Archive for the Live Action Category


Live Action: Hana no Asuka-gumi Movie

December 12th, 2005

Hana no Asuka-gumi is a very bad live-action movie based on manga I like.

When faced with an extremely complex story, with many characters and a multi-tiered socio-political set-up, some directors simplify and some rewrite. And some throw the whole story out and create something completely different from the original so that what’s left is something so awful that the original creator would probably not want to be associated it. The original Casino Royale springs immediately to mind…and so does the live-action Hana no Asuka-gumi. This movie is *so* bad, it’s good.

The manga of Hana no Asuka-gumi takes place in modern Tokyo, among the many and varied members of the Zenchuu Ura, the umbrella organization that runs all the female gangs of Tokyo (among other things) and the people who are involved with the principles of this organization. Kuraku Asuka was once a high-ranking member, but is no longer.

I’ve mentioned the original manga on and off across Okazu, reviewed the first OVA and second OVA, and done an overview of the new manga series. All of these are, in one way or another, excellent.

Not so this movie. ^_^

In the live-action version of this wonderful girl-gang story, we are transported to a dystopian future, in which all gangs look like stereotpyes of gangs, from big Happy Days 1950’s gang hair to double-breasted yakuza gang suits, to Mad Max ripoff faux-punk gang leather armor. All of the Omoteban look like Michael Jackson music video runaways, and they tend to yell alot and fight not nearly so much. Asuka’s (in the red jacket on the cover above – click the picture to get a bigger version) and Miko’s relationship is pretty much exactly the same as it is in the manga, and so is both of their relationships to Yohko (chick on the left side of the cover with big hair, which is a bloody shame). Other than that, nearly everything is different.

The worst change is what they did to Hibari-sama. Instead of being a proto-GothLoli freak with a doll and uniform fetish, she’s made into a middle-aged woman who cannot speak and needs misting periodically. This causes the movie to crawl to a stop every time she comes on screen – it sucks any energy the movie has away, just like the horrible mono-tonal Sister Jill did for the Cutey Honey Live-action movie.

But none of these is really enough to kill this movie completely – nor is the fact that the soundtrack consists entirely of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction repeated over and over endlessly until you want to rip your ears off.

Despite all this, there are *still* scenes worth watching.

Chief among these is the scene where Asuka manages to grab Yohko, ties her to a bed and yell at her for a while, with a little light kicking to the ribs. Asuka has what is a genuinely unresolved-sexual-tension filled scene with the woman she loves. This relationship isn’t going to go anywhere…and neither does this movie. It ends in an anticlimactic free-for-all that resolves exactly nothing.

Ratings:
Cinematography – 2
Characters – 6
Story – 4
Yuri – 1
Service – 0

Overall – 2

Like the live action movie based on Blue, one should only bother watching this if one is a total hardcore Hana no Asuka-gumi fan. I am a hardcore fan, and have *two* copies of it. ^_^





Live-Action: Blue Movie

December 9th, 2005

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.





Live-Action: Nana Movie

December 9th, 2005

Nana is a live-action movie based on the manga of the same name by Yazawa Ai. It’s been a huge hit in Japan and I can understand why.

But let me be very honest and admit right off that I do not personally like the manga at all. It’s nothing specific – just not my cup of tea. That having been said, however, if I *were* a fan of the manga, I think I probably would have been really pleased with the movie. As it was, it wasn’t a bad movie, really.

For the three of you who are not familiar with Nana – the story is about two completely different girls named Nana: one a punky musician and the other a sweet girl, who meet on their way to Tokyo and end up sharing an apartment. Sweet Nana gets a pretty good case of admiration for punk Nana, who seems to have no troubles of her own. Of *course* that isn’t the case.

Nakashima Mika and Miyazaki Aoi, who play both Nanas, do a bang-up job. Aoi’s sweet Nana is huggably cute, and Mika’s edgy Nana reminded me strongly of a friend of mine, so I was instantly fond of her. As my friend does not read Okazu, I feel free to say this: there are some people who can smoke sexily. It happens alot in anime – think of Sainte-Juste from Oniisama e. But in real life, there are fewer people who make smoking look good. Betty Davis in Now, Voyager, carried it off pretty well and my friend Meryl looks kind of funny when she’s not holding a cigarette. When I hear her in my mind, her sentences are interrupted by inhalations of tobacco. And she makes it look pretty good. Nakashima Mika has got that same quality. It would seem odd for her to *not* be smoking.

I only read the first volume of the manga in Japanese, and random chapters much later when I picked up the odd issue of Lala – and I skimmed the first chapter in English when 500 copies of Shoujo Beat showed up at my house for Onna!, so I honestly don’t know how accurate the movie is compared with the manga, but from what I remembered it seemed pretty close. Since Nana the movie has been breaking all sorts of records in Japan, I can only assume that the fans thinks so too.

As movies go, especially as Japanese live-action movies go, it’s not bad. The acting is pretty tight, the story is easy to follow and the music isn’t bad at all. Towards the end it gets very slow, a quality that all Japanese live-action movies seem to have a problem with.

The big question for us has to be “so what about the kiss?”. The kiss Nana gives Nana was such a big deal, there was an interview with the actresses about it. It didn’t make them uncomfortable, they said. Well…not surprising because it can hardly be called “a kiss”. A peck, or perhaps, a “chuu”, but not a kiss.

