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Information Exchange => Submitted Reader Reviews => Topic started by: Inyarear on July 03, 2008, 08:15:40 PM



Title: Boku Wa Imouto Ni Koi Wo Suru (2005)
Post by: Inyarear on July 03, 2008, 08:15:40 PM
BOKU WA IMOUTO NI KOI WO SURU (a.k.a. I'm In Love With My Little Sister, or Secret Sweethearts)
Not Rated
Skull
Copyright Company and Date: Shogakukan Production, 2005.
Submitted by Inyarear

THE CHARACTERS

(Since this film is all in Japanese, the reader should be aware that in proper Japanese fashion, the characters' family names come before their given names in this listing.)

Yuki Yori - He's the abusive and incestuous male protagonist, which should tell you plenty about this film by itself.

Yuki Iku - Yori's airheaded, weepy, and weak-willed fraternal twin sister that he'd really like to... you know.

Kusunoki Tomoka - One of the Yukis' classmates. She's been pursuing Yori romantically for quite some time, though he isn't interested in her. He finds her easy to manipulate because her love is blind; also because she's stupid.

Yano Haruka - Another one of the Yukis' classmates. He's either more mellow than anyone I've ever known, or else he's rather liberal-minded about this whole brother-and-sister incest thing.

Yuki Shunpei & Saki - Yori and Iku's clueless parents. They probably could have been rather decent parents in other circumstances, but they've had the grave misfortune of being stuck in this abominable excuse for a movie.

LESSONS LEARNED

What you get out of a movie is sometimes substantially less than the sum of what you put into it.
Teardrops are a big turn-on for some people.
Pretending to feel guilty is a great way to pick up chicks if you're a psycopath.
Pity is not a sound foundation for romantic relationships.
The gift of a puppy can smooth over any lovers' quarrel.
Nobody in Japan ever gets arrested for incest.
Nobody ever tells Japanese parents anything about their kids' sex lives.
If your family tree doesn't branch... you might be in a bad anime.
As long as nobody knows you're incestuous siblings, you're a perfectly ordinary couple.
Being abusive makes you a major chick magnet in Japan.
Some films should not be watched on a full stomach.

STUFF TO WATCH FOR
2 mins - Awww, isn't he a cute little psychopath?
7 mins - Hmmm... Now what should I call this, a dry T-shirt contest?
10 mins - Why is he putting a hand over her mouth?
10.5 mins - RANDOM GRATUITOUS MANNEQUIN-NUDITY BREAST SHOT!
16 mins - Ewww!
18 mins - Yeah, don't you always just feel so sentimental about being abused and neglected?
21 mins - Yech! "You've treated me like the gum beneath your shoe, Yori! Please don't go!"
27 mins - EWWW!!!
28 mins - Ooh! How romantic! Make it stop. Please.
29 mins - Nice wordplay, douchebag!
30 mins - You only noticed you were risking God's wrath just now?
31 mins - Forget it, kid. We're all with God on this one.
32 mins - Way to go, idiot! You just blew your cover!
33 mins - EEEWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!
34 mins - I think you mean that the other way around, Iku.
35 mins - EWWW!!! Wait, I already said that. Make it stop! Wait... Nuts!
35.5 mins - Close, but no random gratuitous breast shot, pervert!
36 mins - Attention, all viewers: have your barf bags ready.
37 mins - Don't push your luck, boy; you've provoked God enough as it is!
38 mins - You know the movie's bad when you're relieved to be listening to this graduation speech.
39 mins - See how repentant Yori is? Yeah.
42 mins - Yeah, right! Chances are your kids will have webbed feet, perverts!
44 mins - Yeah, Iku sure is going to miss being abused.
45 mins - Tomoka's going to miss being used for a harlot too!
48 mins - It's over! Please return your barf bags to their original upright positions.

NOTABLE QUOTES (Translated)

Haruka: "I can't believe she's your twin sister."

Random Bra Voyeur: "Hey, don't get *that* angry!"

Iku: "There's a law that says twins must attend the same school!"
Yori: "Don't make stuff up."

Yori: "If I stay here, I won't be able to do anything with you, Iku. I can't even say I love you. But if we live out of this area, where no one knows us, we can be a normal couple."

THE PLOT

Let's get something clear from the start: words CAN adequately describe what a big brown buffalo chip this straight-to-video sewer floater of a flick really is, but no small number of them will suffice. Moreover, this film's very existence ought to demonstrate that a movie does not have to be low-budget to be terrible; judging by the artwork and fluidity of motion, somebody obviously cut loose enough money from the budget to hire some decent artists and animators for this project.

What makes Boku Wa Imouto Ni Koi Wo Suru reek of so much refuse is the wretched excuse for a story those talents gave us. If they were just working for a paycheck, I pity them, but if any of them really believed in this sordid story, if they really thought the world needed this torture instrument of a tale inflicted on it, then I sincerely hope their entire company fails and they are thrown out on the streets to starve. Some artists really do not deserve to make a living from their art.

