In the early days of MTV -- the "I want my MTV" days -- one of the cable outlet's slogans was "too much is never enough." The same attitude could apply to All About Lily Chou-Chou, which offers an onslaught of feelings and footage that's quite daunting.
The Lily Chou-Chou referred to in the title is a fictive pop star, an exquisite victim persona combining Bjork, Sarah McLachlan and Kate Bush. She's never really seen; Lily occupies the movie only as a force that permeates the lives of the Japanese junior high school kids who are fixated on her and bombard one another -- and the movie screen -- with instant messages about the effects she has on their lives.
PHOTO COURTESY OF IMAGEMET
This opus by the writer and director Shunji Iwai is an epic about junior high alienation and the wanton cruelty of early teenagers: I Vitelloni, Fellini's realist masterpiece about alienated youth, with an even more self-absorbed and dangerous crowd. Their misbehavior is all the more awful because it doesn't stem from rage or volatility; these kids are just caught up in the hormonal surges that often lead to casual brutality.
The movie follows several roving bands of boys and girls as they intermingle, often physically and in emotionally violent ways, and it chronicles the resultant power plays.
Lily Chou-Chou is mostly about Hayato (Yuichi Hasumi), a lonely and shy boy who goes by the name "Lily-philia" on a fan's Web site. He doesn't fit into his school, especially after his close bond with his only friend, Shugo (Shusuke Hoshino), evaporates. Shugo then takes a sudden turn into bullying, which sends loyalties scattering throughout the school.
Iwai quickly establishes the tribal aspects of the kids' friendships, often making things clear just by capturing their body language; he's hypnotized by them. And because he doesn't stop to explain why these relationships change, the arbitrariness seems all the more horrible and real.
The Japanese obsession with pop drops snugly into Lily Chou-Chou because music gives kids a way to mark their territories and practice their malign exclusions, which is what junior high school can be all about. The film shows that Iwai knows the power of pop and has probably absorbed the work of John Hughes, possibly the most influential creative force in films of the last 20 years, whether we want to admit it or not. Hughes made his often-imitated mark by dramatizing his teenage cynosures while inflating their psychic wounds until they resounded with mythological overtones.
Iwai treats the ensemble cast of gifted young camera subjects with the same care and tenderness. He moves so deftly from one passel of kids to another that it is easy to get lost, especially when we search for more of the music prodigy Ayumi (Yoko Kuno), who has to withstand the deepest pain and comes up with a way of expressing her unhappiness that's like a slap.
Lily Chou-Chou has allowed its director to discover a new kind of cultural phenomenon: it's a slow-moving whirlwind. He loves his characters, and the picture offers an extensive range of emotional coloration, spiritual tones, shifts that are visually complemented by his able cinematographer, Noboru Shinoda.
Lily Chou-Chou has an effulgence that almost makes you think Shinoda has found an entire new rainbow, the glistening, yum-yum palette that makes magazines like the pop culture Tokion so much fun to thumb through. (He finds more variations on chartreuse than I ever knew existed.)
You could get lost in the details, as the director did. Iwai lacks the judgment of Hughes; Lily Chou-Chou runs 146 minutes. There's no reason for a movie about pop music to be as long as a boxed set. Lily zealots discuss every part of her life and are fixated on "the ether," the karmic amniotic fluid in which she dwells. That's because most of them desperately require some beauty in their lives; the Internet postings about Lily are rooted in her fans' neediness.
It's only Lily who gives them sanctuary, and they wax rhapsodic about the healing capacity of her music, a meld of pop and the cooled-out meditations of Debussy and Satie.
The original music was composed by Takeshi Kobayashi, who has worked with Iwai before. (The Western correlative to her sound would probably be something like the heroic pop congregation My Bloody Valentine, which has taken on the stature of myth; the group has completed only one album in the last decade, but its fans buzz full time about the band's future.)
Obviously the picture isn't all about Lily Chou-Chou but about the kids and the way music envelops them. Iwai seems to share the compulsion of Lily's fans, elaborating on minutiae about Lily that he provides in a gesture or two -- like the performers Lily is modeled after.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would