by ·Comments Off on Doberman Cop (1977, Kinji Fukasaku)

The hero is a pig-toting bumpkin in a straw hat (I kept wanting the my-my-Mitchell theme song to play) and the villain is a gangster who fancies himself a talent agent (see also: The Girl Can’t Help It). Rough and active camerawork, but the human action is just whatever, except for Kano who is good with the roundhouse and the high kick. Sonny Chiba’s reputation was that he could fight convincingly onscreen – China had thousands of these guys and Japan just had Sonny. The cops are idiot assholes in this except for Sonny and the one who turns out to be the serial killer.

by ·Comments Off on Evil Does Not Exist (2023, Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

Lovely and not mysterious at all until suddenly it is. The community responds to a tourism company: “The very essence of this village is at stake.” The company has sent a couple of know-nothing PR types – main dude Takumi pokes holes in their plan but also drives them around and indulges the guy’s desire to do manly backwoods things like chop wood. Then Takumi’s daughter goes missing, and the PR dude must be killed to maintain nature’s balance (I guess). No big stars – the woman who runs the local noodle shop and wants to maintain the water quality for her broth costarred in Happy Hour. Hamaguchi reveals in Cinema Scope that it was put together rather experimentally, says his own perspective is usually closer to the invading PR people than the rural residents.

The PR people surprised to hear they have to protect their grounds from deer:

The deer they never considered:

by ·Comments Off on Perfect Days (2023, Wim Wenders)

Some unimportant details:
– He always plays classic rock hits in the car, and we’ll see the song start and end, but his trip has been edited down visually, so the music and the picture run on different timelines, Dunkirk-style.
– He won’t sell his cassettes for a coworker, but lends the guy all his cash then has to sell a cassette anyway to afford the gas home.
– I know the movie title references the Lou Reed song he plays in his apartment, but then is his niece Niko’s name a Nico reference?

Bilge Ebiri has got the important stuff.

by ·Comments Off on Kubi (2023, Takeshi Kitano)

I skipped the last couple Kitano movies – rude behavior to the great man after he gave us the commercial self-destruction trilogy – and am now delighted to discover that he’s still got it. This is an epic 1500’s warlord power-struggle story with about fifty characters, and he nearly keeps it to two hours without making the plot confusing (it really helps that they introduce and re-introduce everyone with onscreen titles). Plus it’s great-looking, fun, and full of beheadings and other gruesome stuff, and gleefully anachronistic – even not knowing any Japanese I can tell they’re conversing more like yakuza than samurai. But I didn’t realize until the name Hattori Hanzo came up that it’s based on real history – all these characters have wikipedia pages.

Kubi means “neck”:

Kitano plays Monkey, the most degraded of the warlords until his plans and alliances come together at the end. He’s scheming with bald Hidetoshi Nishijima (Drive My Car guy, Creepy cop), who’s having a secret affair with rebel-in-hiding Kenichi Endo (a major Miike guy). They’re working under/scheming against the current ruler Ryo Kase (an Outrage lead). It’d take all day to name the rest of them but I’ll note that both leads of Ichi the Killer are in here somewhere (psycho Tadanobu Asano plays a Kitano ally).

by ·Comments Off on Evangelion 3 & 4 (2012/2021, Hideaki Anno)

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Where we left off, the movies were following the series pretty closely, except for one new character. That’s all out the window now, as Shinji awakens from a 14-year nap (but he’s the same age and temperament). He discovers all his friends are dead because he caused a mass extinction that destroyed most the world. But at least he rescued Rei – nope, this Rei is a soulless clone. But at leaast his coworkers are still supporting him – nope, they’ve formed an alliance to try to destroy him. But at least he makes an enthusiastic new friend – nope, a bomb collar blows that guy’s head off.

–
Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Shinji is in one of his dark quiet moods, but at least Fake Rei (a clone of Shinji’s mom) is learning how to be human – nope, she spontaneously combusts. The characters and situations are making less sense than ever (“the cores that form the eva infinities are the materialization of souls”), but this is the best the show has ever looked. Shinji finally fights vs. his dad in identical evas in the anti-universe, then rewrites the world as a new place (“neon genesis”) where he won’t have to pilot no more giant robots.

by ·Comments Off on Perfect Blue (1997, Satoshi Kon)

I’ve been biased against this movie since it first came out on video. At Georgia Tech anime kids would follow you around talking about anime, even if you don’t care about anime, as I did not, and Perfect Blue was their idea of a movie which would instantly convince the doubters. Nowadays I like anime just fine, including Satoshi Kon, whose Millennium Actress was good, and Paranoia Agent was incredible, so I finally gave this a chance. If anyone from Tech is reading… I’m sorry… I’m glad y’all have got your own Anime Fight Club, with its multiple-multiple personalities and identity twists and breakbeat soundtrack, but it’s not for me.

