Godzilla Is Inside All of Us

It seems absurd at this late date to be rediscovering the depth of metaphor in Ishiro Honda's Godzilla. Godzilla has been an icon of world cinema for seventy years, an embassador for international moviemaking in spite of the derision his films have sometimes received. After years of interpretations have pulled Godzilla out of the realm of metaphor and into the world of monster versus monster wrestling fights, that original nightmare born of the hydrogen bomb has faded into memory, but it hasn't vanished completely. Godzilla's home studio, Toho Pictures, has been leasing Godzilla to American studios for years at this point, and Americans don't have that memory of atomic destruction. They see in Godzilla a franchise to exploit, like good little imperial capitalists. Art isn't even in the equation. When it happens at all, it's purely by accident. Every so often, Toho makes a film of their own to keep their hand in and remind the world who owns Godzilla. On the occasion of Godzilla's seventieth year, they've taken Godzilla back to his roots. The result, Godzilla Minus One (2023, directed by Takashi Yamazaki), is an astonishment, a film that can stand not only with the original film from 1954, but as one of the best fantasy films ever made, full stop. It's certainly one of the best films of 2023. It's the real thing. It's a film with something meaningful to say about history and nation and the human heart in conflict with itself. It's a film that the makers of the American "Monsterverse" films should look at with dismay and shame and envy.

Read more below the fold >>

A Kaiju Haunting

Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001, directed by Shûsuke Kaneko) has a novel big idea. It postulates that the reason Godzilla favors attacking Japan over all other nations is because he is animated not just by the atom bomb, but also by the souls of all the pan-Asian dead of World War II. Japan, the movie further postulates, needs a reminder of its responsibility for that catastrophe. This is the kaiju equivalent of the J-horror films that are this movie's contemporaries, in which the giant monsters act as conduits for ghosts. Godzilla plays the role that the video tape played in The Ring, and that the internet played in Pulse. This is one of the rare late Godzilla films that casts Godzilla as a villain, rather than as a defender of Japan, a fact reflected in the design of its star: he has milky white eyes without pupil or iris, like he's possessed. This is one of the most lethal Godzillas, one possessed of an implacable malice rather than the indifference of a force of nature.

Read more below the fold >>

Not Your Disney Princess

It's a shame that the supernova of Hayao Miyazaki has sometimes blinded the world to the fact that there's another genius working at Studio Ghibli. That man is Isao Takahata, who once upon a time created The Grave of the Fireflies, one of the greatest of all animated films. His other work has been hard to get in North America, which is a criminal oversight. The appearance of The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013) on these shores is therefore cause for celebration. It's one of the most beautiful and atypical films from Studio Ghibli, reflecting its director's restless experimentation with animation. It doesn't look like the studio's house style at all. Sometimes, it's deliriously abstract.

Read more below the fold >>

The 1967 Blogathon: Branded to Kill

This is my first entry in the 1967 Blogathon, hosted by Silver Screenings and The Rosebud Cinema. Pay them a visit over the weekend and check out all the other writing by fine bloggers across the net.

By 1967, director Seijun Suzuki had had enough of formulaic Yakuza films. These were the kinds of assignments that his home studio, Nikkatsu, kept feeding him. He was a good soldier, turning out what the studio wanted in films like Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards or Underworld Beauty. Indeed, some of Suzuki's Yakuza films were some of the best films of their types. Suzuki, speaking years afterward, is without guile when he says that he continued making these films because they provided him a living, but he chafed at the restrictions of genre. his films between 1964 and 1967 became increasingly ambitious and daring stylistic experiments as he pushed against the limits of what he could get away with and still deliver what the studio required. When allowed out of the genre, he produced personal almost-masterpieces in Gate of Flesh, The Story of a Prostitute, and Fighting Elegy.

His restless experimentation began to creep into the Yakuza films, too. Tattooed Life, Youth of the Beast, and, especially, Tokyo Drifter show a director who had more to offer than Nikkatsu was interested in using. The living end of Suzuki's growth in the 1960s was 1967's Branded To Kill, which is one of the masterpieces of the Japanese New Wave. Nikkatsu, famously, didn't see it that way. They fired Suzuki for making, "incomprehensible movies," a designation for which Suzuki sued them for defamation. The damage was done, though. Suzuki's career as one of the lions of the Japanese New Wave was effectively over. It would be ten years before he made another feature film before finally reviving his career with his arty and challenging Taisho trilogy in the 1980s. What a waste.

