Category: Everyday Life
Almost once a year?
Going to the movie theatre is just about an annual event for us.
We feel the admission is too expensive after we experienced cheaper prices: CA$5.00 for a matinee and CA$8.00 for the regular price.
Although we do think there are many nice Japanese movies…
Anyway, we went to see The Box of the Môryô, which is from an original story by Kyôgoku Natsuhiko. (It was the first time after we saw The Inugami Clan at the theatre!)
It was the second movie of a Kyôgoku original (after The Summer of the Ubume), but the director is different, so the two movies have pretty different atmospheres.
Our impression is that the previous director cared more about the scene (they built full-size sets for location shots), lighting, and the atmospheric details. This time’s director cared about the overall period atmosphere, such as realistic views and colours. I felt it looked like China, and I was right. They filmed on location in Shanghai, China. We wondered how they managed to create a view of 1950s Tokyo.
The long novel is impossible to fit in a two hour movie, so it’s better not to think the movie and the actual novel are the same. I don’t have a complaint about the movie itself, but my own images of the main characters after reading the stories are a little different from the movie. ‘Black Kyôgokudô’ and ‘Depressed Sekiguchi’ didn’t have enough of a dark image. And I want ‘Enokizu of the Rosy Cross Detective Agency’ to wear stylish outfits and have a cheerfully incoherent personality. And so on…
We guessed they had a pretty big budget for the movie. On the way home we said to each other that we want to watch the ‘making of’.
The movie’s genre seems horror-ish, so I don’t recommend watching it to people who don’t like that kind of movie, but I hope more people go to see it, and look forward to the third Kyôgoku movie. (We actually don’t watch recent horror movies though. It depends on the original writers.)
Maybe it’ll be The Dream of the Kyôkotsu?
– YS, 7 January 2008
7 January 2008
