Robo-G

Yep...Not much for me to add here. Just confirming the reviews and rating. Take it from the prolific DICK STEELE or any of the previous reviewers, this movie is simply very good.

Better yet, don't take our word for it, just watch and enjoy! This director has quite a fondness for making these silly, charming, and predictable films that have a heart of gold. But, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. With Waterboys, Swing Girls (one of my all time favorites), and now this; you sir half a life time pass in my book. Wouldn't mind if you kept on making this stuff though.

One of the best films I've seen this year...9 out of 10 stars!

This was a very funny movie - one of my all time favourites comedies. If you have some exposure to Japan and Japanese culture it is all the more hilarious.

The first two reviews really cover this movie extremely well so I will not say much more. I too watched it on an Air Canada flight (YYZ-NRT), in my case on June 30th. I am sure that I was disturbing the neighbouring passengers with my outbursts of laughter. Unfortunately it is not on the play list for my return to Canada. I'm hoping that a subtitled version will show up in Canada or I may eventually have to purchase the extremely expensive (75$CDN) BluRay version which releases August 3 here in Japan.

As in most Japanese comedies I have seen, the characters are exaggerated, but in this case not beyond the reasonable, preserving a real human touch. It was especially refreshing to have an elderly man as the main character. Someone that family and others don't quite take seriously, not really paying attention to what he says. One of my favourite tiny moments is when he tries to give away what he is doing - that short scene is so true to life. I still chuckle when I think of it. I started telling my wife and son about this movie and they wanted to hear more and more about it, laughing all the time as I remembered more and more scenes.

Highly recommended - a great laugh-out-loud comedy with some heart.

I had the chance to watch the brand new Japanese comedy movie "Robo G" on an Air Canada flight a couple of days ago and I quite enjoyed this movie. Let's cite the negative things first as there aren't too many. The movie has a couple of lengths towards the middle of the film. Some jokes work very well while other ones seem a little bit too generic to get a laugh. Another bad point is the rather predictable story that offers nothing truly interesting.

The strong points of the movie are its sympathetic and humorous moments in many hilarious slapstick situations when the brand new robot suddenly reveals a couple of weird abilities that put a lot of pressure on the untalented and somewhat lazy creators who have many challenges to hide their biggest secret and make the world believe that their robot is a real one and not only a disguised human. This scenario is nothing original but keeps the entertainment on a high until the very end.

Another big point is the good good acting. The young Japanese star Yuriko Yoshitaka is not only charming and beautiful but also a charismatic actress that plays the role of a somewhat hyperactive and naive but also very smart student. The Japanese actor Mickey Curtis plays a rather unusual and stubborn senior movie hero who slips into the costume of a robot and suddenly gets a star out of his boring and lonesome life as. Next to many superhero movies with young actors and many computer simulations or special effects, his acting is quite refreshing and gives the whole thing a very human and authentic touch. This idea is an interesting alternative to other very human robot movies such as "Short Circuit" or "Wall-E" and quite innovating from that point of view even if the mentioned movies are still more philosophical and touching.

The movie also shows some subtle criticism concerning the Japanese society by portraying an old and lonely man left by his wife who is not quite appreciated and sometimes even ignored by his old friends and his family. His story is touching and quite sad as he tries a lot to get not popular on television but especially within his very own family that doesn't care much about his emotions, his energy and his great acting skills. This side story of the old masked hero creates many funny but also sad moments all along this flick.

In the end, this is a very different kind of your usual robot movie that convinces with a solid acting and a couple of good ideas. On the other side, many lengths and the rather predictable ending rate down this flick that could have hit harder and have been even more innovating at some points. It's certainly a good watch once one DVD or even in your local movie theatre but I would not directly recommend a purchase of this movie.

Ota, Kobayashi and Nagai are three workers at an electrical company which normally makes vacuum cleaners and the like; their boss assigns them to make a robot to enter into a robotics show, more as an advertisement for his company than anything else. The hapless workers are able to come up with a robotic-looking suit, but can't make it do anything and with less than a week to go, they're in despair when after spilling a soft drink on the computer keyboard, the suit goes haywire and leaps out of a window, shattering into its component parts and nothing more. The three have no choice, really, but to advertise for an actor to wear the suit, the primary requirement being that the person have the proper measurements to fit the suit. Their first choice, unfortunately, turns out to be allergic to metal and so they turn to their second pick, the elderly Suzuki (Shinjiro Igarashi aka Mickey Curtis, a one-time real-life rock star), who has recently retired and has nothing to do. Suzuki's family tunes him out, the caregivers and other clients at a senior centre think he's getting senile, and this one-time-only gig will give him something to do. But while at the exhibition, he dazzles the crowd with his antics and when he saves a spectator from a falling pole, well, he's a hero and everybody wants him. But how long can our three researchers keep up the pretence, and how much can they control the increasingly undependable Suzuki, particularly since the young woman he saved has become increasingly enthusiastic about this "new robot"? This is a very funny film that manages to skewer geekdom while celebrating it. One of the best scenes has our trio giving a "lecture" to some college students in which various kids ask how they managed to get the robot to be able to do this and that; they cleverly turn the question around, asking what the students think they did, and busily take notes as the students proceed to explain how to build a robot - that scene alone is priceless! There are no real bad guys here, and nothing terrible happens to anybody, but the sheer premise of the film sets the audience to laughing from almost the first minute, and as for the ending, well, let's just say it was unexpected! Good fun, and worth looking for!

