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Simply A Masterpiece

Really Surprised!

hyped garbage

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Follows three call-girls and their intertwining lives inside the Castle Love Hotel ------------ A bored housewife decides to live life on the wild side .. She's introduced to the sex world through nude modeling , and after a scary encounter in the Love Hotel District she becomes attracted to a bold proud call-girl who takes her under her wing . She teaches the housewife to cherish her body as a play-toy , and charge every man when there's sex involved not out of love .. The housewife's life slowly degenerates until she and call-girl pasts come colliding together ..A police detective (who's also call-girl on side), investigates the murder of one of the women , as the case sheds some insight on the life she's living aswell ---------------- NC-21 :: Highly adult , Highly perverse .. Do not watch around children or elders8.5/10

What's striking about the movie is the murder at the opening scene. A woman's body was found that was cut in half, and decapitated. The missing parts were arranged with parts from a mannequin. Then the story shifts to the life of Izumi (Megumi Kagurazaka) who's a new house wife of a novel writer. Her husband is a perfectionist, and demands her to be so as well. But when she finds a part time job at the super market, things starts to change in her life.Story is an adaptation of murder of Yasuko Watanabe (description in Wikipedia) by director, and screen writer Shion Sono that occurred in 1997. The movie to me had two phases. First half was about Izumi, and the way she gets duped into the shady side of society. The second part is the horrible truth about Mitsuko (Makoto Togashi), and the truth about who's body it was that was found at the beginning of the movie.The first part of the movie was beautiful, but the second part of the movie was gruesome. First part was well made, but I couldn't get into the second part. Mitsuko's character lacked authenticity, and her social background improbable. So otherwise it was a fine movie, but there was no story towards the end (Mitsuko's life seemed forced, just to justify the plot). I wish the quality was consistent throughout the entire movie.

I saw this movie today at the Viennale at an afternoon screening and i had a hard time to sit thru it. it seemed overly pretentious and misogynistic to me. don't get me wrong, i enjoyed visitor q and i realized the Belle de Jour, Vivre Sa Vie references. But Shion Sono was not able to pull of the absurd combinations of violence and sexuality that made these movies work. on the opposite. it seemed like a constant male masturbation fantasy with a few literature references tossed in to justify it. even looking at it from an exploitation angle, it just failed to deliver. the acting was less than convincing and at best as average as the mise en scene and also the use of music was terrible, constantly failing to set the counterpoint as obviously originally intended. in the end it left the bitter taste of a conservative paradigm where women were punished for their sexuality, got their private parts cut of and were kicked in the stomach. anyway, there seems to be innocence in pissing.

This review was written following a screening at Cambridge Film Festival (UK) - 15 to 25 September 2011 * Contains spoilers * One sounds rather better than the other, more mysterious. (Less accurate?) The starting voice-over sounded as though details being given about district with the greatest concentration of love-hotels were in spite of boredom ('romance-hotels' doesn't sound quite right - and 'love', anyway, is a poor euphemism), but maybe it was just meant to sound a matter-of-fact tone, perhaps as a bid (they did regularly crop up, not usually successfully) to wrong-foot the viewer.Maybe, having left only 70 minutes in, I am not in a position to judge, but this film just seemed like a whodunit, and a not particularly interesting one (except for students of mutilation), but one with (attempts at) embellishments. Attempted, because the Effi Briest, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata sort of neglected wife with a boorish husband (and / or otherwise unhappy marriage) was only one sort of springboard into this 'adventure' for Mitzuko, and it was neither followed up, nor very convincing (e.g. the absence of her pre-existing life, except when - exceptionally awkwardly - some friends are produced and invited around for tea).The stupid husband seemed, from what I could judge from the subtitles, to be a celebrated writer, but actually, despite his airs, of Mills & Boon (perhaps where the romance comes in?), or maybe Alan Titchmarsh. (By contrast, Sleeping Beauty did not need an such excuse, and went straight in, not even via touting hot sausages in a supermarket, but with a proper waitressing job that was not enough to finance university and lifestyle.) Then, along with that Australian film, we move off into the territory of Buñuel's Belle de Jour (frankly more challenging, after all these years (1967), than either), but only as a build-up for sexual liberation generally and, specifically, a cheap laugh about how doing a porno-shoot with a stud makes one better at offering hot sausages enthusiastically (those scenes, in themselves, were surely a surprise to no one, least of all Mitzuko).And that leads us into the domain (no going back) of casual sex, dressing differently / seductively, and the love-hotels about which we were so carefully told before. After that, and an autopsy complete with maggots, a crime scene with violently coloured pink paint, and a sex-scene in a show with the odd paint capsule thrown in, does one care much about where it is going or, more importantly, how it is going there? Well, I didn't, but I cared even less to hear what I am fairly sure was Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and Bach's works for cello accompany all this, and that, apart from not being interested in how it unfolded, was my main impulse for leaving. (Perhaps the incongruity would have been less for those who were unfamiliar with this, even so, admittedly well-known music, perhaps not, but it turned the switch to 'off' for me.) Or was this really an attack on the cultural imperialism and globalism of the western world, disguised as a film? Certainly, there was little evidence of the restaurant and retail chains that dominate most cities. Certainly, we were being shown a culture particular to Japan in the love-hotel. Certainly, the western music of the baroque and the nineteenth century was being challenged to stand up against the most graphically demanding of bedfellows (and thereby proved that Bach is not, after all, strong enough to survive any treatment, even if that of Jacques Loussier were not enough to demonstrate otherwise), so maybe...Still don't care!