Read more below the fold >>

Ashes in the Wind

It's a given that Hayao Miyazaki's new film, The Wind Rises (2013) is beautifully made. Studio Ghibli is synonymous with beautiful animation, and this film is not different. Technical virtuosity can only take you so far, though, and putting a human dimension in to his films has long been a hallmark of Miyazaki's films. He does that here, too. Miyazaki has flirted with politics in the past, as well. The environmentalism in Nausicaa and that same environmentalism mated with a critique of capitalism in Princess Mononoke are examples of this. The Wind Rises is mostly set between the World Wars as Taisho-era Japan gives way to Imperial Japan and fascism, and yet, this film about a modest aeronautic engineer seems to willfully ignore the politics its story suggests. Oh, it touches on them--it can't help it--but there's no strong statement, no critique. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 is the film's central horror, not the calamity of World War II. This seems odd to me, given that its hero designs the famed Japanese Zero. He's complicit in the disaster, but the film not only doesn't deal with this fact, it seems completely indifferent to it. This seems, I dunno, misguided and naive at the very least. If I view it in a less benign mood, it seems revisionist, sanitizing, and profoundly dangerous.

Read more below the fold >>

Roll Them Bones

During the golden age of Japanese film, Shôchiku was Japan's Tiffany studio, home to Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, and Kinoshita. It's singularly weird to see their familiar Mount Fuji logo attached to schlocky horror movies. And yet, during the 1960s, horror came to Shôchiku, as the title of Criterion's boxed set of their horror movies announces. The Living Skeleton (Kyûketsu dokuro-sen, 1968, directed by Hiroshi Matsuno) is a fun example, though it's quaint even in the mainstream of Japanese horror. I mean, Japan was already making horror masterpieces like The Face of Another and Kwaidan, so it's not like this film appears in a vacuum. In spite of that, it's strangely forward-looking, anticipating the J-horror boom of the 1990s and John Carpenter's The Fog.

Read more below the fold >>

Snake in the Grass

It's been well over a decade since I last saw Onibaba (1964, directed by Kaneto Shindô). Once upon a time, I would have named it my favorite Japanese film. Time and (I hope) wisdom has put the kibosh on that. I mean, the very notion of having a favorite anything seems ridiculous to me anymore, particularly a favorite from a national cinema as broad and as deep as Japan's. Even so, Onibaba continues to haunt me. The details of its plot may have receded in my memory a bit, but the images? The tall grass swaying menacingly in the wind? The old woman in the demon mask? The hole into which the bodies of dead samurai were cast? Those are burned into my brain. Looking at Onibaba from the point of view of a Western horror geek, I couldn't help but notice mythic resonances with the Sawney Bean myth, in which rural travelers are waylaid by the locals. Indeed, the first time I saw Onibaba, I was convinced that it was some kind of missing link between the walk through the cane field in Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's a film that encompasses a range of horror traditions, though in retrospect, it is uniquely its own thing deriving from traditions of which I was ignorant at the time. The intervening decade has changed my perception of Onibaba a little. Not much. It's still one of the great horror movie and it's still a movie that I love unreservedly. It's more a matter of placing it in the context of the Japanese New Wave, of the pinku eiga, and of the generation of filmmakers to whom director Kaneto Shindô belongs.

Read more below the fold >>

Watch and Wait

There's a fine line between an exploitation movie and an art movie. Walking that line is a tightrope act. Sometimes, it seems to me that the Japanese walk that line better than anyone else. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unique genres of erotica that grew up as the studio systems collapsed during the 1970s. Toei's "pinky violence" films and Nikkatsu's "roman porno" movies have no equivalents elsewhere, really, and showcase the dance between art and exploitation as a matter of course. On balance, Nikkatsu's films were probably more geared toward art, whatever you might want to use that word to mean. 1976's The Watcher in the Attic (directed by Noboru Tanaka) is a case in point. It has a deliberate, artfully composed visual image paired with an erotic impulse that slowly evolves into a death wish. It's certainly perverse.

Read more below the fold >>

Assassination Games

I don't know what I expected when I sat down to watch Takashi Miike's well-regarded 13 Assassins (2010). The second coming of Akira Kurosawa, maybe? That's what the reviews have suggested. Serves me right for reading them. What I got, instead, was a Miike movie, of course. Truth to tell, I'm not even sure how I want to write about it. Please bear with me as I stumble around the movie.

Read more below the fold >>

White Elephant Blogathon: Hair Extensions (Exte)

I used to collect wigs. Back in my wilder days, I liked to change my hair, color and style, often--more often than was practical were I to change it at a salon. Wigs were a nice way to cater to my changeable moods. I still have a lot of them. They're sitting on styrofoam heads on top of my comic book collection these days. I've been neglecting both collections in recent years. The relics of a misspent youth, I guess. My partner doesn't like the wigs. They freak her out. It's bad enough that the wig heads have a kind of creepy evil mannequin look to them; the fact that many of my wigs are expensive pieces made from human hair sends her over the edge. I can understand her loathing. Seen in a certain light, the line-up of wig heads looks like the trophy gallery of a serial killer, the hair itself a fetish object.

