07-17-2007, 11:16 PM
YYGC is currently playing a one-week special engagement in S.F., distributed by Magnolia Pictures no less, billed as being from the makers of Battle Royale. The plot? A kogal must infiltrate a high school where a website called Enola Gay is urging bullied kids to become suicide bombers. And the kogal is armed with a yo yo. Sounds great, doesn't it? I was excited to see this.
The film is a lot of brooding in front of odd architecture. It's slow, very very slow. There's a five-minute plus scene of two girls text messaging each other. Yawn. It's absurd but not in a funny way, like a film based on a manga where you need to read it to understand what's going on. Yet it never gets abstract enough to be surreal. This is about the birth of a superhero, which we discover at the end. The star is charismatic enough, apparently some Japanese pop tart in real life, and she swears a lot. The first hour and twenty minutes is totally dull.
After that, yo yo girl cop dons a batman suit that comes out of nowhere and there's a ten-minute final fight scene which almost delivers. The duelling yo yo kogal fight is ok - the yo yos are weak cgi and the fight never generates much suspense. There's a final preposterous run through a ruined building filled with automatic weapon firing villians, and then a battle with the sword wielding uber villian; apparently the batman-suit-from-out-of-nowhere is bullet proof but not sword proof. Ok, that batman suit came out of a neat silver case, but the case came out of nowhere. The heroine looks great in it. The evil kogal wears a hot vinyl dominitrix outfit. But even that fails to titilate in that final kogal yo yo fight. How could any director blow a kogal yo yo fight?
If you can catch the last ten minutes on youtube or something, that's all you really need. If I find it, I'll let you know.
Took one for the brotherhood on this one. Fortunately, it was a comp DVD. Gonna sell it at the local used DVD place before word gets out.
The film is a lot of brooding in front of odd architecture. It's slow, very very slow. There's a five-minute plus scene of two girls text messaging each other. Yawn. It's absurd but not in a funny way, like a film based on a manga where you need to read it to understand what's going on. Yet it never gets abstract enough to be surreal. This is about the birth of a superhero, which we discover at the end. The star is charismatic enough, apparently some Japanese pop tart in real life, and she swears a lot. The first hour and twenty minutes is totally dull.
After that, yo yo girl cop dons a batman suit that comes out of nowhere and there's a ten-minute final fight scene which almost delivers. The duelling yo yo kogal fight is ok - the yo yos are weak cgi and the fight never generates much suspense. There's a final preposterous run through a ruined building filled with automatic weapon firing villians, and then a battle with the sword wielding uber villian; apparently the batman-suit-from-out-of-nowhere is bullet proof but not sword proof. Ok, that batman suit came out of a neat silver case, but the case came out of nowhere. The heroine looks great in it. The evil kogal wears a hot vinyl dominitrix outfit. But even that fails to titilate in that final kogal yo yo fight. How could any director blow a kogal yo yo fight?
If you can catch the last ten minutes on youtube or something, that's all you really need. If I find it, I'll let you know.
Took one for the brotherhood on this one. Fortunately, it was a comp DVD. Gonna sell it at the local used DVD place before word gets out.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse