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 Students at a run down all boys high school in Japan try to figure out what they want to do with their lives. Some can't handle facing the future and tragedy results. Artsmagic provided us some advertising material you can see here. 2001, 83 minutes, Widescreen
This just in from Japan: Today's youth are emotionally alienated punks who have no direction and are only able to express their unhappiness by pummeling one another with baseball bats! I am so tired of other countries trying to steal our gimmicks! I hate America's youth as much as most of the taxpaying public that supports their lazy arses and their filthy pop music and junk food addictions, but when it comes to alienation manifesting itself in violent outbursts, I would put our sullen twerps up against any others in the world. With our lax to nonexistent gun laws, absent parents, and liberal media bias that urges kids to screw each other's brains out, this great nation's youth is able to inflict its anger on our society on a scale and with a depth that other countrys simply can't match, least of all those copycats from Japan.
From what I've seen of these Japanese kids, they're all about affecting this aloof coolness that counts smoking and an obsession with their hair among its most distinguishing characteristics. I wont deny that America experienced a similar sort of faux-hip period - back in the 1950s! Sure, every now and again a hairstyle sweeps across our land like the Rachel or the mullet, but no one is silly enough to think that flipping your big hair around and letting the wind blow it dramatically to and fro or letting it droop in their face is going to get the nightly news to sit up and take notice. Likewise, the only smoking that's cool in this country anymore is a nice fat blunt. And we all know that's just a gateway drug. Sort of a drug addiction with training wheels. Regular old cigarettes? We all know from those Truth.com ads that it's icky and distinctly uncool!
Maybe the folks in Japan could get all worked up, wring their hands, and question how their young people had gone off the tracks after watching these wimpy dorks in their dark suits frown and mutter things about not knowing what they want to do when they get out of school, but I come from a country where our nerds have the firepower and rock music to inspire them to wipe out platoon loads of their own classmates. In Blue Spring, one kid takes a big knife and stabs another kid to death in a toilet stall. What kind of barbaric country is that? We rarely have to worry about that situation here since all our kids are carrying guns to school. Kind of hard to use a classmate as a pin cushion when he whips out his Glock and quotes his favorite Marilyn Manson lyric. It's like the bumpersticker says "when you outlaw guns at school, last period P.E. is going to be one big ass knife fight."
This movie is based on a manga by Taiyo Matsumoto who we all know from his really famous manga Black & White. Naturally, since it's a manga, I've never read it. I was raised on Spider-Man specifically and Marvel Comics generally (it's the only thing my parents did right). It's taken me twenty years of personal growth to feel comfortable buying DC Comics and those are about as foreign a comic as I'm ever going to buy. Besides, the fact that lots of girls read manga is enough to put me off of them. Everyone knows that comics are for boys with power fantasies. What the hell must these manga be? Sweet Valley High books with pictures? Like all suspect artforms that didn't originate in this country, my secret commission (don't tell anyone) with the Department of Homeland Security has caused me to study this phenomenon in depth. A critical analysis of manga within the context of Japanese societal norms indicates that they are obsessed with giant robots, horny monsters with tentacles, and girls of questionable age in sailor suits. What this says about that culture aside from the obvious (they're perverts) I'll leave to experts like The Trinity Broadcasting Network, but it left me wondering what kind of lame manga Blue Spring must have been since I never saw one robot that transformed into a car and the screen time the one or two gals in the film got was overwhelmed by the part the midget gardener had!
More annoying than the absence of large battlebots piloted by squeaky-voiced teens was the sheer tedium produced by this movie as nothing interesting happened to a series of characters that were as flat as the guy that fell off the top of the school in the final scene. It was one of those movies where I kept waiting for something to happen that would shake things up and distinguish it from any number of other boring, brooding teen pics. Instead, the movie wanders around for the first hour like a special ed student who got separated from the rest of his class, before finally settling on detailing the rivalry between former friends Kujo and Aoki and how Aoki just wanted Kujo's attention. Aoki clearly forgot that he, Kujo, and the rest of the senior class at the local all boys high school just don't care about anything or anyone! Gawd Aoki! Try to remember your gimmick!
