Simply A Masterpiece

Sadly Over-hyped

Fantastic!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

While not an entirely wasted opportunity, Liza the Fox-Fairy doesn't generate much laughs, and its half-witted premise is thrown at the audience so carelessly that title character's hardships at the hands of a vengeful Japanese pop star ghost fail to make anyone care too much what happens next.Most of the runtime is spent on going through all the people that need to die to push Liza over the edge, which understandably gets quite repetitive. Neither the deaths or the characters show any screen writing genius.The execution itself is well-thought and careful, and the team behind the production seems to have felt all the way they are making a wonderful movie. It always lifts a bad movie when one sees people trying hard, even if they don't really succeed.

All in all, a movie can be enjoyed or not. There are definitely good ones, definitely bad ones, and there's middle ground. Liza the Fox-Fairy is middle ground. I'd say it's exactly on the boundary, but it's a little bit on the bad side. I found it very boring and dull, despite its technical perks.The idea of an alternative Hungary in the 1970s presents an interesting idea itself, but it's not taking the movie all the way. The characters are decent, and so are the artists portraying them. Gábor Reviczky as the police chief is however just as dull as the movie itself. The plot has a lot to offer, but fails to deliver. There are very good elements and moments in this movie, but it never becomes a whole. It also fails to deliver the usual playfulness of Hungarian movies, the feeling of "a little bit yellow, a little bit sour, but still ours". It's a movie from East Europe not for East Europeans, but too East European for the rest of the word.I seriously don't understand the hype about this one. I could not enjoy it. There is no deeper meaning, nothing under a thin (or not so thin) layer of cultural snobbism. Tension is nonexistent, there is no reason to wait for the next scene. It all goes nowhere.At the end of the day, I am sorry for every minute I spent with this movie. It is exactly like a Mekk Burger with a plastic clown. Also, the outcome is very obvious when the Sergeant enters the plot. (Who is actually an Ensign in the Hungarian original - the English subtitle is very poor.)

Finally a Hungarian movie on an international level.If you like movies made by Wes Anderson, you will like this too.A very strange story about a naive girl, who is looking for the love of her life, put in scene beautifully.Normally I don't like Hungarian movies, because all of them still try to solve the trauma caused by the communists, but Liza is different.Although the set design reminds me to the communistic design of the 70's, it fits the story completely and doesn't lessen the experience. Rather the opposite.If you have the chance to watch it, you have to!

This movie starts like a fairy-tale, and retains this style throughout: Liza is a simple young (well, she's hitting 30) girl who hasn't found her dream prince yet. She's working in a fictional Budapest as a live-in nurse for an elderly lady, who teaches her Japanese because she used to be the wife of the Japanese ambassador. Did I mention that it's a very complex fairy tale? Simple Liza reads her favourite Japanese novel over and over, listens to J-Pop and dreams about meeting her prince over a crab burger, just like in the novel. One day, a Japanese pop star from the Sixties appears to her, and they both shake it out. Liza manages to get two hours off to go to a burger joint, which is the closest thing to the crab burger joint of her dreams. While she's gone, her ward dies, killed by the only seemingly innocuous spirit of a Japanese pop singer, Tomy Tano. Liza inherits the flat, but the evil spirit is now jealous of her quest for a dream lover. Many good men, and some mediocre ones, die, and Liza's only explanation for this is that she is a fox-fairy, a Japanese mythological figure of a young, attractive woman who is inevitably killing off all of her suitors ...This is a very odd, very complex and very well made movie in the style of Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain about a young woman finding happiness. I especially enjoyed the subcosmos of equally erstwhile as well as fictional J-pop star Tomy Tano, he seemed to be living in an eternally hip and fun world of great tunes and swinging moves.