The best comedy yet from Japan’s exciting new talent and Leeds favourite Yûya Ishii. Stuck in a tiny flat in Tokyo, Mitsuko is unattached, friendless, broke and 9-months pregnant. Her inept parents thinks she is in California, happily settled with the baby’s GI father. One day she follows a cloud back to the run-down alley where she was brought up. She takes her down-and-out neighbours in hand, helping to revive the local café, securing care for her family’s old landlady, and sorting out a young man’s love life. As her due date nears, Mitusko’s mission to be a good neighbour and a ‘cool’ person flourishes into a joyous finale.
- Director:
- Yuya Ishii
- Running Time:
- 109 mins
- Subtitles:
- Yes
- Year:
- 2011
- Showing:
- This is a past event.
There are no planned future listings for this event, and as such tickets are currently unavailable; however, any future screenings will be posted here, so watch this space!
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I keep accidentally voting the wrong number of stars, but this wasn’t one of those times…
I just wasn’t convinced by this, by the irritating characters (which is sometimes a humorous and pointed device. Not here), by the inane, icky plot, by the general smug vibe.
Japanese cinema has always been great at eating itself, and at taking something already so far out (by Western standards) we think it’s like, totally rad, and then putting a spin on that to make most of us (including the, presumably, thousands that don’t get it – surely the only reason we have X Factor instead of Takeshi’s Castle. Who cares if his mum died of consumption at the age of twelve? I want to see how many pints he can drink without pissing) think we’ve just had our brains tasered and our eyeballs replaced backwards by accident.
So – and I could well be totally wrong here – I think this film is a piss-take of Tampopo etc – that amazing vein of Japanese almost-family cinema that everyone loved before we realised we’d rather see people saw their own tongues off.
But it’s still smug, irritating and shallow. Cheap shots and faces I remember in far-better movies mugging like terrified darkies in a Georgia medicine show. Get the Happiness of the Katakuris instead. AND Tampopo.