Product Description: Opposites attract in this charming love story from Japan. Ichiko is a happy go lucky girl who falls in love with serious Eri a fellow student at the university. Ichiko wants to tell the world about their love beginning with her father. But gay romance is not quite as easy as Ichiko envisions. When she comes out she learns surprising family secrets. And Eri s studies soon are keeping them apart.System Requirements:Running Time: 96 minutes Language: Japanese Subtitles: EnglishFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/GAY & LESBIAN UPC: 754703763044 Manufacturer No: WOL4530D
Make use of the capabilities of the format perhaps? I'm not reviewing the content of the film here, just the DVD authoring. The subtitles are hard-coded onto the video stream, not on a switchable subtitle track. The US licensor/manufacturer just got the English-subtitled "film festival" print of this film and ripped it straight to disk. Part of the point of DVD technology was multiple switchable language tracks and subtitle streams. The manufacturer was just lazy and took the fast-track in this case. I guess getting the original print and the subtitle script and doing it properly was too much work for them. Why bother releasing it if it's going to be a half-baked attempt?
Another perpetrator of this kind of laziness is Viz Media with their "Kamikaze Girls" US release.
Sweet Eri is a serious, career oriented young woman who spends most of her time with her nose in a book studying to become a lawyer. Her younger friend Ichiko is quite a bit bubblier and fun loving, but possesses a gift for language and translation. While they could not be more different personality wise, something clicks between the two young women and they become quick friends after meeting each other at a dance club. However, this friendship is not quite the type found in such films as Kamizake Girls. Instead, Eri and Ichiko are lovers and during the time they have known each other their affection for each other has grown quite deep. However, besides a gay friend named Take, the young women have not revealed to anyone their relationship.
Ichiko takes the first step and introduces Eri to her father. She believes that because her father is a literary liberal that he will be quite open to her and Eri's relationship and she is quite right. However, she learns a bit more than she bargained for when she learns not only is her father gay, but that her deceased mother was a lesbian. Apparently her father and mother were best friends and decided to marry after both of them broke up with their significant others. They did not "love" each other in the "traditional" sense, but they wanted a child, so Ichiko was born. Eri's family is a more rigid and she is hesitant to speak out. What will become of the two lovers?
Although I have watched such films as Nakajima Takehiro's Okoge and Hashiguchi Ryosuke's A Touch of Fever and Like Grains of Sand which deal with the subject of male homosexuality. Love My Life is only the second film that I have watched on the topic of lesbianism in Japan. While the film's subject is quite promising, the execution falls pretty flat. The film opens well when it deals with issues such as "coming out" and introducing one's same sex lover to one's family, but other matters are handled rather ham-fisted such as the general repugnance felt by the general populace towards gays and lesbians. Also, the films subject matter derails quite unexpectedly somewhere in the middle of the film and I felt I was watching a completely different film. Love My Life is enjoyable, but, in my opinion, Shindo Kaze's film Love/Juice is a better film dealing with similar themes.
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