What passes for countryside in Japan is often a vast sprawl of low-rise development: chain restaurants, big-box stores, gas stations and pachinko parlors. While there’s no shortage of films that have tried to capture the ennui of life in such areas, the results are often as uninspiring as the locations they depict.
The title of “It’s Boring Here, Pick Me Up” says it all, really, but director Ryuichi Hiroki’s portrait of provincial life is a more complex coming-of-age story than most.
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