Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

sol- Fate causes the paths of a guerrilla film crew and two feuding Yakuza clans to clash for the second time in ten years in this outlandish comedy from 'Suicide Club' director Sion Sono. The movie initially feels like a twisted version of 'Bowfinger' or 'Cecil B. DeMented' as the young guerrilla filmmakers heartlessly intrude on the Yakuza madness to get money shots. In between the violence, there are also some moments of macabre beauty too, such as a young girl in a white dress sliding through a sea of blood, and things get more complex as the story progresses and jumps to the present. Deliciously weird and wacky as the film is, it takes a long time for the paths of the protagonists to cross once again, and the film feels way too long. It is, however, the midsection that needs trimming (especially a romance) as the carnage-heavy finale is glorious with the guerrillas' insensitivity to all the bloodshed at peak. The unemotional way in which they film all the action is uncanny; one gets a sense that they have completely lost all sense of distinction between reality and movie-making. The film has some solid performances too, particularly from Jun Kunimura as a much-feared Yakuza boss whose daughter used to be in toothpaste commercials, and Shinichi Tsutsumi as the other Yakuza boss who became fixated on Kunimura's little girl at an age that many would consider creepy. Fumi Nikaidou (as the adult daughter) also keeps singing her toothpaste jingle. It is that kind of delirious, unconventional comedy if one is in the mood for something decidedly different.

WILLIAM FLANIGAN Viewed on DVD. Cult Director Shion Sono delivers a film that has to be seen to be believed (or not believed)! The plot involves a "gorilla film" group of dedicated losers (who has spent the past 10 years aggressively going nowhere) unexpectedly given the chance to film a battle-to-the-death between two mob gangs (and the unexpected bloody wipe out of the victors--as well as surviving members of the film crew except for the gorilla film director--by a police SWAT group). Or maybe all this never really happened except in the imagination of the gorilla film director. (Obvious clues are there to ponder.) Starting with an overly embellished English translation of its title, the movie is way, way over the top in all contemporary cinematic categories (and then some): creativity; humor; Japanese cuteness; melodrama; violence; acting (there are well over 30 speaking parts plus one reluctant cat); CGI gore; music; mobile (hand-held) cinematography; editing; break-away sets; etc. (The film's complexity is such that the viewer can not help but wonder how Sono was able to pull together and transform the massive amount of raw material he must have started with into this polished product.) Although the movie is fairly derivative, Sono seems to be trying to one-up himself (not others) in scene after scene. And he is mostly successful. Actors appear to have been frequently unleashed by the Director so as to improvise their parts and seriously caricature their roles. This tactic usually has a galvanizing impact on the viewer (especially in the final third of the film). The movie, though, is too long with many repetitive scenes in the mob battle. Surround sound is hit/miss erratic. Subtitles are close enough, but fail to translate the names of the film's principals during the opening (or closing) credits! An obvious candidate for eternal cult-crowd homage. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

