Whereas Nana was a good movie based on a manga I don’t much care for, Blue is a bad movie based on a manga I don’t much care for.
The Blue manga was never a favorite of mine. The movie stays true to the basic plot of the manga, so if you read my earlier review, you’ll get the gist of the movie.
Unfortunately for the audience, the movie manages to disappear the few decent aspects of the manga. For one thing, in the early chapters of the manga Kirishima Kayako and Endo Masami seem to be enjoying life, most especially, their time together. In the movie, while Kirishima’s actress manages to make her sense of the other girl’s nearness fairly intense, they never seem to actually have fun with each other – we almost never see them laughing and smiling.
Through no fault of her own, the actress who plays Kirishima has an expression that makes her seem unsatisfied. I blame her eyebrows – they just look evil, which kills any expression she might have of contentment. Endo’s actress smiles in a dreamy, stoned kind of way, which makes her seem like she doesn’t eve notice that its a girl she’s kissing. Or even that she’s kissing anyone.
More irritating was the fact that in the manga, Endo and Kirishima touch quite bit – hold hands, touch each other’s faces and hair, while in the movie – even when they are kissing – the girls act like they have no arms at all, and barely touch. It leaves the viewer with a cold and nothing-much kind of feeling.
But that’s not the worst of the movie. The worst is that this movie was 1 hour, 56 minutes and 37 seconds long. How do I know that? Because I spent a lot of my time watching the clock on my media player, rather than watching the lingering, moribund, frequently stagnant action on the screen. You know how sometimes a director frames a scene without the characters in it, *then* they move on screen, or conversely, they move off screen and the camera lingers? Imagine every scene where this technique is used…on both sides, so we get a framed shot for 10 seconds, then the scene begins, then the scene ends and we get another 10 seconds of framed shot. It was breathtakingly boring, let me tell you.
An extra plot complication was added to the movie, in case all the nothing was moving too fast for us. So while Endo has disappeared over summer vacation, Kirishima takes up painting…still life, of course, which is probably some kind of symbolic thing for this movie. So we watch her sketch, and begin to paint and get a critique, and paint some more for a moribund 15 minutes or so that add nothing to the movie, except an aborted kiss attempt and a fight that could have been handled more simply.
And I haven’t even touched on the soundtrack – or lack thereof. The background was as barren as the beach the girls sit upon.
Even the end was significantly more blah than the manga, which was a feat. In the manga, Endo leaves for Tokyo without Kirishima, and as the train pulls away, she begins to cry (up to this point we had never seen her do anything other than smile, so we are meant to see that she has some human weakness after all – and how much she really loves Kirishima.) In the movie she leaves without tears, and then we watch a “video” she sends to Kayoko…4 mind-numbing minutes of out-of-focus waves from the beach where they sat and talked. An insanely dull, and entirely fitting, ending to what is sadly one of the most lackluster movies I’ve ever sat through.
Ratings:
Cinematography – 2
Story – 4
Characters – 4
Yuri – 7
Music – -1
Service – 1
Overall – 3, maybe. If you’re hardcore Yuri fan, or a a Nananan Kiriko fan, you may want to schedule in 2 hours to knit or whittle or something while this plays. Otherwise, save your time and energy.
I have previously reviewed the manga Blue, by Kiriko Nananan and the live action movie based on it. But now the Blue manga is available in English translation and so, deserves a second look… (Note: As of 2015, this is available only from third-party sellers.)
