Fridae

This teenage romance is so-o-o-o boring. It moves at a snail's pace � no, a glacier's pace � no, a tectonic pace.

Directed by Isake Nakae, it stars Yuya Yagira (the lead actor of Nobody Knows) as a taciturn high school graduate who cannot decide what he really wants to do with his life. He finds a job at a gas station, but his parents are unsupportive. Only his eccentric grandmother (a lively Mari Natsuki) insists he keeps it because a gas station is, as she puts it enigmatically, "a rest-stop for life's drifters".

When a girl (Erika Sawajiri) shows up at the station for work, Yuya is at first surprised at his own loss of control around her. But he is even more surprised when he starts falling in love with her. Little by little, she gives in to him too...

Adapted from a novel, Sugar and Spice suffers in the way that many movies adapted from novels do. It fails to portray the interior emotions of the characters in a cinematic way. While novels do a fine job of depicting inner lives and processes, movies have to find a way to externalize that. The Hours (adapted from Michael Cunningham's novel) did it splendidly, while Possession (from A.S. Byatt's novel) did not.