Love & Pop

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Love & Pop
Directed by	Hideaki Anno
Produced by	Toshimichi Otsuki
Written by	Hideaki Anno Akio Satsukawa
Starring	Asumi Miwa Kirari Hirono Kudō Yukie Nakama
Running time	110 minutes
Language	Japanese
IMDb profile

Love & Pop (ラブ&ポップ Rabu & Poppu) is director Hideaki Anno's first live action film, an adaptation of Ryu Murakami's novel, Topaz II. It somewhat follows the film Tokyo Decadence, an adaptation of Topaz I filmed by Murakami himself. Love & Pop was filmed almost entirely on hand-held digital cameras, and contains some very unusual camera work, including many different mounted camera positions, such as on a model train riding on tracks. The film also flips from widescreen to 4:3 aspect, distorts (with effects such as a fisheye lens), confuses, and makes use of overlays stacked in layers to convey the character's emotions. Some people may think this style is innovative, while others may find it amateurish. Others see it as a combination of the two, a purposeful "amateurism" to make the film more "real", in a partial cinéma vérité style.

The film follows four Japanese high school girls who engage in enjo kosai, or compensated dating. This is a practice in Japan where older businessmen pay teenage girls for prostitution, or more commonly, to simply hang out with them. The movie is also a credible coming-of-age story. The main character, Hiromi, does not have the direction in life that her friends already have. Hiromi's friends were going to buy Hiromi a ring, but Hiromi refuses to take all the money because she doesn't want her friends to be jealous. Hiromi goes on dates by herself to get money for the ring. She gets in over her head, as the brilliant cameo by Tadanobu Asano as "Captain E.O." shows. Hiromi falls too far into the misogynistic world of enjo-kosai because she is trying to hold onto a "friends forever" vision of the past. She can't move forward.

An official English DVD was released in 2004 by Kino on Video.