The young man, who first appears to be a deranged, borderline funny, character is revealed to be a person with a traumatic past whose life had been forcefully taken away.
All about lily chou chou guidance series#
Furthermore a series of political and social commentary is hidden beneath its surface. Save the Green Planet! jumps starts like a comedy, continues as a thriller and ends up being sci-fi. A detective steps into the game, investigating the rich man’s disappearance and the situation gets more and more complicated. He kidnaps the executive of a pharmaceutical company and starts interrogating and eventually tortures him in order to reveal the conspiracy that he is weaving. The film starts off looking like a comedy, with light hearted music and a protagonist who is convinced that the powerful leaders of his country are evil aliens in disguise preparing for invasion. South Korean cinema is the master of genre bending and Save the Green Planet! couldn’t be a more perfect example.
Save the Green Planet! (Joon-Hwan Jang, 2003) The list below presents films that characteristically cross the boundaries between seemingly incompatible film genres.ġ. This tendency consequently helped to attract film viewers with different tastes, giving East Asian cinema the chance to surprisingly multiply its target audiences. The fierce invasion of Western culture, the repeated colonisation of the countries by foreign forces and the interplay between their local identities and global influences are only some of the factors that pushed the directors to create movies that break the established genre conventions, positioning them in multifarious cinematic categories simultaneously. Martial arts films with a twist of comedy and raw violence, horror films that turn out to be musicals and crime films that transform into heart-felt melodramas are not rare hors d’oeuvres in the rich menus that East Asian cinema has to serve. Its diverse film traditions, once strictly typified by jidaigeki and wuxia movies, have finally succeeded to showcase that the directors who represent them can give birth to a wide variety of films that belong to a broad range of genres.īut what is this unique differentiator that lends modern East Asian cinema with its undeniable and essential appeal? The phenomenon of genre bending could be safely identified as a major component of this appeal. The result is a film that's flawed and brilliant in equal measure.įashioning this tale of teenage alienation into a much grander project about pop culture, technology and the breakdown of human relationships, "Lily Chou-Chou" further proves Japan's growing reputation for producing haunting and disturbing cinema.East Asian cinema has been enjoying its well earned and long yearned global recognition during the past couple of decades. Yet, for all its meandering lack of focus, Shunji Iwai's apocalyptic vision of teenage angst creates some fascinating sequences (such as the boys' dreamlike trip to Okinawa, filmed through their digital video camera). Relying on a confusing flashback structure and a ponderous accumulation of incidental detail, "Lily Chou-Chou" is desperately in need of some streamlining. Returning to school, he defeats the school bully and begins a reign of terror that no one, not even Yuichi, is safe from. But after a lavish trip to Okinawa (that's paid for with stolen money) ends with an unexpected death, Hoshino begins to change. Yuichi's turbulent life in secondary school begins as he befriends Hoshino (Oshinari), joins the kendo club, and gets mixed up in the odd spell of petty crime.
It's the perfect image of writer-director Shunji Iwai's world, a place in which nothing (from bus hijackings, to pop concerts and even school trips) is experienced first hand, because it's always mediated through technology that distances individuals from each other - often with disastrous results. Japanese characters flash up on the screen as Yuichi (Ichihara) logs onto his "Liliphilia" website to chat to other fans of the pop star Lily Chou-Chou.
"All About Lily Chou-Chou" opens with the clattering sound of a computer keyboard.