Kirandeep Yoder
The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.
gantulgaunubold
so i watch this movie at summer time it was kinda long like 2 hour 40 min but this movie was best it just shows some of my lifetime about bully something.inside of me just enjoy watching this movie and i hate myself so much. and i just thought youth is kinda hard one of the most complicated moment in ur life.but i still enjoy so much most heartbreaking scene was kite.after seeing that she wanted she wanted to enter ether i actually have no idea...
Fredrik Hamper
At first I found the back and forth messages/typing completely distracting but I became used to it after a while and it blended into the movie.The scenery and overall atmosphere is beautiful. Another reviewer pointed out that this movie would have been better with a linear narrative and I agree with that. I wanted to know more about the main character and wanted everything to stop for a moment.The ugliness of human nature - there's a lot in this movie. The overall movie left a bad taste behind. One character I wanted to see something good happen to was Kuno (the piano player). Horrible incidents started to pile up as the movie went on and it wasn't very realistic or maybe I personally have a hard time seeing the world in that light.This was a powerful movie and the only reason I'm giving it a lower score is because of the morbid atmosphere it left behind with me.
chaos-rampant
I was perhaps lucky to have seen a Hollywood film a few days prior, Alexander Payne's latest and supposedly also about a spiritual journey of sorts and passing for an 'indie'. The comparison is devastating. The many times Oscar nominated film: airbrushed beauty mistaken for purity. This little obscurity: lyrical breath and pulse from life.In 1968, there was a film made in Japan called Nanami: Inferno of First Love, also Japanese New Wave about confused, apprehensive youth feeling the first pulls to join the fray of existence: love, pain, loss, all the adult stuff they used to know as words. The fulcrum of that film unraveled from this notion: if you peel a cabbage you get its core, but if you peel an onion? (this is really worth puzzling over btw, in a Zen way, and the film worth seeking out.)The answer to that very much pertains here. This is the New New Wave: even more visual episodic movements through edges of life, even more radical dislocations from the ordinary world of narrative. The story is about teenage high school students: cliques and counter-cliques and much tension and drama inbetween them as they discover love and power. This is woven together with a thread about music, revolving around a band named Lily Chou-Chou that is all the rage among youth. Now and then conversations are enacted in some unspecified blogosphere: this is given to us as disembodied words against a black screen. We presume we'll get to know the people behind the nicknames and identify them as one of several youths whose lives we intimately follow in its petty cockiness and idle pleasure, or even worse that they don't matter at all and this is purely ornamental. It is actually much, much deeper. Now we're lucky this is Japanese, and even perhaps unconsciously so. Typical for New Wave, the world is distinctly modern and vibrant. It is all about youthful rejection. But as with Oshima and the rest back in the 60's, what these guys perhaps don't know is that French film that seemed so radical and appealing to the Japanese at the time and was presumed to have re-invented cinematic grammar, it was built on precisely what the Japanese had first revolutionized about representation in the 18th and 19th century. The calligraphic eye.So every rejection of tradition that we find in those films, or this one now, only serves to re-discover what was so vital and groundbreaking about Japanese tradition in the first place.In other words: if the old Zen Masters were alive now, all of them exceptional poets or landscape painters in their day and with a great sense of humor, they would all be New Wave filmmakers.This is as Zen as possible and in the most pure sense of the term. Transparent images. Vital emptiness. Calligraphic flows to and from interior heart. Mournful beauty about what it means 'to read the love letters sent by the moon, wind, and snow', to quote an old Buddhist poem. Plum blossoms at the gates of suffering.So this is where it goes deeper than say, a new Malick film. There are no intricate mechanisms to structure life. That is fine but what this film does is even more difficult to accomplish. Just one lush dynamic sweep of a calligrapher's brush that paints people and worlds as they come into being and vanish again. I have never seen for example a film present death so invisibly, so poetically.So if you peel a cabbage you get a core, but if you peel an onion?We may be inclined to answer nothing. The film may seem like it was about nothing, at best tears from a teenager's overly dramatic diary. The form mirrors the diary after all, after Jonas Mekas. A whole segment about a trip to Okinawa is filmed with a cheap camcorder. Let that settle and then consider the following key scene: a choir of students gets together for a school event to sing a capella a complex piano arrangement, Debussy's Arabesque. They had a perfectly capable piano player to do it but wouldn't let her for petty school rivalries. So once more we may be inclined to think that it was too much hassle for something so simple. Adults would never let things reach that stage. A compromise would be made, the piece would be played on the piano, properly.Now all through the film we see kids listen to music, everyone seems to have his own portable cd-player for that purpose. Presumably they listen to Lily Chou-Chou, who we're told was heavily inspired by Arabesque. We don't actually listen to her. We never see her or the band, at the big concert we're left outside and marvel at a giant video projection: artificial images in place of the real thing.But in this one occasion the kids achieve something uniquely sublime: they articulate the music, actually embody it, by learning to be their own instruments and each one each other's. The entire film is the same effort: to embody inner abstract worlds and their 'ether'. The method is rigorous improvisation.Something to meditate upon.(This is one of two best films from the decade in my estimation. Incidentally both were shot on digital, our new format for spontaneous discovery).
ghostsarescared
I watched Lily Chou-Chou last night and was mesmerized and deeply moved by it. The use of lighting and shadow instantly produce a subject-less nostalgia, sort of a yearning without knowing what one is yearning for. Perhaps these youth yearned for a purpose. Confusion about identity is central to this film, and I felt a very helpless feeling throughout. The music, especially the song 'Kaifuku Suru Kizu' was very haunting. I don't know if it was the notion of 'ethereal music' placed at the beginning meant to trick the viewer into hearing something that isn't there, or if the music really contained an 'otherness'-either way, I felt something I hadn't before when I heard it. The song's been stuck in my head all day. Overall a soul-crushing movie that still remains realistic despite its dreamy feel. I think it accurately portrays the chaos of ideas and meanings and meaninglessness of our modern age colliding with human emotion. 8/10.
