Today is a “something completely different” kind of day. Yesterday, I watched a movie so special that I wanted to tell you about it right away. Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah Ze Moveeh is like everything you’ve ever seen, only better. ^_^

Ada is a transsexual living in Manila. After her boyfriend takes her money and dumps her, she decides to move to a small town to leave her bad memories behind. With her best friend Didi and her her niece Aruba she opens up a salon, where she tries very hard to not fall for the local hunk, Dodong.

And then she’s hit in the head with a pink meteorite. Didi convinces her to swallow it to gain power (she saw it in a comic book) so Ada does…and transforms into the superheroine Zaturnnah, played wonderfully by Zsa Zsa Padillah, who matches her body language to Ada’s and boy can she sing!

Did I mention this was a musical? Oh yes. It is.

Ada is played by BB Gandanghari – formerly known as Rustom Padilla, a hunky lead actor who, in 2009, came out as transsexual and changed her name. She’s utterly fantastic in every way as Ada. Sensibly, Ada wants to avoid having her heart broken again, and  is convinced that Dodong is only in love with Zaturnnah. In the meantime, as Zaturnnah, she’s busy saving her village from threats like giant frogs, zombies and aliens.

The movie was fun and all, right up to the aliens, where it was catapulted into my personal list of “thank the gods I am alive to see this.” The alien queen, Queen Femina, is obviously a Psychotic Lesbian – with a properly tragic backstory. She and her Amazonistas were…I’m running out of superlatives for this movie. Let’s just say if they made figurines of Queeen Femina and her Amazonistas, I would *so* own them.

Didi is a perfect sidekick – she reads comics, so she *gets* what it’s all about and makes sure Zaturnnah has a suitable costume (and one for herself.) Plus she’s got “comedic sidekick” written all over her. She’s a frickin’ hoot.

You’re probably wondering if Ada and Dodong get together. Of course they do (!) and it was an adorable end scene, with all the townspeople singing and dancing and fireworks and flowers and hearts everywhere. Totally “Awwwwwww….”

I found you the full trailer. Watch and enjoy.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

This movie is, apparently, based on a wildly popular Filipino graphic novel of the same name (which looks spectacular, too.) If any of my readers from the Phillipines have read it, please let us know how it is!

Many, many thanks to Donna for finding this. You are the Master of movies. I loved it. ^_^

Funeral Parade of Roses (薔薇の葬列) is part documentary, part art film and part dramatic narrative, following the gay and drug cultures of late 1960’s – early 1970’s Japan.

Like any movie that is trying to be so many things at once, it’s only partially successful at any of them.

The “gay” part follows Leda and Eddie, two gay crossdressers who work as hostesses at an okama bar. Leda is the owner’s regular, his wife in effect, and Eddie is his piece on the side. Leda rants about Eddie at home and Eddie stresses about Leda in the car. The owner is kind of an asshole, so I don’t feel bad for him. There’s a bittersweet story in between the melodrama here, one about love and betrayal and is exactly why so many LGBTQ people today are fighting to be able to have legal, social and financial recognition for their relationships.

Interspersed between art film scenes which can only be described as “Man Ray, they ain’t” are scenes of the group that are making those films led by a guy they call Guevara, and the drugs and parties they participate in. These scenes are campy because really, there’s no other way to film semi-nude drunken/stoned dancing in their underwear scenes that aren’t plain old sad.

These scenes are further cut by “documentary” sequences in which the film crew asks inane questions of the okama boys, or the drug users. These questions invariably made this viewer cringe. “So,” the interviewer asks Leda, “you don’t see women as sexually attractive?” or asks one of Guevara’s group, “What happens when you smoke marijuana?” I cringed for the same reason I cringe when I’m forced to watch a show on Ancient Egypt on Discovery and the narrator talks about everything in that tone of obsequious amazement. (We have a shorthand phrase for that kind of ingenuous astonishment – “Were they here….or did they come?” which was an actual phrase used at the sound and light show at Chichen Itza. It was used as a kind of chorus, and made us laugh every time they said it.)

Everything between Leda and Eddie comes to a head when they have an extremely silly fight, made even sillier by goofy carnival music. (I was rooting for Leda. Eddie was a jerk.) Another counterculture element is added in the form of a Eddie participating in a porn movie shoot and scenes from Eddie’s youth that are taken right out of a pulp novel. The end to the story was likewise full of pulp-y horror and melodrama, and post-story art film moralizing.

The DVD comes with a pretty thick pamphlet that will tell you everything I just said, but do it with film crit admiration, hyperbole and a digression into Pink films and lots of references to filmmaker’s names, which I won’t.

The links to the title on Amazon go to the Region 2 version with subtitles. I don’t suppose that should present too many obstacles to modern viewers, but FYI. The R2 has been localized for a British English speaking audience, which provided me with a little bit of extra pleasure to imagine the British audience for this movie.

