Human Flower Project
Boys over Flowers/Hana yori Dango
The hit movie this summer in Japan is ”Boys over Flowers,” spun off from a popular comic book and TV show. Everyone’s comparing it to Sex in the City, though this fantasy has much better odds. Heroine Makino Tsukushi, a working class gal, enrolls in a fancy high school where four handsome rich boys rule. Known as the “Flower 4” with their metrosexual grooming, the guys befriend Tsukushi, and then some.
For non-speakers of Japanese, Wiki offers help with the alluring title: “Hana yori Dango, literally ‘Boys before Flowers,’ is a pun on a Japanese saying, ‘Food before Flowers’ lit. ‘dumplings rather than flowers.’
“‘Food before Flowers’ refers to the fact that food, being more practical and more necessary to survival, should be chosen over flowers, something pretty but not essential to life. The author furthers the pun by changing the kanji of the title to mean ‘Boys over Flowers’ implying that boys, like food, maybe are a necessity to life rather than a luxury like flowers.”
We’re not sure when or if this movie will be released in the U.S. but it sounds like it’ll lose very little in translation with the 14-20 year old female set, who’ve made it a media “necessity” in Japan.
Boys Over Flowers, with Mao Inoue as Makino, and her flowery fab four:
Shota Matsuda, Jun Matsumoto, Shun Oguri, and Tsuyoshi Abe
Photo: luna park6