Confessions

Last night I watched a movie with two friends. One a lovely lesbian, whose girlfriend recommended it to us, the other a straight guy. It wasn't a great movie, and it certainly wasn't as good as it thinks it was. It was called Confessions, a Japanese movie about revenge which used a non-linear plot and excessive slow-motion to cover up a pretty standard revenge movie. It was also incredibly overlong, which gave it an unwanted 'epic' feel despite it being non-epic in theme and tone.

It centres on a class of schoolkids following the death of their teacher's young child. Each of the main players 'confess' their actions as the plot unfolds. We're left with a few more deaths and everyone involved emotionally or physically ruined. You know the score, but it was interesting for a few reasons, hardly any of which were the plot, which was made even less interesting by the fact that nearly every character was completely unsympathetic.

For instance, the class of kids had at least 40 kids crammed into it, which was pretty intense. Despite being contemporary, only one of the kids knew that you couldn't get AIDS through drinking milk, and some of them think that they could catch it by breathing AIDS-infected air ("does this smell a little AIDS-ey to you?"). This occurred after the teacher infected the two kids who killed her daughter with AIDS milk, it's a really pleasant story.

There were two interesting people on show in the movie: one was the teacher herself, one the only schoolgirl to give a confession, Muzoko. The teacher herself is ostensibly the star of the movie, since she is the one to get the plot moving, but the actress who plays her suffers from a weird condition. She is very attractive from the front...

Yeah, attractive enough, until you rotate her 90 degrees. I wasn't joking about how many kids there are in the room hey? [source]

but whenever she is viewed in side-profile, she looked like a completely different, much less attractive person. Very peculiar, I call this condition 'hidefromsideviewitis.' It can be seen in the Facebook photos of anyone who only poses in one way (you know the type, she's hugging a friend to her right in every picture so that she looks her best - in all of her 3,415 photos).

The other, less morally approved incident for me was the character of Muzoko, a smart, seemingly misanthropic character who idolised an Internet figure who had killer her family and got away with it. She ends up dead. She was played by a very pretty actress, and one whom we all agreed would surely become a great beauty in due time. They often use girls older than their age to play schoolgirls in movies, and so we thought she may be 19 or 20 already. Imagine our (joint surprise) when we looked her up and found she was born in 1996. Isn't that ironic that my last post was partially about child molestation.

Anyway, my friend said that she would keep her on lay-buy, an Australian shopping process where you reserve something in a shop, which is kept on hold for you until you come to pay for it later. It's ostensibly to prevent you from either coming back later to find it gone, or lugging it around with you as you shop all day. Taking that to its conclusion, we'll ALL put her on lay-buy until she becomes legally ogle-able. But we all felt uncomfortable with ourselves. Personally, I haven't felt this bad since 'The Saturdays' came along.
Anyway here she is:

Yeah, give her three years, and she'll be either very pretty, or a Lindsay Lohan style wreck. Right now though, WAY too young for a room full of adults to fall in love with. [source]

                 
In conclusion: not a great movie, but interesting things in it. I will be in Leeds from Wednesday until Sunday, and so my survival isn't guaranteed. Today I am off to a funeral for a 91 year old woman I met once. It's sad, of course, and the constant reminder of mortality will probably make me the chief mourner. Have a great one everyone, and if you know anything nice in Leeds, let me know. Also, continue sending me poorly-written hate-mail. It makes my day.

Yours, P.

P.S. Logged back on to put the pictures up, funeral went down a blast: I was called handsome by a woman aged 95. Still got it ;-)