I’ve said for years that any adaptation of my favourite anime, ‘Method Boat’, is going to be terrible and pale in comparison to the original. See, the story was a tacit depiction of addiction and how it turns a man into an island, and also there were also demons and a magic pen that turned its wearer into a random piece of furniture. But mostly, it was about the tacit thing. Of course, the live-action adaptation got all of this wrong and made it about a kid helping to run an fight ring, with no punishment or repercussions at the end of the movie. He even gets the girl.
I haven’t been this disappointed since…well, last year, when they adapted ‘Toast in the Well’, that one about the landscaper who was trying to put in a rock formation for a client, and accidentally dropped his toast into what he thought was a decorative well. That’s the movie that started the demand for aggregate in Berwick, because the news leaked that the beautiful garden setup presented in the film’s opening scenes was made using many different materials from rural Australia, and it was heralded as being a film-making marvel. Unfortunately, the changes they made to the story were unacceptable and super dull. There’s a beauty to anime that cannot be represented in live-action, as I keep saying. Still, it was some very nice aggregate. Lovely use of the crushed stone. Can definitely see why the weekend after release, people flooded Berwick and Cranbourne, clamouring for a piece of this beautiful driveway paving action. It’s just going to be remembered as one of those gorgeous movies with a horrible plot, and a terrible case of adaptation-itis. I suppose the places in Cranbourne that offer driveway topping must’ve been pretty happy about the tie-in though, as well as how their product was represented on film. Product placement is just funny like that.
-Dylan