ROGER EBERT ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU MOVIE
ROGER EBERT ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU UPDATE

Lily clocks in at 145 minutes and is one long slog unleavened by real insight or even much coherency. His Swallowtail Butterfly was one of the best films I'd seen from Japan, and its three hours never seemed to dawdle. Iwai has directed some magnificent movies. Other attempts to connect the students' on-line lives to their real lives are just ham-handed - we see Yuichi being bullied, and then retreating into his on-line persona, but this happens so many times it becomes tiresome and unrevealing.

ROGER EBERT ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU MOVIE

In a movie with a more disciplined story - and more of a story to tell, come to think of it - this would be more palatable, but here it's nauseating and jarring. Sometimes he uses that cheesy green-light 'night vision' that seems to have become popular lately, and sometimes he just seems to be pointing the camera at the floor. Iwai periodically overlays text from the Lily chatroom onto the screen, or switches from hand-held 35 to DV (as when several of the kids go on a vacation to Okinawa that was probably financed by stolen money). The film's frenzied visual style (lots of hand-held camerawork) doesn't help matters any. Yoko and Yuichi have a wall between them that even music can't breach. How it is that Yuichi, despite having almost no money, is able to afford a $2500 computer? And when Yoko is humiliated and has her head shaved, don't you think her parents would notice? This isn't the 'anarchy of life' at work or some other such artsy explanation: this is just sloppy storytelling, plain and simple. Many events simply defy explanation: at one point Yuichi is drafted in as a bodyguard to Shiori, for no apparent reason other than to rub his nose in it, despite the fact that he's the last person, logically or strategically, you would want to trust with such a mission. There were many scenes where I was not sure if we were in the past or the present, or who was doing what to whom, or why, or to what end. Characters show up, disappear, or are dismissed at a whim. What is hardest to convey is how pointlessly random the movie is. The few adults in their lives are either ineffectual, clueless, or completely disconnected from their children, but their level of disconnect is pitched at such an absurd level (and played out so awkwardly) t hat it goes from be ing pitiable to idiotic. Hoshino forces another girl, Shiori (Yu Aoi) her to prostitute herself to businessmen, and Yoko is herself bullied ruthlessly by a girl clique, presumably because she's more popular than they are. At school he's bullied and harassed, and one of his former friends, Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari) evolves into his biggest nemesis, eventually enslaving both him and the girl Yuichi idolizes but cannot bring himself to open up to, Yoko (Ayumi Ito). Lily deals with Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara), a painfully withdrawn young man who consoles himself by maintaining a website about his favorite pop singer (the titular Lily). Yuichi staves off the loneliness of his days by devoting a web site to his favorite musician. If some films are dismissed as being cinematic masturbation, Lily probably qualifies as cinematic coitus interruptus. We're just looking at ugly behavior, like someone's morbid home movies. But the film is so abstruse and fragmented on every level it's nearly impossible to ascribe motives or experience any payoff. Like Blue Velvet, another psychically wounding movie that has been widely praised, Lily contains moments of such emotional rawness that it's not hard to see how it has garnered many staunch defenders. Lily is an ungainly, fractured, bewildering movie that despite its massive collection of characters and incidents and concepts winds up being about nothing much at all. The real shame of All About Lily Chou-Chou is that all of this energy and creative work has not produced a better film.

ROGER EBERT ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU UPDATE

He also included ingredients about the murder of a (also fictitious) Lily fan, from which he derived enough material through other people's feedback to create not only a novel but to update an old screenplay he'd written about the coming of age of two boys in modern Japan. Director Shunji Iwai created a web site devoted to a fictitious Bjork-like pop star and asked people to freely contribute material about her. By Serdar Yegulalp on 19:01:00 No commentsДЄll About Lily Chou-Chou is one of those movies where the idea behind the movie is more interesting than anything in it.

Roger ebert all about lily chou chou