My assignment for the White Elephant Blogathon was Hair Extensions (Exte), ( 2007, directed by Sion Sono), a film that has a certain amount of resonance in my household. I didn't watch it with my partner, but I imagine that it would cause a freakout if I did. It's a little bit icky if this kind of fetish--the pathological kind rather than the fun sexual kind--hits a pressure point. I imagine that many audiences will find it ridiculous, but that's par for the course with horror movies. I like the notion that Asian filmmakers can make a horror movie about anything, which this film totally confirms.

Read more below the fold >>

Late Capitalism, Revisited

The wreckage of late capitalism is on display in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's creepy family drama, Tokyo Sonata (2008). One gets the feeling from this movie that the shock of Asia's financial crisis never went away. It haunts this film. The Japanese, it seems, are dealing with the same consequences of globalization as America: Jobs outsourced to China and India, youth with no prospects, a workforce beset with an existential crisis of faith. Kurosawa's movie is drenched in a striking anomie that all begins with economics. The world, it seems, is moving on.

The story here finds salariman Ryuhei downsized from his company. His boss asks him what his skill set is and what he can contribute if they keep him on, but Ryuhei can't even answer him. He's been a minor functionary for so long that he no longer knows what makes him valuable, if he even is. Shamed, he continues to dress in a suit and tie for work every morning as he lines up for unemployment, then hangs around a soup line where he meets another unemployed salariman who, like Ryuhei, puts on a great show of being a busy businessman. Ryuhei's family is none the wiser, though he seems a bit more high strung and testy. Megumi, his wife, dutifully keeps house in spite of her own dawning discontent with the role of housewife, while his sons have crises of their own. Their oldest son, Takashi wants to join the American military as a means of finding opportunity (this film posits a fictional, but plausible scenario where a recruiting strapped military takes volunteers from pacifist Japan), while their youngest son, Kenji, is not getting along with his teacher and wants to take piano lessons. Kenji pockets his lunch money and pays for the lessons on the sly, even though his father expressly forbids the lessons. The film gives more or less equal weight to the stories of all of these characters, especially once the whole facade of a traditional Japanese family comes crumbling down. That happens once Megumi spots her husband in the soup line one day. She keeps it to herself for a while until Ryuhei discover's Kenji's forbidden piano lessons, when she throws it in his face to rebuke his patriarchal authority.

Read more below the fold >>

A Darker Shade of Pink

There's a helpful and informative documentary on Mondo Macabro's DVD for the Nikkatsu violent pink film, Assault! Jack the Ripper (1976, directed by Yasuhara Hasebe) that explains some of the thought behind a major Japanese studio turning first to soft core porn, and then to more violent roughies in the 1970s. It was an act of desperation as the old studio model for filmmaking collapsed, of course, but it doesn't really explain the perversity of the product that resulted. There's something latent in Japanese culture--some virulent misogyny--that fuels the imagery in this film, at least. For the most part, I'm not even sure how to write about this movie.

A friend of mine once asked me if all Japanese films were about rape. "Of course they aren't," I said. It's films like Assault! Jack the Ripper that are responsible for that reputation. When I recounted this conversation in reference to this movie, one of my correspondents asked me "as a woman, how do you find rape in exploitation, pinku or otherwise?" This is how I answered:

Y'know, it depends on the context and it depends on the way it's filmed. A LOT of rape scenes are filmed in such a way that they might be titillating to some audiences. A friend of mine had this very problem with the rape scene at the center of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for example. She thought there was a certain amount of "posing" and while I'll defend the movie, she's certainly right to assume that someone is going to get off on that scene (someone that I certainly never want to meet, by the way). Some depictions go the other direction. The rape scene in The Accused is almost unendurable.

Intellectually, I have a serious problem with the whole rape/revenge subgenre, but viscerally, I respond to it. Ms.45 and the Female Convict Scorpion movies are particular favorites of mine, and rape is central to them. I should note, however, that I am not a rape survivor, so I don't carry that particular baggage around with me. I do not suffer from rape-related triggers. I'm also conscious of the fact that some women have rape fantasies and that they sometimes act them out via consensual BDSM play. It's a thorny set of issues, one that I'm not entirely equipped to deal with.

