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20-seiki shônen: Honkaku kagaku bôken eiga (2008)
An homage to growing up in the 20th century, not sci-fi
The 20th Century Boys trilogy shoves a science fiction story in your face, while actually telling a completely different story about a group of boys growing up in the 20th century. This is made plain by the title alone, but as with many Japanese works, what you see is not actually the important part. And yet it turns out it was all along. In fact, pretty much everything that happens after Kenji's school reunion in the film's timeline is practically irrelevant. There's a robot or two, (dysfunctional) laser guns, UFOs, epic explosions, a world-wide plot to extinguish mankind and lots of blood
but these things are all simply tools used to advance the real story.
And the real story could barely be any more simple. It's the old human drama about what could have been, what should have been, mistakes that were made in the past that continue to haunt the children and the whole of mankind.
The story is told by alternating between bits and pieces of the boys' youth and the consequences they bear in the future. There are many main characters, some mere caricatures and others more detailed. None of them is really elevated above the level of a stereotype though. "Tomodachi" creates a cult which grows to become a world-wide movement, Kenji becomes the legendary leading figure of the idea of resistance, Kanna the leader of a more tangible resistance group, Occho the lone wolf who does the hard work. And that's all you really need to know about them. Other characters play more or less important roles on the sidelines, but what exactly they do is rarely more than hinted at. In fact, what exactly the main characters do is also never really more than hinted at. Part of this may be due to the constraints of condensing the epic story of the manga into under 8 hours of film, but it doesn't really matter in the end. The appeal is in the why, not the what or the how. And the "why" is told through repeated important scenes in the characters' childhoods and subtle conversions between the children's future selfs.
The movie is an homage to growing up in the 20th century, with 1960's Japan revived, throwing in many cultural references that viewers not very acquainted with Japan will simple overlook. It's a celebration of rock music and melancholy for the past, both the past of Japan in general and specifically the past of all characters involved. The movie is wearing the mask of a science-fiction/action movie, just as "Tomodachi" is wearing his mask, but what it's actually about is for the viewer to find out.
The Reader (2008)
Only the "important" half of the book portrayed appropriately
It is sad to see another book-to-movie conversion gone wrong. Overall this film is certainly okay, but if you've read the book, especially in the original, you will probably be disappointed.
Obviously a lot of the director's and cast's attention was caught up with the usual Nazi, World War II and Holocaust themes. Which unfortunately caused them to completely under-portray the more subtle human angle that was the relationship between Hanna and Michael. Especially Kate Winslet's portrayal of a Berlin woman of the time was very, very poor. It is admittedly very hard to accurately portray a typical Berlin character, even more so if one has never lived in the region and even more so without speaking the typical Berlin dialect of German. Unfortunately all these things are necessary to accurately bring alive the character of Hanna Schmitz and the relationship between her and Michael. It is quite apparent that Kate Winslet could never fully get into the character of Hanna Schmitz, which leaves the whole movie with a rather stale aftertaste.
The book has a variety of central themes: simple juvenile first love, responsibility in an unbalanced relationship, pride and how to deal with the problems it brings, broad human rights questions and philosophical points both small and big. While the movie attempts to bring out all these nuances, it only succeeds in a few areas, and virtually all of these have already been covered by a great many movies dealing with WWII themes. Why Kate Winslet won an Oscar for her sub-par performance is quite beyond me.
Having said that, the rest of the cast are pretty good most of the time, the settings are very accurate and the questions the movie does manage to stir up are important and well done. Overall it remains just slightly above average though.