Over 2500 words of reviewing!
A week late, and a book fewer than I was hoping (am reading Vellum but have 40 pages left and figure if I don't post these now, it'll be another week...), but here are some reviews! As always, discuss in the comments if you have any thoughts on any of these things. ^_^
Shockingly, there is no death by butter knife! But here is a long review of it anyway.
Girls Love:
Still, given the title -- and the fact that the movie opens with Yoko saying, "In the spring of my sixteenth year, I fell in love." -- I was 98% sure that there would be no happily ever after, and I was right. Not five minutes into the movie, we see Natsuo collapse, and it's obvious that there's going to be death by illness before the end.
Yoko is a painfully awkward, introverted high school student who spends all her free time practicing the piano. One spring day, she spots a bracelet over the edge of the music room balcony, and tries to reach it. Down on the track field, Natsuo, who's practicing her sprinting, sees her and rushes up to save her, thinking Yoko is about to jump off. They clear up the misunderstanding, and it's obvious that Yoko is dazzled by Natsuo's energy, and Natsuo also seems to be drawn to the other girl.
Their bond is cemented when Yoko, nervous about the piano recital she doesn't really want to participate in (her mother is the one who's always pushed her to play; Yoko actually wants to be a kindergarten teacher), decides to ditch everything and spend her free afternoon with Natsuo. They hop on a bus at random and get off at the last stop, then walk around on the mountain and talk. When they're waiting for the bus afterwards, Natsuo remarks that it feels kind of like they were on a date. "A... date?" Yoko asks, unsure. "Yeah," Natsuo answers. "I went on a date with Yoko today," she says, trying it out. The girls grin at each other, and it was oifnal;kfj; so cute. <3
They head back to Natsuo's apartment, where Yoko sees a picture of Natsuo's friend Kanako, who goes to a different school. Troubled, Yoko wants to know what Kanako is like, and why Natsuo would want to hang out with someone as dull as she (Yoko) is when she has a much cooler friend.
Natsuo shocks the terminally shy Yoko by coming into the bath with her. They talk about various things, and Natsuo teases Yoko with one of the very, very few lines I didn't understand -- something about her breasts, but what? Anyway, this scene (like the whole movie) is filmed with the camera just sitting there, no cuts or anything, no background music even. It was a bit strange at the beginning, but it made this scene almost like a documentary, like you were watching something really happening, and both actresses were especially natural here.
Later on, lying in bed, Yoko opens up some more and drops her formality for the first time and uses plain verbs. Natsuo is delighted, and says it's so much more tomodachippoi. Yoko is a bit hurt: "You say it's friend-like... but aren't we friends?" "Of course we are," Natsuo reassures her. They fall asleep holding hands.
The next day Yoko's mother comes to get her at school, furious with her for having missed the recital and having stayed out all night. Yoko is suspended/grounded (didn't really get the details of this bit either), and during that time, Natsuo collapses again. When Yoko returns to school and finds out, she's very worried, but Natsuo suddenly shuts her out, basically ignoring her. Yoko is devastated, but determined to find out what she did to make Natsuo dislike her. She manages to get the bracelet from the balcony, and heads over to Natsuo's place that evening to give it to her. Natsuo refuses to open the door at first, but finally does and collapses again, and reveals to Yoko that she has a heart condition (another one of the few lines I didn't understand completely, as I need to brush up on my medical Japanese).
Yoko goes to visit Natsuo in the hospital, but when finds that Kanako is already there, she leaves, convinced that Natsuo doesn't need her since she already has a close friend. The next day, Kanako is waiting outside the school for Yoko; she gives her some papers on which are written the cute little song that Yoko had composed for Natsuo, saying that Natsuo has kept them with her all the time, and that she (Natsuo) really cares for Yoko. Yoko finally finds the courage to go back to the hospital, where Natsuo tells her that she really didn't want Yoko to see her like this. As Yoko is leaving the building, she realises she forgot her bag or phone (can't remember) in Natsuo's room, and arrives just in time to stop her friend from jumping out the window.
