Hana-Bi

Hana-Bi (Fireworks) didn't have quite the impression it had on me when I first saw it at the cinema some 13 odd years ago, but then I've seen a lot of films in those 13 years, not to mention most of Kitano's back catalogue. It's not quite the existential odyssey I remembered it to be, but its quality still shines through.

Hana-Bi is a bridge between Kitano's earlier yakuza films like Boiling Point and Sonatine and artier fare like Dolls. It still has moments of explicit violence but is essentially a subtler, more meditative film - albeit a less focused one. Once again, Kitano is lead actor as well as director, here playing Nishi; a cop who leaves his job to go away on a road trip with his dying wife, Miyuki. Running parallel to this is the story of Horibe - his old partner on the force, who was shot in the line of duty and is now semi-paralyzed; wheelchair-bound and alone. Horibe tries to find new meaning in life through painting, taking a different path across the wilderness to Nishi but ultimately arriving at the same bleak point.

In the scenes with Nishi and his wife, there's a convincing sense of long-abiding intimacy, but little dialogue between them - perhaps because there's nothing left to be said at this point in their lives. The comfortable silences and Nishi's compassion (made all the more striking by his violent run ins with the yakuza loan sharks who haunt his final days) have an emotional resonance that doesn't really need any exposition. Hisaishi's elegiac score has its own pull on the heart strings as well.

As is always the case with Kitano, the imagery of the film is deliberate and meticulous. The lingering stills of his own paintings are mysterious signifiers. What exactly do the stamen-headed creatures symbolize? The painting of fireworks, echoing the bittersweet sentiment of the film's title, seems to be about the lives of the protagonists - transient, vibrant, exploding into oblivion.

花火
Dir. Takeshi Kitano, 1997

Brave Story

It's obvious a lot of time and effort has been invested in Brave Story to make a new Sprited Away. In terms of the visuals, it's not a bad effort - slickly animated, impeccably well-drawn with some nice 3D modelling. In terms of the story though, it's a million miles away. Despite drawing liberally on a Miyazakian pallette of temporal loopholes and funny wee beasties, the magic ingredient just isn't there.

What starts out as a (massively implausible and sketchy) story about a boy whose parents have separated and who is looking for a fantasy world in which to take refuge, quickly morphs into a typical dumb quest anime.

ブレイブ・ストーリー
Dir. Koichi Chigira, 2006

Casshern

A relentless stream of bollocks.

Really, I'd like to leave it there, but since I've set a precedent on this blog of more verbose reviews, I will, reluctantly, elaborate.

The DVD copy I have has a quote on the cover which claims the movie is "better than both sequels to The Matrix put together", or in other words, it's better than shit squared - which it really isn't.

Allegedly set in 21st Century 'Eurasia', under the rule of The Great Eastern Empire, Casshern opens with Professor Azuma addressing a room full of the great and good to announce that he has 'discovered' 'neo-cells'. We're then treated to some vaguely scientific bollocks where he explains how these miraculous self-replicating cells are the answer to death (still a problem for mankind even in the late 21st Century).

Azuma and his crew of weird scientists set up shop in army HQ under the auspices of a preening knob called Naito and proceed to fill several enormous pools with red dye and prosthetic body parts. He also makes sure to turn on every available smoke machine and ensures the lighting is set to maximum pretentiousness. After a year of peering through microscopes and farting about with charts, it looks like the professor's experiment has failed. But suddenly the alarm is sounded as the body parts begin to cohere into men! Men whom the army gun down but who escape unharmed through the sewer system, trek across the Arctic Circle and miraculously chance upon an unoccupied super fortress. The leader of this bunch of hacks, who looks like a kind of Japanese Eddie Izzard in battle gear, proclaims them to be Neoroids and declares war on his creators, the humans. As is if on queue, Third Reich-style Neoroid banners are unfurled from nowhere and an evil robot production factory is discovered. Off screen, Rammstein decide this would be the ideal time to start bashing out a few power chords. A few minutes later, the Neoroids' army of several million robots is ready to go. Go get the humans! Go!! Fortunately, Prof Azuma's son, who was killed in a pointless war, has been reborn in one of the re-birthing pools and naturally sets to work against the Neoroid army in his new capacity as ass-kicker in chief, lining them up and knocking them down like so many dominoes. All scored by a ludicrous pop-metal soundtrack.

