Fridae

Lesbian viewers looking for something light and entertaining need look no further. This Japanese dramedy about a cute bunch of girls who take up hula dancing has already shaken its seductive hips into the hearts of many Japanese audiences, performing well at box-office and winning several awards, including Most Popular Film Awards. Now it looks set to win hearts in Singapore too.

Hula Girls is based on a real-life incident that took place in the 1960s in Joban, Japan. The story begins when the local mining company decides to build a Hawaiian-style tourist attraction to resuscitate the dying town. The town folks make fun of it at first, but they stop laughing when the company starts to lay off half of its coal miners because of diminishing demand for coal.

The kawaii Kimiko Tanikawa (Yu Aoi) is one of the girls who want to be a hula dancer for the Hawaiian center. But she and the other hula aspirants fail to impress � until the jaded, chain-smoking dance instructor Madoka (Yasuko Matsuyuki) comes along to works on their moves. Under her tutelage, the awkward girls turn into sexually-confident hula dancers capable of warming the groins of any dyke...

Like The Full Monty, Shall We Dance? and Calendar Girls, Hula Girls follows the standard formula of a bunch of underdogs who take up a minor sport or performing art, and excel in it despite the odds. Still, the predictable storyline should not detract from the many pleasures of the film: Chief among them are the spirited performances by the perky young actresses and the terrifically rousing finale that brings down the house.