Young Thugs: Nostalgia 1988
Kishiwada shônen gurentai: Bôkyô (1998)
1h 34min | Comedy, Drama | 26 September 1998 (Japan)
User review:
This was a pleasant surprise. As a sort of prequel to the film Young Thugs: Innocent Blood, which was a memorable but disjointed tale of teenage waste and wanton self-destruction, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But what Takashi Miike delivered was a rather sweet elegy to youth, though still packaged as a “crime movie” on the cover. It’s really not that at all, but more like Miike’s Radio Days, or a form of Stand by Me (though Radio Days came more to mind, especially as it deals more with sometimes-funny sometimes-not family dysfunction). It follows two of the characters from the first film, Riichi (mostly Richii as I could tell) and Isami, as they meet as adolescents and become friends, collaborating on a model of the Apollo 11 pod.
