(English Title: Legend of 1900)

I don’t remember this movie ever being out the theatres, but I was in Japan when it was released, so I might have be tuned out at the time. I enjoyed this movie immensely. It was recommended to me by my friend Kazubo who is notoriously bad at liking good movies (and good at liking bad movies), so I was extremely sceptical from the start. I was very pleasantly surprised by this movie, and have even decided to upgrade Kazubo’s status to “not completely unreliable in movie taste” as a result. As soon as I finished watching it, I went out and bought the soundtrack. And I even paid top price for it, which is something I VERY rarely do. (I am very good at finding bargain CDs.) The movie is about a pianist, so the soundtrack is, not surprisingly, piano-based. Very good all around. The movie is touching and leaves a lasting impression. (*****)

This is a very bad movie starring Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron. I know, it’s my own stupid fault for picking it, as romantic comedies (romadies?) have never been Keanu’s forte. He was most excellent in Bill and Ted’s, and quite passable in Matrix (mainly because his job was to be stunned the whole time), but he really isn’t that good at anything else at all. But I have seen almost all the other movies in the whole wide world, so sometimes I have to delve into these murky waters. At least I wasn’t expecting it to be good, so I wasn’t actually disappointed per se… (0)

I really enjoyed this one, which surprised me quite a bit. It doesn’t pretend to be particularly deep, so as long as you don’t go in expecting a Nobel Prize winning theory on biomechanics, you should be pleasantly entertained for an hour and a half. Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston do a great job in the lead roles. It is a fun movie to watch when you don’t want to think about anything too heavy. (No pun on the “heavy metal” theme intended.) I don’t even like heavy metal, but it didn’t really matter. The story is strong enough to make up for the bad music. Interesting trivia fact: Mark Wahlberg has tattoos on a number of body parts, so they had to do some serious make up (and post-edit special effects coverups) every time he showed any skin. He shows his chest quite a bit, and his chest has a big rosary tattooed on it, but the director decided that was too “hiphop”, so they had to cover it up every time. Also, one of the characters wore a Harley Davidson shirt, but the film-makers weren’t able to get permission to show the HD logo, so they had to go in afterwards and re-create the guy’s shirt in every scene. (****)