All About Lily Chou-Chou
by Shunji Iwai
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DVD details
Actor: Ayumi Ito, Hayato Ichihara, Miwako Ichikawa, Sh?go Oshinari, Takao ?sawaDirector: Shunji Iwai
Cinematographer: Noboru Shinoda
Writer: Shunji Iwai
Editor: Yoshiharu Nakagami
Producer: Koko Maeda
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Japanese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 146 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-02-15
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Homevision
DVD Reviews of All About Lily Chou-Chou
DVD Review: Better than expected!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Said "very good" condition, but was like new!!! Very pleased and a great movie as well. :D Thanks!DVD Review: Life With Yuichi
Summary: 4 Stars
Nice in this harsh movie Yuichi and his friends cause mischief and shoplift, Yuichi gets fascinated with Lily Chou Chou, One of his closes
friends Shusuke has a near death experience and becomes a bully he and
the other friends start to mistreat Yuichi.Yuichi has a decision to make
let Shusuke keep bullying him or do something about it.
DVD Review: A striking look at puberty. . .which goes on forever
Summary: 3 Stars
Beautiful and honest and sad. . .
but
overly-long and utterly confusing.
DVD Review: All About Nothing
Summary: 1 Stars
WTF!!!! All you three and above star reviewers need to get your heads back on the ground! This movie was nothing but a bunch of gloomy moody teenagers. Big f-ing deal. It happens everyday in every school. This movie tries to pull a veil over your eyes with stylized visuals and music that makes me want to strangle my dog. If this movie were made in the US with the same exact style and english script but with A-list hollywood actors it would be panned. You know it. DVD Review: A 21st century classic, but poor DVD transfer
Summary: 5 Stars
To get it out of the way, this DVD by Home Vision is a poor transfer which does a great injustice to a beautifully shot classic. It's a grainy, blurry travesty... BUT, it's the easiest way to see the film in English.
As for the movie itself, All About Lily Chou-Chou is a Japanese film portraying the lives of Japanese high school students engaged in, well, the darkest and worst aspects of human behavior. This came out amidst a wave of Japanese "teens gone wild" films, the most notorious being Battle Royale, but Lily is the intellectual crown of the genre (if that's what you want to call it). It's long and confusing (you should watch it twice), but infinitely rewarding for someone willing to enjoy the gorgeous cinematography while being patient with the plot.
It's the magnum opus of director Shunji Iwai, who was already famous in Japan and throughout Asia for intelligent romances such as Love Letter and more arty films like Swallowtail Butterfly. The film stars the best young actor in Japan, the fiery Shugo Oshinari, and the soundtrack is a near-classic unto itself.
I like to compare Lily to the great novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in that they are both works of art that encompass the absolute entirety of human experience: power, defeat, suicide, transcendence, revenge, vindication, pride, murder, rape, justice, victory, acceptance, happiness and utter misery. Lily can be interpreted as a metaphorical history of mankind, told in two and a half hours... or at least that's my take on it!
One of the greatest Japanese films of all time (in company with Kurosawa or anyone else you'd care to name) and the first truly great movie about the Internet (not like there's much competition on that one... anyone gonna argue for You've Got Mail?). Lily is one of those rare films that gets people *obsessed*-- small but dedicated online communities thrive to this day-- which is usually a sign that it's at least worth a watch.
Description of All About Lily Chou-Chou
Yuichi is in the 8th grade and worships Lily Chou-Chou, a Bjork-like chanteuse whose music is lush and transcendent - the perfect tool to escape the pain and anxiety that fills his brutal life in Japan. At home, Yuichi rarely leaves his room, spending all his time in the chat room of Lily Chou-Chou's fan website, but little by little, the reality of Yuichi's offline life becomes unbearable when he is ensnared in a nightmare of teenage prostitution, petty theft, and possible murder. A hauntingly poetic story in the vein of Battle Royale, All About Lily Chou-Chou is a disturbing look at the terror and isolation that characterizes today's youth of Japan.The pain and suffering of junior high is always good movie fodder, and in All About Lily Chou-Chou the topic gets an unfamiliar and moody airing. Director Shunji Iwai takes a discursive, sometimes baffling look into the life of a bullied kid whose misery is broken by his worship of a pop star, Lily Chou-Chou. Internet chat room exchanges punctuate the film's narrative, as Yuichi and his anonymous Lily-philes share their intoxication with the "Ether"--the mystery of life that Lily's voice somehow illuminates. The film's style (and length) offer little in the way of traditional movie-watching pleasure, and the mystifying storytelling will have some viewers giving up in exasperation. Still, the portrait of adolescent loneliness rings true, and the ferocity of school bullying is laid bare. On the latter subject, this film is a little like the kill-or-be-killed apocalypse of Battle Royale, without the fantasy overlay. --Robert Horton
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