Ping Pong (2002)

Great Film overall

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

A fellow screenwriter recommended this as one of his favorite films, and I rented it through Netflix. It is an absolute charmer! The buildup in the first half is a little slow, but entertaining, and by the end of the film, I had fallen in love with all of these characters.There are moments of pure and fresh delight! This story has a heart and soul - it has many! The only criticism I have is that there are not enough female characters in it. Peco's granny is terrific, but Demon's girlfriend is an annoying stereotype.Peco and Smile - an unforgettable pair. Great friendship movie, and excellent footage of table tennis at its best.I especially love the character of Smile. Great writing!

I watched this movie the first time last summer and I really liked it. Now after seeing it the second time I absolutely adore it. The ending almost got me into tears and that's really something.Ping Pong is about friendship and well, table tennis. I really don't think you can call this a normal sport film because that's kind of a lame term. And this isn't a lame film.The directing is good and acting too and the whole mood of this flick is stunning, especially in the end. I got the shivers.Too bad that this is, at least for most people, really hard to find. I'm glad my friend went to Japan and by mistake got this film and then gave this to me. A weird coincidence.

There's a lot of great stuff coming from Japan these days and it's not on horror flicks about stylized spirits and discordant ghostly sounds. "Ping Pong" has something and it captures a feel that many people I know who have visited Japan felt on first viewing "Lost In Translation". It looks like Tokyo and it looks like hyper-real Tokyo at the same time.But this is a very, very different story from "Lost In Translation". Based on a manga, this is a surreal and existential and neo-Zen comedy about the competitive world of young ping pong players in modern Japan. Peco and Smile are two players who have been friends since their youth. Peco (Yosuke Kubozuka of "Go" and "Tomie: Replay") is the brash and outrageous champion who crushes all opponents while rubbing their face in it. Smile (Arata from "Afterlife") is the better player (he's called Smile because he never does - Excellent!) but isn't especially interested and often loses on purpose to Peco out of some sort of loyalty. Not only does this anger his coach (a former ping pong star) but it gives Peco a further inflated ego.During an inter-school competition, both are defeated. Peco loses to the champ of the disciplinarian, militaristic school of skinheads named Dragon (newcomer Shido Nakamura). Smile loses to China (Sam Lee of "Gen-X Cops" and "Public Toilet"), so named, as that's where he is a pro and he's just in Japan to kick start his career (sort of like when a ball player gets sent back down to the minors for a tune-up). Needless to say, the rest of the movie involves the two needing to pick themselves up off the floor solving the inequities of their friendship along the way. And of course, it all is heading back to a great rematch.This is a lot of fun as the competitions are startling in their originality and quite beautiful at times. There are some amazing epiphanies from one character re-christening himself in a river, one of the skinheads getting his due and when Dragon learns to play ping pong completely for pleasure.I'll also say this; the soundtrack is amazing. I don't know who any of these groups are. They're all Japanese. But we were all jumping up and down to the music the first time we saw it. If you have an all-region DVD player, I would suggest you get the Japanese disc as it comes with a feature where you can watch the whole movie with just the music soundtrack.

Ping Pong is an entertaining variation on the tried and trusted idea of friends who are driven apart, and then reunited by something that they have in common. In this case, it's table tennis. In fact, that's pretty much all there is in this film - the relationship between the two lead characters and.. err .. table tennis.You don't need me to re-iterate the plot, so I won't bother.If this film has a fault it's that it didn't explore the back story of the relationships between the adult characters - it would have been nice to have seen them fleshed out a little more than they were - and that the screenplay would have benefited from some minor expansion in a few areas and a similar reduction in others.However, those are very minor niggles about what is a very well executed film that incorporates some unusual direction and that manages to include quite a few celluloid manga moments. My wife laughed out loud at some of the dialogue, so I can only assume that the Japanese soundtrack is more entertaining than the English subtitles, but I found myself enjoying the film regardless.Oh, and there are some nice location shoots, around Kamakura I think, that show off a small part of the beautiful Japanese coastline.If you get a chance to see this film in the cinema, do so - you won't be disappointed.