Castle Lord Masahiro Motoki (lead of Gemini and Bird People In China) betrays the country’s bigwig warlord and imprisons his messenger (Cloud scammer Masaki Suda). Lord MM hopes for victory with help from some alliances, but the movie isn’t focused on military strategy but minor mysteries that plague the lord until he has to ask his imprisoned envoy for help: a murder, a transformed severed head, a missing teapot. All this non-action culminates in an extended confession by the lord’s wife (Yuriko Yoshitaka from Noriko’s Dinner Table) who staged all three mysteries. She and the prisoner convince lord MM to run away from the castle and live a long life drinking tea instead of continuing to fight. Movie looked great, my first Kiyoshi movie in theaters since Tokyo Sonata, but it does go on, I wasn’t so invested in the mystery plot, and I had to laugh when I realized it’s showing some of the same events as Kitano’s Kubi.
Tag: japan
Hiruko the Goblin (1990, Shinya Tsukamoto)
After the relentless Tetsuo movies this one is going for an Obayashi contrast: demonic possession and rushing camera blur and bodily explosions amidst a medium-paced, brightly colored daytime plot with upbeat made-for-TV music. A few good stop-motion and matte painting shots, then after the initial goblin attacks the movie has lost its juice, and they’re just spraying flying spiders with a can of wd-40. Feels like a studio with a bland cursed-high-school story hired an edgy young filmmaker to helm, and each side brushed against each other’s limitations.
The goblin is hard to deal with, since people who see it tend to chop off their own heads. Student Masao has an exploding growth on his back, a Tsukamoto specialty. Disgraced Archaeologist Hieda (Yumeji / Mr. Katakuri) shows up at a high school with homemade ghostbusting equipment, summoned by a professor who then got Evil-Deaded by the goblin’s-eye camera. Masao and Hieda and the school janitor (the non-bald doctor in Dogra Magra) have to piece together the mythology and save the world from evil, I suppose.
Exit 8 (2025, Genki Kawamura)
Long-take digital cinema about people stuck in an endless videogame maze of subway tunnels. Not since A Quiet Place has a movie spelled out its rules this clearly on signage, and not since Cube has the puzzle been solved by a late-arriving autistic guy (a kid, in this case).
When a body meet a body passing through the tile. I picked the poster behind them as anomaly, but Escher’s first name really was Maurits:
You have to go through the loop correctly (turn back if you see anomaly, proceed if not) eight times in a row. We switch perspectives from Guy 1 to Kid to Guy 2. Each guy has parental anxiety and they keep stopping to get emotional or else the movie would be shorter. I liked the loop concept more than the psychological details. One run is all anomalies, peaking in an Atonement tunnel flood.
Normal (2025, Ben Wheatley)
Somehow when I wasn’t paying attention to the drug TV shows and the Russian-made genre flicks, Bob Odenkirk became an action star in his sixties. Here he’s a traveling fill-in lawman, and while halfheartedly playing sheriff for some Minnesota town a lot of shit goes down – a bank robbery brings the yakuza-payrolled townsfolk to armed warfare. “That’s not where I was aiming” – Bob’s first return shot blows apart Evil Mayor Fonz. The dead ex-sheriff’s daughter Jess McLeod teams up with him. It’s all shooting and ‘splosives until the two sides team up to con the Japanese into not murdering them all, then the ruse is exposed and it’s all shooting and ‘sploves some more. A pretty good time, more generic than Free Fire but also better.
Fukasaku Fest:
All You Need Is Kill (2025, Kenichiro Akimoto)
Remake of Edge of Tomorrow. The lines and colors are all neat, and especially Rita’s hair – her overall character design is better than Tom Cruise’s. It’s anime, which means angsty teens are saving the world while wearing battle armor, but first Rita has to figure out why she’s caught in a time loop, getting killed by Jim Woodring creatures every day. Halfway through she meets fellow looper Kenji (was Russian Doll based on this?), who will eventually absorb the enemy alien and sacrifice himself. Everything magically works out in the end, because this was a kids movie and I had no business watching it.
