As the school year end approaches here, all sorts of deadlines are approaching. Somehow I manage to make time for a social life, including trips to cultural sites but more importantly, MOVIE TIME. Unfortunately the theaters in Nagoya are absurd. Tickets tend to cost around $15, plus about $4~8 round trip in train fees just to get to the theater. As such, I've only gone out to see a few films so far. The list so far includes ハウルの動く城, 電車男, Batman Begins, Starwars, and 宇宙戦争. I almost wish I had seen the Japanese dubbed version of Starwars; the dialogue might not have been so unbearable. Plus, Yoda's speech pattern is pretty much Japanese anyway.
We tend to go to the video rental store instead, which is much more reasonably priced at about $2.50. We can even rent music CDs there to identify who is singing those songs we hear in commercials. Just recently we identified the song from a Coca-Cola commercial as たしかなこと. Nintendo DS is advertised using a song by New York native artist Utada Hikaru that goes "You're easy-breezy and I'm Japanesey" which is one of my new favorite lines from a Japanese song, next to "Where is the back door of myself?" Oh and I got the official YATTA! DVD, which has to be the best 5 bucks I've ever spent.
Rather than watching Hollywood, we tend to watch a lot of Chinese, Korean, and of course Japanese films. To further waste my time, I enjoy writing reviews of the films on IMDB. I especially enjoyed writing a negative review of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, since it so often appears on the top 100 films of all times lists. Of course, can you really trust the opinion of a guy who gives an 8/10 to a cartoon about pigs from Hong Kong?
One of the films we've recently watched is 無問題, which is about a guy who leaves Japan to pursue is ex-girlfriend in Hong Kong, who work for Jackie Chan. So in order to impress her, he gets a job as a stunt-man. Jackie Chan doesn't make any appearances in the film, but Sammo Hung does, since he directs and choreographs much of the stuntwork in Jackie Chan films. In the end, the main character has to solve his love struggles, questioning whether or not he should continue chasing his love in Hong Kong. The sequal, 無問題2 becomes a little more comical with the introduction to even more stereotypical kung fu, and this time there is even more of a stereotypical Japan and Hong Kong culture clash. If you don't get anything else out of these two films, at least you'll learn how to say "No Problem" in Cantonese.
Anyway, if I could bring one film back to America to share with my friends back home, it'd definitely be 電車男, since it really reveals a lot about modern Japanese culture, particularly Tokyo lifestyles. It's difficult to say whether or not this story could have been as good were it not based on a true story. In fact, the story unfolded online in a BBS chat. After meeting a woman on a train, and not knowing how to impress her, he went online and began posting messages asking for advice. Each day he advanced his relationship with her, he continued the online thread asking what his next step should be. The original dialogue has been published in book form, or you can find an archive of it here, or check out the official movie site.Of course, I have a whole stack of Chinese and Korean films to show off, such as 春去春又來, 2046, and a few surprises I may bring home... and I really want to get ahold of the Infernal Affairs trilogy. But hey, this blog is supposed to focus on my life in Japan, so all I can say is that 2046, Kung Fu Hustle, and Infernal Affairs are advertised all over in video stores now, much more prominantly than any Hong Kong films sold in America. In the theater, however, Korean films seem much more popular. Also the Korean TV drama
