Kokuho

eli4.0

in another life, i would have really liked just doing kabuki and taxes with you

Pablo Honey ✨ ₊˚ ☾. ⋅ 💫🌌4.0

Nothing pisses an asian guy more than another asian guy as good as him in his area of expertise. And i think that's beautiful.

Jomari Bashin4.0

It’s the kind of film that makes you fall in love with it in spite of its flaws and issues.Even though I only understood about 80 percent of it because of the Kansai dialect, I could still tell the movie was trying too hard to be complex, throwing in scenes and plot points that don’t really make sense and adding subplots that don’t always drive the main narrative. I haven’t read the source material, so I can’t say how difficult it was to adapt, but to me, the result feels unnecessarily long. Some parts could easily have been trimmed without losing anything. I don’t really mind long films; in fact, I often enjoy them, but the lack of focus in the narrative makes this one hard to fully appreciate.On the other hand, it does manage to shine in certain aspects. The visuals and sound were breathtaking no matter where you looked. The kabuki performances are probably the highlight. You don’t have to be a kabuki expert to be impressed. I even found myself in tears during some moments.‎The acting in the film is nothing short of extraordinary. The performances across the cast are uniformly powerful. One of the reasons I rated it so highly is the effort of the two main leads—the fact that they practiced for about a year and a half shows how serious they were, and it clearly comes through in the results. The young talents, especially Soya Kurokawa, also make their own mark in the film. I first saw him in Koreeda’s Monster, and there was something special about him; this film only confirms it.Despite my reservations about the overly packed story and the main theme occasionally getting lost, this turned out to be an accomplished film, even if it struggles a bit with wrapping up all the subplots. Though I was a bit disappointed, I had hoped the film might explore a more romantic or queer tension between the two main leads.