Doris Dorrie's didactic comedy about two German brothers on a trek to a Buddhist monastery outside Tokyo. Over and above the subject matter, however, it is yet another DV demo with a bland, washed-out, homogenized image that appears encased somehow in the skin of a bratwurst. (The lovely -- and misleading -- opening shots of illuminated paper lanterns in a nocturnal snowscape are too dark to reveal the problems.) The additional hand-held tremors and wide-angle bulges are par for the course. And all the drawbacks are exacerbated in the lengthy stretches when we are looking, together with one of the characters, through the viewfinder of a pocket-sized camcorder, with brackets at all four corners of the picture, a time-code in the upper left, and a red dot in the lower right. Scattered sparsely throughout are some interesting touristic observations of Japan, which might pass muster in Doris Dorrie's living room as My Vacation Video. With Uwe Ochsenknecht and Gustav Peter Wohler. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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