Japanese Story (Special Edition)
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DVD details
Actor: Gotaro Tsunashima, Lynette Curran, Matthew Dyktynski, Toni Collette, Yumiko TanakaDVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 100 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-05-11
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures
DVD Reviews of Japanese Story (Special Edition)
DVD Review: Road-trip of Life, Get Reaquainted with Reality
Summary: 4 Stars
Disturbing, spacey, good double-feature with Icelandic film "The Sea". I love Collette too, from "Cosi", "Muriel's Wedding"...
Real-life issues are forcefully grounded in Shockingly beautiful nature photography. You are forced, through use of Shock, to confront the gritty essences of life in the "real world" involving the elementals of earth, sand, sky, and water. The movie's car is the "Car-ride of Life", a vessel that both transports us through life, distances us from experiencing the world, and speeds us tooo fast towards our fate. Quite often we are so removed from the realities of our life by our obsessions, worries, cultural hangups, earning money---even our buildings and societies keep us from experiencing life. Even death is not experienced, as the sick, dying and dead are isolated from the us.
In this car-ride, you have the reconnections with the real experiences of life: in-the-moment experiences of living, emotional connections, sometimes inexplicable love/sex connections, and end-of-life realities.
"Country-girl" and "City-boy" meet, hate each other, they both view each other as rude & vulgar, are forced into days of intense one-on-one...eventually the curiousity & internal lonliness heats up.. They've picked the most extreme "city-boy" you can find, a "Japanese Salaryman".
(NOTE: My own significant-other, foreign-raised, would rather risk an accident than "go" in the woods, seeing this in the film was funny. Also familiar, the fears of looking foolish, trying new things, and tripping on intense internal pressures & absentee workaholic fathers. Also, dangerous lack of skills/commonsense outside the study/work realm.)
Anyway, these two are examples of being too isolated in their own little worlds, they lack "street-smarts" for the whole of human existence. His lack of practical knowlege gets them in trouble with terrible consequences, and her lack of social skills hurts her, especially Japanese business manners. He is very isolated/isolating from everything, prissy, using his camera to shield himself, immature, using Daddy's name to jerk people around instead of learning to use his own power. Her negativity, anger & bitterness are her isolation tools.
The sandbog scene shows his fear of imperfection & embarrassment, him secretely disabling his cellphone preventing her from calling for help. He got them into the mess, too embarrassed to let anybody find out, he's desperate to fix it himself---so he read the BOOK. I think she could've got them out, but would rather have called to make absolutely sure they got out. He had no real concept of how deadly a situation they were in, being far out in the middle of a desert & not prepared.
I'm not sure about the chemistry between these two, there wasn't any warm leadup to the initial hookup, except the stealth-eyeballing each other. But then, are only logical hookups allowed in life? The camera-work treats him more as a woman, he's hairless, no muscles, and very pretty. He's really prissy, distastful of manual labor, dirt--you can see it with his body language.
The actual initial hookup was kinda icky/creepy, he laid there like a plastic doll, or rather like two plastic dolls investigating each other. (And trust me, you cannot do it with pants on, the zipper will slice-&-dice. Also, certain folks are soo prissy, they'd never let you do that to their biz-clothes unless they could run it through the cleaners TWICE. Worse than Seinfeld! Unless he asked her to do it..)
As they spend more time together, they become more honest, better communicators, more trusting, less defensive. He starts to look less like a plastic prissy-doll, more relaxed, happy, more willing to throw away the road maps. The hookups more human, he's taking more active roles. She is gentler, more open to enjoyment, but kinda ignoring how she'll feel when he'll go back to wifey. Both are kinda naive that it's not going to hurt when he goes back. This trip is probably the most unusual thing either has ever done, they've never looked more alive.
Then poof, the car-ride is over way too soon, as it usually does, and she has to deal with something she's never had any experience dealing with. Neither have her coworkers, they can't relate. The loss is 100-times worse than she obviously expected. Her guilt keeps her from making any final goodbyes--if she hadn't boinked, she would've felt fine about making the final goodbye or dealings with the wife.
But then, if you could read the future, what would you have done on the trip? I think they did perfect. It's devastating, and Collette does a fabulous job. In the end, you see that Sandy has come to understand the scrapbook and it's standing testiment for others that have gone away.
NOTE: Of course, the "Bang-it because life is short" idea should be weighed against losing 50% of marital assets & child support.
NOTE: Japanese Muzak: what is with the same horribly bad muzak song playing at "important" moments? Jeez, there's 100-times better Japanese material around, mix it up a bit.
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