Brandon's movie memory

This was everything I hoped it’d be when I heard the vague plot outline. Japanese man wearing loud pajamas wakes up in an all-white room covered in switches. Whenever he presses a switch, something new appears in the room. Meanwhile a Mexican wrestler named Escargot Man prepares for a match. How will these two stories come together?

It gets weirder, of course. The switches are angel penises. The man gets a ton of useless stuff, plus sushi (but no soy sauce). He’s somewhat frustrating to my organized mind because he doesn’t try every switch or hit them in any organized manner. But the stakes are raised when he finds a floor switch that opens a door out of the room – just for a few seconds.

Maybe my favorite part: he has a large pot, and unlimited sushi, so he fills the pot with sushi to weigh down the switch. But it’s too full to lift. So he laboriously starts pulling bits of sushi back out of the pot with chopsticks, when he hits a button that causes an African man to jog into the pot, breaking it in half.

More intricate escape attempts. He finds the exit door has a combination lock (the combo is written on the African man’s head) and a key lock. The key appears on a timer, as does a rope from the sky, so there’s a plan involving swinging and grabbing and running. The man doesn’t talk out his ideas – instead we get wonderful comic-book montages as he envisions what he’s going to do next.

But sometimes he hits the wrong switch and this happens.

Plan is carried out, but he’s stuck. The door is unlocked, without enough room to open, and he can’t get back into the main room. Passage of time marked by red sushi turning brown. He finds a sliding panel and a new room of switches – this time when he hits them, things happen in the world outside that he’s not aware of. Frustrated, he flicks one switch over and over – one that causes the Mexican wrestler’s neck to extend and deliver a knockout headbutt to whoever’s closest.

The man ascends a tower of penis switches… to the final room.

Seems like an extremely good movie by about the halfway point, but it gets long and drags seriously through the second half. Still, I was excited enough about the sequel to rewatch the original.

Sho Aikawa (Scars of the Sun, Gozu) is unappreciated at home (especially by his young son, who’s bullied since his dad is the schoolteacher) and not too respected at work either, but he can escape into his hobby, which is watching the seven episodes of a quickly-cancelled TV series from his youth and making his own Zebraman costume.

TV’s original Zebraman:

A weird bit of animation:

Sho meets a mother (Kyoka Suzuki of Bullet Ballet) with a wheelchair-bound son, and bonds with the son over Zebraman. Meanwhile, a series of villains in funny costumes that seem straight out of the old episodes arrive in town. Whenever Sho faces one of them, he turns from a sad man in a silly suit into an actual superhero, culminating in a big fight against a green-slime alien overlord during which Sho can fly and briefly transforms into a pegasus zebra with a laser cannon.

Sho imagines Kyoka Suzuki as his sidekick Zebra Nurse:

Evil crab man:

Besides the long, drawn-out scenes where Sho connects with either the wheelchair kid or his own son, the movie pads its runtime with a couple of underequipped cops sent to track down the source of the alien invasion (I think they are Atsuro Watabe of Three Extremes and Koen Kondo of 13 Assassins), and a school principal (prof. Kyoto) who’s aware of the aliens and of the Zebraman connection, has copies of unfilmed show scripts that correspond to recent (and future) events.

Professor Kyoto:

Some cops:

From the writer of Ping Pong. The same year, Miike made Izo, part of Three Extremes (which I can’t remember at all) and a TV-movie sequel. Nice comic references to Ring (Zebraman fights the backflipping, well-dwelling Ring ghost in an episode) and Pulse (the principal tries to contain the aliens by sealing doors with red tape).

Buy from Amazon:
Zebraman DVD

Screenwipe season 3 (2007)

I think I watched seasons one and two all in a couple days, but put s3 aside for almost two years because I was afraid of Wire spoilers. But Charlie Brooker didn’t even mention The Wire in this one – it must’ve been between seasons. Instead, the one show he doesn’t slag off is Battlestar Galactica. I like that it’s not entirely about show episodes anymore – he has segments on commercials, being an on-camera presenter, people with menial jobs in the TV industry, the news, and deceptive editing practices on “reality” shows. Brooker’s attacks on poor Ken Russell in Celebrity Big Brother probably didn’t seem overly tasteless at the time, but it was slightly shocking for me to hear them so soon after Ken’s death – I’ll let that one go, since Brooker spent more of the segment attacking the other racist participants and the show as a whole. As usual I didn’t catch half the references, have never heard of half the shows, and as usual it was funny anyway.

Brooker:

Parks & Recreation season 2 (2009-10)

Finished this a while ago, but I forgot to mention. The first season was decent, but this one was even better than 30 Rock. Ann dates Mark Brendanawicz (who leaves the show at the end of the season to be in Water For Elephants), Tom gets divorced, Leslie develops into one of TV’s greatest characters (and dates Justin Theroux) and the Hole is trimphantly turned into a Vacant Lot.