The words every girl wants to hear:

I can relate:

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell (1995, Mamoru Oshii)

OK, boobs, I get it, we all love boobs. The most 1995 thing I’ve ever seen. The only thing I remembered from the VHS is that shot where the cyborg supersoldier pulls something so hard her arms come off, and it’s still the coolest thing here by far (the invisibility-suit effects also nice).

Android moral quandaries ripped from Robocop. It’s so talky in a self-important sci-fi cop-show way, but all this chatter is background noise to the actual plot (reminisce: Nemesis), which leads to a Lawnmower Man ending. The writer worked on Pistol Opera, which needs to come out on blu-ray.

This is who comes for you if you haven’t turned on multifactor authentication:

Jake Cole:

This really isn’t a thriller because the sporadic action merely punctuates a story that uses nearly every plot element as a macguffin to ruminate on the nature of identity and how technology alters our perception of self. The finale, in which a cyborg evolves to propagate itself, recasts the internet and global networking as the next stage of reproduction.

Adding this line to my resume:

by ·Comments Off on Eyes of the Spider (1998, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Same idea as Serpent’s Path – this time Sho Aikawa’s daughter is the victim, and he dispatches some guy he assumes to be the killer within ten minutes of movie time. Now what?

A guy who looks suspiciously like Creepy but is another actor – somebody Sho presumably killed horribly in Dead or Alive, and the star of Kitano’s Getting Any? – offers the directionless Sho a job at his “import/export” company. The business of this company involves Sho stamping an endless pile of documents in a shabby office while the other guys have some kinda shakedown/blackmail/hitman thing going on. These guys appear small-time, so the boss gets involved, and the boss’s boss, and they want to recruit Sho and put down the others, but they don’t go down so easy. Similar look and tone to the other movie, but goes in a more traditionally yakuza direction.

In here somewhere is Chief Ren Osugi of Nightmare Detective… Ren’s Sonatine and Fireworks costar Susumu Terajima… Kill Bill boss Shun Sugata… but I didn’t catch character names, so I’ll sort it out during the next Kitano or Miike binge.

Kurosawa is a White Dog fan:

Great writeup by John Lehtonen. A small piece:

Eyes of the Spider is a film of emptiness, its protagonist hollowed at the outset. Empty time and empty people, and what is projected onto and, eventually, out of this emptiness. Tonally and generically dynamic, it moves its cipher hero (and Aikawa’s iconographic image) through a variety of generic scenarios and roles: the husband, the salaryman, the yakuza.

by ·Comments Off on Serpent’s Path (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

I had watched either Serpent’s Path or Eyes of the Spider (I forget which one) in the pre-blog era on VCD so after enjoying Chime (and before this year’s Serpent’s Path remake) it’s time to re/watch these in HD. They both hinge on a kid’s abduction/murder, and each main character’s plot spirals out of control, in very different ways.

Creepy Teruyuki Kagawa kidnaps gangster Yûrei Yanagi (Boiling Point) with the help of Creepy’s math professor friend Sho(w) Aikawa. But the gangster says another guy did the crime, and they have to keep kidnapping gangsters. The second guy (the husband in Door) fingers a third guy (a minor player in early Miike films), who takes them to the room where they’ve made torture videos for profit (these rooms were common in late 90s/early 00s horror).

Sho and Creepy:

Why is Professor Sho capably handling all the details and abductions here, what’s his deal? And why is he privately coaching the abductees on what to say? I guess he’s just trying to help kill as many members of this organization as possible – including Creepy, who it’s revealed used to work in their organization and therefore thought his own family would be exempt from the business. Darkest subject matter given a matter-of-fact tone with an absurd edge.

Michael Sicinski:

Formally, we can already see Kurosawa’s primary style taking shape; the clinical viewpoint and tendency toward long shots emphasize both an objective, godlike perspective as well as a sense that the film frame is a container, trapping its characters in culture and history. If the overt narrative of Serpent’s Path is somewhat vague, Kurosawa fills in all the crevices with a pervasive dread. Considering Kurosawa’s earliest work was purely genre based, here we see him breaking away from those strictures in a fairly dramatic fashion.