Reviews

There have been a lot of films made about the mighty and brutal warrior Oda Nobunaga, but certainly not one like this, which seems to take its cue from some early legends about his wife Nohime, that she herself was a trained assassin.

The first thing to say is not to come to this film for real life history - the film makers have very much put action and romance and drama above any kind of historical verisimilitude. But the result is very watchable, mostly thanks to some great acting, especially from the two leads, although sometimes Kimura struggles with the widely differing sides of Oda portrayed in the film, from idiotic young man to vicious killer to romantic warrior leader. Jaruka Ayase is terrific as Nohime, the real power behind Odas throne.

The action and drama is often a little over the top, but is always watchable so long as you don't think too much about the likelihood of the plot. The ending will very much be love it or hate it, but I enjoyed it. Like a lot of modern Japanese productions, they seem very good at making a low budget go a long way - some of the settings are quite spectacular.

So overall, while not quite up to the standard of the best recent Japanese historical dramas, this is still very much worth your time.

Yuri is a troubled teenaged girl in modern Japan. She is ashamed over her poverty but refuses to go to college. After an argument with her mother she faints and finds herself in 1945 wartime Japan, and meets a sensitive young man named Akira, who she discovers has volunteered as a kamikaze pilot.

The plot is far fetched, but convincingly acted by an excellent cast and is surprisingly gripping and quite moving. The overall production quality and direction are very good for a low budget drama. The contrast between the beauty of old Japan and the grimness of much modern Japan is well captured by the setting and cinematography.

Overall, well worth seeking out of you are looking for a romantic drama with a twist.

A lot of Japanese film makers make their 'Ozu' film, and thematically this certainly fits the Ozu mould, although perhaps wisely the film maker here doesn't try to copy the Ozu style.

The film is quite simple - it follows a young woman as she finds meaning through her weekly saturday classes on the tea ceremony. Over the years she gradually comes to appreciate the deeper meaning behind the ceremony. And that really is it. But what could be a somewhat boring film is anything but - the lovely performances and nice pacing brings us into the lives of the women who love the ceremony and it becomes all very moving, and not a little enlightening.

It is also, sadly, the last film by the great actress Kirin Kiki, but what a lovely last performance she gave us.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from a film with this title. It turns out to be unusual in that the title explains the main character without him having to explain himself.

But this is an interesting, unpretentious and darkly comic drama about a lonely semi-employed graduate who seems unable to find anything to inspire him in life. However, he gets far more than he expects when he gets a casual job in a bathhouse, motivated mostly by trying to get to talk to an old schoolmate who is a regular. The bathhouse turns out to be a front for certain Yakuza activities. And the shy young man may well turn out to be more interested than he should be in making money from the distinctly illegal goings-on.

The film is nicely paced and always interesting and quite funny in parts. The characters are well acted and oddly likeable despite their unlikeable career choices. The film slightly runs out of ideas in the end, although at least we are spared a contrived twist. The low key ending is oddly in keeping with the overall tone.

After a couple of films where he seemed to be threading water, Hirokazu Koreeda has come back with a genuinely great film. In many ways this is familiar territory for him - a closely observed story of an unlikely family on the fringe of society - a poor working class family who supplement their meagre wages through regular shoplifting. The father justifies it as the goods in the shop 'don't belong to anyone yet, so nobody is hurt'. This rough around the edges but open hearted family expands when they by accident end up taking in an abused little girl.

What starts out as a slice of life film gets more profound as we realised not all is as it seems - and we start to question what it even means to be 'family'. Koreeda never force-feeds his audience with what he thinks, he lets us observe and come to our own conclusions.

This really is one of his best - the only negative in the film is that the plot becomes a little contrived and didactic towards the end, and it requires a little suspension of belief. But its all carried off very well by a uniformly outstanding cast, with the usual Kore-eda mix of experience actors and newcomers.

Tzuzuki is a Ronin, a masterless samurai living at the very end of the long period of peace through to the mid 19th Century which made such swordsmen surplus to Japanese society. He seems happy wandering, helping farmers in exchange for food, but trouble is stirring in Edo and he realises he must go there - it is unclear whether out of duty or hope for his own future. He seems to get lucky when a wandering master swordsman asks him to join him on a mission to help the Shogun against his enemies. This seems to set us up for a traditional clash between desire and duty, modernity and tradition, but the film takes a surprising turn when a few tough guy wanderers arrive in the village and Tzuzuki is hit with a fever, meaning he has to stay longer.