Which brings me to something I’d been wanting to mention for a while – in manga, because the art is static, all time is slowed down, and emotional scenes – especially kisses – are also slowed down and seem more melodramatic than they might otherwise be. In this case the “kiss” is so fast that you blink and you miss it. In the manga, (I am assured by people who know better than me) the kiss is a real kiss. In the movie it’s practically non-existent. One more reason to like manga better. ^_^ (And incidentally, time is even slower for me when I read Japanese stories, like the Marimite novels. because it might take me a while to finish a complex sentence. The characters hang in limbo while I finish. If they are embracing while I’m working at it…the hug might go on for a looooong time. lol)

However, the affection the Nanas feel for one one another, and the akogare/admiration Hachi (punk Nana’s nickname for sweet Nana, which is a play on their names. “Nana” means “seven” and “Hachi” means “eight”) holds for Nana is very warm and fuzzy – and very natural. If you’re a fan of the manga, or you like chick movies in general, I’d recommend this to you.

Ratings:
Cinematography – 8
Characters – 8
Story – 7
Soundtrack – 7
Yuri – 1
Service – 1

Overall – a strong 7

Not a waste of time, unless you’re a hardcore zombie action movie fan.





Takarazuka: Elizabeth

July 8th, 2005

Yay! Imagine my happy-happiness to not only receive this awesome DVD from Japan about a week after I ordered it, but to find that it plays on my DVD player!

(Special Note: I’m getting alot of interest in this post, mostly because of YouTube. I purchased this DVD from the regular Japanese Takarazuka website through a buying service. It is not a cheap process – you will be paying for the DVD, the buyer’s commission, the shipping to buyer and the shipping to you. I don’t have a special source or website to offer you, I just threw money at the problem.)

And before I say anything else, I want you to know that the virgin watching of this DVD was done with my wife and parents – and Mom was drooling over Death’s clothes too, so it’s NOT just geeks, goths and lesbians. ^_^

You may remember back in April, just as the Yuri Revolution tour was getting underway, I, Serge, Donna and Bruce bailed to go see a Takarazuka show at their Tokyo Theater. If you do not remember, please feel free to read my original gushing report.

Clearly the plot, characters, cool clothes and Deathlings have not significantly changed since I saw this show three months ago, so the original review will stand unaltered.

I was very impressed by the DVD itself though. Not only did it unexpectedly work on my R1 DVD player (I knew it would work on my computer, of course, but this was an added bonus) but it was exceptionally high quality, with a nice little “Program” inside that included cast, crew, synopsis, scenes, songs, and history. All in Japanese of course, but that is hardly an obstacle to fangirly-dom. Even more important was the picture card of Nao looking hunky as Der Tod. Yum. It now lives on my desk at work. ^_^

Every scene/song comes with a title on the screen, so you know what song you’re listening to. I was amazed that I could read about 80% of the song titles. I guess they keep those pretty simple.

The number one win in my book was that the tango between Nao Ayaki and Jun Sena at the very end of the revue portion of the show, was just as sexy as I remember it being. I know this is really fanservice Yuri and not really even that, because we’re supposed to see Death as a guy, but you know – Nao is gorgeous and doesn’t look remotely like a guy, so to my Yuri-goggles-on-low eyes, what you have is two women dancing. And I like it a lot. ^_^

I still want one of those Hapsburg shield mirror things from the finale, too. ^_^

Ratings:
Cinematography – 6 (like all stage shows we have too many close ups and often lose what’s actually going on on the stage)
Music – 7 (sticky Broadway theme stuff)
Story – 10 (If this doesn’t make you love history, NOTHING can)
Characters – 9 (With the exception of Rudolph who is a total pussy)
Yuri – 9

Overall – 8, objectively, but for me and those of my androgynous-women-in-uniform-loving ilk, 10, really.





Live Action: Kekkou Kamen Movie

July 7th, 2005

I was so happy to find a copy of the new Kekkou Kamen live-action movie, even though I was pretty sure that there was going to be no yuri in it.

I have reviewed the Kekkou Kamen anime, manga, and three truly horrible live-action movies, previously.

I had high hopes for the new live-action KK, if only because the new movie version of Cutie Honey had been so decent. Oh well. I guess it was too much to ask that this really trashy series ever be “decent.” ^_^

It wasn’t just that the scenes of Kekkou Kamen on a motorcycle were obviously filmed in front of a bluescreen – or that the “lascivious” behavior of the teachers and their henchmen were of the boring “slavering over a bra” kind. It was more like, it just got gross instead of tacky. Let’s put it this way – this movie actually *stole* the laxative schtick from Weather Woman. Does it really get lower than that?

The plot, such as it was, was not really enough for a real movie, so the middle bit gets kind of unfocused. I thought it was just me, but about 2/3 of the way though the movie, Mayumi breaks the fourth wall and actually speaks to Go Nagai, who pops up in a little bubble on the screen and answers. Clearly they’d lost all momentum by then. I didn’t feel too bad about only half paying attention.

Now – here was the one good thing – the actress playing Mayumi. She was *perfect.* In this version, Mayumi is a transfer student from New Zealand – not too bright, but not stupid; really bad at kanji – but with excellent English, which surprised the hell out of me. She’s not particularly cute, either, but really grows on you. Honestly, she was totally wasted in this movie, which wasn’t even particularly creative with its sort-of-sadistic, quasi-sexual tortures. Nothing even remotely as good as Gestapoko from the anime.

I was definitely bummed at the lack of yuri. There’s plenty of room for it – and its just about the one fetish the movie manages to miss – which, if you think about it could either be good, or bad. lol

The one last major bummer was the crappiness of the theme. In the anime Kekkou Kamen’s theme is sung by Shinohara Emi and is really great. The remake of the Cutie Honey theme for the movie was SO good that I was really hoping for a cool remake for KK’s theme. No dice. The new version is scratchy and whiny and generally suckariffic. Boo hooooo.

Ratings:
Cinematography – hahaha
Music – eh
Characters – Mayumi – wow; Everyone else – shrug
Story – bleh
Yuri – snort

Overall, a resounding noseblow of a movie. If you want to see it, you can borrow my copy.