The only compliment I can possibly pay this film is necessarily backhanded: it's short. Probably to make room for commercials (if it was ever shown on TV), this film stops just short of the 50 minute mark. When it stops there, however, it has already managed to prove every existing minute of its footage a minute too many. Even the driest mockery and most cynical running commentary from those viewing it--in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000--could not make this cinematic sludge entertaining to watch.

In fact, because it's not feature-length, many people don't even classify Boku Wa Imouto Ni Koi Wo Suru as a movie! They consider it an episode in a 1-episode TV series. Certainly one can make a case for this: the obvious commercial breaks tell us it's definitely made for TV, and its ending credits strongly resemble those of a regular TV anime series. On the other hand, Marvel's very first Incredible Hulk movie in 1977 doubled as a pilot episode for the TV series, so if that's a movie, I contend this pilot episode for a series mercifully never made should also be considered a movie too, short as it is.

So what's the plot, you may ask? You'll be sorry for asking, but if you must know, here's the Hollywood executive summary: "In spite of having a few pangs of conscience, the cantankerous young high school student Yori ultimately succeeds at pressuring his fraternal twin sister Iku into letting him bang her." Do you really want to hear more details than that? Probably not, but hypothetically, if you were one of those thoroughly degenerate Hollywood film executive to whom writers typically pitch their movie ideas, maybe you would. (Woe to you Hollywood film executives!)

Therefore, I suppose I can also tell you that in a cursory effort to stave off his desire to commit incest with his sister, Yori tries using Iku's gal pal Tomoka as a sexual surrogate for a while. Naturally, this self-serving arrangement of his ends in abandonment and heartbreak for her and doesn't distract him from lusting for his sister at all. I think this subplot was supposed to be a ploy to build sympathy for Yori, but of course it fails at that too.

Needless to say, incest is a dangerous subject for anyone to explore in a movie. As various successful attempts such as the movie Chinatown have demonstrated, however, there are effective and morally acceptable ways to deal with such controversial topics. Where incest is concerned, the three main acceptable tactics are to deny that incest really is incest, to make clear that the story condemns incest, or to portray incest as a kind of random disaster that overtakes the characters involved so that they seem more the victims than the perpetrators of it.

The movie Beastmaster employs the first tactic: although the cousin romance in it was bound to inspire some reviewers to make bad jokes about dueling banjos, one fact its makers do have on their side is that even most civilized parts of the world do not consider cousin marriage incestuous. Chinatown employs the second tactic, with the revelation about how one can be someone's daughter AND sister providing a memorable shock to the audience. (I sure hope I didn't spoil that for you.) Sophocles' classic play about Oedipus Rex is, of course, a perennial example of the third tactic in use: Oedipus and Jocasta didn't know what they were doing until it was too late to escape their monstrous fate.

This story, however, almost seems to be going out of its way to alienate any sympathies we might otherwise have for the characters and insult our intelligence. Certainly there's no attempt to pretend that Yori and Iku aren't committing incest; brother-and-sister couplings haven't been considered morally acceptable much of anywhere since the institution of Mosaic Law in Israel in ancient times, and this story is set in modern Japan. The failed attempt to make Yori the sympathetic character and his subsequent success in getting everything his shriveled and putrescent excuse for a heart desires pretty much rules out any possibility that this film might be condemning incest. Neither do Yori nor the writers who introduced us to him have any grounds for blaming his disgusting behavior on destiny or any other impersonal force: he knows full well what he is doing, and positively seems to revel in it.

The film's makers can't even pretend that they're offering us (to use professional reviewers' jargon) "harrowing realism" to make us face some ugly fact of life that we viewers have all supposedly been too sheltered to confront, because there is nothing even remotely realistic about the development of the incestuous relationship that's so central to this story. What prevents most brothers and sisters from committing incest, as we now know from the research of Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck, is an imprinted desensitization to sexual attraction that arises between any children who spend roughly the first seven years of their lives together; this has been named the Westermarck effect in honor of his discovery. Since this movie's very first scene after the opening credits shows Iku and Yori being raised together as children, his attraction to her later on can only be attributed to some pervert's purely arbitrary plot contrivance.

The worst thing about this movie in my opinion, though, is how everyone of any significance in it is Yori's enabler. In a plot contrivance every bit as unconvincing as Yori's ability to be sexually attracted to his sister, Iku makes the attraction mutual even as he continues to treat her like dirt. Tomoka, for her part, can't seem to get over her unlikely infatuation with Yori even though she knows full well that it's his sister for whom he's abandoned her after getting a lot of free use out of her. Likewise Haruka, even though he hears probably more than he'd really like to know about the whole affair from Yori, tells no one else, offers no helpful advice, and hardly even registers as a character. Iku and Yori's parents register even less.

So far as I know, there is no official American release for this movie, and for this we Americans should be grateful. On the other hand, I hear some band of amoral Japanese degenerates has now made a full feature-length live-action movie drawing from this same literary cesspit. If they've neglected to bundle a barf bag with every copy, I sincerely hope they all catch a debilitating but non-fatal case of herpes, that their principal organs of thought might suffer every bit as greatly as my own frontal lobes have from seeing this.