Shall we dansu?

A good movie with an outstanding story. Many assume that the movie is a love story from the typical Hollywood style: boy meets girl love affair. This is not. It is a story of a man who forgot to love life. His everyday life has become routine and he has no idea where his life is taking him. He has a house and car payment and a family of 3 that he has to provide for. From home, he takes his bicycle to the train and then he takes the train to work. Everyday, same old, same old. Then, one day he sees something that turns his world up-side-down. Dancing? A new way to express himself, a way to communicate with others and show his true colors. The passion he finds is not in a woman or mere lust, but in living life to the fullest. He begins to stop and look around him as he uses dancing to live. A terrific cast of funny and heart filled characters. This is not a movie about Japan or the Japanese, although it does take place in Japan and the cast is made up of Japanese. The setting and the plot of this movie is timeless.

I don't like "grade inflation" but I just had to give this a 10. I can't think of anything I didn't like about it. I saw it last night and woke up today thinking about it. I'm sure that the Hollywood remake that someone told me about, with J Lo and Richard Gear, will be excellent, but this original Japanese version from 1996 was so emotional and thought-provoking for me that I am hard-pressed to think of any way that it could be improved, or its setting changed to a different culture.

A story I found worth watching, and with o fist-fight scenes or guns going off or anything of the sort! Imagine that!

All the characters seemed well-developed, ... even non-primary characters had good character-development and enjoyable acting, and the casting seemed very appropriate.

It's always hard to find a good movie-musical in our day and age, and perhaps this doesn't quite qualify (there is plenty of learning how to dance, but no singing) but I really think that Gene Kelly and others who championed a place for dance in our lives would have thought so very highly of this film and the role of dance in helping to tell a story about a middle aged man, successful with a family in Japan, looking for something... he knows not precisely what.

To the team of people in Japan who contributed to this film, thank you for creating and doing it.

This film is about a man who has been too caught up with the accepted convention of success, trying to be ever upwardly mobile, working hard so that he could be proud of owning his own home. He assumes this is all there is to life until he accidentally takes up dancing, all because he wanted to get a closer look of a beautiful girl that he sees by the dance studio everyday while riding the subway on his way home.

His was infatuated with her at first, going to the dance class just to idolize her, but he eventually lets himself go and gets himself into the dancing. It eventually becomes apparent to him that there is more to life than working yourself to death. There is a set of oddball characters also learning in the studio, giving the film a lot of laughs and some sense of bonding between the dejected.

There is also revelations of various characters, including the girl he initially admired, giving some depth to them by showing their blemished past and their struggle to overcome it.

The dancing was also engaging, with the big competition at the end, but it is not the usual story where our underdog come out at the top by winning it. Instead, there are downfalls, revelations and redemption.

All these makes it a moving and fun film to watch.

Okay. As you can see this is one of my favorite if not favorite films. This is a character drama which is absolutely hilarious. The main character is a business man who is stuck in a "same thing, different day" mentality. He sees a woman looking melancholy out a window of a dance studio from his train everyday and wonders about her and decides to find out more about her. He decides to join the dance class only to find out she is not the instructor. From there he bonds with four other dancers and learns to enjoy dancing as well as finding out about the mysterious woman.

There is no gratuitous (or any) sex involved, just how a small group of people learn how friendships are formed and developed.

This film was remade with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez and the new one while appealing is nowhere as enjoyable as the original. The movie never made it big in America because it was not eligible for the Oscars since it was broadcast on television in Japan (movies cannot be released on TV or they are disqualified for Oscar nominations). It did win numerous awards in Japan for best film, cast, director etc for their "Oscar" awards.

This movie opened in Korea four years later than in Japan due to the now-defunct ban on Japanese pop culture in Korea. But the audiences in Korea were just as enthralled and enchanted by the story as the rest of the world was.

Like Japan, there are many salarymen in Korea who are also facing a mid-life crisis. After the movie premiered in Seoul, dance studios were reporting up to a 50-percent increase in the number of new students.

I took two years of jazz dance during college, and have seen Strictly Ballroom and Dance With Me. But this movie was the driving force behind me finally signing up for ballroom dance (called dancesport in Korea) lessons.

Mr. Aoki was hilarious as the employee who led a double life unbeknownst to his colleagues. It was also interesting to find out the reasons why the other students took lessons.

I too would have taken classes just to get close to the sexy dance instructor alone.

This movie is a perfect ten in my book.