Kimura Elctrical Company is a consumer electronics firm that developed an interest in autonomous robotics, and gave its three man research department - Oata (Chan Kawai), Kobayashi (Gaku Hamada) and Nagai (Junya Kawashima) - some 3 months to create something miraculous. It's about 1 week to go live and demonstrate their newest robot product at the robotics expo, but within the first five minutes of the story, all their hard work went up in smoke and out the window, literally. To salvage the company and their careers, the trio hatch a desperate plot, and that's to get a human person dress up as their New Shiokaze creation, so that they can get through what was thought to be a one-time demo, to buy time while they create another prototype. Think of it like Iron Man, but without the bells and whistles weaponry.

In a departure from the usual Shinobu Yaguchi film, the central protagonist is not a young adult, but a senior citizen. Suzuki (Mickey Curtis) is a retiree and finds it extremely boring to be doing precisely nothing, in a routine he would like to break out of. Coupled with the desire to be the centre of attraction amongst his peers and family, he responds to a classifieds looking for anyone willing to get into a mascot suit, with a handsome paycheck for effort provided they turn up for auditions and fit precisely into the physical measurements provided. A hilarious Yaguchi-ish comedic sequence ensues, and it's not before long our elderly gentleman, hard of hearing, would be selected through a comedy of errors.

The story moves at breakneck speed with Suzuki breathing life into New Shiokaze, and to the horror of its creators, decided to take things into his own hand to give New Shiokaze unbelievable qualities very much like a human, which the expo crowd and media herald as Kimura Electrical's breakthrough in the field of robotics. Fame and popularity soon follow, much to the headache of Oata, Kobayashi and Nagai, when their robot/Suzuki saves Sasaki Yoko (Yuriko Yoshitaka) at the expo from a falling beam, propelling the robot into overnight stardom with multiple requests for more appearances country wide, that Kimura Electric's CEO (Takehiko Ono) is adamant that they follow through. So Suzuki gets on the payroll on the sly, known only to its 3 creators, as the deceit becomes bigger, with more cover up and the spinning of bigger and more lies to cover up the previous, especially when Suzuki begins to make demands, and finds a new career of sorts.

An expanded role goes to Yuriko Yoshitaka's Sasaki, as the girl who coincidentally is a robotic freak, being one of the brightest prospects in her school, and given her new found fame, made it sure that New Shiokaze makes it to her school for a presentation. Here's where Shinobu Yaguchi's theme of youth shines, especially when it's that inevitable pointed message that the young almost always have that spark of creativity and innovation that stuffy corporations should choose to listen to, rather than to shut them out entirely, with the three engineers finding enlightenment amongst the discussion to shore up their own shortcomings and to help accelerate a replacement, with Suzuki behaving more and more erratic, though lending good humour for any audience with his zany antics when in costume.

And Shinobu Yaguchi found a perfect balance in keeping the focus on both the young with the 3 engineers being cast in the classical, perfect mold of zero to hero, and that about the elderly and retirement, where there are always some who are not yet ready to lead an inactive life, feeling bored being cooped up all the time doing nothing and with no aim, and are constantly seeking anything to prove their usefulness and obtain at least some form of attention. This constant tussle between the two groups, with comedy thrown in, made Robo- G a lot more than just another robot film and provides for plenty of humanity, and even philosophical leanings about man and machine if you so decide to dig deeper.

With a premise built on deceit, it opens up tense moments where a nosey parker reporter (Tomoko Tabata) is always on the brink of exposing the entire plot, and bring down everyone involved in the game with some serious repercussions. The last act centered around a press conference brings everything together one full circle, and again the writer-director shows his knack for creating feel good films that are never saccharine sweet, but just treated just right to provide that satisfying feel of an entertaining film that's planned to perfection. It's like a jigsaw, with everything tightly fitting, and falling into place without a hitch, although during the post screening Q&A he had categorically stated that there will be no follow up film to this.

Stay tuned during the end credits roll, because the theme song Mr Roboto whose music and lyrics are by Dennis De Young, is extremely catchy and will grow into a earworm. In fact I like this film so much I just had to re-watch it again at the HKIFF media centre, because I'm not sure when the next opportunity will be, at least for months before the DVD will be out. So wherever you are, if Robo-G comes visiting, be sure you make a beeline and head out to get tickets for this Shinobu Yaguchi crowd pleaser, and be prepared to laugh and be touched by the excellent filmmaking and storytelling. Definitely highly recommended, and one of my favourites of the year thus far! Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto!