Just to show you I’m not hiding any info. Or am I?
Huh… food for thought.
Anyway, this is the first FLOWERS review I find, in English… not that I scouted FLOWERS reviews in Japanese, because that would be too much extra work, to be honest.
And because I couldn’t find a proper poster for FLOWERS, I made my own — you’d think that’s also extra work, but I do like playing around with Photoshop for fun. LOL Does it look official? xD
Moving on! To the review. It’s not positive. Actually, I sensed a hint of irony while reading it, and of course… FLOWERS reeks of Chick Flick – non-negative connotation. Why point this out? Because there’s a lot of description of what’s going on, and the conclusion is “not enough actual drama”?
What then to make of Norihiro Koizumi’s “Flowers,” which recreates the look of everything from the 1930s black-and-white dramas of Yasujiro Ozu to 1960s Toho Technicolor comedies? Neither slavish imitation nor inventive recreation, the film is more about its faux authentic look and feel-good story lines than actual drama.
While pointing out Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is a shot by shot remake, the review mentions FLOWERS recreates the look of every era they’re showing in the film… which, actually to me sounds appropriate. After all, my mom thinks Mad Men should be broadcast with a funny 1960s tinge. LOL
Maybe the film’s fault is having six leading ladies, because that’s a LOT of storylines. It just makes you feel like there’s just too much going on, and then you’ve got the chick flick.
The solutions to the heroines’ various dilemmas mostly include finding Mr. Right — or Mr. Good Enough — and having babies.
Though that alone makes me feel like chocking someone, I gotta put that in the context of the storyline. Perhaps the heroine’s various dilemmas are impossible to solve, so women make do with what they got. It’s called settling and survival… and Japan pretty much sucks at letting women survive without a man. RIGHT?
And what do you know… maybe it’s emotional. I say, if FLOWERS makes me cry, I’d consider it a job done. After all, the film’s biggest crippling device is…
“Flowers,” however, is not Koizumi’s film so much as that of Takuya Onuki, an ad-agency creative director, who got the idea for it while making TV commercials for Tsubaki shampoo. Featuring top models and actresses, the ads offered striking proof that, as the copy said: “Japanese women are beautiful.”
They certainly are in “Flowers,” which stars six of the most gorgeous, if variously talented, Japanese actresses now working: Yu Aoi, Yuko Takeuchi, Rena Tanaka, Yukie Nakama, Kyoka Suzuki and Ryoko Hirosue. Koizumi and cinematographer Taishi Hirokawa film them in one glamour shot after another — perfectly lighted, posed, madeup and coifed.
Bolding mine.
Of course, ad agencies. And talent agencies…
SUCK IT UP, Idol system! SUCK IT UP!
If you want to read the whole review, you can head over to Japan Times.
This is the Spanish edition of Haruki Murakami’s book also titled with the same name. It tells a bizarre real-time (think of Fox’s 24) story surrounding a 19-year-old named Mari who sits at a random Denny’s restaurant in the middle of the night, when a dude comes by telling her they’ve met once before, he’s a friend of Mari’s older sister, Eri. At the same time, Eri is seen in a neverending sleep, as if she never wanted to wake up again.