Ore wa mada honki dashite nai dake (2013) Reviews

• Tomorrow never comes...

  politic19832016-02-10

  'I'll Give it My All, Tomorrow' is a title I liked the moment I read it, particularly as it came accompanied by a photo of a man in boxer shorts. It's fair to say, this is my kind of comedy. In his forties, Shizuo gives up his salaryman job to work part-time in a fast food bar and sitting about playing an 'important match' of his Playstation. Living with his father and seventeen year-old daughter, his slack attitude soon frustrates his family and Bob, the foreign employee in the fast food bar. See as a superior by those younger than him, but a waste by those by those who depend on him, he soon makes it his life ambition to become a manga artist...at some point, some time. This is a film about the life that happens when you're making plans, too busy sitting about and thinking about what you should do rather than getting anything done. While the earnest desire is there, the proactive motivation is somewhat lacking, resulting in a limbo. A mid-life crisis finds your average salaryman working alongside and socialising with young adults still trying to find their place in the world, naturally to the amusement of the likes of me. 'I'll Give it My All...' captures well that somewhat naive compulsion that men have to pack it all in, fight the system and sit in their pants playing Playstation while the rest of society moves on; the freedom we all want, but is probably quite dangerous in misguided and confused hands. Shinich Tsutsumi is well cast as the anti-hero, seemingly confident to those his junior, but unable to achieve and get his life moving, and Yuichi Fukuda's direction works well in magnifying his shortcomings, as a forty-two year old man asks his seventeen year- old daughter to lend him twenty thousand Yen.

• Although it is the grandiose performance and plot of Area 11, the crisis of middle age is empathetic.

  yoggwork2019-02-19

  Although it is the grandiose performance and plot of Area 11, the crisis of middle age is empathetic.