What a waste of my time!!!

Too much of everything

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Vital contains a single scene of such true, deep, tearjerking, aching love that despite all of its sleepy subtleties, it is truly great cinema. This scene makes you cry and relate to it, and only one who's ever been in deep, heavy, painful love with someone can watch it and understand what I mean. It's such stirring drama in one shot lasting about 5 minutes between two people, and you want that scene to last forever. I haven't felt any kind of emotion like that from a movie in God knows how long.There isn't much else to say about this film. Somehow, Tsukamoto has made a film so powerful based on one scene that is more emotional and moving than any work I've seen in nearly a year from many much much less dry filmmakers.

Not being the biggest fan of Shinya Tsukamoto's acclaimed cult favorites "Tetsuo" & "Tetsuo II", I was rather careful with my anticipations towards "Vital"; of which the DVD-box announces it as the director's latest masterpiece. Well it ain't no masterpiece, but it's definitely a compelling and suspense-packed thriller that I liked a whole lot better than the boisterous Tetsuo-films. Especially the basic story ideas are very ingenious and even original! The plot centers on the young Hiroshi Takagi who slowly recovers from a dramatic car accident in which his lost his whole memory and youthful spirit. The sight of a book about surgery suddenly makes him decide to study medicines, where he becomes somewhat of a strange outcast but with a natural talent to dissect corpses. Bit by bit his memory returns and Hiroshi comes to the painful establishment that he's performing an autopsy on his former girlfriend Ryôko, who died in the same accident and put her body at the disposal of the medical faculty. My main problem with "Vital" was that it quickly got tedious once Hiroshi realizes whose corpse he hacks up and - especially near the end - Tsukamoto inserts a lot of irrelevant dream sequences and images of scenic beauty. It actually would be a lot more effective and horrific as a short movie, I think. It's a fairly short film now (86 min.) but it would have been so much better as a part of trilogy like, say, "Three…Extremes" and exclusively focusing on Hiroshi's amnesia. Tsukamoto is clearly a gifted director who also knows a thing or two about cinematography. "Vital" is often beautiful to look at and loaded with symbolism. Worth watching.

After a tragic car accident where his girlfriend Ryôko Ooyama (Nami Tsukamoto) died, Hiroshi Takagi (Tadanobu Asano) suffers amnesia with his memories completely blanked. When he sees a book about dissection, he decides to join the medical school with the support of his parents. In the dissection class, his group participates of the autopsy of a young woman, and while cutting apart the tissue, he partially recalls his accident. Later, when he sees a tattoo in the arm of the corpse, he discloses that she was his girlfriend and becomes obsessed to go further in the examination of the body.This is the first work of director Shinya Tsukamoto that I have had the chance to watch, and I liked very much what I saw. This weird, original and fascinating story is disclosed in an adequate pace and supported by wonderful work of camera and lighting. The central lead cast trio, with Tadanobu Asano, Nami Tsukamoto and Kiki, together with the supportive cast, have also great performances. I intend to see this movie again in a near future, since I saw a DVD spoken in Japanese with English subtitles and therefore I may have missed details on the magnificent image. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Not Available"

This movie was a strange experience, I started watching what I thought was a horror movie and ended up watching a tough "hard to swallow drama".This movie should get, at least, 7 stars for originality! I never saw anything like it. The idea was genuine, the characters were creative and the set was very appropriate and perfectly matched every scene. It has a great photography, high quality images with nice shooting angles helping and transmitting the feelings and emotions connected with each character. From the technical point of view the only inferior element was the soundtrack, which didn't quite caught my ear.However, the plot and its progression is a total different subject! I had a hard time understanding where the flashbacks ended and started and this movie has lots of them! Then, the main character's individuality was very peculiar, I mean, too peculiar, it just turned my head around and made it very hard to understand what was going on, what was he feeling and, thus, where the movie was going... Depressive thoughts and activities are splattered all over the movie, the main character has a hard time distinguishing reality, imagination, memories and dreams, and so do we...From a subjective point of view, the movies theme was too depressing and it's just not my style. From an objective point of view, the plot could have been delivered in a more proper way.In spite of all flaws, the movie did entertain me and I couldn't leave my sofa until I knew how this confusing and strange movie would end.