I’ve now seen 4 movies from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and I have not been impressed by any of them. The adulation this guy gets baffles me. The overt toying with genre tropes in this one left me quite cold. The guy obviously knows what he’s doing, but there’s this off-putting self-satisfaction, almost like he is content with staying at the flashy surface of things. I guess that the self-conscious mixing and matching of romantic comedy, horror, action and coming-of-age is kind…

I'm going to commemorate this movie with a short review, because this was the first time I take my son to the movies. We actually almost never made it past the arcade and crane claw machines at the entrance, but we eventually moved on. As the interminable stream of trailers, ads and 'featurettes' rolled on, he got frustrated and asked for the remote control, so he could fast forward through this nonsense, as he does at home. I explained there…