Takoyaki Journals

thorne_scratch! I completely forgot that I'm under orders from soranokumo to tell you about the Japanese movie I saw over the weekend. Through Netflix I've been renting a lot of Japanese movies, especially the ones brought over by Vis. I needed to wash my brain out after trying to watch Miike Takashi's 'The Happiness of the Katakuris' (Don't watch it), and picked up Linda Linda Linda, which was great.

It's the story of a bunch of girls in a high school band getting ready for the school festival. They lose one of their members to an injury, and decide to replace her with the next person to walk by as their lead singer. The next person happens to be a Korean exchange student who only speaks limited Japanese. From there on it plays out pretty much exactly as you'd expect it to. I loved all of the Korean girl, Son's, scenes. They reminded me very much what it was like when you're playing along with only sort of understanding what's going on around you.

Another plus is that the girls are a Punk band. Yes! Japanese High School Punk! In that way that they are much more ordinary students than anything punkish. Their songs they play are all covers of The Blue Hearts, a popular Japanese punk band. And all the instrumental tracks were done by the Smashing Pumpkins, James Iha.

The only thing I didn't like very much about it is that they don't differentiate when someone is speaking Japanese vs. Korean. Which makes a HUUUGE difference in one of the scenes.