Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Polaris_DiB After a car crash that leads to the death of his girlfriend, a young medical student must regain the memories he's lost of her while dissecting her body in anatomy class, watched over by the careful scorn of a new love interest, the original girlfriend's father and dying mother, his own concerned parents, and the class's professor and students. With love scenes involving mutual erotic asphyxiation, dance and theatre added to a stylistic cinematic structure, and flash-backs, dream sequences, and flash forwards all given equivalent value with the same structural equivalent, Shinya Tsukamoto explores a rather direct territory of Eros and Thanatos while wrestling with history, memory, subconscious, and loss. Thematic quote du jour: "How can I compete with the perfect happiness of false memories?" An interesting contextual aside, Tsukamoto's famous Tetsuo: The Iron Man also revolves, plot-wise, around a half-remembered car accident and the ripple-effect of relationships and memories it destroys. I haven't done enough research into Tsukamoto's life myself to know if there was a particularly horrific car accident he was involved in, but the usage is in fitting with his general themes between organism and technology, reflected in Tetsuo as a man slowly turning into a scrapheap and in Vital as a robot from the future experiencing an electrical surge of mankind's memories before being destroyed on the planet Mars, or the contrasting book-ending images in the movie itself of smokestacks at the beginning and rain and nature at the end.As a final note for recommendation's sake, this movie is 85 minutes long and feels like 15.

Charles Herold (cherold) I think whoever listed this as a "thriller" was going by the plot description rather than the actual film, in which an amnesiac medical student spends several months dissecting his ex-girlfriend at the University. The student is taciturn, is followed around by another, infatuated medical student, and because to have memories of his ex. And that's pretty much the movie. It is deliberately paced and at times purposely opaque.The director has at times a film students fondness for meaningless composition, notably in an early scene in which the students parents stand perfectly still and converse. This sort of statues-holding-deadpan-conversations work well in Hal Hartley movies, but they feel a bit pretentious without Hartley's humor. The opening jittery camera-work also seems like something a film student would do. This sort of thing put me off, but the movie did generally keep my interest, becoming slightly more involving and less pretentious as it progressed, and in the end I feel okay about sitting through it, although I can't say I'd give it a strong recommendation.

kmevy This film really gave me an impression and was for myself a very memorable experience.Like many others i was also quite surprised about the emotional and gentle character of this film. Before starting to watch i prepared myself for something extreme and uncompromising like i experienced in many Shinya Tsukamoto's films. But that is a good thing for this film; making it possible to reach a broader audience. And it definitely deserves it.Technically this film is superb. Lighting and camera were excellent .. and the colors ... Sound design and music weren't that demonstrative but still played, in a subtle way, an important role. Acting was also impressive. Tadanobu Asano, one of my favorite actor since Ichi the killer, was a perfect fit. Nami Tsukamoto was very scary, in a good way ;). But she doesn't have a record at IMDb yet. I wonder why .. her acting was very promising. And letting Kiki perform modern dance was for the atmosphere and art-style a very good idea.To sum the story up, by leaving all the artful details behind, you could say it is about the painful yearning for the loved one. This was extremely good implemented. Just everything, art, sound and acting supported the presentation of this yearning. This is one of those films you don't simply watch. You have to experience them.

zetes It's his least wild, though it does have a certain sense of weirdness to it. The story involves a medical student (Ichi the Killer's Tadanobu Asano) who experiences a bout of amnesia after a car accident. When he re-enrolls in school, he finds himself in a dissection class taking apart his former girlfriend, who was in the passenger seat during the accident. There's a subtext of necrophilia, which Tsukamoto explores in the film's first half. But he ends up veering away from any taboos and into more conventional drama. Actually, it's still pretty unconventional. It gets a bit too ponderous in the second half, and there are some scenes that drag. But Tsukamoto captures some brilliant images, and his infamous editing style pops up frequently, and is put to great use. There are some truly wonderful sequences. I especially loved all the sequences where the protagonist visits his dead lover in a fantasy landscape. The film ends beautifully. I really liked Asano's two female co-stars, Nami Tsukamoto (not sure if she's any relation to the director) and Kiki. Both are gorgeous, though each of them could eat the occasional burger. They're absolutely skeletal. Thank God for companies like Tartan Asian Extreme. This DVD is an especially nice edition with quite a few worthwhile extras.