From the beginning to the end, I practically wet myself, laughing and laughing, non-stop.
It was "Swing Girls" I watched the other day. It´s not a new film and is a film of the same director of "Water Boys", Shinobu Yaguchi (矢口史靖). Also one of my favorite actor, Naoto Takenaka (竹中直人) is in it. I had to watch it. It was a must.
The main character is a country school girl, Tomoko (友子) who isn´t the best student in the school and who gets bored quickly. She gets involved into the jazz world by accident and this is the base of the story.
This nerdy boy, Takuo (拓雄) is the main cause of Tomoko being involved in jazz. He is quite a spoilt and ladylike rad, also the only boy in the big band. But the way he runs with his keyboard is just so hilarious.
He looks quite daggy in the film but he looks like this in the reality. I was quite surprised by change.
He looks soushoku-kei enough to me though… Well, you can call him cute, too.
My favorite character in Swing Girls is her, the drummer, Naomi (直美). She eats and eats and eats. She tries to lose weight but can´t stop eating. She´d keep eating with vibration exercise machine on her body.
Look, how she sits and hold the bucket of Häagen-Dazs. Just great. Talking about Häagen-Dazs, I really miss their maccha (抹茶/greentea) ice cream, hmmm.
Naoto Takenaka is one of the Japanese actors you cannot miss because of his strong character. He´s not the main actor, rather supporting actor but very comical and good. He was in "Shall We Dance?" (note: Japanese one was the original!) and of course he was in "Water Boys".
He often plays a little looser type character but some how you can´t leave him behind. In Swing Girls he´s a meth teacher, Ozawa (小澤) and giving extra class for dropout students during the summer holiday.
When the girls asked him to skip the class for helping other students,
he knew exactly that the girls simply wanted to skive the class, and knowing that he still says OK by putting this "oh, well" face.
Also he himself is a bot of looser and didn´t have enough guts to come up to the stage. But as he loves jazz, so conduct way behind the stage.
How miserable….. but I can´t dislike him. He conducts so happily there. Oh, dear.
Another funny thing is their accent. The school is supposed to be located in Tohoku region (東北) in Japan, to be more exact, Yamagata prefecture (山形県). In general, they have strong accent and dialect in Tohoku region, the sound is very closed and sometimes it´s hard to hear them.
If you can catch their word, you may notice they often end the sentence with "be" or "pe". The slogan of the film was "Jazz yarube! (ジャズやるべ！/ Let´s play jazz!). If it was Tokyo dialect, it´d be "jazz yarou (ジャズやろう)".
According to the director, Yaguchi, he´d made up the dialect, Yoneyama dialect (米山弁), as the location was Yoneyama region in Yamagata. Mind you, Yoneyama dialect doesn´t exist, it was a made up.
There is one scene that Tomoko teases Takuo for not speaking Yoneyama dialect. She s trying to say that Takuo is playing snob. Although Tomoko later finds out that Takuo is a son of a rich family….
I strongly recommend Swing Girls for a good laugh if you haven´t seen it. It´s worth it.
For those whom haven´t seen Water Boys, I´ve put a video just in case you are interested in. I´ve watched this many times too. My opinion is… "how fragile Japanese boys bodies are!".
Swing Girls for the night you don´t want to think anything! Osusume! (Recommend!)
More Japanese films
I really love that film !
It´s a hilarious film, indeed!