sashamalchik

You may be a dog lover (I am), you may love the real story of a real Tokyo Hachiko, but that doesn't excuse 8.0 average vote for a crappy film, a tearjerker that doesn't even succeed in that, a formulaic and just blah movie. Despite all the heartbreak of the story itself and the beautiful dogs that "played" all the right parts well, this bubble gum of a movie failed on so many levels, it lost even the ability to tear-jerk. Richard Gere mentioning "the heart" right before the...moment? All the "see you tonight"'s before he leaves? Please! (just one example)

Maybe the Japanese original film, Hachiko Monogatari (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D_Monogatari) is better, if it can be found anywhere.

If I could make such warm, heartfelt, deeply personal - for them - present for my parents as the director of Children of the Sun - himself a "Kibbutz child" - dedicated to his parents, I would be a very happy man, and they would be very lucky parents. Using only archive footage from 1930s to 1970s Kibbutzim with the commentary of aged first-generation kibbutzniks, with a particular focus on communal and practically devoid of parents interaction child rearing, this documentary can be a great eye-opener to people like me - who thought they had some idea of what Kibbutzim were like. In fact those early, particularly ideologically-charged, utopian Kibbutzim were very, very different from their modern remains - in fact, at times the feeling of watching Hitlerjunge or especially Young Pioneers is unnervingly real. But one of the film's great strengths is not trying to serve as an illustration for a Wikipedia article on Kibbutzim, but focusing on the emotional aspects of growing up there as children - and through that alone tells more than enough about the ideology, the promise, the ultimate fading of those ideas. Overall, an interesting and enjoyable documentary.

Terry Zwigoff made one of my favorite movies - Ghost World. This one can be considered a sequel of sorts. Except, it's backwards: instead of commiserating with the young adult "misfits" in the world of "normal" people, it now laughs and satirizes them in a setting where their greatest concentration can be found - an art school in New York. In a farce-like setup it goes from student to student and ridicules them for all the "non-conformity" clichés that they are, while staying fully aware of being one big cliché itself - and landing the mandatory slaps on the "suburbia" and the "normal world" as well.

But this is where it fails: it lacks any subtlety. What was great about Ghost World, what was its main superiority over Art School Confidential, is that it had enough subtlety to stay an engaging, deep movie, while this comes off more like a flick-for-fun. It's as if Zwigoff decided to do exactly what's expected of him and serve it in a transparent glass box for people like me - who would enjoy the movie tremendously nonetheless, but regret everything it's so obviously missing. Oh - and unfortunately for me, I felt like much of the "art-school" topic has already been depicted very well very recently, in the HBO's Six Feet Under.