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Reviews
Shibito no koiwazurai (2001)
A movie that tries a lot but fails where its most important
As a big fan of Junji Ito, I watched this movie planning to review it as an adaptation of Lovesickness. However, it's really hard to compare the manga with a movie that purposefully doesn't faithfully adapt it
Both are about a teenager returning to their childhood town where school girls play a crossroads fortune-telling game and the presence of a pretty boy wearing black clothes causes the girls to commit suicide with a boxcutter. In both stories, Suzue is driven insane by obsessing over a boy after a crossroad fortune, and the protagonist is linked to a previous suicide 10 years ago
Aside from that, the main plot is completely different, most obviously by the fact Ryusuke is the protagonist of the manga and Midori is only a side character, which means that most events had to be changed in the movie. On this subject, Ryusuke isn't the pretty boy in black in the manga. There's a whole chapter dedicated to him being gaslit into thinking he's the pretty boy. That plot twist in the movie is kind of a clever subversion of the manga, but also a really not clever plot tiwst you could see from miles away
Now, about the movie as a stand alone movie, I think it has a pretty cool, dream-like atmosphere. While slow-paced, at no point was I really bored. The movie was generally well enough shot and did a good job building tension (except for a few hilariously cliche shots during a flashback). The acting wasn't the worst, though it was a bit embarassingly camp at times. I thought Suzue's breakdown was really well-done and the mold subplot was really good at capturing the type of horror Junji Ito likes to do
Now, let's talk about the elephant in the room, the big plot twist: I really don't like it. I have a soft spot for movies where a part of it is revealed to have not actually happened, but these reveals typically require signs and foreshadowing, which this movie does a bad job at so the plot twist comes out of nowhere and feels like a slap in the face of the viewer. The whole ending derails the plot. If it had a better one, I'd consider a 5 or 6/10, but as it stands, I leave this movie with a sour taste in my mouth
Overall, a surprisingly decent movie that does a good job a building tension but wastes it all in the finale. While I appreciate its deviations from the manga, I think a more faithful adaptation of Lovesickness in terms of overall plot would have made for a better movie.
Tomie: anaza feisu (1999)
Expected a trainwreck, end result wasn't that bad
Don"t get me wrong, Tomie: Another Face is a bad movie, but I expected so much worse.
To get things out of the way, yeah, this sure feels like a low-budget TV movie: the acting is wooden, the soundtrack sounds like it was taken from a children's educational video game, the special effects are bad, etc...
I like the anthology format. It's done clumsily here (due to being stitched-together TV episodes) but I still like it, it makes it feel somewhat closer to the original manga. The TV format also helps a lot with the pacing. The first Tomie was an extremely slow mess, so being limited to 25 minutes means each story at least gets to the point
Talking about the stories, they're... fine. They're all cliche retellings of concepts from the manga, said concepts doing all the heavy lifting. None are too memorable, but hey, they could be worse so I'm not complaining.
My mian gripe with the movie is the directing. It lacks any real direction (like any cheap TV movies) except for one part: Runa Nagai. I do think she isn't that bad of an actress, BUT for most of the movie she was directed to do a high-pitched "cutesy" voice which got annoying after 5 minutes
Overall, not a good film, but at least it's watchable and goes by quick, which is more than I can say for other Tomie movies.
Tomie (1998)
Disconnected and boring
You know when you've got a 1000 words essay and run out of ideas 500 words, so you've got to add fluff to fill as much space: this is this movie
The first hour genuinely feels like a generic j-drama. You've got a cheating plot, a detective side-plot that goes nowhere. A better film could use that to carefully set up the climax, but this movie just drops half of what it sets up. It doesn't help that every scene feels like it lasts 1 or 2 minutes more than it really needed.
On the directing side, there really isn't anything at all. You've got one or two interesting shots, but the rest is barebones. It's obvious the director is a fan of Ito's work (for example, one of the kills is taken from "Hanging Blimp", a completely unrelated Ito manga), but it's kinda detrimental, as the movie relies on Chapter 4 and 5 of Tomie, but doesn't really explain what happened in them, leaving the viewer confused if they haven't read the manga.
As for the positives, the soundtrack is good ans memorable. Bar a few examples, the acting is pretty good, especially Miho Kanno as Tomie, who should have definitely reprised her role in it's sequels. The last 30 minutes of the movie is remarkably better than the first hour. Now, it isn't an amazing 30 minutes or anything, but it's relatively enjoyable
Sadly, the film as a whole is dreadfully boring. Like it's not a funny kind of bad, it's just really slow for no reason.