That all said, I think the depiction of rape in movies is almost universally presented with a male gaze, which is very problematic, and that this is especially true in Japan. My primary objection to something like Assault! Jack the Ripper isn't that there's rape involved, per se. If the movie was honest about its exploration of its specific sexual pathology, that would be fine (unfortunately, it's not). My objection, rather, is that the movie encourages the viewer to get behind the eyes of its rapist and, in the end, when he has dispatched his partner in crime, it encourages the audience to think, "about time he got rid of that whiny bitch." Additionally, there are no consequences. He gets away scott free. When the credits rolled, I was kind of pissed. But then, I have to remember that Japan is a culture that produced "Rapeman" manga, in which the title character goes around putting women "in their place." There's an element of this in Assault!, too, given the protagonist's predilection for stabbing women in their vaginas. It's like the movie is punishing women for their sex.

It's hard for me to dismiss rape culture in the movies, especially when one friend of mine works as a rape crisis first-responder and when at least three of the other women in my life are rape survivors. But it's equally hard for me to say it should be out of bounds, because it does express something nasty in our culture's collective unconscious that we probably need to examine.

In any event, the movie itself has a certain amount of high gloss sheen. Director Yasuhara Hasebe is a competent and occasionally stylish director, although he's as clueless about the misogyny he puts on screen in this film as he is in the fourth Female Convict Scorpion movie. He just doesn't get it. The movie itself is an interesting conflation of the cases of the Honeymoon Killers and Richard Speck (during the film's insane climax, I kept hearing Divine in my head screaming "I blew Richard Speck!"). Hasebe's brief from the studio required that there be nudity every ten minutes (at the reel changes, in other words), and he certainly delivers on that requirement). This isn't outright porn--none of the roman pinku films, or their violent cousins are outright porn; the censorship laws in Japan guarantee that much--but it is certainly designed for a porn audience.

The plot follows a pastry chef and a waitress who accidentally kill an insane female hitchhiker and, in the process, discover that murder is an aphrodisiac for them. They try it out on one of their bitchier (from their perspective) customers, and, lo and behold, that's what really gets them off. Unfortunately for the female half of our pair of psychos, her partner in crime soon develops a taste for murder for its own sake instead of sex. You can see it in the disinterest he shows in the blow job she gives him during a picnic late in the movie. Eventually, he has to cut ties with her (literally), an event that culminates during a murder spree in a dormitory full of nurses. The movie has other visual motifs, mainly surrounding food. It films the act of eating in a pretty disgusted way, as if to equate it as a base urge with both sex and the need to kill. For the most part, the movie's grasp of its characters' psychologies is rudimentary at best.

The frustrating thing to me about this film is that I've seen pinku eiga that manage to navigate the borderlands between art and pornography with a fair amount of success (see, for instance, Go Go Second Time Virgin). Hell, this is visually arresting enough to keep my interest during its 74 minute running time, but it's so wrong headed that after it was over, all I could do was shake my head.

---

Current Challenge tally:

Total Viewings: 17

First Time Viewings: 17

Some Thoughts on Seven Samurai

Note: A slightly different version of this piece was written for another, long defunct blog. My apologies to anyone who may have read it before.

One of the hallmarks of a legitimately great movie is the ability of that movie to reveal hidden depths after multiple viewings. The greatest movies are bottomless wells in this way. Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) is one such film. It still functions as one of the best action films ever made. It still functions as an archetypal hero’s journey. It still functions as a probing drama. It reminds me of the description John Steinbeck gave for East of Eden in his introduction to the book: it’s a box into which Kurosawa poured everything that he was.

With this week’s viewing, I noticed that it functions as epistemological inquiry. It never dawned on me before that great whacks of the film are based on misrecognitions. This begins practically at the outset, in which a bundle of twigs turns out to be a peasant carrying a load on his back and continues through Takeshi Shimura’s samurai masquerading as a priest, Toshiro Mifune masquerading as a samurai, and so on. When this thought dawned on me, my first instinct was that it was accidental until I caught myself in the realization that Kurosawa also made Rashomon, in which epistemology is the whole point of the movie. Once this thought occurred to me, I started to realize that most of Kurosawa's films are based on epistemological themes, from the mistaken identity that sets off High and Low to the impostor in Kagemusha. It's the director's dominant theme, it seems, usually hiding behind the other concerns that are in the foreground.

