All About Lily Chou-Chou | Hayato Ichihara, Shûgo Oshinari | Powerful, mesmerizing, and perhaps...

All About Lily Chou-Chou | Hayato Ichihara, Shûgo Oshinari | Simply put...

DVDs:

All About Lily Cho...

	All About Lily Chou-Chou Hayato Ichihara, Shûgo Oshinari Homevision, 2005 average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

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.

for more information click here

Powerful, mesmerizing, and perhaps one of the most nostalgic movies around.

Simply put, this is a new favorite of mine. It's gone to the top of my list, and will for surely stay there for quite some time.

Everything about the movie is fantastic. The acting, the directing, the story... Especially the use of light and natural beauty. Really, somehow Shunji Iwai has conquered the impossible: he's captured some of the most beautiful images I've ever seen on film. And the best thing is, those images have meaning. The film's other highest point is the soundtrack: it's absolutely amazing. Of course, there's the instrumental music here and there, which is high quality, but the REAL meat of the soundtrack is the songs from Lily Chou Chou, the singer Yuichi worships and finds solace and peace in (despite his wretched life). The tracks we get to hear (I think there's only about four or five) are just amazingly... beautiful. They're so poetic that it's hard to describe, but Lily's voice is so... magnetic and strong. I could listen to the tracks over and over again and not get bored of them AT ALL (they're that absorbing).

The movie shows so realistically growing up is, and to quote the dvd cover, it's "viciously" honest, and they're not lyin.

If you want a true visual and emotional masterpiece, don't dare miss this film.

for more information click here

Simply put...

...this is a wonderful film. Fanstastic music, cinematography, acting, and story. A brilliant piece of work from director Shunji Iwai. My favorite film of all time. Buy it. Now.
;)

A 21st century classic, but poor DVD transfer

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.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

products you might be interested in