lexdevil

Lucky Ears is an initially engaging but ultimately frustrating romantic comedy. Starring Kankuro Kudo as the lad with the lucky lobes, a newly hired kitchen worker at a retirement home, Fukumimi also features the great Kunie Tanaka as a restless spirit who inhabits Kudo's body during the hapless youngster's first day on the job. The reason? Tanaka claims he has unfinished business to complete with a beautiful fellow retiree (Yoko Tsukasa from Samurai Rebellion and 70s disaster flick The Last Days of Planet Earth). Standing in his way are other elderly residents, including nutty naval vet Jiro Sakagami and an impossibly effeminate tranny played by kaiju eiga star Akira Takarada. Sounds wacky, right? Well, unfortunately, Lucky Ears is actually an overlong, awkward, and mawkish meditation on love and death that outlives its welcome after barely half an hour. The split personality scenes between Kudo and Tanaka are badly staged, and Kudo simply doesn't have the skills to portray two characters at the same time, though he's reasonably engaging in the film's early scenes. Tanaka brings undeserved gravitas to his role, but is burdened by a bad screenplay filled with platitudes and pious pronouncements on fate and life. Tsukasa is decent in a thankless role as the object of affection, and Shiho Takano serves as attractive love interest for Kudo (when his body ISN'T inhabited by Tanaka's spirit). In the final analysis, Fukumimi plays like an overlong made for television movie (and though the film apparently had a theatrical release, it WAS produced by Fuji TV)and will send most occidental viewers into a diabetic coma.

Melvin Van Peebles is never short on opinions. I'd find it a lot easier to accept them if he weren't responsible for the vastly overrated Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song (forgive me if I omitted any 'a's or 's's from the title) and cinematic atrocities such as the racist, sexist, and plain awful Identity Crisis. Nonetheless, this is a fascinating and frequently dead on documentary about Hollywood's treatment of African American filmmakers.

The threesome of Bill Boyd, Robert Armstrong, and James Gleason play Coney Island carnys vying for the hand of Ginger Rogers, a working gal who sells salt water taffy. With the outbreak of World War I, the threesome enlist and pursue Ginger from afar. The first half of this RKO Pathe production is hard going, with the three male leads chewing up the scenery with overcooked one-liners and 'snappy' dialogue that quickly grows tiresome. The second half concentrates on action sequences as the US Navy pursues both a German merchant cruiser and a U-boat. These sequences are lively and well-filmed, but overall this is an overlong and unsatisfying comedy-drama with a flat ending. For fans of the stars only.