I also noticed that the camera occasionally functions as an echo of the blocking of the characters. During the duel near the beginning of the film, the camera moves not like a camera on a track, but like an additional samurai, watching the action. It mirrors the hyperactive loser of the duel, actually, and when he dies, the film speed slows down, as if the camera movement during the duel and the film speed during the aftermath have put us into his skin. Interesting. I was also very conscious of the way Kurosawa frames shots of groups. Groups of non-samurai always seem to be in motion, fleeing something or running towards something else. Samurai almost never hurry, and are often static against the tide of villagers or bandits. Kurosawa–in this film in particular–is often compared to John Ford, but a more apt comparison is Howard Hawks, who composed shots of groups as a means of building communities. Kurosawa rarely separates the seven samurai when they are in a scene together–he generally keeps them all in the same film frame, even at the end when four of them are marked by gravestones.

I could probably spend a lifetime with this film.

How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth.

During Akira Kurosawa's long eclipse during the 1970s, a period during which he made one film as an exile and made one suicide attempt, the director occupied himself with refining the designs and storyboards for two films he didn't know if he would ever make. At the time, he had only made two films in color, and one can imagine him beginning to burst at the possibilities of color that he might never get to realize on screen. The two films* that eventually resulted from this long obsession play as if the director had taken a gun, put it in his mouth, and splattered both his disillusionment and his pent up ambitions onto the screen in eyeball-searing color.

My local art house has been running a Kurosawa retrospective this summer, consisting of six films. Of these six, I own five of them and have seen all of them on the big screen at one point or another. The sixth is Ran, Kurosawa's 1985 version of King Lear, which I have only ever seen on television and don't own. I skipped the others, but went to Ran.

There is a valedictory quality to Ran. There are so many disparate theatrical elements plucked from his long career and from his national cinema that it seems as if Kurosawa, in this one film, was trying to live up to the criticism that his career was like watching the history of Japanese cinema running in reverse. The theatricality of it is at odds with his early films, but of a piece with them, too. The theatricality of it was always there in films like Seven Samurai, but it was hidden, perhaps because they were in black and white. A great many of the shots in Ran seem decorated rather than composed, as if the director had spent years and years working and re-working them. The volume of Kurosawa's art from this period shows that this is indeed what happened. The director enlisted his friend, Ishiro Honda, to realize many of these pieces on screen, thus, perversely linking this particular apocalypse with the various catastrophes inflicted on Japan in Honda's kaiju films.

There are odd notes, from the androgynous Fool (the actor who plays him was in fact a noted female impersonator), to the grandly theatrical make-up worn by Tatsuya Nakadai, to a Tôru Takemitsu's score that sounds like nothing Japanese at all and most resembles Jerry Goldsmith's Planet of the Apes score. This is a weirdly feminine movie, too. The aforementioned Fool is part of it, but the movie hinges on the two female characters, Lady Sue (Yoshiko Miyazaki) in the role of the murdered innocent and Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) as a descendant of Lady Macbeth. Lady Sue has hardly any screen time, but the pivotal role of the murdered innocent is implacable in a Shakespearean tragedy. Lady Kaede, on the other hand, steals the entire movie from all comers, even the wildly overacting Nakadai. I categorize this all as odd because Kurosawa was never a filmmaker with much interest in women, and yet they dominate his valediction. All told, this assemblage of oddities has a mounting effect, like a top that begins with small wobbles spinning into wildly eccentric gyrations. It would be a mistake to think that this effect is an accident, because, after all, the title of the film translates literally as "Chaos."

Ran is a great movie, no doubt about it, but I'd forgotten just how much of a downer it is. Not all of that can be laid at the feet of William Shakespeare, either. Oh, the broad outlines of Lear are still there, though it changes Lear's daughters into sons and kinda sorta changes Richmond into Lady Kaeda, one of the cinema's most jaw-dropping monsters. Lear is already something of a total negation of life, in which even the villains are inconsequential in a godless void. Its dominant words are no, not, nothing, and (memorably) never never never never. And in spite of all this, Kurosawa goes it all one better. The last shot of the movie has a blind man teetering on the precipice of a ruined castle, having accidentally dropped an image of the Amida Buddha he had been given to keep him company. Rarely has a filmmaker ever matched himself so keenly to the material. Ran is Kurosawa howling in the wilderness.

---

*The other is Kagemusha (1980)

The Blind Leading the Blind

I have to admit that I'm a complete sucker for Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, but I always find it odd when someone else besides Katsu Shintaro reprises the role. I mean, Katsu played the role in 26 movies and a television series. He pretty much laid claim to the role for all time. It just seemed wrong to see the character kinda sorta updated for the West in Blind Fury, with Rutger Hauer in the role, and more traditionally with Takeshi Kitano in the 2003 revival. It's awkward. This problem is sidestepped in Ichi (2008, directed by Fumihiko Sori), in which the blind swordsman himself is absent, replaced by his daughter. She has the same lethal sword stroke and the same blindness, but because she's NOT Zatoichi, the cognitive dissonance is largely absent. That's not to say the movie doesn't have problems of its own.

