Sept 29th - Oct 12th
Japanese Film Club Home Thread
Known Content Warnings
None
Discussion Rules
- Please use spoiler tags/hide details to discuss plot events.
- Feel totally at ease to ask questions or give your thoughts, any time! Someone will probably look at this thread even well after the official period ends.
- Have fun, and do your best to interpret anything said with as much good faith as possible
Availability
It’s on Youtube! Right here, with optional English subs.
- I watched with no subs
- I watched with Japanese subs
- I watched with English subs
- I clicked a poll
How would you rate this film?
2 Likes
Well, I nominated this one, so I like it. 3rd watch actually, cause I showed it to another group of (English only) friends. The language isn’t too hard, though it’s delivered quite rapidly and in natural, not super clear ways. Still easier than a lot of things we’ve watched, I think.
Spoilers
I’ve found these sort of chaotic scrambles to put together something like a piece of art often make for good comedy, mining the frustration of everything going wrong pushed to the absurd. I think there are a lot of good decisions to heighten the little details, those of us watching together were pointing out dramatic zooms, use of music, etc.
But mostly this is an unassuming little movie that I just like cause I think it hits the exact right notes to be likable and funny. The cast gets a lot of personality and even just listening to them repeat メアリージェイン in the most dramatic voice I’ve ever heard is amusing. One of my favorite just casual, fun watches.
2 Likes
Non-spoiler review:
This one was fun! I watched with English subs, and definitely did need them, but it wasn’t nearly as tough as Godzilla or some of the other films. I think it’d be a less enjoyable watch without great understanding, though, considering that a lot of the humor was in the dialogue.
Spoiler review:
The story was unfortunately very relatable! I’ve never worked in an environment like this professionally, but I took a film studies class in undergrad where we got divided into random groups and had to make our own short film, and I definitely felt like some of my frustrations from that experience were reflected here, haha, especially since I got assigned the director role in that scenario, and as time went on, we just got further and further away from my original plan for the project, and kept cutting corners as the deadline approached… As a writer myself, it’s sort of the nightmare scenario 
.
I feel like this type of situation unfortunately happens all the time in the entertainment industry, where execs attempt to change the writer’s vision without much thought put into, like, narrative/character consistency, which causes a huge mess later on and leads to widespread creative dissatisfaction among the team and the audience (though I suppose some people are easier to please, haha). I wasn’t super impressed with her original script, either, but you can do surprisingly a lot to salvage a bad script, if you really try. People will put up with mediocre writing if at least the characters are consistent. Which they weren’t in this slapdash edited radio drama, haha.
Something kind of amusing to me is that the group of us who were watching it kept trying to come up with ways to fix the plot holes in the fictional radio drama as the actual characters in the movie strayed further and further away from the original script…
2 Likes
Nice ending, otherwise wouldn’t recommend.
The Japanese was very understandable, too.
2 Likes
