Breezy cross-cultural rom-com with a New York rocker falling in love and working her way into the Tokyo pop music scene. The 
cinematic equivalent of a Happy Face card with music and lightweight issues:

“Why do you have to be so Japanese about everything?”

“People are different in Japan goddam it !!”

Wish I had more than two eyeballs to help fully devour the film’s ravishing visuals. More of a sensory feast than emotionally resonate narrative. The opening martial arts brawl in the rain made my brain explode !! In a good way…

More of a people and place and time exploration than a story. Languid and lingering cinema with a fabulous, rural, close to 40-minute tracking shot.

Bonkers DIY medley of genres (documentary, autobiography, travelogue, satire, experimental, fantasy) and themes (cultural, anti-colonial, consumerism, progress) hosted by filmmaker, naive dreamer, and jeepney driver Kidlat Tahimik. As Voice of America feeds his obsession with the United States Space Program, Kidlat leaves his Philippine village and Presidency of his youth Wernher von Braun Fan Club (and vivid memory of crude country circumcisions!!) in search of the proverbial American Dream.

“Kidlat, why do you admire America so much?”

“Because in America, I could become an astronaut. Here I’m only a jeepney driver.”