Life goes on. Yoko visits Natsuo at the hospital again, and Natsuo makes one final request: she wants to run one last time. Yoko tearfully agrees, and then it's all really sappy and kind of silly and melodramatic, but damn if my eyes weren't suspiciously moist.
Cut to several years later, and Yoko is teaching her kindergarten class the song she wrote for Natsuo. The girls want to know who the Natsuo in the song is, and why Yoko always wears that bracelet, the one with the flower scratched on the inside.
THE END.
A cool thing about this movie, that I might not have noticed if I hadn't seen The Women (which I still haven't reviewed, and must rant about in another post) is that there is not a single man in the whole movie, except for (possibly) some random guy seen at a distance in a park. Yoko and Natsuo attend a girls' school with a seemingly all-female staff, their fathers are never around, Yoko's students are all girls, and even the doctor is a woman.
I saw this at the Tsutaya cinema in Shibuya last Monday evening, and was one of only 7 people in the room. >_< I hope there were more people at the other showings, because while it wasn't a great movie by any means, and certainly no Love My Life, it was pretty decent and sweet. I can has moar?
Final verdict: I'll be very, very generous and give it 8/10, though I suppose it really merits more of a 6, if we were going by production values and cinematography. Still, it was honest and simple and Natsuo was especially adorable. Also, it gets bonus points for an ending WAY less ridiculous than the one in Boys Love. XD
Featuring the most badly-animated gay pâtissier ever!
Antique Bakery
The animation is so, so bad. It looked like the person who did the backgrounds and the person who animated the characters never even exchanged so much as an email about the look they were going for, because most of the time the characters looked like pasty paper dolls against a computer-rendered backdrop. The super-deformed parts were jarring and the timing was always off, so that they were lame rather than funny.
Overall, I was underwhelmed by this. The "gay of demonic charm" was kind of funny (especially the department store bit), but apart from that... meh. I have the live-action drama to watch, and I've heard that they cut out all the gay bits, which I wonder at, given that a whole character (as well as a sort of important subplot) revolves around the gay. The Korean movie version, however, seems to have gayed it up even more. *intrigued*
Speaking of that subplot, I laughed when Jean-Baptiste accused Tachibana of having a bad French accent, because Tachibana's seiyu could actually pronounce the French more or less properly, as opposed to Jean-Baptiste's, who was obviously just reading a katakana-ization of French. XD
Final verdict: 5/10
Another reason to love KenKen, because there weren't enough already. ^_^;;; Butlers!
Happy Boys
Oh, how I laughed. Seriously, I wasn't expecting this show to be so much fun! I don't really feel like writing about it here, because I took a million screencaps and I want to make them into a silly story, so for now I'll just say that the show has pretty boys, and KenKen in ridiculous host clothes. Which should be incentive enough, no?
Final verdict: 8/10
No superlative seems strong enough!
So You Think You Can Dance Canada
This show was awesome all around. Damn right Canada can dance, and are our dancers ever smoking hot!
Because I am lazy, bullet points:
- Natalli is the sexiest woman ever. Period. Whenever she was on screen, my brain went into "...*drool*... Take me now!" mode. What's more, each of her solos was completely different from what she'd done before, and she threw in some comedy; I get tired of all the girls who just break out the usual spinning around and writhing on the floor contemporary stuff each time they have to dance for their life. I was so happy that she made it to the top four, and though I was rooting for her, I knew she wouldn't win, because yeah, Nico ripping his shirt off + excitable female teenaged audience =/= leggy blonde winner. :(
- Oh man, did the girls in the audience ever like Nico... XD I liked him a lot too, and I'm happy with him as a winner. Il semble être un vraiment bon gars, simple et sympathique. Go Nico!
- Blake was kind of an ass as a contestant, back on the first U.S. season, but I really liked him as a judge and as a choreographer. Though that one time he seemed to be trying to pretend he wasn't gay was really weird, especially given his choice of outfits most of the season. @_@
- The American version has its Russian ballroom dancers, we have Québecois ballroom dancers!
- Tré Armstrong is hot.
- Lisa and Vincent together were amazing, and I watched their Afro-jazz number three times in a row, it was so good.
- It was really interesting to watch Vincent, Francis and Danny lose their English when they were eliminated and said their goodbyes.
