Ai no mukidashi (2008)'s comments

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It's a great film if you think lines like "This bulge is reserved for the pecking of my Maria" is the height of originality and wit. For the rest of us, however, this film is just tedious puerile drivel.

9 years 7 months ago

greenhorg

Mediocre, overlong movie comedy, which would have worked better as a TV serial. The first half had some interesting ideas, and several laugh out loud shock gags, but it also fell apart into a fairly bad film in the second two hours.

It reminded me of Southland Tales, another sprawling, incoherent, high-concept comedy. I'm not sure why this movie is regarded so much better, but I'm tempted to think there is a kind of Japan fetishism in the mix.

5/10

11 years 11 months ago

Torgo

The cult around the film is fairly exaggerated, but I'm not begrudging. Always nice to see something like this at iCM favorite's #1 spot. :)

13 years 1 month ago

jlfitz

with English or Spanish subs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KbRihJ095g

3 years 1 month ago

tadfg

Fantastically original. The four hours flew by. If you enjoyed Sono's other works particularly "Why don't you play in hell?" then you'll love this.

8 years 8 months ago

BlairW

I loved it!

11 years 11 months ago

Joculator

Only in Japan.

12 years 1 month ago

epicureanlotus

There are just so many things wrong with this film. For one, it exalts the male gaze, and every ostensibly "romantic" scene is simply a fulfillment of male fantasies. spoiler

The film may centre around "the art of upskirt photography", and I have no problem with that in itself, but not once does it imply that this behaviour is ethically problematic, even when the victims are high school girls. I would say that this male perspective extends as well to the two-dimensional and implausible female characters—more than once, I wondered if this writer/director had ever spoken to a woman long enough to understand how they might think or feel—but the male characters also behaved in such an unrealistic manner that I'm starting to think it's more just a failure to understand humans in general.

Beyond that, the portrayal of mental illness, sexual orientation and fetishism, child abuse...they're caricatures of what these issues are really like, presented simplistically as plot points, but they're not even exaggerated enough to be satire. They're more like the stereotypical impressions one might have without having even experienced these things secondhand. And by that logic, this film only serves to reinforce such misassumptions, which is particularly problematic when one takes into account the likelihood that many Japanese viewers would not be able to recognise them as such.

And then there's the fact that characters frequently scream and flail about to express their feelings. Or react completely illogically to what others say or do. Or kill themselves or others (with melodramatic spurts of blood) for inexplicable reasons. Or have absolutely insufferable personalities—particularly the pseudo-mother Kaori, who somehow wins over the other characters by being tenaciously obnoxious. In short, this is possibly the least subtle film I have ever seen, along with the other Japanese film that feels like it was written by a middle-schooler: Kokuhaku.

Which is a shame, because there were a lot of themes to explore here: crises of faith, sexual deviance in society, gender identity, cult religions, nontraditional families, the lifelong scars of child abuse, and social ostracisation deriving from noncomformity, among others. In the end, however, each of these ideas were treated in the shallowest possible manner, and I can't say with certainty what statement the director was trying to make, or whether he simply hoped viewers would be drawn in by the four-hour plot and not notice the underdeveloped themes or characters.

5 years ago