by ·Comments Off on Shadow of Fire (2023, Shinya Tsukamoto)

Restaurateur turned post-WWII desperate prostitute Shuri calls a kid “stray dog” right after I’d been thinking of the movie Stray Dogs because of the condition of her apartment walls. She takes in wannabe-customer Hiroki Kono and our lead kid – three fuckups acting like a makeshift family – though I didn’t realize the kid was the lead until the adults blew up at each other and the kid left to survive elsewhere.

Next he falls in with Mirai Moriyama, inheritor of Shin Kamen Rider‘s legacy. Mirai is excited that the kid has a pistol and enlists him in a sketchy revenge plot against his ex-superior officer. As with Kitano I’m catching Tsukamoto’s latest after missing his last two – one of which was also a late-WWII desperation drama. Unlike Kitano, it seems he’s settled down into prestige-drama mode, with only subtle hints of the handheld hopped-up maniac who made his early films.

by ·Comments Off on Shin Kamen Rider (2023, Hideaki Anno)

“Kamen” just means masked, he’s a masked rider. More shin silliness, this one hitting some Smoking Causes Coughing heights of absurdity. Professor Shinya Tsukamoto explains all backstory to our Rider (Sosuke Ikematsu, star of Tsukamoto’s Killing) then promptly dies, melting into soap bubbles, as do all deceased heroes and villains. Rider is strong, punching henchmen into fountains of blood, teams up with Ruri-Ruri (Minami Hamabe of the new Godzilla Minus One) to defeat a series of insect-themed baddies.

Some real Evangelion-ish lines, and I like how the movie comes to a full stop for long minutes while a character calmly unpacks their emotions. Android Ruri’s evil brother Butterfly and Rider 1 have a fatal duel, but there’s a second Rider (he and Butterfly were both voices in Inu-Oh) who will carry on the legacy, going on new adventures with Rider 1’s spirit inside his helmet, a Heat Vision & Jack situation. Government guys Tachi and Taki are the only actors who’ve been in all three Shin movies. One villain was Ichi The Killer himself – why do I never recognize him? – another played the wife whose husband is an alien in Before We Vanish.

by ·Comments Off on Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009, Shinya Tsukamoto)

“Dad, I’m worried about you. You need to get back into biotech research.” Gotta give it up to Shinya for making the same exact cyberpunk movie for the fifth time. Diminishing returns, but once again a guy finds himself hulking out, turning into a machine.

Desaturated greys and browns except for a few popping colors. It’s in English; the dialogue and the plot being spelled out more explicitly are both weaknesses. When the action comes it’s prolonged and incoherent. The soundtrack is more pounding than ever. The clean HD photography clashes with the jittery underground lo-fi intentions. I did not hate it.

Hulking-guy’s son is run over by Shinya. He learns he was born from an android replica of his dead mom… he gets blasted by a hitman, also shoots himself in the head and lives… tetsuos a few city blocks. I wrote “I think Shinya wanted to be a suicide cult leader,” but I don’t know if I meant the director himself or the character he’s playing.

by ·Comments Off on Tetsuo 2 / The Great Analog World (Shinya Tsukamoto)

“Destruction is all I need.” Tetsuo II was the right movie to watch after Videodrome, another analog video fetish film where flesh becomes guns.

Thugs keep tormenting a family, stealing their young son. They shoot the dad in the chest with some gadget while kidnapping the kid in a record store, then later, dad’s arm turns into a weapon and he blows the kid to bits.

The kidnappers return to a subterranean fight club factory of machinery-weightlifting space monkeys, where Goth Lord Shinya considers the transmogrifying gadget a success and orders everyone to be injected, to build an army. But the dad wasn’t transmogrified, it turns out he ironmanned himself out of pure rage, and he has a history of doing this. Same cast as the previous two movies, and practically a remake… it gets too plotty (Goth Shinya is IronDad’s brother), but if the alarming monochrome cyberpunk vision of part one isn’t fresh in your mind, it’ll do.

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The Adventures of Electric Rod Boy / The Great Analog World (1987)

A half-feature made between Phantom of Regular Size and the first Tetsuo. Sure it’s yet another human-machine-merge movie (and watched the same week as Videodrome and Titane, wow) but this adds new twists to the Early Tsukamoto playbook: a vampire gang having covered the skies with a nuclear cloud so they can roam outside without fear of sunlight.

