Mabudachi (2001) User Reviews

It's not easy growing up in a world of belittling adults.

[gondwana · 9/10 · 26 April 2002]

'Bad Company' lets us be witnesses of a few days out of a few boys lifes in Japan in the 80's. Every day they have to write down their thaughts and feelings in their diary. This helps us understand the way they experience life and what emotions guide them. The hard japanese mentality, almost designed to make obeident and submissive employees out of them, doesn't have consideration for their youth and envy to play and fool around. Instead of being motivated, they are driven into pilferage and lies. The pshycological training is too hard. They learnt how to write down what their 'superior'(the teacher) would like to read, but they never were given the chance to understand, enjoy nor express their feelings.

Growing up and learning is more than doing what adults would like you to become.

Bad Company... Bad Film

[elclown · 3/10 · 26 January 2003]

3 out of 10

I can't understand why this movie has such comments and ratings. I saw Mabudachi expecting it to be something else than just a boring drama, and got very disappointed.

This movie is classed as a Japanese drama about three school kids in the late 80's (even though late 90's cars go by the camera). The plot is just a giant McGuffin to criticize the fascism in the school education, and the traditional Japanese family values. However, the film isn't strong enough to cover this McGuffin, making it too obvious to be interesting and deep. It's not such a big problem of plot, but of direction. There are amazing shoots and really nice symbolic scenes through the movie, but ain't correlative with the overall film. The good scenes just seem to be attached ones with the others with 30' transitions of crappy footage, and the beautiful take s are re-shot once and again from every angle possible, making some localizations really tedious (didn't forgot to film 1" of the bridge); the contrast between dramatic scenes and slow-peaced scenes, can be used to relax the audience in order to emphasize the drama (Hana-bi, for example, uses this contrast and succeeds), but it doesn't work here.

In conclusion, the movie has a good set out, but fails when trying to develop the anecdote. As it has some nice points and a few interesting dramatic scenes it may worth a rental if you are common with Japanese cinema. However, if you are looking for somekind of good critic to the Japanese society, all Kitano movies, even Fukasaku's Battle Royale, will do far better than Bad Company.

A Nice Tale About Friendship

[Matt73 · 1 August 2002]

I'm lucky to be able to catch this movie during Singapore International Film Festival. This is one of the best movies throughout the festival.

It's about 3 high school buddies: A bully, a nice boy, and a stupid and chubby one. The story moves quite slowly, but quite impressive.

It follows their activities everyday. Stealing, skipping school, etc. The friendship keeps going strong despite of the problems and quarrels.

The movie takes an unexpected turns towards the ending. That's when their friendship is put into test.

A very nice tale of friendship. I wish they'll release it on DVD soon.