The film takes a strange turn when we realise that Tzuzuki is not just reluctant to leave his farmer friends, but is almost pathologically unable to translate his sword skills into the real job of killing men - even deserving men. The fever itself seems to encompass his whole world. Suddenly everything is not what it seems - not the master swordsman, not the sweet village girl who seems to love Tzuzuki, not the tough but seemingly good hearted wanderers.

This is a very modern take on the traditional Samurai genre. Plenty of previous Samurai movies examine the twisted ethos of the warrior class, but few examine so much how killing itself destroys the humanity of the swordsman. It is strikingly filmed and directed - normally I hate shaky-cam films, but its used effectively here to create a hallucinogenic atmosphere of confusion and chaos. The settings are very beautiful and effectively caught by the cinematography and the short running time of the film means that there is no flab at all - its a gripping, tight film, with its only flaw really that we never really get to understand the characters real motivations. Nevertheless, this is definitely one of the best modern samurai films I've seen in some time.

Yoshiko is a shy office girl who - as we slowly realise - is even more shy than we think. She has vivid conversations with a lady on her bus to work, a local elderly fisherman, a guy in her 7-11 - but all these conversations are in her head, she has only one real friend, the girl who sits next to her in the office. Yoshiko's life is paralysed by her love for 'ichi' (one), the cool guy in her school she's been obsessed with for a decade. The problem is, Ichi was scarcely even aware she existed. Likewise, she is only vaguely aware of the doofus guy in her office (conveniently nicknamed 'ni' (two) who is clumsily trying to persuade her to be his girlfriend. After a near fatal accident, Yoshiko determines to do what it takes to engineer a meeting with ichi to find out if she can really make him love her.

This whimsical, witty and occasional surreal character study focuses entirely on Yoshiko, brilliantly played by Mayu Matsuoko, who was equally striking in last years Kore-eda film 'Shoplifters'. We see everything through this very unreliable narrators eyes. The film is ably directed by Akiko Ohku, but it is definitely overlong, it could have been trimmed by 20 minutes with no loss. The whole film is a very slight edifice, with its low budget frequently showing, but Matsuoko holds the screen in every scene so it never outstays its welcome.

I caught this interesting film at the Japanese Film Festival in Dublin - I had little expectations for it, but came away very pleasantly surprised.

This is an unusual Japanese film - it is very much a theatrical presentation in all ways - it is an adapted theatre production but the director has made absolutely no attempt to 'open it out', it keeps the single set form of a play, with 'enter stage' and 'exit stage' movements by the actors. I assume this was partly an artistic choice, partly for budgetary reasons. But it certainly works well.

The story is also seemingly quite un-japanese - a sort of society satire, seemingly a Japanese version of a Neil Simon style comedy of manners. It is set at the end of an annual party held by a wealthy Chief Executive. The main guests have gone, leaving a ragbag of tail-enders - a shy Toyota engineer who arrived late, a stylish younger couple, a seriously ill casual acquaintance of all present, and the two hosts - the slightly smug husband and his angry, waspish wife. She, seemingly enraged by having to be polite to previous guests she can't stand, lets loose on the shy engineer, teasing and mocking him for his admiring glances at the younger woman. This sets the stage for a series of misunderstandings and arguments as the group gets more and more drunk. The loose social connections between the characters leads to a very japanese style conflict as each seeks to gain their own bearings in this awkward situation.

While the overall story threatens to run out of the control of the Director/writer, it is often hilarious as the characters joust and try to maintain their civility in the face of their female hosts overt hostility. Secrets are spilled, and things get even more awkward when the hosts handsome young son arrives.

The film ultimately I think fails to hit its satirical targets, but its very entertaining nonetheless - while there are certain subtleties to the satire that doubtless only a Japanese audience will get, the Dublin audience I saw it certainly appreciated it and found the characters all too understandable as they scrabbled around trying to keep their dignity as the evening spins out of control.

I caught this film at the Japanese Film Festival in Ireland - I had no big expectations of the film, but I left pleasantly surprised. Its a modest film, but quite touching and engrossing, despite its slightly excessive length.

