This show is a bit of a weird mix, blending old-school folklore with a modern-day BL setting. It feels like it’s trying to be both ancient and contemporary at the same time. I have to admit, the first four or five episodes really pulled me in, but unfortunately, I just couldn't stay interested as it went on. The whole supernatural plot and the folk story elements got pretty confusing after a while. Luckily, the funny back-and-forth between the characters was enough to keep me watching. The series tries to draw parallels to the legend of Bi-hyung, the Goblin King, but since I don't really know that story, I'm not even going to try to explain it. Altogether, it’s 12 episodes, and each one is about 25 to 30 minutes long. The story kicks off with Geum Bok, a guy from the countryside who moves to the big city because he wants to be an actor, but he immediately gets scammed out of his apartment. He’s stuck sleeping on the streets until he has a random run-in with a stranger who p...
The makers talk to a plethora of people in this 100 minute film. Each represents a different aspect of the hentai life — in the Japanese sense of the word, roughly denoting unconventional sexual desires or practices. We meet a butoh dancer who questions the need to classify everyone, a trans activist who writes video-game strategy books, a gay man who’s the MC of Department H, a fashion-runway party for the latex-and-rubber set, a gay erotic artist whose unapologetically sexy and explicit body-fetish drawings have made him a kind of Tom of Tokyo, a deaf lesbian who went to court with her fiancé, who was petitioning to change his legal status from female to male, and had to pioneer new sign-language characters simply to communicate to the judge some of the things they were talking about. As you can see the diversity here is crazy.
The people we meet in “Queer Japan” represent a powerful cross-section of LGBTQ life, and they make a vivid case for how wrong it is to assume that members of that community are all in the same box, or five boxes, or 50 boxes. The message of the movie isn’t merely “tolerance.” It’s more demanding and exacting: Each and every one of us - gay and straight, trans and cisgender, wild and traditional, whatever — are who we are. The movie is a plea not simply for respect but for a recognition of the existential reality of each of our identities. This documentary was very different from what I was expecting to be honest. The kind of broad spectrum that we got to see here was not something I imagined. It felt we had everyone covered except the cisgender gay male. Some of the identities were even a bit scandalous even to me. What Iw as very excite to see what the animation creator and drawings done for 'My Husband's brother, a famous manga and one of my favorite series based on the book. I can see how and why this documentary is a very important step in understanding many aspects and semantic issues of “gay” or “queer” becoming “LGBTQIA+”. But for some odd reason, it failed to keep my attention focussed on the proceedings, as much as I wanted to watch it. (4/10)
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