This works on so many levels. It's ultra literate. It's incredibly witty visually. It leaves you breathless.

great fun for cinephiles

Now streaming on Netflix. This film is just bursting with life and energy. Yanigimachi's choreography of actors and extras is both bustling but controlled. It seems like anything could happen in this movie.

Shows interesting points of the bureaucracy of making a movie and has a lot of references that makes analogies in the movie work. Luckily, I've got the main reference to Albert Camus' Meursault because of a "The Cure" song, but the movie may not make much sense if you don't know the references... I'd probably give it a 3 out of 5 in that case. =P Anyway, the movie makes a good mix of what's happening in the movie they are making and what happens in "real life".

Goddamn glorious. Preaches as both warning and comic tribute to anyone too easily swept up in artificial realities: film sets, film roles, film itself. Assigned to shoot something called THE BORED MURDERER and asked to understand Camus, one of the pleasures of this film is how these characters interact using any number of deflections or advances they seem to barely understand. Yanagimachi directs with fluid steadicam allowing these scenes to play out like graceful mini-ballads. This is a movie to fall in love with and in.

I was really dreading watching this because I hate making-a-film films, and especially the idea of a making-a-student-film film. Basically its a remake of Day for Night, but it's Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (a much greater film than Day for Night) that the movie constantly makes reference to. Why remake Truffaut's lightest film while drawing all inspiration from his darkest film? It's a highly unsettling juxtaposition and just one of the many examples of this film's extraordinary intelligence. And the ending is the scariest sequence I've seen in a long time. One of the great films of the decade.

April 22 2009, April 28 2009

I couldn't tell if I was interested or bored. It did kind of take me back to my college days, and parts of it were amusing and creepy. But it was just okay for me.

A delightfully unique movie that celebrates cinema and reminds us of the fragility of art. But, of course, art is a reflection of us, so we too must be as fragile as movie. This movie reminds that life is indeed like a movie. I really enjoyed all the direct and indirect reference to classic cinema, espcially the French masters.

It made you think about movie making in a deeper way. I watched it twice because of the subtitles. It gives you a window into Japanese university life.

Intriguingly odd, and yet normal & disturbing on so many levels (cleverly reinforcing the dichotomy one of the main themes explores). I highly recommend it. :-)

The plot becomes a hydra, some of the heads are never cut off, but some are : )

Exhilirating story of a group of Japanese students struggling to make a film. Yanagimachi juggles several subplots in his large cast with Altman-esque ease. In fact, I'd say better than Altman. I really cared about these characters and their problems. The movie was completely captivating, a great look at filmmaking and youth culture with a heart-pounding ending.

this was a good movie but the ending didn't really make any sense.

Of all the movies I've seen in my life, this is probably the hardest one to rate. On one hand, it's a film with a fantastic, engaging premise, terrific direction, and some of the best young acting performances I can recall ever seeing. From the film's notional male lead to the metafilm's male lead, every performance is wonderful. There are several well-done long takes, including the opening sequence, during which two of the movie's characters actually talk about said long takes. All this adds up to a very enjoyable picture. But unfortunately, the movie has a few major flaws that keep it from the elite. Firstly, the completely absurd and unnecessary side plot about the professor feels out of place, and its' conclusion is all the more awkward. Secondly, the film rarely grants the viewer closure; one of the main characters in the movie disappears about 4/5 of the way in and we are never given a final verdict on his fate. Lastly, there are points where the movie is clearly trying too hard. Much like Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, these college students are occasionally too bright and too witty, even for people of their heightened intellect, to be believable. But these flaws are not enough to make the film unenjoyable, and I recommend that anyone with an interest in film or the problems haunting Japanese youth today should check it out.