The basic plot should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a Zatoichi movie. Ichi (Haruka Ayase) wanders the countryside as an itinerant musician rather than as a masseuse. There is the obligatory gambling scene in which Ichi can hear whether the dice are odds or evens. There is the band of yakuza thugs terrorizing the town. There is the hidden sword and the hidden skill with the sword. All of this isn't so much a formula as it is a ritual. With this being a distaff version of the character, some changes have been made. The biggest change is that Ichi herself isn't the deadliest swordsperson in the movie. In fact, she gets her ass handed to her by the leader of the Yakuza. Takao Ôsawa plays the hero/romantic interest of the piece. He's better than Ichi, too, though he's kinda sorta castrated by a trauma in his past. He can't draw his sword until the very end of the film. The confrontation between him and the bandit leader turns into one of those heroic bloodshed moments that so enamoured Chang Cheh and John Woo.

For the most part, this is completely sexist, and it's surprising to find this iteration in Japanese genre film, which sometimes fetishizes its death-dealing heroines. Still, Haruka Ayase seems a good deal softer than Meiko Kaji ever did, I guess. Be all that as it may, it's disappointing that this becomes about the men and their problems rather than Ichi herself.

Ichi's story is interesting enough in itself to carry the movie, but it serves here mainly as a counterpoint to the way the movie downgrades the archetype. She sets out on her own to find her father after being sexually assaulted and killing her attacker. The movie makes a good deal of hay out of her "disgrace," though I don't know that it endorses the notion. There is a good deal of violence against the women in this movie, but the movie refrains from really turning Ichi into an archetype of female revenge even as she chops up the rapists and exploiters throughout the movie. I'm a bit troubled by the regressive way it places women in the background, even its ostensible heroine. I mean, if you're going to do this, what's the point of creating this particular character in the first place.

I'm also kind of bothered by the way this movie turns into a romance and with how it perpetuates the myth of the regeneration of manhood through violence. Maybe I'm just being picky. Maybe I'm letting feminism get in the way of enjoying the action.

As befits an updating of Zatoichi, this film is almost classical in its approach to filming action. It eschews the fast cut shaky-cam style of contemporary action films in favor of a more Kurosawan approach. It rarely gets closer to the action than a medium two-shot, but it does indulge in slow-motion. There's blood, but there aren't the geysers of blood from the balmier days of the chambara. The blood here is digital, but it's not overly intrusive.

This approach is appealing, but it has a drawback. Lacking the eye for mise en scene and editing of a Kurosawa (or even a Fukasaku or a Misumi), this approach has a kind of flattening effect. The movie never really wows the viewer with either the action or the style. In this regard it's almost exactly like a mid-period Zatoichi movie, but that shouldn't be counted as a compliment. Much as I love those movies, I'm under no illusions about their aesthetic merits, just as I'm under no illusions about this film, either. Still, it's an attractive movie and an entertaining chop-em up. I wish I could like it better than I do.

Reeling and Rocking

A year or so ago I reviewed the Japanese girl rock movie, Linda Linda Linda, or rather, kind of reviewed it, while linking to a YouTube clip of the title song. I love that movie to pieces. So when one of my correspondents told me that they liked another Japanese girl rock movie better, I was intrigued. The movie in question is Nana (2005, directed by Kentarô Ôtani), which is based in turn on a manga. The movie itself isn't especially concerned with the healing power of rock and roll as an object unto itself (as Linda Linda Linda was), so much as it uses music as a plot device. It could be anything, really.

Anyway, the plot of the movie follows two girls who are named Nana who meet by happenstance on a train to Tokyo. The first Nana, who we first meet in a pre-credit concert sequence, is an aspiring rock star.  She is world weary and jaded already even though she's only 20. The other Nana is going to Tokyo in pursuit of a boyfriend who went off to art school there. The second Nana is a gushing schoolgirl at first. Naive is putting things mildly. Things end badly with her boyfriend, who clearly doesn't want her around him. Also by happenstance, the two Nanas wind up as roommates. It's a mutually beneficial relationship: rocker Nana teaches schoolgirl Nana to be independent, while schoolgirl Nana plays matchmaker for rocker Nana and her ex-boyfriend (now a successful rock star in his own right).

This all sounds fun, but it turns out limp. I think I knew it was going to be limp when it got into the habit of starting songs as diegetic musical numbers and then truncating them, almost like the filmmakers didn't actually have complete songs to play with (it eventually gets out of this habit, but the damage was done early; it's also likely that this was a casualty when the run-time of the film got long, unfortunately). I didn't dislike the movie, which should relieve my friend who recommended it, but I did resent that it wasn't better, and I wish it was more in love with rock and roll, and in love with better rock and roll at that. That's NOT a problem that Linda Linda Linda had.