- Speaking of English, Jean-Marc mixing his prepositions up like there was no tomorrow had me translating back and forth in my head to figure out which ones were coming out "French" and which were just him getting confused.
- Leah Miller turned out to be a rather charming host, in spite of my initial misgivings. Not that anyone can ever compare to Cat Deeley, of course. ^_^
- Overall, the choreography was excellent. At least four different numbers brought tears to my eyes, and plenty of others had me grinning or laughing.
- I don't want to go off on a stereotypical "Canadians are so nice!" tangent, but... I really liked all of the contestants, and they all seemed to like each other quite a bit. It was great to see them so excited for each other.
- Dan's comment about the Lisa/Nico paparazzi routine made me laugh ("I don't think they'd allow that on tv in the States!"), but it's true that a lot of the dances were more sensual/sexual than what we've seen on the U.S. show. More adult. I liked it. :D
- Go-Go dancing! XDDD
Final verdict: 9.5/10
I'm a pretty even-tempered girl, and it takes a lot for a book to frustrate me, but this book managed. And how! If anyone would like to read this book, I'll gladly give it to you -- you may want to skip this review, then, because I'm about to reveal the surprise ending, which totally surprised me because it had NO BUSINESS ENDING LIKE THAT!
My Sister's Keeper (Jodi Picoult)
This book is the kind I usually avoid (and if you're wondering why I read it, it's because it was given to me by a friend wanting to get rid of stuff before moving away, and I needed some reading that fit in my purse), the kind that is classified as "women's interest", because apparently women are only interested in sappy family stories. :P
:P, I say!
Story: Kate has a rare kind of leukemia, and her parents conceive Anna to be a cord blood donor. Kate is still sick, and Anna ends up constantly giving things to try to keep Kate healthy, such as blood and bone marrow. But when Anna is thirteen, Kate is dying of renal failure, and their mother insists that Anna give her sister one of her kidneys, she decides that enough is enough, and finds a lawer to help her file for medical emancipation.
Anyway, the book follows Anna, Kate, their mother, their father (who is a firefighter, which is way too obviously symbolic and also a plot device later on), their brother who is a pyromaniac, the lawyer, and the woman who has to evaluate the family, who is conveniently the lawyer's first love and neither was ever able to forget the other and BLAH BLAH BLAH.
I didn't hate the book the whole way through; I didn't even really dislike it. Mostly, I was unmoved by the whole thing, which is probably a sign that the writing wasn't all that great, because I tend to be rather nakimushi. I had a hard time really warming to any of the characters save for Kate, and the Campbell-Julia story was too cliché, but what got to me was that all the characters just sounded the same to me: the book is written in the first person and switches perspective, going from one character to the next, but there wasn't much variation in mode of expression, and Anna did NOT sound her age. Still, the book wasn't bad -- not until the end, anyway.
So after the hearing that's torn the family apart, while Kate lies dying in the hospital, the judge grants Anna medical emancipation, so that she doesn't have to give Kate her kidney if she doesn't want to. This means that Kate will die, but even with the transplant, she was more than likely to die anyway, and she was tired of suffering. As Campbell, the lawyer, drives Anna home, they get in an accident and Anna dies.
And they give her kidney to Kate, whose cancer then goes into remission, and then there's an epilogue in which a healthy Kate reflects, a few years later, upon her sister.
#$^@$@#$*($%^@#!!!
First of all, that renders Anna's whole struggle, the knowledge that she's going to live the rest of her life knowing that she had it in her power to save her sister and didn't, totally pointless. It renders their mother's growing understanding, that sometimes you just have to let go, totally pointless. IT MADE THE WHOLE BOOK TOTALLY POINTLESS!
Most of all, the real reason Anna went through with the hearing was because Kate had asked her to stop trying, saying she was fed up with suffering and that she didn't want to go on. Now that the parents know this, and were starting to accept that they had to let Kate go -- that she WANTED to go -- they still have the transplant done. I can understand that they've lost one daughter, so they're sure as hell going to try to save the other, but the doctors had said that there was only a 10% chance of the operation being succesful, and that even then, the odds were that it would only give Kate a couple of years more.