The film focuses on Makato, a middle aged man devoted to his wife, two step children, and his daughter from a previous marriage. His career is suffering from his refusal to do the extra hours and weekend work needed to climb the corporate ladder, he sees no sense in sacrificing time with his children. Unfortunately, his modest happiness is threatened by his wives pregnancy - he first worries at the impact on his daughter, but overlooks that his older step-daughter feels even more threatened by it. Only his wife seems happy about the pregnancy. As his step daughter rebels and he is demoted to a demeaning job at work, designed to force him out, his modest life threatens to fall apart.

The film is very nicely directed by Yukiko Mishima, although the editing is too loose - a number of flashbacks are superfluous and the film could have been tightened up and shortened. The cast, including the children, is uniformly very good. The film wisely avoids too much melodrama in favour of a slice of life realism, although there are plenty of fairly heavy handed visual metaphors added in. And its particularly nice to see a film which explores the difficulties in taking on step children. Even the no-good father of Makato's step kids is treated sympathetically by the film. This is a film with no bad guys or good guys, just people struggling with the petty tragedies of life.

I've just managed to catch up with this quite elusive film as I'm a big Akira Kurosawa film and from what I saw from the description and trailer, this would seem to be Koreeda's 'Kurosawa' film - there are obvious references to both Rashomon and High and Low.

The film indeed is clearly influenced by both those films, with a bit of Kurosawa's lesser known court drama Scandal thrown in. The plot follows a lawyer, asked by a colleague to assist with a seemingly straightforward capital punishment case. A middle aged man called Mizume is accused of, and has confessed to, the murder of a factory owner, and the theft of money. Mizume had only just been released after a long prison sentence for a previous murder. The lawyers job is to avoid the death penalty by trying to muddy the waters around the murder, and perhaps suggest it was an impulsive act and not planned (from what I can understand, Japanese law tends to have a range of gradations of homocide, with the judge ultimately deciding if it was serious enough for the death penalty).

The job of the lawyers is complicated by the apparent passivity of Mizume, and his constant changing of his story. At first, his explanations are just vague and contradictory, but he then states that he killed the man because he was paid by the mans wife to do so. As the main lawyer, Shigemora, digs deeper, he finds yet another possible motive.

I won't give away the ending, except to say that there is a 'probable' reason given in the end, but so many versions are given its not entirely clear what happened, or (seemingly the core question of the film) whether the truth is relevant at all to the operation of justice. Shigemora is caught in a Rashomon like situation of not knowing whether there is any one real truth, and whether knowing, or exposing, this truth is in any way relevant, morally, ethically or legally.

While the film sort of hedges the line between being a procedural and a more philosophical exploration of justice and truth (which reminded me a little of some recent Korean films such as Memories of Murder and Mother) the film also shows clear influence from High and Low as the main protagonist agonises over the guilty mans motivation, and starts to identify with him - shown rather allegorically in their prison conversations, with one face 'reflected' over another.

Rather like Kurosawa with Scandal and High and Low, the film seems to reflect the Directors concerns with the operation of justice in Japan, although those concerns seem pretty universal. In particular, the question of whether 'justice' and 'truth' are in any way compatible. Rather like Kurosawa's early films on the topic, the approach is perhaps a little too didactic for audiences not up to speed on the operation of the Japanese system.

As a film, I found it quite engrossing, while simultaneously a little frustrating. Koreeda is famous for a very deliberate, slow approach which in his best work absorbs the viewer into the life of his characters. Unfortunately, this type of film I think requires a more dynamic style, and the film is somewhat one-paced. Worse, it is hamstrung by some rather clunky didactic dialogue (the lawyer is followed everywhere by a young assistant, always asking stupid and naive questions which seem to have no other purpose than to explain to the audience what we are seeing), and some heavy handed metaphors. The two leads are good in the roles, but there is quite poor acting in some of the lesser roles - I think mostly due to the undercooked script and somewhat contrived plotting. I can't help feeling that Koreeda was trying to get something off his chest with this film, and found himself with a type of film making he's not really comfortable with.

So while the film is certainly quite gripping, and I found the insights into the Japanese court system very interesting, this is nowhere near the Directors best film. Its certainly worth anyones time with an interest in Japanese cinema to watch it, but be prepared I think to be a little disappointed if you are either a Koreeda fan (I certainly am), or for that matter, a Kurosawa fan.

