Monday, November 07, 2005

Moon Child

The hell?

Moon Child is a Japanese movie set in the future. There are vampires. Street gangs. Stylistic gun fights that look very, very pretty. Really bad haircuts. The glances between the two male leads have more heat than the looks either give the woman who is supposedly in the middle of a love-triangle.

Oh, and I didn't pick up until the last ten minutes that ethnic conflicts were a big deal. I didn't realize that there were Taiwanese/Japanese conflicts going on, in part because the subtitles didn't indicate when someone was speaking Cantonese and when someone was speaking Japanese and every now and then someone said "Don't speak Japanese!" and at the end I realized, oh, that's important.

And the leads are two Japanese pop stars, Gackt and HYDE, and Gackt wears more makeup then the female lead.

And there's this night visit to the beach where everyone acts like a 90210 episode, or at least the opening credits.

And there's a drug trip with a huge flying fish, I'm not sure what that meant.

And some very interesting shots that were appealing visually.

Unfortunately, the story was all over the place with jumps of years that made no sense and an ending that left me cold, when I think I was supposed to be crying. Still, this is such a weird mix of elements and possibilities that it's worth viewing.

A fanboy review here, and two more objective reviews here and here. This review at Midnight Eye points out the "strangely homoerotic symbiosis between the androgynous two leads"; glad it wasn't just me who noticed it.

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