I was completely disgusted by the end, and don't even feel like writing about it anymore.
Final verdict: BOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Shockingly, there is no death by butter knife! But here is a long review of it anyway.
Girls Love:
Still, given the title -- and the fact that the movie opens with Yoko saying, "In the spring of my sixteenth year, I fell in love." -- I was 98% sure that there would be no happily ever after, and I was right. Not five minutes into the movie, we see Natsuo collapse, and it's obvious that there's going to be death by illness before the end.
Yoko is a painfully awkward, introverted high school student who spends all her free time practicing the piano. One spring day, she spots a bracelet over the edge of the music room balcony, and tries to reach it. Down on the track field, Natsuo, who's practicing her sprinting, sees her and rushes up to save her, thinking Yoko is about to jump off. They clear up the misunderstanding, and it's obvious that Yoko is dazzled by Natsuo's energy, and Natsuo also seems to be drawn to the other girl.
Their bond is cemented when Yoko, nervous about the piano recital she doesn't really want to participate in (her mother is the one who's always pushed her to play; Yoko actually wants to be a kindergarten teacher), decides to ditch everything and spend her free afternoon with Natsuo. They hop on a bus at random and get off at the last stop, then walk around on the mountain and talk. When they're waiting for the bus afterwards, Natsuo remarks that it feels kind of like they were on a date. "A... date?" Yoko asks, unsure. "Yeah," Natsuo answers. "I went on a date with Yoko today," she says, trying it out. The girls grin at each other, and it was oifnal;kfj; so cute. <3
They head back to Natsuo's apartment, where Yoko sees a picture of Natsuo's friend Kanako, who goes to a different school. Troubled, Yoko wants to know what Kanako is like, and why Natsuo would want to hang out with someone as dull as she (Yoko) is when she has a much cooler friend.
Natsuo shocks the terminally shy Yoko by coming into the bath with her. They talk about various things, and Natsuo teases Yoko with one of the very, very few lines I didn't understand -- something about her breasts, but what? Anyway, this scene (like the whole movie) is filmed with the camera just sitting there, no cuts or anything, no background music even. It was a bit strange at the beginning, but it made this scene almost like a documentary, like you were watching something really happening, and both actresses were especially natural here.
Later on, lying in bed, Yoko opens up some more and drops her formality for the first time and uses plain verbs. Natsuo is delighted, and says it's so much more tomodachippoi. Yoko is a bit hurt: "You say it's friend-like... but aren't we friends?" "Of course we are," Natsuo reassures her. They fall asleep holding hands.
The next day Yoko's mother comes to get her at school, furious with her for having missed the recital and having stayed out all night. Yoko is suspended/grounded (didn't really get the details of this bit either), and during that time, Natsuo collapses again. When Yoko returns to school and finds out, she's very worried, but Natsuo suddenly shuts her out, basically ignoring her. Yoko is devastated, but determined to find out what she did to make Natsuo dislike her. She manages to get the bracelet from the balcony, and heads over to Natsuo's place that evening to give it to her. Natsuo refuses to open the door at first, but finally does and collapses again, and reveals to Yoko that she has a heart condition (another one of the few lines I didn't understand completely, as I need to brush up on my medical Japanese).
Yoko goes to visit Natsuo in the hospital, but when finds that Kanako is already there, she leaves, convinced that Natsuo doesn't need her since she already has a close friend. The next day, Kanako is waiting outside the school for Yoko; she gives her some papers on which are written the cute little song that Yoko had composed for Natsuo, saying that Natsuo has kept them with her all the time, and that she (Natsuo) really cares for Yoko. Yoko finally finds the courage to go back to the hospital, where Natsuo tells her that she really didn't want Yoko to see her like this. As Yoko is leaving the building, she realises she forgot her bag or phone (can't remember) in Natsuo's room, and arrives just in time to stop her friend from jumping out the window.
Life goes on. Yoko visits Natsuo at the hospital again, and Natsuo makes one final request: she wants to run one last time. Yoko tearfully agrees, and then it's all really sappy and kind of silly and melodramatic, but damn if my eyes weren't suspiciously moist.