I was delighted to see the release of that genuine rarity - an Irish action/war film. And that its based on one of the great untold (or at least undersold) stories of valour makes it all the more intriguing. And its wonderful to see the 'Jadotville Jacks' finally having their story told.

I'm slightly reluctant to report that the film itself is something of a mixed bag. Its a particularly difficult story to tell because so many of the events are mired in historical controversy. Even a Graham Greene or John Le Carre would struggle to make sense of the conflicting real life plots of that period. Ultimately, nobody really knows why it was thought to make sense to isolate the soldiers in Jadotville and then fail so miserably to support them, or for that matter why the Katangans were so determined to dislodge them. We only know that the soldiers were victims of geopolitical plotting far from the battlefield. The films tortuous script tries hard to illuminate the multiple double dealings going on in the background, but ultimately this becomes tiresome and excessively literal.

The film tries very hard to be both a historical record, reasonably faithful to the events, and also a kick ass action film. Thats a very hard trick to pull off, and it doesn't quite manage it. Primarily, I think the problem is an excessively literal script - full of little walk in parts from historical figures making portentous and suitably ambiguous statements, with some clunky domestic scenes that try to illuminate the men behind the soldiers stranded in the town. Some of the dialogue is frankly a little painful. Thankfully, this is balanced by genuinely superb action scenes and a great narrative pace. I couldn't help thinking that this is a film that could have done with two different directors - the actual director who shows great talent and skill filming in Jadotville, and another who could handle the other parts of the film with a bit more subtlety and empathy.

It is a pity that it seems the film will not have a wide cinema release, because it deserves to be seen in the cinema. Certainly the audience in the cinema where I watched it were very enthusiastic about it (not least the ladies behind me who regularly expressed their appreciation of Jamie Doran quite loudly). But with luck it will be widely seen on Netflix.

This is the first film from Zhang Yimou and Gong Li, the launch pad for a series of superb films which introduced many in the West to modern Chinese cinema. It is the story of a young woman who marries a dying man and then inherits his winery (actually a distillery) famed for its Baiju (red sorghum spirit).

The story is simple, with little dialogue, helped along by a near continuous voice-over of a storyteller. Normally this would be an intrusive device, but somehow it works for such a visual film which aspires to an almost epic scale. I can't help thinking Zhang may have been influenced by Terrence Malick films like Badlands and Days of Heaven. But it is certainly an original and striking debut, if not quite as good as his later masterpieces, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. Of course, what all three of those films share is a near obsession with primary colours, but for visual effect and symbolism.

Gong Li of course is charismatic and luminous, it can never have been a doubt from this film onward that she would be a star. But the real star here is the lush, erotic photography. It is a bit of a pity that the final third of the film loses its focus somewhat and becomes a more conventional melodrama. But that is forgivable for a film made in the circumstances. It still holds up very much as a film worth watching.

A run down school, a seemingly random group of people conducting awkward interviews with new arrivals seems an odd way to look at the afterlife, but Kore-eda has created something really special with this film. He somehow makes an enormously unlikely scenario for purgatory - where the dead are asked to select the memory they wish to hold onto forever, and (most unlikely!), this is recreated by a ramshackle low budget film crew, and turns it into something profound and beautiful.

The film is a truly remarkable ensemble effort - there are no real stars in this film (despite a beautiful minor part from that truly great actress, Kyoko Kagawa), even the most minor characters (including an adorable old lady in the throes of a mercifully pleasant dementia) are given their own time and space and are depicted wonderfully. Dull looking salarimen who struggle to find memories that are worth keeping are shown to have lives of real depth and quality. A schoolgirl is dissuaded from a clichéd remembrance of a nice day in Disneyland, and instead remembers a beautiful moment with her mother. A mouthy, sex obsessed older man is shown to be boastful simply as a way of hiding the real love he has for his daughter.

The film is obviously open to all sorts of interpretations, but for what its worth it seems to me to be about the importance of those small moments of joy, of grace, that make life worth living. Interestingly, he implies that those moments don't necessarily have to have really happened - it is the memory that is important, not the reality. Just one moment of ecstasy is maybe just enough for a life worth living.