Grethiwha Beneath all my suffocating inhibitions, my inability to share my true feelings, my fear of doing what it is that I really want to do - there is a character somewhat akin to 'Hirata', in Sion Sono's 'Why Don't You Play in Hell?'. Here is a ridiculous and frankly insane character - a wannabe film director (and leader of the 'F**k Bombers' cinema club) who'll go to literally any length to realize his dreams and is not remotely discouraged by his complete lack of accomplishments over the past ten years. He's nuts, and yet my soul is frankly screaming for me to live my life with the same liberated, unashamed, energetic, joie d'vivre, that Hirata maintains in the face of it all... The spirit of the F**k Bombers!Before Sion Sono was a filmmaker, he was part of a poetry collective called 'Tokyo GAGAGA', that took their poetry screaming into the streets. 'GAGAGA', Sono's explained, is the 'sound of the soul'. By that same token, I've often felt that Sion Sono's characters are the soul, personified: their actions are crazy, over-the-top, and usually comically violent - they're not realistic, normal characters - and yet I see my own soul realistically reflected in his characters, more strongly than anyone else's.Like Kurosawa's 'Dreams', 'Why Don't You Play in Hell?' is autobiographical in the most uniquely and completely outlandish way. Hirata is Sono, from his early amateur filmmaking days, when he really did go round with his gang, calling themselves the F**k Bombers, playing Bruce Lee in the park, and being called an idiot by young children. That just about everything else in this movie is heavily fictionalized is pretty obvious, but just as Sono's characters don't reflect normal people, but capture their spirits, his story, if you consider it autobiographical, captures the spirit of his experience becoming a professional filmmaker. It's a movie about the spirit of movies, the spirit of filmmaking, and as Sono says, the 'love of 35mm'.It's also about a yakuza turf war. And there's some romance as well: a meek boy falls in love with a girl after seeing her shove a piece of broken glass through another guy's cheek with her tongue, and shortly gets over his own shyness. The movie is a crazily-ridiculous breathlessly-paced action-comedy, capturing the same punk rock energy as Sono's Love Exposure, and it's his most polished-looking film yet. It's a lighter affair than most of the movies he made before - the psycho-horrors and the Fukushima-dramas - but it's no less good; it's thoroughly entertaining from start to finish, and especially, everything after the F**k Bombers finally cross paths with the yakuza is pure genius.It's a movie that had me laughing, had me tapping my feet to the music (all written and composed by Sono himself), and had me grinning cheek-to-cheek the whole way through. And, like Sono's very best movies (Hazard, Love Exposure), it might have even inspired me, to loosen my inhibitions a little bit.

michaelhirakida Unfortunately, This Japanese Gore Film is unsatisfying to watch. The only way I would watch this movie is if it was for the ending which even it has its problems.The story is very complicated. There are these amateur filmmakers who want to make a film, this guy who is captured by the Yakuza whose boss wants to make a film for his daughter who was in Japanese ads when she was a kid, Some kind of truce between two mob bosses that gets broken, I have no clue what went on. This movie for the first hour is extremely boring, unpleasant (Not in the gory way) and really needed a huge rewrite. All it is, is just boring, pointless and bad exposition and talking and violence that adds nothing until the whole movie finally gets in shape and remembers: "HEY! Wasn't There A Film we had to make?" I felt I was watching a Japanese soap opera instead of a gore picture!The guy who gets captured by the Yakuza, Koji, guess how he finds his crew? He pukes on some written wishes. But the puke goes on for way too long which makes it unbelievable. The only thing good was the ending. I thought this whole freaking movie was going to be an awesome bloody massacre movie. But no, the first hour and a half is just pointlessness and set up to the film they are going to make, then the last 35 minutes are amazing violence and death and it is one of the best action sequences I have seen in a very long time.But the fact that they kill every important cast member except the selfish overly confident unlikable director feels like a huge middle finger to the audience. Also, he doesn't realize HE MADE A SNUFF FILM AND WILL RELEASE IT TO WIDE AUDIENCES ACROSS JAPAN!! This guy should be freaking put in a jail cell!But the police show up and he escapes while they kill everyone! Then, they show him running down the streets, then show the premiere of the film where the clueless audience members applaud as the other cast members are fine and well and are all dandy. BUT OH NO WE CANT END ON THAT NOTE. Lets go back to the shot of him running with the freaking footage which the police are possibly going to hunt him down for and then, CUT! The director says. Yes. I have no freaking clue what was going on. This movie just gave up three quarters of the way through the whole entire ending.This movie is just a headache to watch. All I asked for was great gory fun and the Trailer made it look amazing. But of course I was fooled and got sucked into a gun shot loud drama, then set up, then a almost perfect ending. If you really want to watch Japanese Bloody or Gory films, watch something like Battle Royale or any other movie that is better.Its only worth it for the ending action scene. That's it.41/100 D+