Other shows:
I watch about an episode a month of The Larry Sanders Show. Watched the first episode of Louie twice and haven’t made it to the second. Never started on season 2 of Saxondale or The Thick of It, though I keep intending to, and I have no idea where I left off with The Sarah Silverman Show, Futurama or Metalocalype.

I last watched this in theaters so my memory was fading. The first thing I forget about a movie is the ending. So I know Spider (Ralph Fiennes) is in a post-asylum halfway house remembering his childhood, when his mom was killed by his dad (Gabriel Byrne) and replaced by a new woman he picked up at a bar, but after that gets hazy.

John Neville (Gilliam’s Munchhausen), who plays Spider’s fellow patient, died the day before I watched this:

Miranda and her two Spiders:

Well, both women are Miranda Richardson, and young Ralph (often shown with the ghostly presence of full-grown Ralph following behind, peering through a window or hiding around a corner) takes matters into his own hands, tying his spiderweb-strings to the oven knob and turning on the gas after the new woman has passed out. But the woman who lays dead when the emergency crew arrives is Spider’s own mum, his dad weeping over her, uncomprehending.

My favorite comic-relief scene:

The central mystery of the movie seemed to be “how did a seemingly normal, if quiet and string-obsessed, boy turn into this mumbling, shuffling schizophrenic?” and one presumes it has something to do with his dad killing his mom. But the ending reveals that Spider was unhinged from the start. This is the kind of ending that makes you want to rewatch the movie with the thought that Spider’s POV is unreliable as both child and adult, but I blew it by rewatching having forgotten the twist.

Buy from Amazon:
Spider DVD

Based on a controversial-in-1851 novel which was apparently filmed before in 1975, though IMDB has little to say about that version. Opens in 1835 Paris, great viscount Michael Lonsdale is visiting sex queen Senora Vellini (Asia Argento playing Spanish, the best work I’ve seen from her) when he spies young Ryno de Marigny. Ryno (a large-lipped newcomer) has been seeing her for many years, but swears this was the last time, on the eve of his marriage to lovely, upright Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida, older sister of the Fat Girl, lately in Rubber and Kaboom).

Ryno moves in with his wife, her gramma and gramma’s friend Yolande Moreau (of Amelie and Micmacs) and all is well. But Hermangarde doesn’t know the depths of her hubby’s relationship with Vellini. They were extremely in love/lust, ran away to Algeria and had a daughter together who died from a scorpion sting (shot in a very classy way, painful without being graphic), and since then they’ve had an obsessive love/hate thing. So after Ryno moves his family to the distant seaside, Vellini shows up and eventually wins him back. Lonsdale gets the final word.

British series with a brilliant premise, but kinda gets old over six episodes. Three or four would’ve been perfect. And no, I didn’t watch them all the same day. Matthew Holness (cowriter) plays Garth Marenghi, self-aggrandizing pulp horror author, Richard Ayoade (director/cowriter) plays TV producer Dean Lerner, and Matt “Dixon Bainbridge” Berry plays cheesy dreamboat actor Todd Rivers. These three present Garth’s unjustly forgotten 1980′s TV series Darkplace (which also stars Alice Lowe, Timothy Dalton’s assistant in Hot Fuzz), stopping the show frequently to comment on the story or its production. The humor comes from how terrible the show is (Dean Lerner’s acting is especially hilarious) and how deluded the cast and crew is about its greatness and importance. Both of the Mighty Boosh stars have cameos, though Vince was hard to spot under his monkey suit

The main cast:

The Boosh:

More shows to search for: Bruiser, My Life in Film, Nathan Barley, and (obviously) Man to Man with Dean Lerner

Another let-down from the supposedly bold new school of French horror cinema. Movie takes a pregnant girl and throws every kind of evil at her, trying to be as extremely traumatic as possible, creating a damsel-in-ultra-distress, not to make any sort of point a la Martyrs, but just to fuck with us a la Frontier(s).

Her husband is killed in a car crash (like The Descent but not as cool), then a woman is stalking her at home, then home-invasion, stabbing faces with scissors, and OMG the intruder is trying to steal the now-quite-pregnant protagonist’s almost-born baby! The woman’s kindly boss is killed, so are a couple cops, and the woman accidentally KILLS HER OWN MOM. You can’t get more traumatic than this! The intruder kinda becomes a faceless demon thanks to a lit-aerosol-can attack, successfully cuts out the baby, and I don’t know who’s still alive at the end.

Stupid shots “inside” the woman show the baby’s reaction to the events. All this happens during riots in the Paris suburbs, which is either supposed to be an excuse for reduced police presence (despite all getting totally killed, the cops were alert and aimed to help) or a metaphor that I don’t care enough to unravel. The directors have a new thing out called Livid. I’ve seen baby-snatching intruder Béatrice Dalle, appropriately enough, in The Intruder.

