A man, who once dreamed of becoming a punk rocker, is working as a low salaryman at a musical instrument parts company. He's secretly in love with his colleague. One day, he finds a little turtle on the rooftop, naming it Pikadon.
Hiroki Hasegawa Kumiko Aso Toshiyuki Nishida Kiyohiko Shibukawa Makita Sports Motoki Fukami Toru Tezuka Eita Okuno Miyuki Matsuda Dai Hasegawa Yukimasa Tanimoto Izumi Yumeno Ichirō Ogura Sôichirô Tahara Hakase Suidobashi Shinji Miyadai Kenichiro Mogi Daisuke Tsuda Erina Mano Megumi Kagurazaka Daikichi Sugawara Kazuki Namioka Gen Hoshino Shoko Nakagawa Inuko Inuyama Ikue Otani Hiroshi Suzuki Aki Hiraoka
Atsushi Moriyama Masao Teshima Tsutomu Yanagimura Takeshi Suzuki Eiichi Kamagata Hirohumi Shigemura Hidetoshi Yamamoto Naoto Miyamoto
러브 앤 피스, Rabu＆Písu, Love and Peace, Rabu & Pîsu, 爱与和平, 愛與和平大作戰
South Korea12
Japan
South Korea12
Japan
South Korea
Sion Sono is a genius. Not just a master filmmaker but an incredible artist and writer as well. This just might be his masterpiece. It's almost impossible to categorize but I see it as an epic fairy tale/fantasy/satire/love story. It's hilarious, moving and totally engaging. Amazing practical effects by Kiyotaka Taguchi. Tons of puppeteering. Great music. Transformative performances by Hiroki Hasegawa, Kumiko Asō and Kiyohiko Shibukawa. (Kiyohiko Shibukawa delivers one of the best drunk performances I've ever seen.)
No US release on this title which is absolutely ridiculous. Third Window Films released the film on Blu-ray in the U.K.
I love this film.
Watched Third Window Film Blu-ray
Kaiju love. The dejected unite because your pain and dreams will rule the world. I wish I had kids, so I could try to make this our Christmas tradition.
Eighth Review for The Collab Weekly Movie Watch
Well.... that whole Tokyo Olympics thing didn't age that well, eh?
Having been introduced to the peculiar universe of Sono through his film "Love Exposure", I am once again immersed in the director's fascinating world. Rather than being a nearly four-hour epic on religion and human behavior, this film utilizes typical tropes of the genre by focusing on a man who after losing his beloved radioactive turtle (?) runs into a group of rockers who literally chain him to sing on the streets where he expresses his sadness and writes a song on the fly. This captures the attention of a label that, as expected, begins to exploit him and strip him…
I’m not gonna lie…this is long. There isn’t much in the way of spoilers, but if you haven’t seen the film, I can’t say that much of this will make any sense…
WELP! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED! HERE WE GO……
Ryoichi Suzuki is a sweaty, nervous, human-shaped pile of depression. He has been bullied labeled as “Hazardous Waste” and constantly bullied by his peers his past and his pissed-away potential to the point where his acid reflux and his social anxiety are in a dead heat for the title of “Most Crippling”. In this ocean of uncertainty, he has found two islands: Yuko, his shy co-worker who peeks out from behind the shell of her headphones to give Ryoichi the literal…
Like E.T. only if instead of an alien it's a turtle that a homeless Santa Claus grants the power to write pop songs which Elliott then steals to become a famous rock star. Then there's a kaiju fight. I don't fuckin know either.
Viewed with the Amazing Edith’s *Collab Film Group*.
There is a strangely beautiful metaphor underlying this scatterbrained plot regarding ego. The bullied and persistently ashamed Ryo is a turtle; a personality so fragile it must hide within an exoskeleton. So when he is left alone to sulk and fester in his emotions, he always ends up underneath his glass table over his back. He is squeamish and skittish, always wishing to cover up his face and hide from the world, only occasionally finding comfort near water. This metaphor unfortunately does not develop or become greater than the sum of its parts. Somehow the tie-in to ego is supposed to make sense with these subdued reptilian observations.
In pop culture, there are…
1st Sion Sono
One thing that this film can’t be faulted for is a lack of imagination. Love and Peace is positively bursting with ideas, befitting the fact that it took 20 years for Sono to bring this to fruition. Interestingly, the gap between this and Toy Story was twenty years, and certainly the narrative elements around the puppets does feel like Sono’s reimagining of the idea ‘what if toys had a soul?’. Added into this is the presence of the adorable turtle Pikadon, perhaps a reference to the fact that after the success of TMNT, there was a craze for children buying turtles that resulted in a number ending up in sewers. Truly, Pikadon is adorable, especially in his…
Find someone who looks at you the way giant Pikadon looks (down) at Ryoichi Suzuki in the stadium. You may not deserve their love, but you'll thank Santa Claus you've got it.
Really enjoyed all the puppetry and robotics, and that ending is pretty fucking great. If you know a better Christmas kaiju rags-to-riches rock n’ roll fable about the power of love, I’m all ears.
This is a short review because I have so much to say.
PS: How'd those 2020 Olympics work out for you, Japan? Love and peace? Did they "make Japan great again"? Looked like an expensive cluster fuck to me. I don't know, maaaaybe... Olympics = bad?
PPS: I wrote a better review in the…
This movie is a Christmas movie and also a tragicomedy about an ex musician, then it becomes Whiplash, then Toy Story, then it becomes Kaiju and things get more far fetched it goes on.
Sion Sono made lot of f**king movies and I haven't watched that much of his filmography. The thing is also that he works on a fast pace, in 2015 he made 6 films 😮 His versatility is mind boggling.
Part of the Collab Film Club.
Wow... what was that? I didn't expect such an emotional mixture of heart and madness. When a 50 meter turtle really touches you at the end, only Sono can be at work. These 117 minutes were incredibly crazy, funny, kind, Christmassy and above all damn stupid.
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In short: I love it. If you've always wanted a mixture of Gamera and Toy Story, you'll get exactly that with Love & Peace. It's exactly for these completely abstruse ideas that I love Sono. One of the best Christmas movies of all time.
Final Score : 83% 🍎
Watched with The Collab.
Asian Cinema Challenge, week 44: Directed by Sion Sono
It's hard to be too critical of a movie that is a man's passion project, a phrase which, from what I've read, very much applies to Sion Sono's Love & Peace. It's a film that's both profoundly sentimental and deeply cynical, mixing unpleasantness with fantasy, fairy tales, and a marauding kaiju, often all at the same time. There's an enormous amount to admire in Sono's decades-long commitment to the project, as well as in the movie's determined oddness, but since it main character is so hard to like, it's often difficult to engage with the film.
Whereas many cinematic protagonists who fly too close to the sun are…
2015 was a rather impressive year for Sion Sono, as the very idiosyncratic director topped his streak of making at least one film every year for the past decade by releasing FIVE new films (and one television special), all incredibly different in style and genre, tethered only by the renegade style always open for trips to the preposterously emotional. Shinjuku Swan was a yakuza comedy, Tag was an action-horror, The Whispering Star was a contemplative B&W science-fiction film, The Virgin Psychics was take a wild guess, Sono really frontloaded himself with a lot of films for fans to try and catch up with, and the man certainly loved letting them guess what the genre roulette would land on. Even his…