Unlike some other sci-fis with plots written by 12 year olds, Casshern is not even a visual feast - yes it clearly has a sizeable budget behind it; it's vast in scale, but appears to be going for the Terry Gilliam look, falling well short, and ending up instead with an upmarket, oversized version of Knightmare. There's no-one as charismatic as Tregard in Casshern though, and the CG is ridiculously intrusive, dovetailing with the live action like a fifty foot top hat dovetails with a child's head. Given that this film was clearly not made on a shoestring, in contrast to, say, Big Tits Zombie, I would have to rate it as the worst thing I've reviewed on here to date.

Temporal disruption ends...

キャシャーン
Dir. Kazuaki Kiriya, 2004

Kokkuri

Kokkuri is essentially the Japanese equivalent of Ouija; a hand-drawn board, consisting of a circle of hirigana characters, over which participants move a coin at the behest of an unseen spirit - Kokkuri-san - to spell out the answers to their questions.

Not that you need to know this in order to watch the film Kokkuri because it has virtually nothing to do with it. The closest we come to the spirit world is a lace curtain rustling in the breeze. As it transpires, the game of Kokkuri is merely the clunkiest of pretexts for a mind-numbingly dull psychodrama. Despite being slower paced than a dead tortoise and having approximately nothing happen in its 90 minutes or so run time Kokkuri still manages to be convoluted, confusing and illogical. Quite a feat I'd say.

I won't even bore you with the details of the shit plot, suffice it to say that it's a blatant rip off of Dark Water. The camera-work is amateurish, the acting ponderous, the script derisory. Zeze doesn't even have the good grace to bring the simmering lesbian undercurrents to the boil. Note to director: when making a horror movie, at least one scare is a good rule of thumb. Sudden cut shots to small moody-looking Japanese girls are not always the answer, however dim the lighting and however many rusty wind chimes are clanking in the background.

こっくり
Dir. Takahisa Zeze, 1997

Seven Samurai

I'll say from the off that I have mixed feelings about Seven Samurai. On the one hand, you'd have to be a fool not to appreciate the sublime craft of Kurosawa's direction - the impeccable (and groundbreaking) cinematography, each scene's meticulous attention to detail and the deft handling of action sequences - but on the other hand, I found the film too slow-paced at times and ultimately, over-long. The content doesn't really seem to justify the 3 1/2 hour running time.

The story is actually very simple: in 16th Century Japan, bandits are rife and regularly raid villages to steal their produce. One village resolves to take a stand against the bandits and hits on the idea of recruiting samurai to protect it. The first half of the film, which deals with the assembling of the seven samurai - the prelude to battle - is absorbing, but excruciatingly slow-paced. The second half, which is more focused on the actual conflict between samurai and bandits is, for me, the more engaging. Throughout the film though, the various relationships between key characters (high/low caste, master/apprentice, wise man/fool) are intriguingly developed. Despite being quite a big ensemble piece, there are some memorable performances - in particular, Takashi Shimura, charismatic leader and master samurai to Katsuhiro's raw apprentice, and Toshiro Mifune, who hams it up as the irascible clown of the group.

The film touches on a lot of big themes - the class divide (encompassing both illicit love and the injustice of the peasant's lot within the feudal system), rebellion, war, honour, duplicity. But like the role of Mifune's character, Kikuchiyo, a lot of the themes in Seven Samurai seem quaintly archaic - signposts to forgotten places. It's a film, I think, that will always enthuse movie lovers based on the brilliance of its execution and storytelling, its evocation of a lost time, rather than in the enduring substance of its message.

