Japanese Film Review: Cyborg She (僕の彼女はサイボーグ) - Best time traveling cyborg movie since the first Terminator!

Best described as a Japanese comedy/sci-fi/romantic melodrama.  The English translation actually should be 'My Girlfriend, the Cyborg' based on the Japanese title  僕の彼女はサイボーグ ... but I digress.There's no sense in beating around the bush here.   The first 2/3 of this movie is pure otaku jerk-0ff material! Imagine this premise:>A super attractive girl, who turns out to be a cyborg is sent from the future to save the life of a geeky college student.  She is programmed to follow him around 24/7 and protect him, so as they end up living together, he has to teach her the ways of the world of course much hilarity ensues...Its all rather cartoony... lots of people getting slapped across the room by freakishly strong yet still hot girl who is entertainingly non-emotive.  As its pretty over-the-top in this respect, you can't get too picky about the storytelling details... but the movie also has an interesting time travel component to it (exactly like Terminator) that makes it more than justa cheesy comedy... instead of naked Arnold saying "your clothes, give them to me" to punks in a dark alley, you get cyborg girl in an 1980s leotard shoplifting in a department store.  doh. :-POf coure the paradox of time travel is not covered in any way (any one who watches Star Trek knows that if you go back in time and change the past, you wouldn't exist in the same form in the future to be sent back in the first place).  But you'll have to put those tricky detail aside for the duration of this movie...  focus on the important things:  its a comedy and it has a hot girl in itPoor Raoul! :-(The actors all do a decent job,  the girl is played very well by former gravure idol Ayase Haruka ( 綾瀬はるか), there's a cameo from Shinjuku Incident's Takenaka Naoto (竹中直人),  and its directed by none other than Korean director Kwak Jae-yong ( 곽재용 ), the director of 'My Sassy Girl' and 'Windstruck', to name but a few.  The biggest problem in the film is the male lead,  who's character is an annoying wuss most of the movie.  :-PLong time etchy blog readers know one thing that REALLY bugs me about asian comedies (particularly Korean ones) is when they suddenly shift gears into a life and death tragedy in the last 20 minutes (probably the most blatant cases would be 'Sex is Zero' and 'Windstruck',  which as I mentioned is by the same director).    But I have to say, unlike those cases, the life and death part in 'Cyborg She' is relatively tolerable,  even though it still really comes out of left field,  there's a good reason for it to exist other than to illict tears from the audience.  (seems like Director Kwak has finally perfected his comedy->dramatic death scene->comedy transition!!)I'll give it a strong 7/10, especially if you are into those realistic looking japanese robots that look like women.  (you know who you are).