Wednesday 14 April 2010

My Rainy Days (2009) @ 天使の恋

SEXY
Gravure model-turned actress Nozomi Sasaki (佐々木 希) for all your lolita needs.
At a glance:
Cute as a button. In other words, jailbait.
Not that this is a Vatican daily and we're too uptight - but Cathay-Keris Films release My Rainy Days (2009) @ 天使の恋 @ 出租天使 (Romanised Japanese transliteration: Tenshi No Koi) is first and foremost, a very dangerous movie. No, we're not even talkin about the sleazy-lookin poster, which depicts the glorious bare back of Nozomi Sasaki as Rio, the schoolgirl whore who falls in love 35-year-old history teacher Kouki Ozawa (Shosuke Tanihara) after a chance meetin. We're talkin about how a popular mobile phone novel now gets NC16 screen time in a social irresponsible movie that glosses over the serious issue of child prostitution with glam halter tops, credit cards and Louis Vuitton umbrellas, making it merely incidental in what is, in essence, a love story with no moral resolution.
Bad news on the doorstep:

If only he could resist.
The danger in making a commercial movie for general release that intentionally overlooks opinion (especially when one is obviously needed) is that people, regardless of age, might really think that these things are normal and socially tolerated. This is ironically worse than the position where a movie glorifies lolita lifestyle from the outset. In My Rainy Days, we are treated to a two-hour long doomed (and potentially illegal) relationship between two people, which is stylishly shot but frighteningly hollow. Undertones of abandonment, bisexuality and feminism carry the film but everythin is incidental to the plot and the sum experience is largely unrewardin.
Love hurts.
Perennial wonderment:
Lolitas.
Reminds me of:
Lolitas.
Amacam joker, berapa bintang lu mau kasi?
If none of this bothers you and you really are looking for a movie with some pretty movin pictures to look at, My Rainy Days is by and large an unlikely Japanese romance that is mildly entertainin in patches (despite replicating the overdone brain tumour plot device you get in every other Korean drama) thanks to the MTV chemistry between the lead pair and some unexpectedly rich story detail. You feel that writer and director Yuri Kantake knows exactly what he wanted. The problem is whether it's what you want as well.★★
Bonus material:
Surely you could do better than this.