七人の侍
Dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1954

Juon 2

Well, that explains the gaze... sort of. At the end of Juon, Koyoko catches the eye of the new owner of the Saeki house, Mrs Kitada, and being the psychic type, immediately clocks her as being in possession of a dead woman's soul. It first becomes apparent to the viewer that Mrs Kitada is not herself when she brains her husband with a frying pan for complaining about his egg yolk. Even if you put this piece of slapstick brutality down to her getting out of bed on the wrong side, you're left in no doubt when she literally transforms into Kayako in front of Tatsuya Suzuki, who has ill-advisedly gone to check up on the property. Possession is the theme of Juon 2 - various people who come into contact with the house end up being possessed by Kayako and Toshio.

I'm assuming that this isn't a sequel to Juon, so much as a second DVD containing some material that would originally have been broadcast at the same time as the stuff on the first DVD. That's the only way I can explain why the first two chapters of Juon 2 duplicate the last two chapters of Juon and why the last two chapters of Juon 2 are both about 5 minutes long and are, basically, Shimizu taking the piss. Why not have a hundred Kayakos, all creaking in unison and hunting in packs? Why not have a couple of people tasting the sake that Kyoko left in the Saeki house (despite the fact the Kitadas would surely either have consumed or binned said liquor)? The only thing this installment really serves to do is to flesh out the story of the Suzukis - Tatsuya and his sister Kyoko - but in doing that, it still provides a few choice moments of ghastliness.

呪怨 2
Dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2000

Juon

OK, so this really is the first film in The Grudge franchise - the made for TV movie, Juon. I don't know whether it's because I saw the theatrical release first and had an inkling of what to expect, but Juon was nowhere near as hard to follow. In terms of chronology, it's not linear, but mercifully, neither does it jump around like a frog on a hot plate. Instead, you get six distinct stories - or chapters - each centered around one character and their, usually fatal, experience of the curse. These function nicely as a series of vignettes, putting me in mind of a short story collection like Creep Show, where each episode ratchets up the tension before the pay-off.

I like the fact that more time was spent on the Toshio character as well - the back story of Toshio and Kayako is hinted at in the theatrical release, but details like the neglect of Toshio, Kayako's obsession with Toshio's teacher and her husband's jealousy of him does help to establish more of a context for subsequent events.

Naturally, being a TV movie, the budget is considerably lower and it does occasionally show - but mostly just in terms of flat lighting and slightly cheap-looking sets (interestingly though, the same set is used for the Saeki house as in the theatrical release). Special effects are used judiciously, to create some great moments - the first reveal of Kayako in the attic is very creepy and there's pure schlock horror fun to be had in the scene where a bloodied Kanna ascends a staircase in laboured steps, then slowly turns around to gape jawless at her stricken mother. The ending of the film, which uses no more special effects than a mutual gaze, has to be one of the best WTF moments in recent memory.

呪怨
Dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2000

Drunken Angel

Kurosawa's first collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, is a Film Noir set in a Tokyo slum. The Drunken Angel of the piece is an alcoholic doctor who is drawn to young yakuza hood Matsunaga - subsequently diagnosed to be suffering from the advanced stages of tuberculosis. When Matsunaga's old boss, Okada, returns from a stint in jail, he pretends to fall back in with Matsunaga but is secretly preying on his weakened condition in a bid to take his territory for himself.

I can imagine this being too slow-paced for some, but I found it to be an engaging insight into a bygone era of dapper gangsters and smoke-wreathed speakeasies, a curious melange of East and West, symptomatic perhaps of the American occupation of Japan at the time of the film's production. The main intrigue lies in the relationship of the doctor and Matsunaga; the way he sees his own failings magnified through his patient's plight and feels compelled to help him despite (largely hypocritical) misgivings about his lifestyle. In a sure sign of the times, the blame for Matsunaga's condition - and the ills of society in general - is laid squarely at the door of the demon drink. No-one, including a man dying of tuberculosis, gives a second thought to chain smoking their way through every scene.