The film sounds quirky and slow, and it is paced at the speed of life - slow, but all too fast at the end. But it is never less than engrossing and in the end, beautiful and moving. Kore- edas films are not disposable entertainment, they are real art of the type that will stay with you forever if you allow them to wash over you. Try it, you won't regret it.

I was looking forward to this film as I know Chengdu quite well and the topic of the rapid changes in China society interests me a great deal. I was less than impressed with the only other film by Zhang Ke Xia I'd seen (The World), which seemed to me to be a clunking metaphor in search of a script, but I thought it still sounded promising. How wrong I was - I find myself mystified by the praise this film has been given.

It starts out so well, with some beautiful and moving interviews with retired workers from the factory, now moving out from Chengdu to an industrial estate to the suburbs (but we suspect of course that this is a fiction, the factory really is no more and the workers are disposable). The insight into what these workers thought of their jobs (they were highly prized) and the genuine pride they felt in their factory is moving and fascinating. But for whatever reason, the film then moves to using painfully obvious actors to read scripted lines. The actors are quite awful, using the pauses for effect and blank stares into the middle distance of amateur dramatic society volunteers. And they quite obviously people who've never been in a foundry in their lives (neither i suspect had the film makers, as the working foundry scenes were patently set up). I can't help see this as an obvious insult to the real workers, who presumably were not considered good looking or articulate enough to be in the film. The scripted stories they tell are so obvious and fake in comparison to the more sober recollections than the real people, its hard not to feel they were written for effect, not to create a real remembrance or to provide some sort of deeper truth (which is usually the excuse of film makers trying to justify short cuts and showy technique). I can only wonder what those people who were interviewed and poured their hearts out would think to see tiny scraps of their personal stories told by some patently bored flown in actors.

The rest of the film is pretty much standard documentary work, with little real feel or imagination in its telling. The photography fails miserably to convey the genuine grandeur of those old industrial buildings and makes no attempt to tell us what the new 24city will look like, apart from a brief moment showing us the model for the new complex. No attempt whatever is made to tell us a bit more about the mechanics of what is actually happening or how the former workers will be treated. The juxtaposition of hardy old industrial workers and the somewhat vapid younger generation is rather obvious and clichéd, it doesn't actually tell the viewer anything new or interesting.

I can't help thinking that this film would never have gotten its release if it had been made by a less exalted film maker. I strongly suspect that for whatever reason (pressure by the government?), the original film was altered significantly, forcing the use of actors and its lack of any concrete reference to the present or future for these people. If this is the case, then it should have been scrapped, not presented as the farrago it is.

This is one of the earliest Ozu films widely available, and the Criterion version is outstanding in quality.

Its a perfect example of Ozu at his best. Its a gem of a film - beautifully shot, a perfect structure, funny, sad and fascinating. The story is simple enough - a traveling troupe arrive at a town, not realizing the reason the chief actor picked the town is because an old flame of his lives here with his son. His current girlfriend in her jealousy tries to stir things up, but things don't turn out as either expect.

What is most striking about the film is just how modern it seems. The characters are believable and funny, the female characters are strong and willful, while even the minor characters are nicely sketched out. The acting is nothing short of brilliant, which makes the whole film very entertaining - this is no period piece of academic interest only, its a great work of art and a wonderful film - a masterpiece really.

I missed this film when in the cinema, but managed to track it down on DVD. I am so glad I did - it is a superb film, fully deserving of the rave reviews it got originally.

It features a stunning central performance by Hya-Ja Kim as a woman whose mildly retarded son is accused of the murder of a schoolgirl. She is by turns dotty, confused, but utterly determined to do whatever is needed to save him. But this film never follows genre conventions - director and writer Bong Joon-Ho delights in upsetting all our expectations, giving us knockabout comedy when we expect action, horror when we expect plot, and heartbreak when we expect a satisfying solution to a mystery. It is brilliantly directed and editing, with a great soundtrack (even the sound editing is wonderful). Its an impossible film to really describe, you really need to see it to fully understand just how great Korean film making can be.

It never ceases to amaze me how Korean film makers seem capable of balancing so much in their films - so many of the best films from Korea seem to defy any genre categorizations. They are often funny when you expect them to be horrifying, thrilling when you expect them to be ethereal, and have a way of turning all audience expectations upside down.

