Suspect X (Yougisha X no Kenshin) (2009, Japan)

This movie is a love story made out to look like a murder-suspense-mystery. But how you look at it determines the success of the movie. If you look at it as the crime drama that it facially appears to be, it has fundamental flaws that sink it. But if you can change your view and see it as a love story . . . maybe.

But it's a stretch to see it as a love story. It seems the writer of the story had an end point in mind – something abstract about love – and then constructed this crime drama story around it to get to the point – by any means necessary.

The movie involves a murder and subsequently two geniuses are pitted against each other – a math genius who aids the murderer, and a physics whiz helps the crime investigation, but oddly, they're acquaintances, and arguably friends.

One fundamental flaw is that once a suspect has an air-tight alibi, even a "suspect X", police don't waste time pursuing that suspect on a hunch and keep thinking some smoking gun piece of evidence is going to magically appear to implicate them. Air-tight alibi!

Another fundamental flaw in the logic is how an easily defensible case of involuntary manslaughter is turned into a homicide investigation by the characters themselves.

OK, I don't know Japanese criminal law, so my thinking may be skewed, but following U.S. law, the evidence probably would have amounted to the murderer not even doing jail time. Despite the movie's offering of the otherwise, there would have been overwhelming evidence that it was a case of self-defense. Maybe Japan doesn't allow for self-defense as a justification for one's acts.

But maybe the writer overlooked this legal flaw in order to attribute it to character flaws where they act irrationally due to ignorance or love.

Another flaw that I didn't realize until the second viewing is that the police-helping physics professor, and his genius, is the main character in the movie (it's more apparent in the trailer). The problem is (aside from not exactly being bowled over by his logic or genius (nor his arrogance)) this protagonist is being used against the murderer and math teacher, but the scenario establishes those two as sympathetic characters from the start.

The murderer is really a victim and the math teacher is just a man in love who thinks he can help out his neighbor. The attempts to make him creepy only appeared on second viewing of the DVD, and still didn't take away from him being a sympathetic character. He plots, he deceives, but he's not evil. He's just in love.

The viewer knows the general truth about what happened, twists notwithstanding (nor make sense), and then we are forced to see how the protagonist unravels the plot, but truth is already established, not just the truth of what happened, but the moral truth that it was a case of self-defense, and we're not on the side of the protagonist.

That all said, it's not a bad film per se. It's an enjoyable enough ride, but definitely not one to dwell on whether all the pieces add up, and it was worse on second viewing, which only corroborated the doubts I had during the first viewing. There are twists towards the end which I also have doubts about, but would leave up to the viewer to decide about.

I'll pass this movie with a fresh 6 out of 10 tomatoes. It's worth watching for fans of Japanese film, it is distinctly Japanese (with telltale sexism involved, btw), but I don't recommend this film as a suspense or crime drama. It doesn't hold up. I don't give it a rotten rating because it doesn't insult my intelligence.


Juno (2007, USA)

When the trailers came out for this movie, I could tell it was of the same breed as such cinematic bile as "Thumbsuckers" and "Garden State" – two films that are easily on my list of worst films of all time, and I don't even have such a list. They are the list. A Hong Kong film called "Ming Ming" also makes the list. "Little Miss Sunshine" is also in the pedigree, although I don't remember hating that film. Didn't love it, either.

But this pedigree of film is kind of a hybrid between Hollywood and independent; or rather Hollywood trying to be indie because it seems the hip thing at the time and a potential money-maker. Disgusting.

They are films that pander to the indie form, but they aren't indie, they don't have the independent spirit. They aren't starving, self-doubting artists who don't know if their films will make it to any audience. And if not starving artists, even if they do have money – money is good for filmmakers, film backing is good, if you have money, support filmmakers – they don't have the artistic vision.

They're trying to make money using a formula. Try it enough times and you just might hit paydirt. They ripoff the style of artists with lesser means and try to imitate it because what real artists come up with is still cooler than anything they'll make, because those artists mean it.

Getting off my soapbox, I braced myself to hate this film, and I'm pretty much right about the pedigree.

This Fox Searchlight film thinks that more than half of the recipe for an indie film is a soundtrack of predominantly low-fi, whimsical, sweet, clever, and yes, independently produced ear candy, and if you take away the soundtracks of "Thumbsucker" and "Garden State", you more or less have shit. You'd lose all the indie dinks who raved about those films.

The dialogue in this film sounds like it was written by someone who was constantly shocked with a cattle prod by someone who was yelling, "Be more hip, make it more 'hipster', man". The dialogue is truly pretentious.

The film also panders by making all the characters likeable, even if flawed. Everything works out smoothly, everything's hip. There's no real tension, it's simple and straight-forward. No sophistication.

That said, on the second viewing of this DVD, I'll pass this movie with a fresh rating. I stand behind all my criticisms, but differentiate this from "Thumbsuckers" and "Garden State" in that I was able to watch it for the second time.

Even with the pretentious, snappy hipster dialogue, the story does chug along at a good pace and the situations are likeable, if not believable. Oh, no synopsis of the film because the trailer above says it all.

I'm begrudgingly going to like this film. And I'm going to do an end-turn on myself. I said this film wasn't sophisticated, but that's kind of what's good about it. All the characters are likeable and do the right thing at the right time. The father says the perfect things, the stepmom is there when she needs her, the boyfriend is perfect, the adoptive husband is flawed but ultimately does no harm, etc., etc.

My point to myself is what's wrong with a film that portrays how people should ultimately treat each other – which is well. My family members are married and raising children and I always hope they'll do and say the proverbial "right thing", and a film that portrays people doing the right thing is not a bad thing.

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