Cut to several years later, and Yoko is teaching her kindergarten class the song she wrote for Natsuo. The girls want to know who the Natsuo in the song is, and why Yoko always wears that bracelet, the one with the flower scratched on the inside.
THE END.
A cool thing about this movie, that I might not have noticed if I hadn't seen The Women (which I still haven't reviewed, and must rant about in another post) is that there is not a single man in the whole movie, except for (possibly) some random guy seen at a distance in a park. Yoko and Natsuo attend a girls' school with a seemingly all-female staff, their fathers are never around, Yoko's students are all girls, and even the doctor is a woman.
I saw this at the Tsutaya cinema in Shibuya last Monday evening, and was one of only 7 people in the room. >_< I hope there were more people at the other showings, because while it wasn't a great movie by any means, and certainly no Love My Life, it was pretty decent and sweet. I can has moar?
Final verdict: I'll be very, very generous and give it 8/10, though I suppose it really merits more of a 6, if we were going by production values and cinematography. Still, it was honest and simple and Natsuo was especially adorable. Also, it gets bonus points for an ending WAY less ridiculous than the one in Boys Love. XD
Featuring the most badly-animated gay pâtissier ever!
Antique Bakery
The animation is so, so bad. It looked like the person who did the backgrounds and the person who animated the characters never even exchanged so much as an email about the look they were going for, because most of the time the characters looked like pasty paper dolls against a computer-rendered backdrop. The super-deformed parts were jarring and the timing was always off, so that they were lame rather than funny.
Overall, I was underwhelmed by this. The "gay of demonic charm" was kind of funny (especially the department store bit), but apart from that... meh. I have the live-action drama to watch, and I've heard that they cut out all the gay bits, which I wonder at, given that a whole character (as well as a sort of important subplot) revolves around the gay. The Korean movie version, however, seems to have gayed it up even more. *intrigued*
Speaking of that subplot, I laughed when Jean-Baptiste accused Tachibana of having a bad French accent, because Tachibana's seiyu could actually pronounce the French more or less properly, as opposed to Jean-Baptiste's, who was obviously just reading a katakana-ization of French. XD
Final verdict: 5/10
Another reason to love KenKen, because there weren't enough already. ^_^;;; Butlers!
Happy Boys
Oh, how I laughed. Seriously, I wasn't expecting this show to be so much fun! I don't really feel like writing about it here, because I took a million screencaps and I want to make them into a silly story, so for now I'll just say that the show has pretty boys, and KenKen in ridiculous host clothes. Which should be incentive enough, no?
Final verdict: 8/10
No superlative seems strong enough!
So You Think You Can Dance Canada
This show was awesome all around. Damn right Canada can dance, and are our dancers ever smoking hot!
Because I am lazy, bullet points:
- Natalli is the sexiest woman ever. Period. Whenever she was on screen, my brain went into "...*drool*... Take me now!" mode. What's more, each of her solos was completely different from what she'd done before, and she threw in some comedy; I get tired of all the girls who just break out the usual spinning around and writhing on the floor contemporary stuff each time they have to dance for their life. I was so happy that she made it to the top four, and though I was rooting for her, I knew she wouldn't win, because yeah, Nico ripping his shirt off + excitable female teenaged audience =/= leggy blonde winner. :(
- Oh man, did the girls in the audience ever like Nico... XD I liked him a lot too, and I'm happy with him as a winner. Il semble être un vraiment bon gars, simple et sympathique. Go Nico!
- Blake was kind of an ass as a contestant, back on the first U.S. season, but I really liked him as a judge and as a choreographer. Though that one time he seemed to be trying to pretend he wasn't gay was really weird, especially given his choice of outfits most of the season. @_@
- The American version has its Russian ballroom dancers, we have Québecois ballroom dancers!
- Tré Armstrong is hot.
- Lisa and Vincent together were amazing, and I watched their Afro-jazz number three times in a row, it was so good.
- It was really interesting to watch Vincent, Francis and Danny lose their English when they were eliminated and said their goodbyes.
- Speaking of English, Jean-Marc mixing his prepositions up like there was no tomorrow had me translating back and forth in my head to figure out which ones were coming out "French" and which were just him getting confused.
