by ·Comments Off on Pleasures of the Flesh (1965, Nagisa Oshima)

Bad-luck dummy Itsushi (guy with the writing on his face in the same year’s Kwaidan) loves his student Shoko (Pale Flower) but she marries someone else. Itsushi tries to protect her by pushing some guy off a train, but is spotted and blackmailed(??) by another dummy who stole a suitcase full of money and wants someone he doesn’t know to watch it while he’s in prison. Itsushi decides he’ll just spend it all on women and let the criminal kill him when his sentence is up. First he shacks up with Hitomi (Green Maya in Gate of Flesh), the ex of a gangster who catches up with her, at the cost of her pinky finger. Then he buys Shizuko (Eros + Massacre), sending the money to her shady husband, who eventually comes to take her back. Then he’s with Nurse Keiko, who feigns illness for a whole month to avoid having sex with him, then tries walking into the sea, then marries him but doesn’t stop hating him. Finally he buys sexy deaf-mute Mari from a thug, who tries to steal the rest of the money. And when his true love Shoko comes back to him in need, he’s just finished spending it all, so she turns him in to the cops.

Hitomi with knife, about to lose a finger:

The year before Violence at Noon, based on a story by the Samurai Reincarnation guy. I’m really enjoying all the pre-1971 Oshima movies, should maybe watch more of those.

Keiko:

Mari:

by ·Comments Off on Fireworks (1997, Takeshi Kitano)

It’s been a minute (twenty years) since I’ve seen this. Officer Kitano lives a depressing life in forced retirement with his sick wife, one friend dead, another crippled and suicidal, and loansharks after him. So he robs a bank, funds the suicidal friend’s new painting hobby, and takes his wife to the beach, fighting off the gangsters and capitulating to the cops.

Won the top prize at Venice, same year as Ossos, Chinese Box, The Tango Lesson, and 4 Little Girls. As usual, Josh Lewis gets it.

by ·Comments Off on Cloud (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Ryosuke and Akiko are a young couple driven by money (he’s new, she starred in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy). He quits his factory job to get rich buying junk (like pricey Sailor Moon snowglobes) and reselling it online, guided by schoolmate Muraoka (the First Love guy) and with help from very loyal assistant Sano.

But somebody is after him from the beginning, laying tripwires in his bike path and throwing car parts through his window, and soon his online identity gets doxxed and a gang of aggrieved customers who got ripped off by his fake designer handbags are after him, breaking into his house and Serpent’s Path-ing him for revenge. I’m not sure what all this double-crossing gun intrigue adds up to, besides the dreamlike final scene which spells out that unchecked greed will lead you to hell.

The Arkanoid Conspiracy:

Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker:

The sound mix elevates the humming of Yoshii’s computer monitor, as if the digitally transmitted virus of Pulse were still going strong years later. The inexplicable proliferation of evil is often Kurosawa’s beat, which can help explain the derangement exhibited by Yoshii’s enemies, a portrayal of capitalism’s deleterious effects as ethics-overriding brainworms. Maintaining a surface tonal grimness while turning the screws on Yoshii, Cloud is nonetheless one of Kurosawa’s goofier outings, full of manic outbursts and violence whose extravagance borders on comic.

by ·Comments Off on Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989, Kazuki Omori)

A very silly movie, rarely ever good, with big sweeping symphonic music that sometimes gets close to ripping off Star Wars. Jeers to Criterion for getting people to take a 1980s Godzilla movie seriously enough that I was tricked into wasting an evening on it.

Army weapon temporarily turns Godz into a Trapper Keeper graphic:

Competing English-speaking forces kill each other to capture Godzilla DNA, then a plant lab gets blown up, then a psychic girl speaks to plants. Botanist creates a plant monster and the next time hitmen come to steal secrets they get Little-Shopped. Plant monster and Godzilla fight.

What? Your IVYSAUR evolved into BIOLLANTE

Some of the human players: Yoshiko Tanaka (right) starred in Imamura’s Black Rain the same year, the plant scientist had starred in Samurai Spy in the 60s, the psychic girl became a Godzilla regular.

Godzilla will return, and return, and return

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Mamoru Oshii)

Very CG movie, but that feels appropriate for the content. Some idiot corporation has produced a bulletproof kung-fu sexbot, and the cybercops have to stop the killing while negotiating different levels of reality, like a boring eXistenZ.

by ·Comments Off on Broken Rage (2024, Takeshi Kitano)

Very good concept, two-part movie combining various Beat/Kitano personas. In each half he’s an elite hitman who gets recognized during a job, so the cops enlist him as a mole to take down a drug dealer. But it’s a typical crime movie for the first half and a silly-assed comedy in the second. Feels long for a one-hour movie, after remembering that zany Japanese comedies are rarely funny to me.

by ·Comments Off on Violent Cop (1989, Takeshi Kitano)

V-Cop is introduced beating up a high schooler who attacked a homeless guy, hell yeah. The new chief likes his style but wants not to be disgraced by association, V-Cop doesn’t care, has little respect for the bosses. Turns out cops are supplying the drug dealers, and VC’s baddie-killing investigation technique gets him fired. He’s having a nice day as a civilian when punks kidnap his sister and a hitman stabs him and blows a bystanders’s head off. Final showdown: VC and the hitman blast each other full of holes, he finishes off his sister, the drug trade carries on with barely a hitch. Great theme music, a familiar Satie tune.

I liked the rookie partner’s expression when VC ran over a suspect:

by ·Comments Off on Godzilla Minus One (2023, Takashi Yamazaki)

I get that in today’s marketplace you’ve gotta reboot everything at least once per decade, but it’s a shame to churn out new reboots so soon after the superior Shin Godzilla. This is as talky as the Anno, but some cheesy shit from the director of Parasyte. What’s funny is this movie stops every 20 minutes so our hero (coward would-be-kamikaze Shikishima, survivor of Godz and war, played by the voice lead of Your Name and Summer Wars) can have a trauma breakdown, while Hideaki Anno, who invented trauma breakdowns, never did this in Shin.

He shacks up with a neighbor whose kids died in WWII bombing (she’s the great Ruri-Ruri from Shin Kamen Rider) and gets work as a minesweeper, until Godz returns. They blow up a mine in its mouth, but it has hyper-healing abilities and nuclear-blast-attack, which it uses to destroy a battleship. When the wild-haired doctor’s plan to sink the lizard using bubbles(?) doesn’t work, our guy gets help from a mechanic who hates his guts (Munetaka Aoki of the new Serpent’s Path) then uses his plane-crashing skills to blow up the monster’s head. His not-wife, who’d apparently sacrificed herself to a nuclear attack to save him, escapes with minor injuries.

by ·Comments Off on Foreboding (2017, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

I’ve got a bit of a backlog, and sometimes I’m in the mood for a Kiyoshi movie and wonder why I never watched this one from eight years ago, and the title Foreboding sounds generic enough, and it takes me 20 minutes to realize this is the alien invasion companion piece to Before We Vanish. This starts out effectively unsettling, with elements of the paranormal social malaise from his other movies, then as it introduces the human-concept-reaping alien Dr. Makabe (the two guys in Asako I & II) it gets silly.

The fake doctor, coming for your concepts:

Kaho of Tokyo Vampire Hotel and a Gamera movie is our lead, refusing to play the alien’s games, but her husband Tetsuo (starred in Tokyo Tribe and Lesson of Evil) is happy to lead the fake doctor to people who’ve wronged him. Health Minister Ren Osugi arrives too late in the game. Humans start disappearing from the earth, somehow this all still leads to the classic movie ending of people talking and fighting in an abandoned warehouse.

Humanity’s future rests with them: