LINDA LINDA LINDA (2005) ★

Ah, high school: you can barely stay awake, your best friend won't talk to you, a boy spotted you at the incinerator and now thinks he's in love, and your band sucks. On the up side—sometimes your band is good! (Let's hear it for punk.) OK, even if you add in a thematic strand about Japanese/Korean cultural exchange, this looks on paper like a pretty featherweight story, and, truth be told, the finished product doesn't roll out many surprises or invest the characters with unexpected depths. But director Nobuhiro Yamashita and screenwriter Kōsuke Mukai nail both the large arc and the small, offbeat moments with a steady, unshowy craftsmanship, and, perhaps more importantly, they approach the material with patience (for instance: we watch the girls in the band practice many times, improving slowly, in long takes, instead of rushing through the process via the short cut of a "training montage"). The joys of the film thus have space and time to accrue slowly and quietly, and the final result has retained the faint air of a masterpiece for twenty-plus years.

A ★★★★½ review of Linda Linda Linda (2005)

Ah, high school: you can barely stay awake, your best friend won’t talk to you, a boy spotted you at the incinerator and now thinks he’s in love, and your band sucks. On the up side—sometimes your band is good! (Let’s hear it for punk.) OK, even if you add in a thematic strand about Japanese/Korean cultural exchange, this looks on paper like a pretty featherweight story, and, truth be told, the finished product doesn’t roll out many surprises or invest the characters with unexpected depths. But director Nobuhiro Yamashita and screenwriter Kōsuke Mukai nail both the large arc and

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