- Leah Miller turned out to be a rather charming host, in spite of my initial misgivings. Not that anyone can ever compare to Cat Deeley, of course. ^_^
- Overall, the choreography was excellent. At least four different numbers brought tears to my eyes, and plenty of others had me grinning or laughing.
- I don't want to go off on a stereotypical "Canadians are so nice!" tangent, but... I really liked all of the contestants, and they all seemed to like each other quite a bit. It was great to see them so excited for each other.
- Dan's comment about the Lisa/Nico paparazzi routine made me laugh ("I don't think they'd allow that on tv in the States!"), but it's true that a lot of the dances were more sensual/sexual than what we've seen on the U.S. show. More adult. I liked it. :D
- Go-Go dancing! XDDD
Final verdict: 9.5/10
I'm a pretty even-tempered girl, and it takes a lot for a book to frustrate me, but this book managed. And how! If anyone would like to read this book, I'll gladly give it to you -- you may want to skip this review, then, because I'm about to reveal the surprise ending, which totally surprised me because it had NO BUSINESS ENDING LIKE THAT!
My Sister's Keeper (Jodi Picoult)
This book is the kind I usually avoid (and if you're wondering why I read it, it's because it was given to me by a friend wanting to get rid of stuff before moving away, and I needed some reading that fit in my purse), the kind that is classified as "women's interest", because apparently women are only interested in sappy family stories. :P
:P, I say!
Story: Kate has a rare kind of leukemia, and her parents conceive Anna to be a cord blood donor. Kate is still sick, and Anna ends up constantly giving things to try to keep Kate healthy, such as blood and bone marrow. But when Anna is thirteen, Kate is dying of renal failure, and their mother insists that Anna give her sister one of her kidneys, she decides that enough is enough, and finds a lawer to help her file for medical emancipation.
Anyway, the book follows Anna, Kate, their mother, their father (who is a firefighter, which is way too obviously symbolic and also a plot device later on), their brother who is a pyromaniac, the lawyer, and the woman who has to evaluate the family, who is conveniently the lawyer's first love and neither was ever able to forget the other and BLAH BLAH BLAH.
I didn't hate the book the whole way through; I didn't even really dislike it. Mostly, I was unmoved by the whole thing, which is probably a sign that the writing wasn't all that great, because I tend to be rather nakimushi. I had a hard time really warming to any of the characters save for Kate, and the Campbell-Julia story was too cliché, but what got to me was that all the characters just sounded the same to me: the book is written in the first person and switches perspective, going from one character to the next, but there wasn't much variation in mode of expression, and Anna did NOT sound her age. Still, the book wasn't bad -- not until the end, anyway.
So after the hearing that's torn the family apart, while Kate lies dying in the hospital, the judge grants Anna medical emancipation, so that she doesn't have to give Kate her kidney if she doesn't want to. This means that Kate will die, but even with the transplant, she was more than likely to die anyway, and she was tired of suffering. As Campbell, the lawyer, drives Anna home, they get in an accident and Anna dies.
And they give her kidney to Kate, whose cancer then goes into remission, and then there's an epilogue in which a healthy Kate reflects, a few years later, upon her sister.
#$^@$@#$*($%^@#!!!
First of all, that renders Anna's whole struggle, the knowledge that she's going to live the rest of her life knowing that she had it in her power to save her sister and didn't, totally pointless. It renders their mother's growing understanding, that sometimes you just have to let go, totally pointless. IT MADE THE WHOLE BOOK TOTALLY POINTLESS!
Most of all, the real reason Anna went through with the hearing was because Kate had asked her to stop trying, saying she was fed up with suffering and that she didn't want to go on. Now that the parents know this, and were starting to accept that they had to let Kate go -- that she WANTED to go -- they still have the transplant done. I can understand that they've lost one daughter, so they're sure as hell going to try to save the other, but the doctors had said that there was only a 10% chance of the operation being succesful, and that even then, the odds were that it would only give Kate a couple of years more.
I was completely disgusted by the end, and don't even feel like writing about it anymore.
Final verdict: BOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!