Review of Swing Girls (2004) by Greg L — 23 Sep 2012
The nicest thing I can say about this is that it is not literally the worst movie I've ever seen, though it's pretty close. The second nicest thing I can say is that the Japanese market Region 2 DVD contains English subtitles, though unfortunately that robbed me of the excuse that I was simply not familiar enough with their accent when the movie turned out to make virtually no sense at all.
Everyone is constantly a terrible human being to everyone else, in the fashion of a 1990s sitcom. There are no actual characters; there are only lazy-Japanese-writer stock high school caricatures and clichà (C)s. Virtually nothing happens for any reason at all other than "because the script calls for it to," and a number of storylines are simply abandoned, presumably because the scriptwriter simply forgot about them. It is a movie that utterly lacks denouement, with credits rolling literally at the climactic scene. Imagine a few fairly unexperienced college students writing and putting on a stage play, except for cameras, if you want an idea of the level of quality we're talking about.
Most of the alleged comedy comes largely from "they're from up north, so they talk funny," with no actual humor involved (with perhaps two major exceptions: one being legitimately well delivered, the other being physical comedy so unimaginably inept that I had to rewind the movie simply to see it again). Most of the time, everyone just says horrible things at everyone else, and we are supposed to laugh at this for some reason.
Even the soundtrack was a massive disappointment, with there being precious little actual big band jazz played during the movie (despite the name and premise).
I could only recommend this movie to someone for one of two reasons:
1. "It is the second piece of pop culture to contain the song 'Mexican Flyer,' and explicitly references the first.".
2. "It is a movie so unthinkably bad that you absolutely must see it for yourself, because it's often hilarious but never for the right reasons.".
This review of Swing Girls (2004) was written by Greg L on 23 Sep 2012.
Swing Girls has generally received positive reviews.
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