Buy from Amazon:
Inside DVD

The Haunting In Connecticut (2009, Peter Cornwell)
Unhappy teen tears his walls apart with an axe, finds plentiful dead bodies and flashback shock cuts. Is formaldehyde flammable? Apparently so, and unhappy teen lights the place aflame, pausing to transform into a green ghoul for a few seconds. I hope Martin Donovan is still alive. Oh nice, here he is along with Elias Koteas. Mom rushes in as the house, which seems to have literally been built out of dead bodies with writing on their skin, burns around them, blowing away ghosts with her mighty prayers. Nothing dumber than a true-story ghost movie, but I liked the poster art for this one. The director made cool stop-motion horror short Ward 13, one writer did The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera and the other created Revenge of the Nerds.

.com For Murder (2002, Nico Mastorakis)
Haven’t seen a thriller with VR glasses since The Lawnmower Man – or maybe these are the Silence of the Lambs night-goggles that this Tarantino-chinned quip-happy stalker is wearing. First she tries the Rear Window flash-photo trick, but he says “I’ve seen Rear Window too,” then gets blinded by lightning and falls down the stairs. Coda: Huey Lewis plays a cop! I don’t get where the dot-com part comes in. Mastorakis did other video nonsense like Ninja Academy and Death Street USA.

The Forgotten (2004, Joseph Ruben)
I really wanted to see this (and the similar-sounding Flightplan) when it came out but the bad, bad reviews finally led it here instead – shame. Julianne Moore just wants her son back, and Gary Sinise won’t help, but some boring guy admits that the son was kidnapped as an experiment to see if parents can forget their missing kids. Oh but the boring guy is an ineffective memory-erasing alien special-effect, and after she defeats him by endlessly repeating that she has a son, he’s sucked into the sky. Julianne gets her son back, and as a bonus, Dominic West. Director Ruben made Return to Paradise, which I liked, and writer Gerald Di Pego did Burt Reynolds flick Sharky’s Machine.

The Crazies Remake (2010, Breck Eisner)
Ah, the ol’ knife-scrape-against-the-wall tactic. Trying to steal a truck, Timothy “Dreamcatcher” Olyphant and Radha “Surrogates” Mitchell are laid low by gun-toting crazies. Movie has a good look to it, and not as schizophrenic as The Haunting In Connecticut. As the couple escapes, the town behind them is nuked (shout out to Return of the Living Dead, the original town-nuking Romero ripoff), but they survive inside the fridge, err truck, and aren’t blinded at all from looking directly into the blast. From the writers of Pulse Remake and Amityville Horror Remake.

Cabin Fever 2 (2009, Ti West)
Two heavy bleeders flee the school dance (I think) – the boy is detained and the girl is picked up by Mark Borchardt. Elsewhere a stripper spreads the Fever in various real gross ways. Now a poor cartoon with too much fake film-weathering effect shows the disease spreading throughout the world. No main characters, then? I continue to not share the internet’s love for Ti West.

Skyline (2010, Bros. Strause)
A sweet grey sparkly alien demon is threatening two tenacious teens (Eric Balfour of Texas Chainsaw Massacre Remake and Scottie Thompson), but fighter jets intervene. Nice 360 pan of the aliens winning, then the two kiss while being tractor-beam abducted. It’s all Matrix inside the ship, the muddy humans having their brains sucked out one by one. It’s gooey and neat looking, but the alien made from the apparently-pregnant girl’s dismembered boyfriend’s brain saves her. Seems super dark, with the end of humanity and all, despite the final teen-love-conquers-all message. The Strauses are renowned effects artists but unfortunately, so are the writers.

Frankenstein (2004, Marcus Nispel)
Michael Madsen as “Harker” (wrong novel) aims to kill a woman with a melon baller but shotgun-toting detective Parker Posey scares him off. Flashlight chase scene in an abandoned factory, booo-ring. Hulking hooded guy (Frankenstein? Vincent Perez of Time Regained) dispatches Madsen, later turns up at Posey’s house to set up a sequel that never came. From the director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre Remake, Friday The 13th Remake and Conan The Barbarian Remake.

Has a lot in common with Zodiac – investigations into a never-solved serial murder case, which gradually wears upon the investigator until he’s acting more like a suspect than a detective.

Our main local detective is played by Kang-ho Song, star of The Host and Thirst. His local partner is Roe-ha Kim (A Bittersweet Life). They’re joined by a city detective from Seoul, Sang-kyung Kim (Hahaha, Tale of Cinema), don’t even hide their witness-bullying and evidence-planting from him, and eventually they pull him down to their level.

It’s a period piece, set in the 1980′s, punctuated by air raid drills (in case of attack from North Korea) and footage of demonstrations throughout the country. Very well-made movie, if super-depressing by the end.

The Times:

Finally and without fanfare, though, it becomes impossible not to see these impotent and crushingly overwhelmed public servants as victims of a kind. The image of these hapless men, who belong to a postwar generation born in the grip of authoritarianism, standing helplessly by as one after another woman brutally dies has a blunt-force power that needs no explanation.

Buy from Amazon:
Memories of Murder DVD