Boy with an electricity pole growing out of his back seems to be a gag, so he’ll conk his tormentors when he bows apologetically. The movie opens with silent-film silliness, and contains some extreme stop-motion, both in creeping metal cables winding over people and in the hoverboards the vamps ride down the city streets. Our guy travels into the future, meets Woman In Glasses (I’ve now seen Nobu Kanaoka’s complete filmed works) and an older electricity-pole guy who claims only they can save the world. Indeed, the Rod Boy apologizes so hard after his professor friend is killed, he takes out the robot vampire powering the global destruction machine.

by ·Comments Off on Two by Shinya Tsukamoto

The Phantom of Regular Size (1986)

Industrial-sounding mayhem, and did I hear a Psychic TV song? Nervous guy is attacked by a Freddy Krueger type in the subway, transforms into a scrap-metal mutant-man who kills his girlfriend with his giant spinning drill cock. A psychically linked rival appears, they face off and travel in stop-motion like The Wizard of Speed and Time. Looks wonderfully cheap and frantic, even the titles are scrawled Brakhage-style in rapid partial title cards.

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Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988)

Guy goes to a workshop, cuts his leg open and shoves a metal rod in, but only seems to realize the horror of this after it becomes infected, then he runs down the street until hit by a car. Our new guy, who turns out to have been the driver in that last scene, finds metal in his cheek while shaving, woman next to him on the train station touches metal thing on the floor and it becomes her hand, she chases him down and they battle… he defeats her but his feet turn into rocket shoes.

Between Maniac and Tsukamoto, subway restrooms are gonna be a theme this month. This is also my second movie in a row where the male lead is butt-raped, but this time it’s by a Doctor Octopus lady in a possible dream sequence. It’s a semi-remake of the short, but in this version the girlfriend does stab him a bunch of times with a kitchen knife and burn him with a hot pan before he drills her while unconscious. Tetsuo’s off the hook, if not the filmmaker.

See Also: Haze

Girlfriend (who helped dump the guy from beginning in the woods) is dead in the tub until the metal guy outside infects the house through its pipes and she attacks again, then transmogrifies into him, and they go speed-and-timing through the streets.

I’m sure the director had a good idea of what was happening in the last ten minutes, two metal-encrusted mutants in an extreme stop-motion battle, but I didn’t. Most of the movie is very watchable, which is only surprising since I’ve seen this before on VHS, and remember it bring a spastic, plotless, ear-piercing nightmare. In either event I wouldn’t have pinned this filmmaker to direct a prestige remake of Fires on the Plain, looking forward to that one.

by ·Comments Off on Shin Godzilla (2016, Hideaki Anno)

For a two-hour movie it sure starts fast – there’s a “sea eruption” as the coast guard examines an abandoned craft, and a gushing leak in an undersea traffic tunnel, then a flurry of government workers reacting to the news, each worker rapidly introduced via subtitle, and this is all in the first two minutes. Little did I realize we’d mostly stick with these government workers for the next 118 minutes – this is a Godzilla movie told from the POV of the bureaucrats trying to devise a solution to the kaiju problem. I meant to watch this two years ago as part of a double-feature, but was so disappointed by the American remake, I cancelled. Should have carried on with the plan – despite its insistent focus on meetings, this is unique and excellent.

While the government works on their undersea-volcano theory, Godzilla’s tail shows up on the TV news, then as the PM is assuring the public there’s no danger of it coming onshore, it comes onshore. The fate of humanity may depend on the government’s response, but the higher-ups only listen to high-ranking officials, not anyone with actual knowledge or ideas. A scrappy young voice-of-reason deputy cabinet secretary named Rando (Hiroki Hasegawa, lead Fuck Bomber of Why Don’t You Play In Hell?, also in Before We Vanish) forms an impromptu committee of underrated functionaries to brainstorm solutions the old-guard leadership isn’t coming up with, making this the most Colonel Blimp-like of Godzilla movies.

Back to the giant monster movie at hand, the thing that comes onshore is… not Godzilla? I thought it might be a monster that G ends up fighting, but after struggling through the city and splashing blood everywhere, it collapses then suddenly evolves into the G we all know. Every time it stops and then rises again, it’s more powerful with new abilities – the fin-glowing, fire-breathing, purple-energy-releasing sequence is especially impressive.

