Hana to Arisu (2004) Reviews

This movie looked like six episodes of a female oriented, manga based TV show that were combined and packaged as a film. The target audience appears to be adolescent females. The premise of the film has a "day in the life of" theme involving a small group of high school students. While the storyline did provide a few funny moments, it was like watching an after school special with ballet oriented piano and violin music playing in the background. And even though the movie was about two hours and fifteen minutes long, the storyline still managed to produce a few dead end plot points. A notable bright spot was the fine acting performances by Annie Suzuki and Yu Aoi. The audio is in stereo. As for extras, there's a trailer for the movie and a "Filming H&A: Behind the Scenes" feature (1:04:30 hours). Lightly recommended.
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The synopsis for this movie is all wrong. Arisu never dated anyone for the entire duration of the film. She had a crush on a guy who was always seen with Masa and told Hana she could "have his friend." Hana ended up developing a crush on Masa and began watching him and taking pictures of him and joined a comedy club that he belonged to. Hana is the one who saw Masa hit his head and told him he had amnesia so she could be with him. Arisu did realize she started to have feelings for Masa, but only because Hana asked her to pretend that they had dated before and to "give him memories." Other than the synopsis being incredibly off, the movie was enjoyable ^_^ Very strange and random in parts, but all-in-all, I enjoyed it. -Elaine (Yurissa M.'s sister-in-law)
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