And I didn’t even understand 40% of it. So don’t treat this as a serious review - just a blogger’s rant.

Of course, I have my biases about the flower boys in the first place: My first encounter with them was when they were used as an excuse to start a boy band in Taiwan for “Meteor Garden”, and since then, the so-called Flower 4 has never sat right with me. But with the Japanese counterpart hitting the big screen, making a ton of money, and a shoot that went all over the world, I expected some high-energy silly fun, even if it is about boys compared to flowers (Of course, the whole title is Japanese wordplay. “Boys” in Japanese share the same sound as the Japanese sweets “dango”.). So I went, like most of the other men in the screening, accompanied by a member of the opposite sex. Now I know what a Sex and the City screening must’ve been like.

The trailer, which show central couple Makino and Domyoji running around the world in an adventure, promises such energetic silly fun (exploding cars in Hong Kong? The two doing Castaway on an abandoned island?). The film itself starts off just fine, with the two about to get married when a very very expensive family heirloom is stolen. As a result, the two run off around the world to get the heirloom back, with a little (and I mean very little) help from the other flower boys. That’s it. Really.

However, the filmmakers somehow managed to make everything drag. Apart from the first 20 minutes, there’s no sense of fun at anywhere they go. Dialogue scenes are shot from a distance, as if they’re trying to show TBS and Toho shareholders where they spent their money on by showing as much of where they are as possible. The movie was shot on digital video, with no cinematic flair whatsoever so one can hardly find any difference between the actual movie and the flashbacks from the TV drama. With TV dramas shot like movies these days, you would figure that Hana Yori Dango Final would looks better on the big screen. You’d be wrong - I’ve seen Japanese dramas shot better than this so-called movie.

Of course, I don’t even deserve to review the film if I didn’t understand 40% of the dialogue. Actually, when I can tell a film is bad just by understanding 60% of it, doesn’t it make it worse? I didn’t understand 50% of Gururi no Koto (most of those scenes involve lots of dialogue), either. For all I know, it may be a total embarrassment once I find out what the rest of the movie is about, but the acting, the directorial technique, the editing all told me at that point that there’s something better beyond the written word for all 140 minutes. Hana Yori Dango didn’t have that.

The so-called script simply boils down to two people arguing all the time, especially Jun Matsumoto (whose perfect boy  band hair stays perfectly waxed even on an abandoned island) and his arrogant and loud bad boy voice screaming in every other scene. His surface tough-guy exterior becomes increasingly irritating along the way. On the other hand, Mao Inoue was fairly likable as the girl next door, but even her acting is relegated to simply reacting to events along the way, as oppose to actively doing anything. When she’s not being told something, then she’s just arguing with Domyoji, which  makes me wonder why these two are together in the first place if they talk like that to each other every day. Worst of all, of these adventures boil down to an anti-climatic “that’s it?” resolution that would make you hate rich people like the flower boys for the resource they use for their excessive luxury. Then again, you probably won’t, because they’re still rich and handsome.

Perhaps that’s why it’s such a favorite with the female audience. This is essentially porn for virgin schoolgirls and women who dream of being like protagonist Makino - your poor girl next door swept away by four rich handsome guys who lavish her with attention and luxury like champagne on private planes and pools in presidential suites. Men has the same type of latent fantasy, they’re called action movies.

Don’t mistaken me as a TV drama adaptation hater, either. As much as I don’t like the trend, I actually think drama adaptations can be quite well-done. At least Hero and Bayside Shakedown earn their 2-hour+ runtime with complicated cases that take multiple steps to untie the knots. Hana Yori Dango runs 131 minutes, which is way too long to pull off what the story turned out to be.

I suppose not having seen the drama, I must not be in the position to judge this film. Actually, the filmmakers do their best to let the uninitiated understand what’s going on, and a film should be able to stand on their own as a film instead of a 2-hour episode of a TV show. That’s why people criticized the second and third installments of Lord of the Rings as not real films, because they aren’t “complete” films with a beginning and an end. But at least those films are miles away better shot, better written, and better acted than Hana Yori Dango, which looks like it was shot for TV, and that’s where it belongs.

Still, girls will probably still flock to it for the same reason they would flock to a Daniel Henney movie - Jun Matsumoto appears topless in one scene. Wet. While saying “I love you” to a girl.

By the way, here’s the exact reason why the film did not deserve a 131-minute running time.

MAJOR ENDING SPOILERS:

The so-called family hairloom was a fake, and was a scheme concocted by Domyoji’s mother and father to test the couple’s love. Everyone was in on it, hence meaning that everything that appeared in the film is false and artificial. Just like the manufactured emotions and endless verbal expositions.

Consider yourself warned.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 8:16 am and is filed under review, Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.