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: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Bright Future (2003, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Ugly digital video was the craze that year. The story of two fuckups working dead-end jobs until the ambitious one (post-Ichi Tadanobu Asano) murders their annoying boss and gives his pet jellyfish to the useless one (Joe Odagiri of Princess Raccoon). The imprisoned guy’s dad (Tatsuya Fuji, star of Oshima’s Passion/Senses) shows up to figure out what happened, while the useless guy accidentally infests the river with a swarm of killer red jellyfish. This movie felt unusual back then, and remains so.
B. Kite:
The film returns at the end to a gang of teens, earlier rhymed with the fish through an overhead shot of the group drifting through the city streets at night, illumined by their glowing walkie-talkie headsets. Their aimlessness and matching uniforms might not suggest anything spectacularly promising, but Kurosawa places the title under them as a caption – Bright Future – and has insisted he means it. Why not? Like the fish, they’re adaptable and perched on the point of transition … Ambivalent Future, the fascinating documentary made during the film’s shooting by Fujii Kenjiro, shows the extent to which indeterminacy is a guiding force at every stage of Kurosawa’s artistic process. He expresses an almost Bressonian refusal to either create psychologically defined figures or help the actors find their way into a role.
The boss interfering in his employees’ personal lives, on his last day alive:
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.
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:
The Serpent’s Path (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
French remake of Kurosawa’s own film with Ko Shibasaki (Miike’s Over Your Dead Body) in the Sho Aikawa role, and Staying Vertical star Damien Bonnard as Creepy. This one is more straightforward, less cryptic than the original (especially in Ko/Sho’s plan and motivation), maybe more grounded and less absurd. As a spiraling-revenge film chock full of cool French actors (kidnappees, in order, are Amalric, Gregoire Colin, and Slimane the Temple Woods guy) I was bound to enjoy this, but after watching the original and its companion this year, and in the wake of the great Chime, this can’t help but feel superfluous.
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.
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.
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.
Chime (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
I love 45 minute movies, make more please. This is peak creepy K.Kurosawa. In my current state of mind the knife murders felt pretty normal, the real horror was when chef Mutsuo Yoshioka (who had small parts in Foreboding and Onoda) embarrassingly blew a job interview. I can’t tell if his wife (Tomoko Tabata of The Hidden Blade) is also affected or if she’s just obsessively Japanese. After the chef’s student commits suicide in class, the chef kills another student (Takashi Shimizu, whose previous movie Sana was also a horror about people hearing a weird sound). Comes to no real conclusion as to what is happening or why. Made with a new DP and Hamaguchi’s editor.
Adam Nayman in Film Comment:
A sudden act of violence that passes the narrative baton from Tashiro to his middle-aged instructor Takuji is staged with the same slow, inexorable inexplicability as the murders in Cure (Kurosawa doesn’t so much avoid jump scares as invert their affect; his set pieces are drenched in the numb, hypnotic dread of sleep paralysis). In lieu of a sociopathic Dr. Mesmer figure puppet-mastering the action, Chime dispenses with an antagonist — and a hero — altogether, and simply offers glimpses at a society in the throes of some profound, collective malfunction. To invert the title of a film by one of Kurosawa’s former students, the film unfolds in a space where evil does, indeed, exist.
Before We Vanish (2017, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
A young hot blank dude (Nightmare Detective Ryuhei Matsuda) is found wandering with amnesia and returned to his wife Narumi (Masami Nagasawa of Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister). Blank teen boy Amano (also the name of my favorite sandwich place) recruits dickhead reporter Sakurai (Sion Sono’s Fuck Bomber) to help him locate a blank girl (Yuri Tsunematsu, also in Wife of a Spy) at the center of a recent crime.
Blank Nightmare Detective backed by choir:
But the blank trio are really aliens, learning about human concepts on their way to build a device from scavenged parts that will invite global destruction. The boy and girl finally meet, ruining a cop’s sense of self over wacky comedy-suspense music. The reporter is surveilled by Ministry of Health officers in an unmarked van. Gunfights and CG explosions ensue, and none of it’s very good, ruining my plans to follow this with the miniseries spinoff Foreboding.
Reporter, blank girl, and blank boy with machine gun:
