If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Writer/Director Sion Sono is my favourite filmmaker of this century. Though some of his early stuff, from the 90s, is a little shaky, everything he's made since Utsushimi (2000) has been phenomenal. He is bold and visionary, and his films are always memorable, confident and flawless in their direction.Sono's dialogue is not realistic, but hyperreal. Emotions are cranked up to eleven in a Sono film. But it does not feel so much like a melodrama, as it does, somehow, a complete externalization of the internal, like the characters are literally turned inside-out, and there's a lot of blood, and it's kind of horrific and kind of funny, but through all the gore and craziness their inner feelings, their souls, are put on full display and ours are reflected in them.There's a lot of screaming in Sono films. My favourite example is in Hazard (2005), where the main character, Shin, fed up with his dull life, runs screaming across his high school recreation ground. I could not scream in front of people like that, but I'd love to, and somehow this sequence, in amongst a montage of frenetically-conveyed backstory, expressed his character more clearly to me, connected me with the character more quickly, and deeply, than any more subtle approach could have.These characters wear their emotions on their sleeves; their feelings are conveyed intensely and immediately through the acting, dialogue, scenario. Take for example Himizu (2011): When the parents of both main characters, Yuichi and Keiko, feel they'd be better off without their children, they have no qualms about telling them so: Yuichi's father drunkenly tells him again and again about the insurance he would have collected if Yuichi'd drowned in the tsunami... Keiko's mom even builds her a snazzy little construct with a noose for her to hang herself, and decorates it for Christmas! And when Yuichi gets fed up, he sets out into the city, carrying a knife in a shopping bag to punish all the terrible people out there.Sono's films are the opposite of subtle: they are over-the-top, ridiculous. Consider his breakout hit Suicide Club (2001), in which the schoolgirls impulsively and joyfully commit suicide, after hearing it's become trendy to do so. Or, consider the absolutely stunning depths of insanity reached by the end of Strange Circus (2005) and Guilty of Romance (2011), films I can only categorize as darkly-comic psycho-sexual horror films. Yet, beneath the surface, there is an underlying, ecstatic truth to these films, these characters and situations.Before Sono was a filmmaker, he was a poet. It's not enough for Sono for a poem to be written, it must be yelled in public, repeated, made to sink in. Consider the repetition of poems in Guilty of Romance or Himizu. In another one of his films, it may be a bible verse. Poetry is intrinsic to Sono's films. His entire scripts, his films, are effectively a form of poetry he is sharing with us. All of his films are written himself, they are his art, and they are never compromised.I will not, in this review, explain what Love Exposure is about, except to say that it is the ultimate Sion Sono film. It's the summation of everything that came before. It's gory, it's insane, it's frenetic, it's wildly entertaining and extremely funny, it's completely ridiculous and intimately relatable. There's truth and poetry underlying every outrageous scene. I feel, simply, that it is the greatest film of my generation.

I feel envy to the people who haven't seen this movie; because you get to experience it for the first time. And what an experience. 4 hours of sheer craziness...in a very good way. The same feeling when I first see Battle Royale...in awe. "Time flies when you're having fun." How true. You would never know how long the movie is until it ends, and I wish it would never end. I hope the 6hours version will be released one day. I'm not going to bore you guys with the details of the movie. That's what google is for. Just go out and rent or buy it. I get to experience it on bluray. I became an instant fan of Hikari Mitsushima. A must see for Asian film lovers.

Love Exposure is a film unlike any other. It has a hideously unattractive running time of four hours which is the longest film I've ever seen by far! And it explores a range of strange themes with panache such as religion, cults and erm... 'Knicker-snapping'? Love Exposure's first 2 and a half hours or so surprisingly went very quickly. It was never slow and used the most of its running time by exploring some outstanding characterisation. The characters are likable for the most part, but flawed for extra dimension. We especially get to spend a lot of time with our hero, who is very likable with his energy and passion for committing sins in order to confess to his priest father. The family is beautifully fleshed out with interesting issues. Unfortunately he's also a self-confessed pervert, looking for his one and only Mary, who happens to be a man-hating, Nolan-loving girl who falls for him whilst he's in drag (as a dare).Once the love triangle is introduced things become even more interesting with the addition of two new characters who have a complex back-story. I found the love triangle to be almost Shakespearian and compelling to watch. You really want Honda (the main man) to get his Mary (Yoko), but she's interested in his Lily Savage alter-ego who she thinks is a real woman! It seems like the film is on to a winner until around the two and a half hour mark things become extremely repetitive and even more confusing with the introduction of a cult. The final hour and a half is extremely ponderous and rambling. Do we really need to have this long segment where Honda works for a porn company. Why not just cut the whole thing and have a voice-over saying, "I worked for the porn company..." etc.I also found the ending to be some-what unbelievable, although very sweet. It'll come as no surprise to you that Love Exposure's biggest problem is it's eye-watering running time where at least an hour could've been cut. If that had happened then I'm pretty sure that I'd be sitting here, giving it a strong 8/10, maybe verging on 9/10. But it rambles and seems as if it's going on and on after the pacey and exciting two and a half hours. Love Exposure doesn't justify having such a long running time, although it didn't feel four hours, it did feel very long. Te detestable film "Import/Export" felt much longer than this! There's a lot to admire in Love Exposure with its incredible characterisation, exciting and interesting writing with a complex story-line, but being four hours it takes away its effectiveness. Love Exposure is worth a watch if you're willing to stay up until 3:00am and drinking lots of coffee! Fortunately it wasn't boring, rather just tiresome. I'm sure that a masterpiece could've been created if the film didn't lose its fantastic focus in the last hour and a half, and an hour had been cut. Still a memorable experience though.

For me, "Love Exposure" is something of a terrific one-off experience. How to begin to describe with any degree of rationality the extraordinary effect of bewildering excitement it has had on a near octogenarian, is a task I find daunting. And yet for a work unlike any other in its helter-skelter delivery of an adolescent's quest for romantic fulfilment ( which I suppose is what it is all about), I feel I should at least take up the challenge. With such an engagingly innocent central character as schoolboy Yu, it seems completely natural to suspend disbelief and go along with everything he experiences, including his hilarious initiation into the skills of a panty photographer, his role as father-confessor at a perverts' convention and his attack with explosives and much blood letting on the HQ of a brainwashing religious cult. Buried beneath it all there could well be many serious messages (you get a big chunk of Corinthians!) or it could be just a pile of tosh. But in the end, who cares, such is the delirious pleasure that just under four hours of outrageous goings-on have delivered. I suppose I just love the theme of innocent youngsters taking on the wicked world. Gosh! I am still reeling, my critical faculties all but shattered!