---

The three men profiled in It Might Get Loud (2008, directed by Davis Guggenheim) don't have a problem with loving rock and roll. They are, respectively, Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. The movie opens with White cobbling together a one string guitar from a board, a couple of nails, a coke bottle, and a pick-up. White is endlessly inventive. All three are endlessly inventive in their respective ways, about which the movie goes into in great depth. The conceit is that they've all three been assembled into a warehouse to talk about playing guitar and maybe to play some, too, which is the promise that the movie makes. Then it fails to deliver on it. Oh, there's a ton of guitar. True. But you don't really see the three of them come together and jam until they play The Band's "The Weight" under the closing credits. It's a good way to keep the audience in their seat during the closing credits, I guess, but it seems like a cheat. You never really have a sense of them interacting. One wishes that White's prediction at the outset, that "there might be a fist fight," had come true.

Still, it is a fair portrait of each guitarist in turn, with Jimmy Page coming off the best--he's really turned into a lovely old man with a twinkle of a boy still in him--as evidenced while watching him play air guitar to Link Wray's "Rumble" or playing air guitar with a theremin. It's White, though, that makes the strongest statement about the nature of his art, when he plays a Son House song and then declares that he's spent his entire career trying to play that song. In one other respect, the movie is a success: it makes me want to go home and play guitar.

Some Favorite Japanese Films

Everyone has their favorites and these are some of mine. I don't do rankings, and this is subject to change at a whim. Freely associated and in no particular order, starting with the directors who are the three 800 lb. gorillas of Japanese cinema:



Seven Samurai (1955, directed by Akira Kurosawa). This was my gateway into Japanese film beyond the Godzilla movies of my youth (and, hey look! It's from Toho, too!). There are Kurosawa films that I like more than this, actually, but there aren't any to which I return more often. It's a big box with everything in it, a film that's actually too short at three hours long.

Ugetsu (1953, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi). Ordinarily, I don't care for Mizoguchi. I find him to be the most manipulative of any legitimately great director. You can generally see the wheels of the plot turning as you watch. And yet, I can't take my eyes off of Ugetsu. Because it's a ghost story, there's a certain formalism to the manipulation that makes it rather more palatable to me, and lends it the power to break my heart.

I Was Born, But...(1932, directed by Yasujiro Ozu). Later Ozu is too rigidly formal for my tastes (although, not so formal that he's above fart jokes in Good Morning, which, coincidentally, is a remake of this film). Early Ozu, on the other hand, seems positively antic in comparison. This is my favorite of his early films, in part because I was raised on the best of the Little Rascals shorts, and this film is like one of those shorts writ large. It's funny and touching at the same time.

Stepping away from the shadow of the Kurosawa/Mizoguchi/Ozu axis, here are some of my other favorites:


Onibaba (1964, directed by Kaneto Shindo), which strikes me as some kind of missing link between I Walked With a Zombie and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Desperation and survival set against a vast sea of grass. A hole. A demon mask. A weird erotic charge. Some days, this is my favorite Japanese film.

Black Rain (1989, directed by Shohei Imamura) depicts the bombing of Hiroshima in one of the most harrowing sequences in any film about the war that I can remember. But Imamura frontloads the film with that imagery in order to get it out of the way (and to influence) the more subdued horrors that awaited the survivors. I'm not talking about the immediate aftermath, but rather the long term effects. In this respect it becomes one of the director's more subtle examinations of class and women in post-war Japan.

The Human Condition (1959-1961, directed by Masaki Kobayashi). Another war film, this time a three part epic about the war in Manchuria, and a complete and utter rejection of Japan's militaristic past. One can sense a deep personal investment in this movie from Kobayashi, who really hit his stride with this movie.

Goyokin (1969, directed by Hideo Gosha) is an anti-samurai movie. Oh, it's got enough action and enough "cool" to satisfy the most jaded chambara fan, but it's a negation of the Bushido code and the corrupt social structures it gave rise to. If Kurosawa was the John Ford of the samurai film, Gosha was the Robert Aldrich.

The Story of a Prostitute (1965, directed by Seijun Suzuki) was made for a pittance compared with the commercial films Suzuki was making at the time, shot on standing sets with very little budget. But this is my favorite of Suzuki's movies, one where, for a change, the director seems personally invested in the story, without throwing out his restless experimentation with film as an abstraction. Another film set in Manchuria during the war. It haunts a lot of the Japanese movies from this period.

