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.
Tag: japan
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.
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:
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.
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:
Dogra Magra (1988, Toshio Matsumoto)
The Funeral Parade of Roses guy two decades later has turned to narrative… but it’s super-meta-psycho-narrative, at least. In the 1920s an institutionalized amnesiac is given conflicting stories by a hairy Dr. Detective and a bald Wacky Doctor, and instead of piecing together the real story, he either goes on a killing spree, or doesn’t.
Which of these doctors would you trust:
Labyrinth of Dreams was based on the same author’s work, and I wondered if the novel was an influence on Shutter Island. The boy went on to be a voice actor, most notably dubbing Leo in Titanic, and the not-bald doctor/detective Hideo Murota is in all the Kinji Fukasaku movies. Unsurprisingly this cinematographer also worked with Terayama.
Outrage Coda (2017, Takeshi Kitano)
I’m starting to wonder if these movies do have continuity and they’re not just starting over every time with the same cast playing new characters. I checked my writeups for parts one and two, and still don’t know for sure – but hey, one of those cops is back in this one.
The bulk of the movie is the higher-ups of a Japanese crime family plotting against each other: Ren Osugi, Sansei Shiomi, Toshiyuki Nishida. This goes on forever, and right when you can’t take any more of it, Kitano flies in with his buddy Ichi and they shoot a hundred guys. A few women appear, all of them prostitutes. I’m making this sound bad, but of course it’s a good time, and I’m looking forward to the brand new Kitano joint.
Demon Pond (1979, Masahiro Shinoda)
Thirsty traveler (star of Tampopo) enters dusty village, finds a stream and nearby house, meets Yuri (a female impersonator, also of Yumeji) and coincidentally his long-missing friend Akira (of Samurai Rebellion), who has become Yuri’s reclusive boyfriend and the town bell-ringer who keeps away evil spirits. The traveler would like to see the local Demon Pond before returning to work in the morning and his friend offers to guide him. Seems like a restrained, traditional Japanese folk story so far, but I was underestimating it.
As soon as the girl is alone, a carp poacher spies on her until he’s bitten by a crab, then the movie turns suddenly goofy, the carp and crab transforming into costumed characters off to see the undersea princess (same actre(ss) as Yuri), the eerie score mutated into crazy electro music. The princess wants to see her lover at another lake but is trapped here as long as the bell is faithfully rung. Back in town the poacher gets an angry mob after Yuri, insisting the bell not be rung, realizing their mistake too late as the lake destroys the town. I enjoyed this more than Shinoda’s Silence. Carp also starred in Pitfall, and Crab was in The Eel (heh).
Boy (1969, Nagisa Oshima)
Boy lives with an adoptive family of scam artists, the parents both Oshima regulars (she’s the criminal’s wife in Violence at Noon, he’s an officer in Death by Hanging). They earn money by having the kid and mom Curly-Sue passing cars then shaking down the drivers. This life doesn’t bring Boy happiness so he’s hoarding his allowance to afford a train ticket out of town, but the others catch up, and carry on until one of their crashes proves fatal and a suspicious driver reports them. Kind of a true-crime story, adapted from news stories, and predicting a bunch of Kore-eda films. The Boy is really good but his lines are so post-dubbed that it sounds like he’s a talking doll having his string pulled.
Boy didn’t act again, but grew up to be Morrissey:
