Birigyaru

Tender and touching, this movie is a real story (based) of following your dreams and of how a great teacher can help people to realize their true potential.

The main hero, Sayaka - thickly painted social butterfly at the start of the story, with no knowledge and no skills to speak of - with the help of 'cram school' teacher working overtime because of his belief in his students - is gradually transformed over the course of the movie into successful student, sure of herself and her abilities, who applies for the entry exams into one of the finest universities in Japan.

Great story and great cast -- frankly, I was quite skeptical when I started the movie, but all the performances were so believable, and the flow of the story is so finely woven that it completely won me over long before the movie was over.

This movie moves you on many different levels - girl's struggle with her own insecurities, her troubled relationship with her family, the teacher finding ingenious ways to help students who are not interested in learning, to start with - everything is told with so much skill and so much heart that you can not help being pulled in by the story.

Watch it! One of the external reviews called it "an entertaining time-waster". Well if it is, it is probably the most useful way to waste two hours of your time :)

A lots of teenage and coming of age movies don't touch with the subject of school materials. Usually they just focus on romantic relationship or broken hearted experience in high school. Well. You can expect differently from this one.

Sayaka Kudo, a pariah high school girl that only knew how to enjoy her life instead of studying, suddenly face the challenge to enter one of the most prestigous university in Japan. She had only one year to make that happened. Her mother asked help from the golden heart tutor Tsubota-san to assist Sayaka in her impossible quest. Can they make their dream come true?

There are some out there who believe that mainstream films can never be artistically great or entertaining. I am certainly not one of them - and this film definitely proves it.

True, it's not groundbreaking by any means. But is it interesting? Is it emotionally gripping? And most importantly, is it memorable? This is all three, and more.

Taking literally the best parts of what characterizes Japanese film - over the top acting, narrative exposition, classic tugs at the heart-strings moments and melodramatic long pauses - this film pulls great screen writing, direction and acting to produce what has to be the best two hours to come out of mainstream Japanese cinema in a very long time.

I inevitably compare this film with the former TV show Doragon-Sakura and its sequel. That's the reason why I chose to watch it.

The fact is, this film is not as good as Doragon-Sakura in many ways. The most serious one is the image of that key teacher. Kanji Sakuragi was so cool and determined in Doragon-Sakura, while in this film, the teacher was so weak and unimpressed. This disappointed me the most.

Another reason why this film performed poorer than DS is the length I guess. After all, 10 episodes showed a greater advantage than 2 hours in terms of atmosphere and depth.

All in all, this film didn't successfully transfer the spirit I needed originally. What a pity.

As a student who is aiming the exams to university, I was encouraged by this a lot, I mean, really a lot!

Well, this movie does not have much rank here, I suppose it is because people living under Western education system or examination system cannot understand properly that pressure of university-entry exams in Asian countries like Japan.

In my opinion is a really excellent movie, the relationships between the characters are also touching such as family and friends...

So I rated 10

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