Completed
kythestar
3 people found this review helpful
Aug 8, 2018
Completed 0
Overall 10
Story 9.5
Acting/Cast 10
Music 10
Rewatch Value 10
A small regional jet lands at a report airport in Southern Japan, possibly on an island. The stewardesses bow as the guests disembark and walk across the ramp to the terminal. Gradually, the stewardesses notice that one guest has wandered slightly off course and is kneeling on the tarmac. When they approach him to see what is wrong, he points out a child's shoe embedded in the concrete.

So begins a very warm and quirky fantasy movie. The rest of the movie is a flashback to before the airport was built. The very quirky local villagers are resisting the airport construction. A new construction executive arrives with his young son - who is sent to the local one room school. There are many funny and eccentric characters. Some of the sequences are lightly surreal. The main characters are children, but a wide spread of age ranges are portrayed as part of the community.

I saw this in Japan in a movie theater (no subtitles) Not sure if or when it will be released on DVD, much less released outside of Japan. One interesting aside -> for non-Japanese who are studying: for some odd reason, I felt that the clarity and articulation of the dialog in this movie was exceptionally good. Much better than anything you see on Japanese television.

However, like almost everything Japanese, there are bawdy hints around the edges. For the Japanese, these are a normal part of life. Some conservative viewers might be slightly uncomfortable as to why certain of the women in the movie keep lifting their skirts and flapping their white underwear at passers by.

It was a very pleasant evening at the movies for me...

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Completed
Yura Lee
3 people found this review helpful
Nov 7, 2020
Completed 0
Overall 9.0
Story 8.0
Acting/Cast 10
Music 8.0
Rewatch Value 9.5

Believing makes my wish come true, people call it a miracle.

The words, "I was able to fly because I wanted to fly. Believing makes my wish come true, people call it a miracle."
When I saw this, I was surely still a high school student, an age that is said to be a child in the world.
The childhood and freshness that I felt even at that time.
I remember thinking that I liked Ryunosuke Kamiki's acting.
Now that I'm an adult, I'm sure that what I feel and what I see is different, so let's see it again.
That's why movies are wonderful. (What's the story)
And I saw it again (laughs) That's right
! !! The boy, Kamiki-kun, is precious,
Somehow it reminds me of Wes Anderson (laughs)
I'm a child, I'm free, I have a dream, and adults just got older.
"I wanted to make a movie that gives me the power to keep believing when I can't believe something." It was a movie that was
really full of power.

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Completed
midnighteye
1 people found this review helpful
Nov 9, 2020
Completed 0
Overall 10
Story 8.0
Acting/Cast 9.0
Music 9.5
Rewatch Value 10

Whimsical

The lightness, genuineness and sensitivity with which the Japanese people manage to tell certain stories are incredible, managing to transform even the simplest things into something magical. To have an example, it would be enough to see how Into the Faraway Sky begins, with the two young protagonists who meet by chance - with impressive naturalness - while they pee on the edge of a country road: Kohei is rough and impetuous, but he has goodness and fortitude. Deliver milk every day down to town. Ryosuke, on the other hand, is the newcomer, he comes from Tokyo and his father has just moved to that remote village with the aim of driving out the inhabitants. The Japanese government intends to build a huge airport in its place. It was many years ago. Just an ideal panorama for Isao Yukisada (former director of beautiful films such as A Day on the Planet and Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World), who, as usual, leverages the deepest melancholies of the human soul, filtering his story through the eyes of a group of children and stuffing it all with characters to say the least over the top. To be clear we are around Always - Summer on the Third Street (Takashi Yamazaki, 2006), but with the same nostalgic vein as When the Show Tent Came to my Town (Yoshihiro Fukagawa, 2005) and a pinch of the pop madness of Memories of Matsuko (Tetsuya Nakashima, 2006): the result is a work that for its entire duration makes you feel small and manages to entertain even the most frivolous things, as during the long and insistent sequence in which Kohei and Ryosuke go around putting firecrackers in the cows' shit to treacherously dirty the unsuspecting passers-by. But then they meet Hiharu, a strange little girl who observes the stars every night hoping to one day be able to see the UFO that, according to her words, would have kidnapped her father. The three become inseparable and their friendship grows stronger while the diatribe rages in the village over the construction of the airport, which sees part of the inhabitants against and part in favor: Kohei, Ryosuke and Hiharu live the problem with the lightness of children. and they will try to solve it in their own way, with imagination and ingenuity, during a summer that they will never forget and that will mark them forever. The choral structure of the film allows us to follow several other parallel stories, creating an exciting and daring mosaic made up of flying men, gangs of crazy criminals and unlikely marriages. And between a surreal curtain and the other, at the end Yukisada abandons the usual realism of his stories and lets himself be abandoned to the imagination, just like the children protagonists of the film. Because - as Kohei's father also says - anything can happen when you believe it is possible. A basic poetics that has led someone to bother even the master Miyazaki, perhaps exaggerating in drawing a parallel with Yukisada. But Into the Faraway Sky is a film that makes you feel good, and that's enough. Unmissable. gang of crazy criminals and unlikely marriages. And between a surreal curtain and the other, at the end Yukisada abandons the usual realism of his stories and lets himself be abandoned to the imagination, just like the children protagonists of the film. Because - as Kohei's father also says - anything can happen when you believe it is possible. A basic poetics that has led someone to bother even the master Miyazaki, perhaps exaggerating in drawing a parallel with Yukisada. But Into the Faraway Sky is a film that makes you feel good, and that's enough. Unmissable. gang of crazy criminals and unlikely marriages. And between a surreal curtain and another, at the end Yukisada abandons the usual realism of his stories and lets himself be abandoned to the imagination, just like the children protagonists of the film. Because - as Kohei's father also says - anything can happen when you believe it is possible. A basic poetics that has led someone to bother even the master Miyazaki, perhaps exaggerating in drawing a parallel with Yukisada. But Into the Faraway Sky is a film that makes you feel good, and that's enough. Unmissable. Because - as Kohei's father also says - anything can happen when you believe it is possible. A basic poetics that has led someone to bother even the master Miyazaki, perhaps exaggerating in drawing a parallel with Yukisada. But Into the Faraway Sky is a film that makes you feel good, and that's enough. Unmissable. Because - as Kohei's father also says - anything can happen when you believe it is possible. A basic poetics that has led someone to bother even the master Miyazaki, perhaps exaggerating in drawing a parallel with Yukisada. But Into the Faraway Sky is a film that makes you feel good, and that's enough. Unmissable.

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Into the Faraway Sky (2007) poster

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