The movie starts out with an interesting enough scene. Kujo, Aoki and some of their mates sneak onto the school roof and participate in the bizarre ritual that determines who the top dog of the class is. It involves climbing over the railing on the roof, hanging onto it, and releasing your grip on the railing as you try to clap an increasing number of times, all the while falling backward towards the ground about five stories below. Whoever claps the most is the winner. Whoever can't grab the railing again probably won't be back for the next semester. Director Toshiaki Toyoda does a good job of building up the tension and I was holding my breath hoping, I mean, wondering if, someone would fall. After this scene though, I steadily lost interest as we learned nothing more about the characters and they never did anything remotely as interesting as this.
Following Kujo's victory at the clapping game, he does little more than stand around on the school roof staring off into space, playing soccer by himself, or listening to the midget gardener dispense his wisdom about life using flowers and blooming as his metaphor (easily the worst part of the movie). I shouldn't be surprised that an apathetic guy doesn't, you know, do more, but as a viewer, I could sympathize with Aoki, who became quite irritated that Kujo cared about nothing including ruling the school. What's the point of being the boss if you aren't going kick the crap out all the wannabes who disrespect you? Sure, Kujo puts a few people in their place early on with a nose twist and a beating with a baseball bat, but that's not the sort of thing you can bank. You have to be ever vigilant in protecting your top spot. Let me see if I can channel the midget gardener for a moment to explain. The school is like a garden and Kujo is the gardener. Unless he wants a bunch of weeds taking over his garden he either needs to dump a bunch of chemical spray on it or he needs to forget about gardening all together and just go back to being a pansy and play soccer.
The movie makes stumbling attempts to broaden its canvas and show the universality of the delinquency that runs rampant at this school by showing us some other characters who have no dreams or who have had their dreams crushed. There's a kid who talks to cheery trees, the guy they call the Ghost who might have some fatal disease and then there's the star pitcher who lost the game that would've sent his school to nationals and ends up joining the Yakuza. He gives a nice downer of a monologue about how baseball was his whole youth and how going to nationals was his whole life and since he shook off the catcher's sign and called his own crappy pitch he now has to become a gangster. I guess when you think about Donnie Moore committing suicide three years after losing the game that would've sent the California Angels to their first World Series, this is the part of the movie that resonates with the most truth. Unfortunately, the baseball player character was little more than a throw-away situation that had no bearing on any of the Kujo-Aoki stuff.
The movie plods along for most of the first hour with our whiny brat stars moping around about nothing in particular. Once Aoki gets fed up with Kujo ignoring him and his role as leader of the pack, things do pick up, but in a rather meaningless and predictable manner. Aoki gets a radical new haircut, picks up two sycophants, and starts brutalizing everyone in the school all in an effort to draw some reaction from Kujo. Kujo finally confronts him and they punch each other several times, but nothing much is settled. Kujo isn't going away, but he isn't really hot to be the kind of bad ass that Aoki thinks he should be.
If you didn't see the ending coming a mile away, then you haven't watched your share of movies about self-destructive kids. Is there anyone out there who actually thought that Aoki was going to survive his descent into madness? No one ever does in these movies. As Kujo realized what Aoki was going to do and raced breathlessly up the stairs (oh, so now you care?) to the roof, I thought to myself that wouldn't it be neat if the movie ended with Kujo talking Aoki into getting some counseling? How groundbreaking would it be if Aoki realized that maybe he should give his life another chance and that all he needed was a stiff and regular dose of Paxil? But frankly, there's more drama in having Aoki take the Nestea plunge off the roof as he tries to clap thirteen times (five more than the current record). A good looking, though ponderous movie that plows no new ground in its subject matter and actually barely scratches the surface of the blank slates that pass for characters in this one. It left me alienated and indifferent.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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