Movies
Song Story: Cinema Fighters Project
Song Story is a 12-short anthology split into two different releases. Each of the stories is based on Japanese pop songs, which means the directors had the liberty of making something a bit more creative. And that's exactly what they did. The quality of the shorts is relatively stable, but they are different enough from one another and none of them felt lazy or uninspired. Isamu Hirabayashi had the most abstract of the six shorts and display, which is why it's my uncontested favorite of the bunch, but all of the films here added something substantial to the film. A fun discovery.
A decent drama, though I expected a bit more from this one. I liked Ando's 0.5 mm and I'd heard good things about A Piece of Our Life, but it felt rather sterile and a little too by the numbers. As if I'd already seen this film a million times before, only with different actors and from a different director. It is quite novel within the Japanese canon I guess, there aren't that many gay dramas, certainly not high-profile ones. The start of the film is pretty good too, but then it starts to falter a little. The romance never dazzles and the drama felt a bit overdone, especially the boorish boyfriend didn't add much. Performances are nice though and the cinematography is pretty decent too. Nothing out of the ordinary, but some well-framed shots and nice camerawork. Add a decent score and you have a solid, though somewhat unremarkable drama. It's not a terrible introduction to Ando's work, I'd just hoped it'd be something more than that.Read all