Review for Quirky Guys and Gals

Introduction

I really ought to pay closer attention to what I read, as just skimming a press release can make me jump to some unwarranted assumptions. Not that I wouldn't have reviewed Quirky Guys and Gals anyway, but I would have approached it without certain preconceptions. I'd gathered that it was an anthology movie, and that Gen Sekiguchi, director of Survive Style 5+ was involved. I adore Survive Style 5+, which certainly deserves the 'quirky' descriptive. It too is an anthology of stories, but stories that intertwine and bounce off each other in unexpected ways. That led me to expect something from Quirky Guys and Gals that just isn't there. Quirky Guys and Gals is a proper anthology, in that it is a collection of four short films, made by different directors, only one of which is Gen Sekiguchi. There is a common theme, that of the quirky directness of their respective characters, but these stories are completely separate from each other.


Quirky Guys and Gals is also a low budget student film, although not the sort of student film that you would expect. The directors are established professionals, so are the cast and the crew. What the New Cinema Workshop that financed and distributed this film is doing is educating the new wave of movie producers, there are 26 of them listed on the PR material, and the exercise behind Quirky Guys and Gals is to get these short films into production. I never knew that producers had to go to school. I thought all they had to do was get the money together, light the blue touch-paper on the director and retire to a safe distance, where they spend the rest of the shoot fending off the bean-counting studio execs, while the creative stuff happens.


Anyway, the four stories in Quirky Guys and Gals…

Cheer Girls (dir Yosuke Fujita)

Chiharu leads a cheerleading team in college, but they don't cheer any sports team. This trio of cheerleaders have a mission in life that is far more important. They bring hope and enthusiasm to the downtrodden in life. Like a superhero team, when they spot misery and despair about to strike, they change outfits and leap into action with carefully choreographed routines tailored to boost an individual's self-esteem. Whether it is a boy who can't tie his shoelaces, a restaurateur unable to open a jar, or a guilt-ridden businessman, there's always a cheer to bring a smile to their faces. But maybe Chiharu needs the cheer the most.


Boy? Meets Girl (dir Tomoko Matsunashi)

Konosuke is the typically shy, introverted high school student. He shrinks into invisibility, is unable to put himself forward, which makes nursing a crush on classmate Kaori all the more painful. She's a photographer who looks for beauty in all things, but never seems to look his way, and Konosuke can't work up the courage to talk to her. Then one day, in a fit of despair and contemplating ending it all, his friend puts some makeup on him to prepare him for the next world, only he goes a little too far. The odd thing is that as a girl, Konosuke gets more attention than he ever did as a guy. And in Miyu, Kaori has found her perfect model.


Claim Night (dir Mipo O)

Coming home to darkness is troublesome for Mayuko. She's been looking forward to a special meal, but the power cut isn't good for her perishables. Her blood pressure only rises further when she calls the electricity company to get the supply reconnected. One tirade later and the call centre manager pays a visit to personally apologise. Mayuko isn't going to let him off easy though. She's going to give him a piece of her mind, and claim as much compensation as she is entitled to. And as the poor man grovels and apologises and rushes to satisfy her every whim, she notices that he's kind of… cute!


The House Full of 'Abandoned' Businessmen (dir Gen Sekiguchi)

It's a tale for our times. Mrs Okada is walking through the park, when she sees the forlorn figure of businessman Mr Hirata sitting alone under a tree. An awkward conversation with a lot of excuses ensues before the truth comes out. Hirata has been fired, and he's keeping quietly to himself all day before going home, to make his wife think that he still has a job. Seeing him getting a tan that will quickly give him away, Mrs Okada takes pity on him and takes him home with her. She even tells him that he's welcome everyday while her own husband is at the office. Then the next day she finds another unemployed businessman in the park…

Picture

Quirky Guys and Gals gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer on this DVD from Third Window Films. It's an NTSC-PAL standards conversion, but a damned good one. The image is clear and sharp throughout, a smooth and artefact free representation of the digital video source, with no issues with judder or ghosting. Only when I paused the film and skipped back or forward a few frames did I notice any blended frames, and I was still unconvinced until I checked the runtime online. The image itself is bright, exceptionally colourful, and rich in detail. That detail does slip a little in darker scenes, while fine texture does exhibit moiré on at least one occasion. The only real oddity was one scene in the final film where the image suddenly became soft, as if of a lower resolution, otherwise the transfer is most acceptable.

Sound

In terms of audio, you get a fairly pedestrian DD 2.0 stereo Japanese track, with optional English subtitles (although you'll have to turn them on and off directly with your remote control). These aren't films with complex sound design, so the audio works just fine in this context. The subtitle font did appear a little chunky, but more worrying were the odd grammatical flubs, the sort of typo that spell checking misses, "loose" instead of "lose", or "week" instead of "weak". There's also an odd word choice in the second film, the gender neutral "crotch" where direct reference to male genitalia would have made more sense in the story's context.

