| Movie of the Month: PIKA*NCHI |
Title: PIKA*NCHI Life is Hard Dakedo Happy
Lenght: 119 minutes
Language: Japanese
Release Date: October 18, 2002
Masaki Aiba plays Shun, who is the narrator of the first movie. He's the average kid living with his father. He does okay in school has friends, and lives a very normal life.
Jun Matsumoto plays Bon, who is the rich kid in the group. He looks up to his father and hopes to move into the apartment room on the top floor of the rich building where he currently lives with his parents. Bon obviously enjoys cooking and often has a strange preference in girls.
Satoshi Ohno plays Haru, the quiet, passive character. He does things without thinking, and will follow the lead of anyone. He is very weak against women. Shun mentions that Haru is the most "unfortunate" person, for death seems to be prevalent around him.
Kazunari Ninomiya plays Takuma, the leader. He moved to Yashio (where all the boys live and are from) so he wasn't close friends with the other boys yet. In those times, the 4 boys would compare things they stole from the convenience stores as a game. Takuma impressed the group when he managed to steal mounds of condoms and cigarettes. He is now most interested in skate boarding, and is the first to do so in the suburbs of Yashio.
Sho Sakurai plays Chu, the yankee leader of the Samezu Clan. He got dismissed from school for smoking and when he chased a pervert teacher who tried to harass a girl student that Chu liked.
The 5 boys, live in Yashio, an area in Tokyo that is separated by bridges from main "Tokyo-ish" places like Harajuku.
The movies starts with them venturing to Harajuku in hopes to lose their virginities. Shun indeed meets a girl who he immediately falls in love with. Throughout the movie, they date each other, and Shun vows to enter Aoyama Gakuen University so that he could be near her when she is working as a vet. Shun does not inform anyone of his new girlfriend, and slowly begins to change into a all-study, no-play student that his friends can't relate to.
Bon on the other hand, went to Harajuku hoping to start his own booth to sell food. Although that ends in disaster when some men ruin his materials for selling in their area, later on, Bon's father tells him that he will be sent to study in a foreign place. When he announces this to his friends, they all assume he is being sent to America to study something like business so that he could be a successful business man later in his life. After a heart-warming goodbye, he realizes that he was simply being sent to live with his father's Vietnamese workers to learn how to perfect cooking Vietnamese food.
Haru was failing at flirting with girls until he is approached by older woman to buy things like expensive paintings. Their, uhm, "womanly features" (lol) seduce Haru into buying whatever they want, and instead of going home with a girlfriend, he goes home with a useless dolphin painting. Later, while going home, he sees a young girl who is moving into the Yashio area. He falls in love and attempts to make contact with her through his newspaper route job. Instead, he perks the interest of the girl's mother.
Takuma, an avid skateboarder, is confronted by another skateboarder while in Harajuku. Takuma is dumbfounded by this other skateboarder's skills which far surpass his own. He asks the other to wait 3 months, and then they shall have a face off. The other skateboarder laughs off the challenge, saying that he will be in California where all the world's greatest skateboarders would be gathering.
Lastly, Chu is off trying to "engrave his soul into the ground" as he states, by doing crazy stunts like bashing his head through rock plates and doing stints with a ring of fire.
Shun's secret girlfriend is revealed but he still insists on working hard to go to Aoyama Gakuen, Bon has started to enjoy cooking more and more, Haru ends up in a relationship with that girl's mother and is the first to lose his virginity (Actually, I think he was the only one in the movie?), Chu learns the deeper meaning of his clan and being a yankee, and Takuma's father, who had been distraught throughout the movie to pay off debts and deal with his wife leaving him, hangs himself.
Just before they realize that Takuma's father has killed himself, as a tribute to their friendship, Shun instigates an attack on a boat which carries salarymen who party with paid hostesses and drink and tie their necktires around their heads. In the beginning of the movie, the five boys had stated that they would never become like those adults who lived so carelessly and acted like fools, hence the boys' concern for Shun when they realized that Shun wanted to go to a good college and probably become a salaryman. Shun, wanting to prove to the others that even if he were to attend college, he wouldn't become like those adults, he plans out an anonymous attack on a random boat at night. Chaos ensues as the four other boys join in to destroy the boat. Within this event, Shun learns that his girlfriend was one of the hostesses present. Heartbroken, he dumps her, and then literally, into the sea with the others, although the girl was probably too confused to realize.
After the five have arrived at Takuma's home and discovered Takuma's father, they all stay with Takuma as support, even though everyone else insist that Shun go home and rest since his entrance exam for Aogaku is tomorrow. Shun says it doesn't matter anymore because his girlfriend that he was trying to impress was a phony who had such a job. The others still want Shun to get into college, to represent them, as the rest of them haven't progressed in life since junior high. Only Shun had worked hard for a goal and neared the end, and he was their only hope.
Simply, this movie is about friendship.
Actor: Jun Matsumoto
Actor: Kazunari Ninomiya
Actor: Masaki Aiba
Actor: Satoshi Ohno
Actor: Sho Sakurai
Movie: PIKA**NCHI Life is Hard dakara Happy
Movie: PIKA**NCHI DOUBLE Life is Hard dakara Happy
AllDramaFanatic
Follow the link and download the three different files. You wil have to splice the files together. If you aren't sure on how to do it, just go to the FAQ page for links and such.
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