SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Famous Comrade Challenges many of the most basic philosophical assumptions about god, heaven, and hell. If you ever wondered about your own impact on others and your ability to do good works.. Or wondered if god could evolve eventually, there is so much to chew on. Imagery as diverse as clowns, Mexican wrestling, and the symbols of Japanese culture flutter as butterfly wings with the strobe and flicker of film infecting NOT only as genius can from the other side of the planet. The layering of thought and ideas is very satisfying compared to typical American films. I am not surprised that all but one of the reviews even gave an accurate summary. This can be a complex film, but not necessarily. A creative child couldn't help being charmed by the poetic surface of action and color. A stunning treat.

Atavisten Comparisons to El Topo and 2001 A Space Oddysey are counter-productive with regards to this movie. It has the surreality and meta-physicality of neither, nor is it as well put together as those two. This is a bizarre comedy, nothing more. As such it's quite entertaining at parts.A guy in a dreadful yellow and green pajama finds himself in a white room totally empty except for some strange bumps in the walls. What follows here will keep you laughing long after the movie finishes.The director Mattchan is a man with a lot of ideas, some of them good, some of them not. For instance, the parallel stories serve almost no purpose (at least successfully).

emm7 "One of the weirdest movies you'll ever see" and "El Topo meets 2001 Space Odyssey meets Nacho Libre meets a routine by Steven Wright or Eddie Izzard" are just some quotes used to describe Hitoshi Matsumotos second film Symbol (Shinboru) the word I've been using to describe it to people is just "weird".Symbol begins in Mexico where a family is eating breakfast. The father is wearing a wrestling mask and is soon picked up by a swearing Nun who has a severe case of road rage to take him to where he'll be fighting that night. The film then cuts to a Japanese man wearing spotty pyjamas who wakes up in a large, completely white room. He doesn't know where he is or how he got there and he begins to search the room for any clues. He pushes what he thinks is a button and hundreds of laughing naked cherubs appear out of the walls, they soon disappear back into the walls leaving nothing other than remnants of their tiny willies on the paintwork, the man starts to scream and the craziness begins!The man presses a willy and a toothbrush is thrown into the room from a wall, he continues to push many of them around the room and all sorts of objects appear, jars, sushi, magazines, a person who runs from one side of the room to another, a whole array of random objects. He soon realises that one of the willies reveals a door in the room but it always disappears by the time he gets to it, what then unfolds is him trying to find a way to escape from the room using different objects for different purposes, it seems almost like a video game.In Mexico everyone is doubting that the father wrestler who's stage name is Escargot Man will win the fight, but it's soon revealed that he's secretly got someone to help him in the fight. The film is set half in the white room and half in Mexico, during the film it appears the two stories have no relevance to one another but by the end they do.It's a very funny script and excellent acting by all characters but especially by director Hitoshi Matsumotos who plays the main unnamed Japanese character in the film. You have to have patience to watch this film, it takes quite a while to get into but once I got past the "What is going on?" stage but I really enjoyed it. It's quite silly in its jokes so don't go into the cinema thinking you're watching a serious arty film because it's anything but.

Annie_Mah When is a sub genre born? Does it simply derive from a formula or certain elements that are reused often enough? Or can it be a set of expectations you bring into the theater with you? I ask because Symbol seems to be deliberately riffing on all of these things, trying to find the line where familiar tropes become, well, symbols. It plays both with a familiar sub genre and a less-familiar setup that's on the verge of becoming a sub genre at this point; you could even argue that this is the movie that pushes it over.For most of its running time, Symbol seems to be two completely unrelated movies running parallel to each other. One is a Mexican Lucha Libre movie (or maybe "short film" is more appropriate, given the relatively small amount of running time it involves). It's perfectly conventionally shot and with a simple narrative; the wrestler Escargot Man prepares for a tag team match, while a kid in the audience cheers him on.The other storyline is deliberately, seemingly perversely different. A nameless Japanese man (comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto, who also wrote and directed) wakes up in a featureless white room about the size of a bachelor apartment, wearing a set of candy-colored pajamas and a ridiculous bowl cut. He has no idea how he got there. Exploring the room, he finds exactly one notable feature: a button on the wall shaped like, uh, male genitalia. Pressing it triggers an explosion of cherubs from the wall, who leave behind...more penis-shaped buttons. Pressing those buttons, in turn, triggers a bizarre and seemingly useless array of objects that come shooting out of the walls, along with other, generally disagreeable effects (like one which turns into a butt and farts toxic fumes at him). Eventually, though, some of the buttons start to reveal their potential usefulness in mounting an escape...except that whoever trapped him in this room seems determined to screw with his head.Believe it or not, all this weirdness turns out to be headed somewhere relatively straightforward. I mean, it's still a weird movie that I'm sure even Matsumoto wouldn't be able to explain completely, employing as it does Lynchian dream logic and a love of the absurd for the absurd's sake. But the two threads do end up coming together in a way that...well, "makes sense" might not be the way to put it, but they do come together to make a point. The movie makes an attempt at profundity near the end which is a lot more palatable for being weird and slightly inexplicable.Up until then, aside from the slight and seemingly straightforward Luchadore subplot, the movie is a one-man show. Matsumoto unfortunately depends a little too much on mugging and acting zanily idiotic--the character he's playing makes a number of choices that reveal him to be a dimbulb--but the situation is a natural one for humor, especially as the faceless forces that control the room seem to enjoy tormenting him. There's also a hilarious recurring sequence in which comic book panels narrate Pajamas Guy's various plans for escape while Matsumoto grooves out in the foreground. (And the narration is in English for some reason!) I'm not sure if "Shinboru" has some other shading of meaning that doesn't translate well into English--I'm assuming that the Symbol of the title refers to the little penis-buttons (yeah, I knew writing this review was going to be awkward), but it also seems to relate to the various motifs and elements we expect in a genre story, and the storyteller's attempt to break free of them. In that sense, this is an extremely meta movie. One thing's for sure, if the movie's about helping to define genres, than its clearly staking out a patch of ground under "bizarre Japanese mindfu**".