Once again the bleakness of the film and its central theme of Man's inherent vampirism of spirit is mitigated somewhat by a slightly jarring, upbeat ending - although the fact it feels jarring might have more to do with my own taste for dysphoria, typical of the modern viewer, than it does with an excess of sentimentality on Kurosawa's part. That said, American Noir of the same era tends to be darker and more uncompromising.

酔いどれ天使
Dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1948

Rashomon

The second of six films shown at The Barbican as part of their mini Kurosawa retrospective - and the first of three that I plan to see there.

According to the ordinance of the film criti-rati, I should probably be telling you how this is an unimpeachable masterwork, perfect in every respect, but at risk of being labelled a philistine, I have to say, in my view, it isn't. Yes, technically, in cinematographic terms, Rashomon is a cut above. Its distinctive visual style, as well as groundbreaking storytelling techniques have no doubt been very influential on subsequent generations of filmmakers, but thematically I found it to be somewhat unsatisfying.

The basic premise goes thus: three men take refuge from a storm in a temple and relate the story of a bandit's murder of a nobleman and rape of his mistress. The story is told four ways: from the perspective of each protagonist and also from the perspective of one of the three men in the temple, who claimed to witness the event. Everyones' story is different, filtered through the gauze of self-interest, which leads the 'honest rogue' among the three to the conclusion that human beings are incapable of absolute truth and all basically absurd and untrustworthy. A fact which, in Beckettian style, he takes great delight in. This idea might have been new to cinema - in the way it's told, visually - but writers had been employing similar devices for centuries. The fundamental problem with Rashomon though, is that the protagonists are reduced to archetypes - the bandit, the nobleman, the priest, are functions of philosophy rather than fully-realized characters. Now, before I'm accused of blatant hypocrisy at this point by certain parties (you know who you are!), I confess that in a recent debate on Tarkovsky's Stalker, these same observations were made about that film and I poo-pooed them. So yes, I'm a hypocrite.

The ending to Rashomon is also slightly disappointing - it was, dare I say it, a bit of a cop out: having exposed the moral relativism lurking at the heart of humanity, Kurosawa allows sentimentality to creep in, suggesting that the redeeming factor for mankind lies in its continual rebirth and the possibility to evolve beyond a self-serving existence. Compassion, in other words, will be our saving grace. To me, that seems a little trite.

羅生門
Dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950

A Snake of June

From one rain-soaked film to another. As with Dark Water, the torrents that rage beyond soundless, sterile interiors are indicative of a public/private, inner/outer dichotomy which seems to obsess many Japanese filmmakers. In Dark Water, the 'inner' was repressed memory, in A Snake of June, repressed sexuality.

It's not as experimental or extreme as I would have expected from Tsukamoto - the film actually has a fairly linear narrative. A couple, locked in a loveless marriage, are stalked by and drawn into the dark, fetishistic world of a slightly unhinged individual, played by Tsukamoto himself. Despite its restraint (this could easily have gone down the sleazy, exploitative route) and its almost myopic focus on the emotional responses of three characters, it's also a richly symbolic film. Naturally, the symbols are all about sex and death, but then Tsukamoto is a Surrealist at heart.

The fact the stalker/photographer is played by the director suggests that he, and by implication, the audience, are complicit in an act of voyeurism and ultimately A Snake of June is the kind of film that leaves you feeling slightly unclean. It's hard to love - I don't see myself revisiting it for quite some time - but a fascinating slice of Japanese art house nonetheless. With directors like Tsukamoto, Miike, Sono, Kitano and Sabu all consistently producing unique, thought-provoking films of the highest quality, you'd have to say contemporary Japanese cinema is in very rude health indeed.

六月の蛇
Dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002