Poetry is one of the very best Korean films of the last few years. I saw it last week, and still can't get that wonderful old lady out of my head. It is, very briefly, about a proud but desperately poor woman in her mid-60's, who looks after her taciturn teenage grandson, who finds out that he may have been involved in the rape of a girl who later commits suicide. Simultaneously, she is diagnosed with early Alzheimers disease. She is also trying to find an artistic outlet, to make some mark on the world before she loses her grip. All these elements come together in a way with is somethings horrifying, sometimes fascinating, and ultimately very beautiful.

This film is a flat out masterpiece and demands to be seen.

Poor mild mannered Shamoto is trapped in his little aquarium business with his hot, but frustrated wife and his teen-aged daughter who loathes her step mother and has nothing but contempt for her father. Into their life roars Murata, a fast talking, vaguely sleazy, but oddly friendly rival, who owns a much slicker, larger aquarium business. And maybe he has a little bit of other things going on in the side, in more ways than one. Shamoto is going to get the ride of his life, and he isn't going to enjoy it.

This film is impossible to fit into any neat category. Its part horror, part black comedy (its extremely funny at times), part serial killer movie, with a huge dollop of allegory about business and Japanese society. And its also a hoot - brilliant acting and direction keeps you hooked as the film gets gorier and gorier. The entire cast is compelling as a group of seemingly ordinary people who are teetering on either side of major personality disorders. And its not always clear who the real psychopaths are. Only the fish seem normal.

This certainly isn't a film for everyone. But if you enjoy a black comedy and have a strong stomach for some very realistic looking gore, then this will certainly keep you distracted for its 140 minutes or so.

This is Ozu's first color film, and also one of his more lighthearted later films. It also stands out as perhaps his first film where he unambiguously takes the side of rebellious youth over the wisdom of age.

In a universally great cast, Shin Saburi plays a typical Japanese father - a successful executive with a nice home life, two lovely daughters, and a dutiful wife. He is, by the standards of the time, an open minded and liberal man who, we see from the very beginning, welcomes the idea of a marriage based on love, rather than the more traditional arrangements, such as his own marriage. He is also very much a hypocrite as he (provoked by a clumsy attempt to ask for his hand) refuses his elder daughter permission to marry the man she loves. His objection to the marriage has less to do with the suitor than, it seems, his feelings that his paternal authority has been undermined.

As with all Ozu films, it gradually meanders to its close with a general acceptance by all the characters that life goes on and that only by tolerating each other can society move forward. The tone of the film is more comic than usual (some very amusing scenes), and it lacks the emotional punch of some other Ozu films. It is a bit more loosely plotted than usual, with an unusually contrived plot by Ozu standards, but its still a pleasant and wise film.

One standout performance is the quietest of them all - the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka plays the traditional wife. In one crucial scene, the camera lingers on her face as she is quietly absorbed in listening to music on the radio - telling us all we need to know about this woman who has sacrificed her individuality for her husband and family. It is in little moments of magic like this that Ozu films show why they are essential viewing - this film, while not one of his major works, is no exception.

Its hard to review a film like this when you've been looking forward to it so much. While its not my favorite of his books, I'm a big Haruki Murakami fan, and I love Anh Hung Tran's earlier films - I thought this was potentially a match made in heaven.

The film is good - very good. Just not the great film I'd hoped it would be. There are wonderful scenes and great acting, and the cinematography is beautiful. But I think there are some major flaws. The flow of the film is oddly disjointed at times - while the book is very much written from the perspective of an older, wiser man looking back at his immature youth, the film seems unsure of its own perspective. The voice-over is poorly structured, seemingly aimed at filling in narrative gaps rather than giving us the older narrators overview. Oddly for Tran, a director who has been extremely minimalist in the past, some scenes are far too overwrought, not helped by the intrusive and anachronistic score. The casting is also uneven - Rinko Kikuchi is a marvelous actress, but is simply too old to play a convincing 20 year old. The character of Reiko is also played by an actress much younger than the character in the book, but the part hasn't been changed accordingly. That said, Kenichi Matsuyama as Toru and in particular Kiko Mizuhara as Midori are terrific.

I really don't know how someone who doesn't know the book will react to this. I suspect that if you are a romantic at heart, you will like it, even if you find it a bit overlong and some of the characters too thinly drawn. Fans of the book will mostly love it as it is quite faithful (maybe too faithful) to the story.