him to seize this chance for happiness and see how his relationship with Midori turns out.'

WTF is the Toru alienating Midori bit. There's only this scene at a bar where he sort of rejects her request for sex. If anything, the movie is more about Toru trying to call Midori after that and she not answering the phone and ignoring him in public.

Reading the novel summary, I can see what the story was supposed to be about. Naoko vs Midori. Naoko the troubled girl that Toru is compelled/obligated to protect and Midori this confident girl who has problems of her own but she is able to face them head on. The movie gave me Naoko as a very nice but mentally damaged girl and Midori as someone who is doing to Toru what he is doing to Naoko. The Midori in the movie doesn't strike me as 'outgoing, vivacious, supremely self-confident'. She sort of is but not in a way that made me think, ah, she's the other side of coin compared to Naoko.

I'm bloody tempted to get the book and have a read. The summary in the wiki and the movie I saw are different in their points of emphasis. Perhaps this is one of those movies that I will never understand like No Country for Old Man. However, until I read the book I can never be sure.

Jmovie review: Scabbard Samurai

Scabbard Samurai starts off with this samurai, Nomi who only has a scabbard and no katana on the run with his daughter. My first thoughts were is this going to be a lone wolf and cub type movie? I quickly realised it was not when Nomi runs across his first assassin and gets slashed in the back before running off. The daughter, played by the little girl from Runaway nurses his wounds by grinding plants together and applying on his wound.

Nori the scabbard samurai runs into two other assassins and gets shot in the head and his neck snapped before once again running away. Ok, now I know for sure this not a realistic samurai movie. Comedy, perhaps? Nori gets captured and has 30 days to make the son of the lord laugh or else he has to commit seppuku. Ok, now we're getting into the gist of the movie.

Samurai without a sword and his daughter have 30 chances to make this comatose-like young lord laugh or else he's dead. Throw in two guards who get caught up with helping Nori and you have the makings of an interesting comedy. I like the humour in Scabbard Samurai. Of course there's a lot of slapstick with Nori's attempts but the funny thing is how they come up with the jokes and the guards blaming each other when they fail.

Nori attempts a lot of crazy stunts, some of which require turning off your brain but without realising it, this movie really endeared me to this silent samurai and his smart daughter. Behind the 30 attempts to make the young lord laugh is a father and daughter story where the daughter does all the talking. Thank goodness the daughter is not too smart like in Runaway or maybe its just the absense of idiots in this movie that makes her stick out like a sore thumb.

Scabbard Samurai is one of those rare crowd pleasing movies that touches the audience without being overly manipulative. Its been a while since I've watched a Japanese movie this good. I guarantee that you will laugh, you will cry and you will definitely remember this gem of a movie.

Jmovie review: Documentary of AKB48 to be continued

I remember reading about this movie showing in Japanese cinemas some time ago and I believe they've got a part 2 that's coming out soon. If you follow Japanese pop culture, there's no escaping AKB48. Somehow they've worked their way from a niche otaku idol group to exploding all over the country and showing up in everything. I don't think Morning Musume back in 99 was even that big.

My knowledge of AKB48 consisted of listening to their early very suggestive songs ,playing the two PSP games and watching them in doramas so I went into the movie withsome knowledge of who they are but not their personalities since I haven't watched Japanese variety shows since the good old days of Momusu on Utaban and Hello Morning. The PSP games did provide me with more information such as who liked anime and who had a famous father but its acting for a dating sim.

I was hoping to get the answer to why A-chan is the most popular girl of the group.

So Documentary of AKB48 starts of with the main girls eating around the table, having a conversation and the camera rotating around them. Tells me nothing about who they are and what they do and the too scripted nature of the introduction is boring. Then we get right to a short clip of the main girls miming, I mean performing before showing the girls very excited at the 2009 Kohaku and then distributing heat packs to fans lined outside the AKB theatre a happy new year on new years day. That's interesting because what makes them different is that they're a more accessible idoru group.

Then the documentary takes a turn for the worse by doing various interviews with certain cast members talking about nothing. There's plenty of crying and stuff about members changing groups but I was just fucking bored because they is no good damn narrative. Whoever made this documentary had no fucking idea how to make one. If someone who had no idea WTF AKB48 was they would be even more lost than me and would probably fall asleep thinking why should are care about these girls when it doesn't introduce them to me and tell me what they do?

Not that there's no introduction. The documentary shows their names, which generation they are from but asks them fluffy questions that fans probably know the answers for. Why not bloody start with the main girls talking about how they started and how they worked for years as an indy group? How the group is different in that the fans get to interact with them a lot and how often they have to perform. Documentary of AKB48 lacks a starting point to hook the viewer in and then meanders around having no idea what to impart of the audience.

As can be seen from the screencaps, Documentary of AKB48 looks bloody gorgeous but someone forgot to spend money and hire an editor who could make sense of the footage. Avoid it like the plague. Documentary of AKB48 is a marketing tool that for some reason only markets itself to the most hardcore of fans.

Jmovie review: Hana no Ato/After the Flowers

Hana no Ato is a film in the same vein as the three movies in the Yamada Yoji trilogy; a study of the lives and customs in feudal Japan with a slow build up to a fight in the end. The only difference is that the main protagonist this time is a female, Ito played by Kitagawa Keiko. Ito is the daughter of someone of high rank and has been trained in swordplay by her father. Ito is so good that she managed to beat the best fighters from Hagai dojo.

While sakura-watching, Ito meets a samurai from Hagai dojo, Eguchi who recognises her as a swordfighter and proposes a practice match. After the match, the movie is basically about the situations that Ito and Eguchi  finds themselves in and the clan politics that influence their lives. Its an examination of feudal life and how everyday behaviour is regulated from closing and opening shoji doors to how people speak and never say anything directly.

The story is enlivened by Ito's fiancee, Katagiri a glutton who is not as carefree and ignorant as he seems. Komoto Masahiro always plays sad characters who experience tragedies in doramas so this smiling fiancee who is a lot smarter than he looks fits him perfectly. Eguchi has a fiancee as well, played by Ito Ayumi and the two loverbirds can only look at each other from afar knowing that life decisions had already been made for them.

Being the female version of Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade, Hana no Ato is not as gritty. The two fight scenes are more fanciful and not as desperate. There's a more sanitised feel with less blood. Enjoyment of the movie will depend on how much the viewer buys into Ito's motivation for the final fight.

Hana no Ato has all the elements that made me love Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade but I just didn't enjoy as much. I think it has much to do with the lack of chemistry between Ito and Eguchi, especially with their relationship being based on one fight. Still, the script has gives the viewers more reason why he is important to her. I wouldn't call Hana no Ato must watch but its definitely a pretty decent movie and is definitely better than Love and Honour.