A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011)

A DANGEROUS METHOD does a nice job of telling a story but to me as a viewer who's not an expert on Carl Jung, Sabina Spielrein and Sigmund Freud I felt like this film was only scratching the surface of the story and the relationships between the three main characters.

The film opens with Spielrein being committed to a psychiatric hospital. Her doctor is Carl Jung and I don't really know how psychiatric hospitals work, but for some reason Spielrein kinda becomes Jung's assistant or something. Time passes and Jung becomes friends with Freud. The friendship seems to be strained from the very beginning because Jung married into money and Freud is jealous(?) of Jung's extravagant lifestyle. Jung also begins an affair with Spielrein which you would expect to be superhot, but it's not. It's not hot in the least and on top of that, the fuck scenes probably don't even add up to 2 minutes total.

I wanted to like this film and while I didn't dislike it I really had no feelings towards it at all. Overall it was a bland, disjointed and boring watch that I will never repeat. Skip it and read the Wikipedia pages on the three instead. I found the one about Spielrein to be especially fascinating. Her husband was murdered during Stalin's Great Purge in the late 1930's and she, their two children and 27,000 others were massacred by Nazi pussies at Zmiyovskaya Balka on August 11/12, 1942. Holy fuck, humans suck.

AMALFI: REWARDS OF THE GODDESS (2009)

Japanese kidnap/political thriller (filmed entirely in Italy) about a Japanese diplomat who gets involved with the case of a young Japanese girl kidnapped two days before a big political summit. His bosses are all butthurt at him for getting involved when he's suppose to be working on protecting the summit but he stays on the case anyway.

Ehh, AMALFI was mildly entertaining, but it never really grabbed my attention. None of the characters were very likeable, the story was too predictable/safe, the kidnappers were pussies and it seemed like everything just fell into place to solve the crime. Worth watching, I guess, if you're really bored, but as for me I'll never watch it ever again. Even the presence of the superhot Erika Toda from the DEATH NOTE series didn't ease my apathy for long.

DON'T LAUGH AT MY ROMANCE (2007)

Mirume (played by Ken'ichi Matsuyama from the DEATH NOTE series) is a normal college student. He goes to school, but doesn't seem to be into it too much. One day a new Art teacher, Yuri (Hiromi Nagasaku), shows up and Mirume instantly falls for her, much to the concern of his friend En-chan (Yu Aoi). En-chan is secretly in love with Mirume (and probably has been her entire life), but she's too shy to ever tell him. Mirume appears to consider En-chan as a little sister or maybe even less than that. Either way, he's definitely not into her romantically.

Most viewers would probably be turned off by length of the film (137 minutes) compounded with the fact that pretty much the entire film is made up of long, extended shots where the camera never moves, but I loved every second of it. Was director Nami Iguchi channeling Yasujiro Ozu? The direct cut transition shots to static objects like buildings and roads, the limited use of music (including music heard by the characters), the minimalist camerawork, the character driven story and the lack of tracking shots makes me believe the answer would be yes, but we'll probably never know since I can barely find any information online about this film and she hasn't released another film in over 5 years. I find that to be very depressing because I really admired this film and I found myself thinking about it so much afterwards that I actually sat down and watched it again.

Favorite scenes: Yuri getting a drink out of the refrigerator; Mirume blowing up an inflatable mattress; Mirume showing Yuri how to add oil to the space heater; the fountain shot and every single scene with Yu Aoi. She was amazing. I rented this film because I'm a fan of Ken'ichi Matsuyama and ended up becoming a fan of Yu Aoi also. Well there's another 40 or so movies I'm gonna have to watch! =)

Highly recommended.

I like how the title is written on the screen in English but yet the subtitles are still wrong.