I rarely write public reviews (this's my first in IMDb), as I've MANY pending writing-deadlines, but am writing this one as I saw "Hako Otoko" at the Berlinale yesterday... and was incensed by the sheer hyper-pretentious and abstruse banality of the film, especially the plot... wait, what plot! I'm not against cyberpunk or magical and/or parallel sur/realism at all -- there're great examples of the same, esp. In Japanese cinema -- but this film was a form of entitled directorial pseudo-philosophical/poetical onanism that also didn't hesitate (perhaps even deliberately) in gratuitously displaying the sole (and talented) actress's body wantonly but not artistically... or even seductively. In a nutshell, this apology for a film -- and I speak here as someone in love with the master-works of post-WW2 Japanese cinema -- isn't any of the things it claims/strives to be: it pseudo-poeticises and faux-philosophises sans empathy on the issue of homelessness, it objectifies the female body sans any plot- or other logic (not that that's any justification for the same!), it has NO story worth the name (and call me old-fashioned, but I'm with Kurosawa-Sensei on this!)... and it attempts to fuse the (vacuous?) conceptual abstruseness of an "Inception" with the thick pretentiousness of pseudo-arthouse cinema! The only reason I've changed my original rating of 2/10 to 4/10 is that the acting -- despite the massively underwhelming roles -- is quite competent and impassioned and... truth be told, I'm a Japanophile! :-)
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