Love Com aka Lovely Complex is another movie adapted from a Japanese Manga, so you can expect a film filled with cute teenagers that talk like chipmunks, with eyes that are held as wide open as possible, and set in a colorful world that seems inspired by the Wizard of Oz.

The story isn’t very complicated and doesn’t hold much surprises for that matter. The premise of the film is your basic: shorty (boy) and too tall (girl) falls in love with each other. The variation set in Love Com is that too tall confesses her love to shorty, but shorty thinks too tall is just joking and even if too tall wasn’t joking, they would just look too odd as a couple.

Even with such a basic plot, I did find the first 45 minutes or so of Love Com to be fun and at times quite funny. The tall girl (Risa - 170 cm) was genuinely charming and whenever she screamed “Eehhhhhh!” it did make me smile. The short boy (Otani - 159 cm) was charming enough as well, although it seemed he was plastered with way too much makeup, but perhaps this was to make him look younger than his actual age - probably early 20’s. There really wasn’t a doubt that the the couple would eventually get together, so after the first 45 minutes or so, the movie just fell into a repetitive rut, with more scenes of “I don’t like you (but I really do).” The movie also suffered from an ultra cuteness that got more grating as the movie continued.

Fortunately there were some funny cut scenes interspersed in the movie to provide a break from the ultra cutesy-ness. I did hold out hope that the two main characters would go to a karaoke bar and bust out a Japanese rendition of “I Got You Babe,” but sadly this never happened. In its place there were a couple of Puffy AmiYumi tunes on the soundtrack that were pretty good on its own.

Love Com isn’t a complete waste of a movie. The two main characters are cute, but get too damn cute as the movie plods along. Also, the plot is utterly predictable and after the two main characters start their initial romance period, their just isn’t much left to be said in the movie’s razor thin plot. If you have an affinity for ultra cute Mangas, you might enjoy Love Com more than I did. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I can’t really stand Takashi Miike films, but after watching Love Com, I think the next movie I will watch will be Ichi The Killer - just to cleanse myself from the ultra cuteness of Love Com. “Eehhhhhh!”