The (Live) Power of Rock and Roll

Beck was a great manga/anime series, so much so that I decided to write about it. When I heard that they were going to reimagine the series as a live action film, I was quite the excited moviegoer. Was it as good as advertised? Yes, actually.

For those not in the know, Beck is the story of a normal boy, Yukio "Koyuki" Tanaka, who by chance gets involved in a rock band, discovering himself and life and love in the process. Add in a legendary guitar, murderous music producers and all kinds of ridiculous but entertaining elements and you have this anime.

The movie adaptation loses a lot of elements from both the anime and manga, and that's not really surprising given the movie's limited running time. They do keep a lot of the basic stuff, such as the whole Lucille thing, the days Koyuki spends in school (although there is no Beatles awesomeness) and the whole crazy rock festival at the end. There is one element I'd like to discuss about the movie, however.

In the manga, Yukio is said to have an amazing singing voice. The anime depicts this by using an actual rock singer sing the songs in Beck in sometimes ridiculous Engrish. The movie however takes this to a different extreme: it does not feature Yukio singing AT ALL. Instead we see reaction shots of people mesmerized by his mindblowing singing. I'm not gonna lie, I don't like that decision one bit. I guess it's cheaper than recording a song and hiring a decent guy to sing a song.

Ray and Maho are portrayed by Hiro Mizushima and Shiori Kutsuna respectively; both are surprisingly fluent English speakers, but there's a bit of a problem. While Mizushima speaks mostly unaccented English (he learned the language as a child in an international school in Europe) Shiori Kutsuna grew up in Australia and has an obvious Aussie accent. To non-English speakers this is fine, but to someone like me... (._.)

It's an OK movie, but it's nothing I'd really recommend unless you are a fan of the series. In fact, see the anime and the manga (which has recently finished!) instead.