Harockerce What a beautiful movie!

TeenzTen An action-packed slog

Phillida Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Fulke Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

tedg Magical spaces in Hispanically influenced films are easy to locate. We as viewers find it easy to place ourselves there it seems natural. Only Medem challenges.There are three similarly structured magical traditions in modern Japanese films, and I find them tantalizing, sometimes difficult, visceral. This is squarely within one of these traditions, a small unsettling masterpiece. There seem to be many such, films that have not escaped the island. "All About Lily Chou-Cho" is my favorite, but this has a notable reverse fold.A common fold is that of performance in life: we all are acting a role that we are drawn to. "Audition" is a great example of where life performance slakes the life that contains it. This construction goes there and then reverses itself.Imagine a setup where two sisters end up working for a gang which hires out actors to play roles in families for pay. Pretty standard stuff for this tradition, and many of the ordinary girl-sex-angst-parent dynamics are acted out, some symbolically. But now imagine an overlain setup where they are unknowingly hired by their father to play themselves. There's more. Imagine that the film is broken into a collection of first person narratives, each reporting what they discover, and one of these leverages the fact that the father is a reporter- detective (who discovers the gang and sets up the inverted acting gig).The gang, incidentally, is from a previous movie that is not particularly relevant, except in that it occupies the same magical universe of lost girls.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Polaris_DiB Sion Sono follows up Suicide Club/Suicide Circle with this, a telling of the story from a different perspective that, Lost-like, answers some questions from the previous movie while exchanging even more. This movie, however, is more character based, and involves the issue of role-playing in society--rather than being merely a commentary on pop culture, it's a discussion of the nature of being "connected to oneself" or, really, being who you are meant to be, not who society wants you to be or even what you were born into being.A great way in which Sono pulls this off is to have multiple voice-over narrators engage in a confessional storytelling mode. Unfortunately for international viewers, said voice-over often is delivered over dialog of the movie as well, and the sub-titles can tend to fall behind in many cases, resulting in it being difficult from time to time to tell what all is being said. Can't fault the intentions, but this movie is probably not nearly quite the experience it would be in its native language.It also commits the cardinal sin of an unjustified playlength. This movie ran about 2 1/2 hours long, but ten minutes could have been shaved off of the end. Sono attempted to justify it with a repeated motif of running away, this time with Yuka, the younger sister, but the movie had a much stronger ending on the "Let's start over" moment. Due to the introspective nature of the movie, however, it makes sense that sometimes the best ending doesn't necessarily end the idea. It's just that this is one of those movies that fades out tantalizingly several times before finally actually ending, and that gets frustrating to watch some times.--PolarisDiB

ctizon Wow. I must say, of all the films out there, this one has a concept that has never been done before.When this film was released, most of its recognition stemmed from it being the director's follow-up to his cult favorite "Suicide Club" (2002). In fact, that is what sparked my interest, as I am a die-hard fan of "Suicide Club". However, after viewing this film, I have to definitely recommend not going in and expecting a sequel. This film takes place in the same universe, and its story may clear up a bit of the whys in "Suicide Club", but it has a different story completely. Different characters, different timeframe, different genre, everything, but standalone film or sequel - this is one of the best films I've seen.We pick up the story a bit of time before the events of "Suicide Club" (6 months prior to be exact). A 17 year old girl named Noriko Shimabara lives with her father Tetsu, her mother Taeko, and her sister Yuka. Utterly bored with life, she spends hours contacting various teenage girls through the website "haikyo.com" (present in the first film). Aching to leave home and meet those like her, Noriko packs her bags and runs off to Tokyo. The very next morning, she meets Kumiko - the founder of the website haikyo. But she is immediately swept into a bizarre game of acting as part of a family and getting paid for it. Eventually, she contacts her sister Yuka, who runs off to be with her sister. Their mother commits suicide, and 6 months later their father hears about a suicide cult in Tokyo that caused 54 girls to jump in front of a train. Tetsu has a feeling that Noriko is involved, so he starts a very long journey to get his daughters back. However, by the time he reaches them, 2 years have passed, and they have become completely detached from reality and from themselves.This is where the movie reaches its climax, and goes into the bizarre and gruesome territory that anyone familiar with the first film would be expecting. But this is NOT a horror movie in any sense of the word. It's almost pure drama. Even though it has a seemingly complicated plot, at heart it is simply a story about a girl's journey to her own soul and to the heart of life. And what a dark journey it is.The ending is a bit like the first one's ending, with a sense of accomplishment. It is quite the uplifting ending for an otherwise depressing film. But it gives no easy answers. I'll be looking forward to the third one, where the events from this film and the last film are finally tied up.The symbolism and messages in this film are incredible, and the plot was perfectly crafted to convey them all. I don't see how anybody could NOT like this movie. It is the perfect embodiment of all human emotion.10/10

DICK STEEL This Japanese film is my closing film for this year's SIFF. It tells of a compelling family story, where "safe" is boring, and a child is off looking for that spark in life to spice things up. Turning her back to her family, Noriko makes her way to Tokyo to look up her internet friends, friends she came to know through an online forum. At first everything seems puzzling, until she realize that they are all "actors", folks providing "rental family" services to lonely people out there, yearning to belong.It's ironic that Noriko had turned her back on her real family, only to join a surrogate one, pretending to be close knit to a lot of other strangers. She takes on her online persona, and forgets about "Noriko", the life she left behind. Which makes it really strange - why would anyone want to abandon their own family, and comfort zone, to make believe with others? It's a social exploration of alienation, and on a separate note, tries to look at the trend of suicide clubs in Japan.One harrowing scene that was replayed, was that of 54 female students jumping off a train platform in unison. Taking on pseudo-security camera views, and plenty of blood with the smashing of heads on track (in full glory), it'll make you wince, yet wonder in astonishment, the question of Why.ßRunning parallel to Noriko's narrative, are a few others, like her dad's, her sister Yuka's (who also joined Noriko in her new role), and a forum founder Komiko. Taking on parallel and different points of view, it is no wonder that this film clocks in at slightly more than 2 1/2 hours. The father seeks Noriko and Yuka and wants to start afresh by welcoming them home, but find that the siblings have already disowned their lives thus far, preferring to pretend to be someone else, someone they have total control over, someone that they have created for themselves.The movie started off strongly, but the pace sagged around the half way mark, before picking up again for the grand finale. It also helped that almost all the female cast in this movie are eye-candy, contrasting the seriousness of the issues presented, with their outward cuteness and pretty faces.It's a pretty weird story, with strange characters, those who don't bat an eyelid over suicide, taking it as a form of higher calling. However you'll still be stuck at the Why question, as the movie doesn't offer any concrete answers, and somehow teased with an ending hinting of a possible sequel, that probably wouldn't be made.