Crows Zero

Compared to Blue Spring, the wildly opposite (and inferior) interpretation of this subgenre. Teenagers with outrageous physical capabilities duke it out for control of the school. One side's leader earns the council of a pushover rat yakuza, the other is distracted by his best friend's likely-deadly brain disease. In the end, amidst a drawn-out, hot-blooded battle, brotherhood and honor win out. It's idealistic in the opposite way that Blue Springs is pessimistic. It's also commercial in all the ways that film is pointedly anti-commercial, rather overly concerned with narrative and plotting where Blue Springs rejects narrative and plot. But it sort of works out, with Tokio and Ken forming uneasy parallels to one another as the seemingly-doomed counterparts to Genji and Serizawa respectively. In fact, the overplotted nature of the film ends up bringing some of my favorite moments, such as the aftermath of the disastrous group date, or the letter Ken leaves for Genji. But because of this, there are a vast range of characters, largely on Serizawa's side, who feel underdeveloped in the film because there was no 15-minute side plot dedicated to them. There's a lot of rock and roll, but I don't think the soundtrack is always perfectly managed, and during the final fight in particular the soundtrack sometimes detracts from the scene rather than adding to it. But there's usually nothing to complain about when it comes to the soundtrack. Action scenes usually have good context, and typically do something that's interesting when we lose context. Of course, there are limits to how awesome and cool it can possibly be when every fight is the same type of knockdown brawl. Nothing intricate in the action itself, but the scale of the action scenes is always good, and our leads are just cool enough to make a drawn-out, muddy brawl interesting. (I'm aware that Toyoda, who made Blue Spring, made the third film in this series, Crows Explode, and that nobody likes Crows Explode much. I'm rewatching the first two Crows movies, so we'll see if I like it when I get to it.) "Don't take it personally."