Tattooed Life (1965, Seijun Suzuki)
Fighting Elegy star Hideki Takahashi is Tetsu, an assassin whose life is saved by artist Kenji (star of Black Snow, not that one). Broke, our guys try to find anonymous manual work, but get tangled up with women and get themselves noticed (and implicated in murders and explosions). Kenji sketches the boss’s wife naked, which doesn’t go over well with the boss, and now Tetsu has to avenge his stupid brother. Suzuki brings mad style to the final ten minutes – which is an improvement over the one minute of mad style in Kanto Wanderer.
Yumeji (1991, Seijun Suzuki)
Our guy is a notorious artist of sexy paintings (pop star Kenji Sawada has made good movie choices, playing leads in Hiruko the Goblin, Mishima, and Happiness of the Katakuris). His pretty young beloved is sick at home with her parents, wants to elope but not right now, so Yumeji enjoys a heavy romp with a prostitute, picks up another artist’s model, and becomes obsessed with a widow(?) and her bizarre story, until her husband (the crazy guy from Zigeunerweisen, even crazier) arrives and chases everyone around.
The Women of Yumeji: Covering her mouth tuberculosively is Hikono, who starred in Strange Circus. Center standing is model Oyo from a hitman movie called Pornostar and center seated/smiling is Mrs. Wakiya, who later starred in similar sounding Two Portraits of Miyagino (artist/prostitute love triangle, disappearance, kabuki-style sets). These two seem to have swapped personalities for this portrait, but I haven’t misidentified them unless they also swapped kimonos. I’ll dishonorably join the rest of the web in not being able to identify the others, but far left is the prostitute he’s with at the beginning.
I’m (re)watching these out of order, Yumeji coming a decade after Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za – the cinema world loves a trilogy. Extremely loosely based on true events, the movie also plays fast and loose with dream/reality, life/death. Despite the apparent genre of “period artist biography,” it’s unpredictable and bizarre, with something crazy in nearly every shot.
Sean Rogers in Cinema Scope:
While Kagero-za ends with an unexpected and unnerving glimpse into some kind of afterlife, Yumeji begins a little more reassuringly, with events that soon get explicitly figured as a dream — even if the protagonist dreams of a duel in which he gets shot in the head. After all, the yume from Yumeji also means “dream,” as the renowned real-life painter Yumeji Takehisa muses toward the end of the film, which fictionalizes a period in his life from around 1918 … As in Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za, the film closes with the prospect of Yumeji’s transportation across a body of water to a dimension of death or dream, this time ferried there by “the devil” Onimatsu.
Underworld Beauty (1958, Seijun Suzuki)
Half fun and half dark and sour, dude gets out of prison having hidden away the stolen diamonds and tries to use them to help his crippled comrade, gets tangled up with the comrade’s sister, their former bosses go after him, and a ton of guys die. Both leads would return in Take Aim at the Police Van.
Zigeunerweisen (1980, Seijun Suzuki)
Dream-logic stuff happens, shot in a dreamy way by resurgent Suzuki (his big comeback, according to people who didn’t see A Tale of Sorrow). Story of the titular sound recording where the composer’s voice can be heard on the recording is true, the characters sharing this story are a German professor, a guy named Nakasago who is maybe his colleague or maybe a random maniac he met on a beach, and the girl (a geisha in mourning and her various doppelgangers). Between them, the three lead actors have been in all the weird Japanese movies: the prof in Funeral Parade of Roses, the girl in The Human Bullet, and Naka in Farewell to the Ark, Izo, and Nightmare Detective, not to mention the rest of Suzuki’s trilogy.
Sean Rogers in Cinema Scope:
A blood-red crab superimposed on a dead woman’s crotch, a bowl of pork fat grotesquely overfilled, a tongue erotically licking an eyeball in close-up, a man buried to the neck below riotously flourishing cherry blossoms — these visual flourishes originate entirely with the filmmaker, rather than the lean and fragmented short stories by the Taisho-era modernist Uchida Hyakken that serve as the film’s source material … Suzuki and screenwriter Tanaka Yozo, who scripted all the films of the trilogy, delight in setting up mysteries that are never resolved: Did Nakasago murder the woman on the beach? Did he seduce Aochi’s wife? Did Aochi himself sleep with Sono, or was she a ghost? And can Nakasago reclaim his daughter from O-Ine, even from beyond the grave?