Extras

Quirky Guys and Gals gets a static menu from which you can play the film, or select any of the individual shorts separately. Do that, and you'll miss out on the overall animated beginning and end credit sequences, but you will instead get a brief message from the film's particular director.

Also on the disc in the extras section are trailers for some 16 other Third Window Films DVDs, as well as interviews with the directors, Yousuke Fujita (17 mins), Tomoko Matsunashi (12 mins), Mipo O (23 mins), and Gen Sekiguchi (13 mins). These appear to be exclusives to the Third Window disc, and the directors speak specifically about their segment, and their careers in general. I was a little stunned to learn that Survive Style 5+'s brilliance wasn't appreciated in its native Japan.


There are also some web links on this disc, but you'll have to stick the disc in a DVD-ROM to find them.

Incidentally, this is one of those Sony authored discs that finds compatibility issues with Sony DVD players, or rather my Sony DVD player. Instead of going back to the main menu after playing the interviews, it would jump to the next bit of data on the disc and play that, usually the director's intro to their movie and then that segment. On my Panasonic Blu-ray player, the disc operated as it was meant to.

Conclusion

Quirky Guys and Gals is funny, surprisingly so. The four stories within are daft, silly, simple and straightforward, premises lacking in depth and complexity, and certainly not all that thought provoking or insightful. They are what they appear to be, delightful, little quirky explorations of the bizarre side of human nature, not too weird or out-there, but twisted enough to raise more than just a smile. They are more than just simple comic sketches, but they do follow a set-up and punch line format that reminds me of more elaborate gags. The humour is still pretty obvious and in your face, and it wasn't too hard to see some of the twists coming ahead of time. But having said all that, Quirky Guys and Gals was funnier than it had any right to be. I certainly wasn't expecting to be laughing out loud as much as I did, and looking back on the film, I'm hard pressed to explain just why. Something about its absurdist approach to its material clicked with me, a deadpan surrealism that appealed, which definitely makes it worthwhile.


In terms of style and comic sensibility, Quirky Guys and Gals throws you in at the deep end with perhaps the most inaccessible of the four films first. Cheer Girls is the most absurd of the films, its premise the most starkly ridiculous, and in execution a combination of early Japanese cinema like that of Yasujiro Ozu, and kids' sentai anime shows of the eighties. The cheerleader trio consists of an indomitable leader type, a clueless comic sidekick, and an idiot comic sidekick that has to have lessons beaten into her. They bring hope to the hopeless by cheering them on in their mundane everyday tasks. But slowly a dark edge is revealed in Chiharu's personal circumstances, and the kind of people and activities they end up motivating. It took me a while to warm to this film, the deadpan seriousness of the characters takes a while to click, and it isn't made easy with the Ozu style locked-off, single camera shots, which seem at odds with the subject matter. But it did grow on me to the point where I was laughing at the end.


As a means to warm up the audience for what is to come, Cheer Girls works a treat, and Boy? Meets Girl builds on that. Its premise isn't the most original, gender swap stories have been made into movies ever since Tootsie, but there is something heart-warming and accessible about the tale of a boy trying to make an impression on the girl he's crushing on, by dressing up as a girl himself. What makes it funny is that he's not all that effective in drag, but the characters around him certainly act as if Miyu is for real. Claim Night on the other hand starts off as the least promising of the four films, simply because its premise is so obvious, the call centre nasal receptionist rubbing the consumer completely the wrong way, obviously reading from a script and unable to form a coherent thought for him or herself. I though that this would be a predictable, slow burn comedy as Mayuko would no doubt encounter further impediment on her quest to get her electricity reinstated. Claim Night turns out to be anything but predictable in the way that it pans out, drifting in a more unexpected direction than you would think, and with a peach of a coda to the story as well.


Of all the quirky stories in Quirky Guys and Gals, it's The House Full of 'Abandoned' Businessmen that is the quirkiest. It's also the most predictable and comfortable of the four. You know exactly where this story is going from the beginning, but it's so uplifting and likeable that you go along for the ride anyway. There is a slight enigma at the start of the film, the idea that a housewife would take in a businessman into her home when her husband is out invites some curious thought, but those thoughts are quickly dispelled when Hirata takes a look at her Mrs Okada's photo albums. Also the minute that you find out that her husband too is a salaryman, you know just how the film will end. But there is a wonderful scene where a pack of grateful businessmen offer to do Mrs Okada a favour and evict a cockroach from her kitchen.


Quirky Guys and Gals isn't the first title that I would think of when it comes to compulsive purchases. Its light, frothy and short fare doesn't make it the most fulfilling of movies; it's over almost as soon as it begins. But I haven't been as enthused, and as entertained by a movie in a good long while, as I was when watching Quirky Guys and Gals. It's the sort of film that you discover by chance, and rewards those who are most simpatico with its style and its ephemeral and surreal content. It's definitely one to try before buying. Hopefully it can get a TV showing to allow more to sample its singular charms.