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Neighbour No. 13 |
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Juzo Murasaki was badly bullied as a kid. His class
mates would spray him with water, feed him with bugs
and all kinds of evil things, but when they one day
poor acid on his face, they went too far. Juzo is
all grown up now and has just moved into a new
apartment below one of the guys who used to bully
him. He's suffering from a severe case of schizophrenia
and soon, the bully will wish that he could reverse
time and undo what he once did to poor Juzo.
I've been wanting to see this movie for almost a year
now so as soon as it was released on DVD in Japan,
I immediately picked it up. The movie starts out really
promising as the movie looks brilliant technical
wise. The photography is stunning and the scenery
is just amazing. However, as soon as the movie got
going, my expectations dropped drastically.
Neighbour No. 13 does have a relatively touching
story and as a drama it does work on some levels
but this movie has some serious pacing problems and
unless you're watching this in a cinema, there's a
big chance that you will press the stop button on
your remote quite early on in the movie. The fact
that the movie is two hours long doesn't exactly
make you want to see the rest either since this was
one of the slowest movies I've ever had to sit
through. Don't get me wrong though, this movie does
have potential, it actually has so much potential
that it's just beyond me how it could've went so wrong.
Every now and then the movie does pick up the pace
and provide us with some intense moments but just
as it's about to get going, it slows down again and
almost goes in reverse. Somehow they did manage to
create a whole bunch of interesting factors and
problems to solve or explain that the further into
the movie you went, you actually started to find
yourself mildly entertained. However, when the movie
was finally coming to an end, they found an easy
way out and I kind of felt a bit cheated.
I don't know how this movie can be so popular. I was
very disappointed to see that this was a very slow
paced drama. Sure, it does look nice technically
and the story is pretty good. But this movie was
just too dull to last for two hours.
A guy is split in half (or that's what it looked
like anyway), but this really wasn't very gory.
The experimental ambient music really didn't do
the trick for me. Ambient music can often have a
tendency of making a slow movie feel even slower
and that's exactly what it did here.
This was nothing like I had expected it to be. I don't
understand why critics are praising this drama thriller,
because let's face it, this was so not a horror movie.
If you have a long attention span (which I don't),
you might find some pleasure in watching this, since
even I got something out of it. I just didn't get
enough, it was simply too slow and too dull.
Review By: AnthroFred
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