Swing Girls

I fell in love with this movie 5 minutes in. I loved everything about the movie, the acting was great, the directing and pacing were perfect and the music brought it all home. This is a nearly perfect film. Too bad its so hard to get a hold of.

Hilarious. Such a joyous band of Japanese high school girls (and a boy) just trying to have fun playing jazz. The excitement and humor easily ooze out of the screen and every scene just gets it right. Never really loses its pace nor does it burden itself with usual cliches of movies like this. A fun ride that I would take again and again.

So maybe it doesn't have the dramatic depth or striking cinematography of something like Sound! Euphonium, but it has the same overwhelming love for music and youth. And how great is it that the actors actually learned their instruments during filming. Maybe I'm rating it a bit too high but this is about as much fun as you can have with film. "There are two types of people in this world, those who swing and those who don't"

Really, really silly and cutesy, to the point where it almost comes across as a parody of this type of Japanese humor, but there's not really any sense of insincerity or mocking and it's entirely too fun and wholesome not to love. For anyone who found the sense of humor off-putting and wants a more subdued (and in my opinion much better) take on a very similar story, I would recommend Nobuhiro Yamashita's 'Linda Linda Linda.'

Charming and good fun. The fact that the performances are authentic makes me look at the film in a whole new light; that really is incredibly impressive. Also, no wonder Nodame and Stresemann went on to become Nodame and Stresemann--they're great fun in this.