Boys Over Flowers The Movie
Yasuharu Ishii

The story: Tsukasa Domyoji, the rich young head of a business conglomerate, announces that he will be marrying Tsukushi Makino in the spring. But the engagement gift of a bejewelled tiara, a Domyoji heirloom, is stolen. In order not to jeopardise the wedding, the two decide to recover it on their own.
Boys Over Flowers is the best-selling shojo (young girl) manga of all time in Japan. It has been the source material for various adaptations, including the Taiwanese version Meteor Garden, which launched the career of the F4 pop idols.
A little background here as the movie picks up where the second season of the Japanese live-action TV series left off, with the cast reprising their roles on the big screen.
Tsukushi Makino (TV actress Mao Inoue) attends a high school for the privileged and finds herself a fish out of water given her lower-class background.
Worse, she crosses the path of F4, the ruling clique of four guys who can make life hell for anyone they choose. But she eventually falls for Tsukasa Domyoji (Jun Matsumoto, member of popular boyband Arashi), the leader of F4, and at the end of Season 2, says yes when he proposes.
There was talk at first of a third season but the producers chose to wrap up the series with a movie instead.
The problem, as with such jumps from the small screen to the big, is how to tell a story that would engage new fans as well as satisfy old ones. Unfortunately, there is little here for the former and only slightly more for the latter.
The contrived story has Makino and Domyoji searching for a stolen tiara so that they can learn about the true meaning of love. The plot is simply an excuse to move them to exotic locations such as Las Vegas, Hong Kong and an island supposedly in the South Seas, to fill up the two-hour-plus running time.
Matsumoto as the arrogant and hot-headed Domyoji and Inoue as the plucky yet vulnerable Makino share some chemistry, but the bickering grows tedious and the lessons learnt are too pat. The issue of class differences is raised and then dismissed in throwaway lines.
To be sure, one is not expecting a serious dissection of social issues here, but perhaps this would have worked better as a two-part TV series finale instead.
Released in Japan in June, distributor Toho expects the film to gross over 10 billion yen (S$130 million), which would make it one of the top-grossing domestic movies of the year.
I guess Boys still rule in Japan.
(ST)