When purple energy beams destroy the prime minister’s chopper, a know-nothing with seniority is made PM, and pretty easily convinced by the U.S. to let them nuke Tokyo. Sure he feels awful, but he has no ideas or power of his own, so it’s up to Rando, his team and his negotiations with the talented half-Japanese daughter of a U.S. senator. The movie is obvious about its politics and complaints – and again, it’s mostly meetings – but it’s also excellently paced and has outstanding monster-devastation scenes.

There are a million actors in this, each introduced with onscreen name and title, and I only kept track of a few. The PM is Ren Osugi, who shows up in every other Japanese movie I watch, and died last year. Kayoko is Satomi Ishihara of the Ring sequel Sadako 3D. Rando’s team includes Mikako Ichikawa of Anno’s live-action cartoon Cutie Honey, and Shinya Freakin’ Tsukamoto.

Not really horror, a disaster movie – made in response to the American version, which wasn’t good at all. This got a limited release in the US, where it mostly appealed to nerds on fansites, while in Japan it won best film and best director and was only outsold by Your Name. Hideaki Anno made this as a mental break between Evangelion films, the fourth of which is now five years delayed. Codirector Shinji Higuchi made Attack on Titan with some of the same cast, and directed sfx for the 1990’s Gamera movies. Anno might be following up with an Ultraman movie, and if he never finishes making the theatrical Evangelion series, I’m never gonna start watching it.

by ·Comments Off on Vital (2004, Shinya Tsukamoto)

After an accident, Hiroshi (Tadanobu Asano of the Thor movies, star of Bright Future and Ichi the Killer) wakes up uncommunicative, barely knowing who he is. He returns to med school and begins a four-month class where he dissects the body of his girlfriend Ryoko who died in the crash, while he experiences lucid dreams (or returning memories, or a split consciousness) in which he spends time with Ryoko.

So it’s another trauma movie from Tsukamoto, about pain and memory and body horror – though this is a quiet and restrained movie, and we hardly see any surgery, so it’s not so much a horror movie as the poster would have us believe. This was made before two of my faves, Haze and Nightmare Detective. Employing crossfades and slow zooms into splotchy patterened walls, it effectively represents Hiroshi’s dark, blurry mindset without going into the usual Tsukamoto shaky-cam histrionics.

Ryoko:

Her parents:

Hiroshi’s own parents had apparently given up on his future before the crash and are warily glad that he’s back in med school – dad is Kazuyoshi Kushida of Oshima’s Sing a Song of Sex, and mom is Lily of Oshima’s Dear Summer Sister. Hiroshi makes the odd decision to contact the girlfriend’s parents and let them know that he’s cutting her up. They take this news better than I would’ve figured, and as the mom (the cinematically named Hana Kino of Ôbayashi’s Beijing Watermelon) is dying of cancer, dad (Jun Kunimura: the unlaughing lord in Scabbard Samurai, lead gangster of Why Don’t You Play In Hell?) seems to appreciate Hiroshi’s company. There’s also another emotionally disturbed med student, Ikumi, who blames herself for a professor’s suicide, and seems to exist in the movie mostly as an audience surrogate to stare in disgusted wonder at Hiroshi as the other students slowly abandon him.

Ikumi:

by ·Comments Off on Silence (2016, Martin Scorsese)

Devout priests Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver convince Ciaran Hinds to send them to Japan, where Christianity has been outlawed, to covertly spread the good word and to locate their teacher Liam Neeson. I’ve seen this story told before, in Masahiro Shinoda’s film, so I knew the general outline and some of the characters. I liked Scorsese’s three-hour remake (with a new epilogue) a hell of a lot better – even if I still can’t comprehend some of the characters’ actions, it’s an intense, awe-inspiring film. Would’ve been cool if it had hung around in theaters, since I would’ve liked to watch again after a few weeks or a month, but I guess America wasn’t interested in sacrifice and devotion this holiday season because it only lasted a week.

I couldn’t resist stealing a couple of screenshots from Film Comment:

In Japan, our white saviors meet interpreter Tadanobu Asano (lead ghost in Journey to the Shore), Shinya Tsukamoto himself (tortured to death by being tied to a cross and pounded by the surf for days), drunken traitor Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka of Tokyo Tribe), and eventually, toothy torturer Issei Ogata (extremely different from his gentle software developer in Yi Yi and twitchy emperor in The Sun).