The movie itself is paced excruciatingly slowly, with that slow, death-trance music that so many Japanese movies seem to favor. (See my reviews of Blue and Kakera for similar complaints.) The background for the movie is the student protest-torn Japanese political and social landscape, which represents both a counterculture – and the roots of the political landscape that now exists in Japan in mainstream culture.

I can’t say I learned anything from this movie I didn’t know, or couldn’t guess, but then, I was actually alive during these years. For an audience twenty years younger than me, the bits at the gay bar might be a bit of a lesson about a world long before they were born.

Overall – 6

My very sincere thanks to James Welker for his sponsorship of today’s review – it was an interesting experience!

Well I just finished watching Kakera, a live-action adaptation of Sakurazawa Erika’s Love Vibes manga. In a word, it was abysmal.

The original was a short romance between two women, each who have other attachments they need to clear up before they can get together comfortably. The main conflict comes from Mako’s discomfort with “being gay,” when she is still in a “I’m not gay, I just love you” mindset…and the issue of her boyfriend who feels that he’s allowed to leave her, but when she leaves him for another woman, gets angry. You know, pretty normal stuff. If you are interested, you can read my review of the Love Vibes manga from back in 2004.

The original ended on a high point, maybe a little idealistically, as Mika and Mako go running off together hand in hand.

The movie pretty much squeezes the life out of the original story, and fills the gaps with the movie equivalent of formaldehyde, giving it body without making it look truly alive, and leaving behind an unpleasant smell.

Mako, the cheerful, average girl with an average boyfriend has been turned into a total wet rag, Haru. Mika, the energetic bisexual now becomes Riko, a sculptor of prosthetic body parts who lives at home and is…strange.

The idea that Riko could find *anything* appealing about Haru is hard to swallow for most of the movie. And when they do kiss, it’s that typical Japanese no-movement, no-reaction dry lip pressing that just makes me want to stab something. Every time you almost sort of start to like one or both of the characters for a second, or the movie shows some sign of life, an awkward, unpleasant and usually depressing scene is inserted that stops the momentum and ruins the mood.

In an interview, the director proudly says she rewrote about 80% of the original story. All I can say is that she has some serious issues, if this was written with her life experiences in mind. (Thanks to Katherine H for the link to the interview. It explained a lot.)

What really just kills this movie dead is that it utterly craps all over the happy ending of the manga. Forget running off hand in hand. I won’t tell you what happens, because it’ll just piss you off.

Ratings:

UGH

This is exactly how not to do a live-action adaptation of a manga.

After watching and reading fourteen million hours worth of Catholic schoolgirls getting into vary degrees of trouble, or not, I am the obviously not the only one who thought, “I wonder what would happen if these characters had superpowers and had to fight evil nuns?” Kawahara Izumi clearly had that same thought and so wrote the shoujo manga Warau Daitenshi Mikaeru, about three girls at St. Michael’s Academy, a private school for girls. I have not yet had a chance to read the manga, but after watching the Live Action adaptation of the story, which has come to America under the name Arch Angels, I absolutely will track it down.

The story follows Shijou Fumio, whose life radically alters when her mother dies. Although they lived in poverty, it turns out that Fumio’s father was unbelievably wealthy and her older brother, who had been kept by the grandmother who threw her pregnant mother out, now wants Fumio in his life.

Fumio transfers to St. Michael’s and instantly, due to her good grades, excellent athleticism and general down-to-earth qualities, is immediately escalated to the rank of star of the school, nicknamed “The Saviour.” She joins Saiki Kazune, known as “Oscar-sama,” and Sarashina Yuzuko called, hysterically, “the Colobockle.” Of course, there’s oodles of akogare/admiration involved in this new star status.

The three are bonded together over their love of average, everyday Japanese food and snacks, and further grow close because they suddenly manifest superpowers, which they will use to defeat the evil Sister Marlena who is kidnapping random delectably pure girls for some nefarious fate or other.

Okay, so that’s the plot. What makes this movie work is the utterly crackheaded use of special effects, and the insane plot complications, compounded by things like eyeball grenades, a CGI dog named “Damian” and a climax which had me *howling* with laughter. Everytime you thought it couldn’t get weirder and funnier…it went leaps past that.

So, now I have a submarine run by a St. Michael’s nun to add to my helicopters at Astrea Hill. If I keep this up, I’ll have a whole military division just based on Catholic school armaments! Awesome. Clearly I need to collect the whole set! And that doesn’t even include soulassassin’s fighter jets.

Oh, and for those of you who watched Ueno Juri in Last Friends and went gaga for her butchy Ruka – she plays Fumio. ^_^

Ratings:

Cinematography – 7
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Yuri – 2
Service – 2

Overall – 8

Anyway, if you, like myself, need to detox from Catholic schoolgirls and their keigo-speaking proper selves, by watching them slurp ramen before they take on evil with their superpowers, Arch Angels is exactly what you are waiting for. ^_^