Nana

I am one of NANA comic books' fans, so that's why i really love this movie! It contained all details i wanted it to have. The actors were so real, especially Kyosuke, it was like he jumped out of the comic books! The soundtracks went along with the scenes very well. And they did all the emotional scenes pretty touching. I could laugh and cry along with Nana and Hachi. Both the comic books and the movie perfectly complete each other. When I read the comic books, I have to imagine the characters' voices but in the movie I hear their voices and I deeply get into their feelings. Mika Nakashima was so good at expressing her voice. Aoi Miyazaki was the perfect Hachi, she was cute and innocent. Yuna Ito wasn't so much like Reira but loved her voice though. I really wish they will make NANA II!!!

I liked the freshness in the first half of 'Nana'. The two girls Nana (Nakashima) and Nana (Miyazaki) meet and are reunited by 'coincidence'. Then they decide to move in together and we are shown glimpses of their worklife and lovelife. However, in the second half, as the film shifts to Nakashima's Nana's lovelife, it gets painfully slow and boring. The film was slow to begin with but the first half managed to stay enjoyable. The 'reunion' in the end looks rushed.

The instrumental pieces in the background score add to the freshness and winter season. However the songs are quite bad. Cinematography's quite adequate. From the two Nana's, Miyazaki is the better actress. Even though she frequently shows her toothy smile, she brings out Nana's naivety, vulnerability and cheerfulness with tremendous ease and makes her character very likable. Conversely, Nakashima is mostly wooden. She pretty much has one expression on her face throughout the whole film. The supporting cast ranges from adequate to wooden.

So to speak, 'Nana' could have been very enjoyable had the second part received more consideration. This film may appeal more to the younger generation.

Nana may suffer from being a condensed version of an expansive Manga universe, but it also knows exactly how much time to spend on individual plots strands. Nana is a coming of age, female friendship film that handles immature and young emotions with absolute maturity. The most impressive aspect was creating a relationship between one of the protagonists boyfriends and another girl. It easily could have made him a villain, but instead took an unbiased look at how the relationship came to be. Luckily, for a film focused on bands, the music is relatively good. Nakashima and Miyazaki both inhabit their roles well and build up a believable friendship. Highly enjoyable, even if it doesn't quite feel complete.

So after hearing about the Nana mangas for a while, I finally broke down and started reading them and became immediately obsessed. Therefore, within a week of reading the mangas, I had to watch the movie.

As far as adaptation screenplays go, I thought this movie was very solid. They chose their material well, and cut out appropriately. But of course, it is difficult to be 100% satisfied with a film when you're so in love with the source material. I was disappointed with the actual story arch of the film because I felt like it barely tapped into the intensity of the Nana's relationship because they failed to really, really show the progression of the friendship, in my opinion.

I was also slightly disappointed by the music, not because the music was bad, but because it wasn't what I was expecting. Perhaps because I am an American with very little exposure to Japanese music, I was expecting Trapnest to be a lot less pop (well, I thought they might be pop in the way that Evanescence is pop) and I definitely expected Blast to be more traditional Sex Pistol, Clash, etc. style punk rock.

But regardless, I enjoyed the movie very much and would indeed recommend it to fans of the manga.

An IMDbian recommended this and underlined that it is an adaptation of a popular "shoujo manga" (girlie/chick comics). The NANA sensation can be compared with the craze caused by Densha otoko (Train Man) in Japan. Even the American girls find time to flip through it. Well, as the last page of chick comics said goodbye to me some twenty years ago, and my old bones cannot hold much dross energy for punk or rock n' roll music after work, sorry, not much interest shed in the first place. Besides, Nana was never heard to me. Just that the very last rental ticket was idling so I grabbed the VCD without much expectation... but it turned out to be a delightful surprise.

The names of the two Nanas and their room 707 are very interesting. "Seven" in Japanese is pronounced as "na-na", a universal lucky number. Two Nanas live together in a "na-na-tse-row(zero)-na-na" room, they rob all the luck of the world! The family names of the Nanas exhibit tellingly their characters. Nana KOMATSU, the traditional Nana who only longs for getting married was born with a last name means "a small (ko) pine tree (matsu)". Imagine a tiny pine tree in a traditional Japanese still and quiet landscape painting, not a grand view, right? And the modern Nana, Nana OZAKI who is independent and strong enough to brave any storms in her life, is given by Heaven a grandiose label, "a huge (o) mountain summit (zaki)". Comically, Mount Everest sprang from my head when I made the analogy. Their names are so self-explanatory, so graphic, so vivid.

Two namesakes of paradoxical personalities live under the same lucky-lucky roof in harmony, both traditional and modern qualities exist, fuse inside one body (Room 707) without causing any conflict. On the contrary, they are helping and inspiring each other. They happily found each other. That is the ideal of the original author Ai Yazawa: the attitude, the attribute, the bearing, the idiosyncrasy of 21st century Japanese feminism (woman figure).

While watching it and laughing at the lousy English lyrics of the loud songs, I remembered two other movies: "La double vie de Véronique", which is right now stirring a little hot talk in town intriguingly. (It really beats me a lot why it suddenly becomes so popular in its second coming after its first screening in 1991???) Two identical Weronika/Véronique live their separate lives in France and Poland. She came across/found her so accidentally in a commotion and they got connected in a mystic way. They are actually searching for each other and found though a little late.

Another is Ingmar Bergman's Persona. Destruction, selfishness, atrocity, tragedy... are fitting negative words to depict this one, though. Elisabeth Vogler ("Vogler" -- Old German "Bird-catcher") a self-made-mute actress (Liv Ullmann) who so determinedly and cruelly wills to divorce herself from the pain of her own existence/façade which she has been playing for a long time and is now fed up with. She transfers absolutely her "self" (identity) on to Alma ("Alma" -- Spanish "Soul") a nurse (Bibi Andersson), who somehow envies her, and causes her collapse. The actress tries so hard to dump forcefully the pain she dislikes onto a weaker partner to make her like herself. A stronger "her" tortures the weaker "her" inside a dead quiet remote country house.

And how wonderful it is to see the 22-year-old Ryuhei Matsuda (bass guitarist Ren) has grown into fuller manhood and has shrugged off the enigmatic androgynous air he displayed in Gohatto (1999). (Gosh! He looks like neither boy nor girl... though with an enticing face.) Another good discovery.

The present day Japanese women are struggling with the pulling forces of the traditional and the modern feminist values, some may have found it, some still groping, some in the mid-way of a tunnel, some in a cul-de-sac. May every Japanese woman's identity be successfully located so as to achieve an inner "harmony", a pillar idea of the Japanese society and culture.