J. Cabrita:

There is an essential balance to Silence, subverting a colonizer’s prejudices while also considering the prospect that Rodrigues’ missionary work is disseminating objective truth; one does not reduce the other, but enlivens it, makes it meaningful, potent and mysterious. Adapted from a novel by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic persecuted for his religious values at home and discriminated against for his race abroad, Scorsese’s film also occupies the novel’s ambiguous middle ground.

N. Bahadur, who also makes good connections with The Age of Innocence:

In terms of the film’s critical distance from Rodrigues, what is important is that it is not Christianity which is being critiqued but rather perspective. The moral fundamentals of both religions in the film do not include concepts of pride and glory which both Rodrigues & the Inquisitor demonstrate. Both men are completely invested in their way of viewing the world – fully formed yet opposing views which make sense – and by watching their debates we can already see Scorsese’s perspective: does moral righteousness negate a moral perspective? A colleague mentioned: “they talk about faith needing to take root, but it only becomes faith after becoming rootless.” Perhaps on a moral and ideological level, Rodrigues and the Christians are right: advocation for a Universal truth, yet they fail on a political level because of the failure to see the colonial implications of their actions. While the Japanese in the film prove to be far more selfless and with rather more reason or martyrdom, yet on a moral level the Inquisitor is despicable and inhumane.

G. Kenny:

The opening title, with its sounds of nature followed by absence of sound, constitutes an arguably almost literal-minded demonstration of the movie’s theme, but that plainness is purposeful … And of course the most virtuoso filmmaking of the piece, the scene where Rodrigues comes to his most crucial decision. It’s just crushing, not least for the way it’s set up. Liam Neeson’s Ferreira, speaking to his former student of “a suffering only you can end,” tells Rodrigues his sacrifice will be “the greatest act of love ever performed,” and Rodrigues’ Japanese interpreter (Tadanobu Asano, great) tells the priest, “It’s just a formality.” Which is it, for God’s sake? And then the soundtrack drops out for the second time.

Bilge, from his great Voice article about Scorsese’s holy trilogy:

There’s a vanity behind Rodrigues’s sense of responsibility, too, and Silence slowly interrogates this earnest man of the cloth. Once he gets separated from fellow priest Garrpe (Adam Driver), Rodrigues is accompanied through the film by … the unchanging, ever-present face of Jesus, about whom he dreams at night. The priest even sees Christ’s visage replacing his own reflection in a pool of water, and he giggles maniacally at the thought that he might be headed for a fate similar to his messiah’s; he exults in the glory of a martyr’s death … Rodrigues will not die a martyr. He will not become a saint. His sacrifice will not be written about in the annals of his faith; if anything, he will be a shameful footnote. But he will, finally, achieve true compassion for another man [Kichijiro], the two of them united in their weakness. And in this, who’s to say that he has not found the divine?

by ·Comments Off on Kotoko (2011, Shinya Tsukamoto)

This fits in nicely with Tsukamoto’s Haze and Nightmare Detective, which featured lead characters more convincingly distraught and psychologically unbalanced, more grimly depicted than you’re used to seeing in horror movies (always with crazed handheld camera). Now we’ve got a young mother (Cocco, who also wrote the story and songs and did art direction) living alone with her toddler. Just that simple character setup (young mother + child) is enough to make you cringe if you’ve seen any Tsukamoto movies.

Sure enough, she is extremely tormented, overprotecting the child at some times and plotting to murder him at others. Actually she does murder him onscreen, but since the movie reflects her baffled view on reality, he turns up alive a minute later. Fortunately (as rarely happens in horror movies) people notice that she’s clearly an unfit mother, take the son away and leave him with relatives, and Kotoko passes the time between her allowed visits sitting home, cutting her arms and watching them bleed.

But where’s Tsukamoto, who likes to star in his own films? He plays an award-winning novelist (his first book is entitled Bullet Dance) who begins stalking Kotoko after hearing her sing on a bus. He’s concerned for her safely, encourages her to cut him instead of herself. That relationship is going alright until he turns out to possibly not exist… and she’s excited that she’s getting her son back until that also turns out not to be true. Epilogue, she’s in the loony bin being visited by her now-teenage son and doing crazy crying dances in the rain.

The first few minutes are insane – Kotoko sees people as twins, has to quickly determine which of the two is the evil one trying to destroy her so she can fight back. “I don’t see double when I am singing.” The movie’s a bit long (have I mentioned that I love Haze‘s 50-minute length?), padded by Cocco’s songs.