One Paragraph Reviews: Waters (一段落レビュー：ウォーターズ)

And thus begins a new saga (which sounds much better than a series, really) in which Edo covers any number of films and dramas in the span of one paragraph (or two, I have to give myself some leeway here, lest the whole plan collapse in upon itself before its even begun). Think of it not as exchanging depth for breadth, but rather as an intriguing art form particularly suited to the blogging medium and our modern fast-paced culture, so focused on the here-and-now and all that instant gratuity nonsense.

Oh ho, I hear you cry, art form my hiney. What is this, but a simple ruse by which Edo may exert as little effort as possible in order to produce a wide and theoretically reader-enticing array of what will inevitably turn out to be nothing more than pure and utter drivel best crammed into some lost corner of cyberspace, or, indeed, never written at all, instead of brazenly placed upon this blog in front of the unwitting and entirely unsuspecting eye of the casual reader? Oh ho, a clever ruse sir, but I will not be taken in!

... I hear you cry. You should probably speak with someone about that nasty habit of run-on sentences you appear to be developing. Left unchecked, I hear such conditions can escalate quite rapidly.

In any case, you are, needlessly verbose or no, quite wrong. While this project is being undertaken in an attempt to cover a wider array of media than I have been able to up to the present time, it is also meant to be an exercise in succinct writing. After all, as brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes...

Come to think of it, grandiloquence does sort of get out on a loophole, doesn't it? Provided it isn't tedious, of course, and that's really all dependent on who you ask... or who you don't, in fact, and considering the fact that I, as a rule, don't ever ask anyone when t comes to the contents of this blog, it stands to reason that...

(Yes, yes, Edo, you've taken this joke far enough. Get on with it already.)


(...there's a reason I used one of Polonius's speeches to audition for Hamlet, you know.)


All cheap and over-extended jokes aside, this is, in actuality, a sort of exercise for myself. As many of you may (or may not have) noticed, I am often a bit too... verbose for my own good, and while I can produce works limited by quite short page or word counts, such productions require a great deal of editing on my part. Detailed length has always come easier to me than succinct fact.

Ergo, a challenge. Review things in a paragraph (or two, if I just can't help myself, plus a nice line of conclusion drawing it all together), combating my deeply ingrained tendency towards loquaciousness and yet at the same time covering all the most basic and fundamental points of that which is being discussed. From my perspective, anyway.

Look, it's a personal blog. If you want objective, pick up your geometry text book.

(... I'm not sure, and I pointedly avoided most topics which tend to be assumed objective by the unassuming public such as history and literature textbooks, but are any groundbreaking yet controversial advances being made in the field of radii and hypotenuses...?)


Thus, without further ado, here is today's review. (Except for this rhyme, for which we make time.)

ウォーターズ (Waters)

A movie that is, on the surface, nothing more than a comedy that forays into the life of a ragtag bunch of men (ranging from young to... well, less young) who wind up forced into the hosting business, for one reason or another. Oh, if only. Our leading men are all led to one particular host club, which requires a start-up investment from its employees due to its current state of dilapidation. While all the characters theoretically have their own convoluted back-stories, the only ones the movie really cares about are those of Oguri Shun and his (potential) love interest because, well, they're the pretty ones. Twists in the story (confusing as it may be) are inevitable, and the movie rounds itself off with some casual misogyny involving the unfortunate implications underlying the characterization of women with money and power (because men in those same positions are absolute paragons of virtue).


In Conclusion: Don't bother, unless you really like Oguri Shun and aren't too hip with that whole "satisfying ending" idea.

This is Edo, signing off whilst realizing that she may have to ignore some textbook rules about paragraph construction in order to give this series any chance at success.

(Yes, yes, I know this is rather late... The funny thing is, I had it almost completely written on Monday, and it was just the actual posting that kept slipping my mind... Oh, well. Consider it a rather mildly cautionary tale against procrastination.)