Tokyo Rampage

This film has the strange dark/violent Japanese poetics that I like about their films. It's like there's just chaos, but there's actually a story here. The main character seems to just drift through individual scenes, but she's incredibly charismatic and intriguing at the same time. It's not as breathtaking as other similarly styled Japanese films, but it still captivated me. (01/23/2017)

Just as the contrasts between acts of violence and the gentle psyches of real youths were incomprehensible to many at the end of the millennium, Toyoda’s switch from (anti-)genre film to emotional visual collage is often met with incomprehension and confusion. As a means of conveying the mood of the time and of the characters to the viewer, it is a noteworthy method, but the insufficient dramaturgy does not allow the concept to resonate. Though Toyoda primarily wanted to film a testimony to the time of his adolescence, PornoStar comes across as a genre film most of the time and it will thus remain as such in the memories of many viewers. (02/23/2013)