Cure (1997, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa) is one of the creepiest movies I can remember seeing. For some reason, this film always strikes me as a way of processing the sarin nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo subway by Aum Shinrikyo, even though it really has absolutely nothing to do with it. A serial killer/police procedural, this veers off into Kurosawa's now-trademarked horror of ambiguous alienation in its second half. The creepiest of the new wave of Japanese horror movies.

A Snake of June (2002, directed by Shinya Tsukamoto) is a combination of pink film and film noir, filtered through director Tsukamoto's freak-out sensibility. This is comparatively restrained for him after the fireworks of Tetsuo, but I like that about it. An amazing addition to the cinema of voyeurism and sadomasochism, all filmed with a persistent veneer of oceanic dread. Yet surprisingly optimistic in the end.

Giants and Toys (1958, directed by Yasuzo Masumura) is a candy colored dismantling of Japanese corporate culture that seduces with the visuals before sticking the knife in. At its core, this is as nasty a film as American films like The Apartment or Sweet Smell of Success, but it goes them one further by radically breaking with the "rules" of Japanese cinema. This is edited fast, with its beats coming almost syllable for syllable sometimes. Nagisha Oshima exempted Masumura from his blanket condemnation of traditional Japanese film. This movie is one of the reasons why.

Odd Obsession (1959, directed by Kon Ichikawa) is my favorite of Ichikawa's many films, mainly because it demonstrates that even in 1959, the Japanese had a more incisive insight into the sexual relationships between men and women than could be found in any other national cinema. Nobody does weird psychodrama like them. This makes a great double feature with Masumura's Manji, which also adapts a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki.



Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972, directed by Shinya Ito) is the masterpiece of Japanese exploitation cinema. What you might get if you hired Mario Bava to remake Caged Heat. It doesn't "transcend" it's generic roots, so much as it sinks into them so deeply that they become a kind of abstract art. Meiko Kaji cemented her place as the queen of Japanese cult cinema in this series (of which, this is the second and weirdest). She doesn't speak much, but her lacerating stares speak volumes.

Pale Flower (1964, directed by Masahiro Shinoda), which finds the innovations of the Japanese new wave finding their way into genre films. This is an austere, chilly fall from grace in the tradition of the bleakest of film noir, laid bare with a staccato editing scheme. Shinoda later turned into kind of a mannerist, but in this film, he shows an instinct for the jugular.

And two animated movies:


Grave of the Fireflies (1988, directed by Isao Takahata), which is, bar none, the saddest film ever made. Reduces me to a puddle every time I see it, which isn't often because I don't think I could take it.

Steamboy (2004, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo) has all the eyedrugging destruction you could ask for in a steampunk epic, while never losing sight of the "fun" quotient. I like this a lot more than Otomo's groundbreaking Akira, but I'm generally not an enthusiast for Japanese animation, so take that however you like.

Opening Gambits: Suzuki's Kanto Wanderer and Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards

Both Kanto Wanderer and Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards were made in 1963, during director Seijun Suzuki's most prolific period. It's well known that he was getting bored with making stock yakuza films, and that he was beginning to dismantle the yakuza film's visual and generic conventions. This would find its fullest flowering a couple of years later, but these two films are an interesting example of the director beginning to chafe at the bit. The difference in these films is immediately apparent from their opening scenes, which are what concern me here.

Go to Hell Bastards is the more conventional of the two, but it has interesting characteristics. Suzuki tends to avoid close-ups in his opening. Most of it is master shots. But not all. The first shot is a medium two-shot of an American soldier:


Then cut to a few master shots:


The first real close-up of the movie. Note, that it's not a close up of a human being:


Cut to a couple of medium two-shots:



Then back to master shots for the mayhem that opens the movie:




Most of the interiors of the remainder of the movie are filmed from a dramatic distance, like this shot:


Even the close-ups start from a distance. This medium two-shot dollies in close for a striking face-off:



But a lot of the film is at arms length. These two shots are typical:


Well, so what? Let's compare this opening with the opening of Kanto Wanderer, which starts with a close-up:


And then another:


And then another:


And then another:


And then another:


And then another:

And so on, with the duration of each shot getting shorter and shorter. This is a mildly disorienting sequence for two reasons: one, we have no context for these characters. These are the VERY first shots of the movie. Second, Suzuki has unhitched them from their environments. We are looking so closely at these faces, we don't have any idea of where they are and why they are there.

What I think is going on in these movies is this: Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards is exactly the kind of movie Suzuki was beginning to get bored with, and, as a result, he has adopted a cinematic idiom of distance. He doesn't really care about his characters, so he puts them at arm's length. He's deadpanning. In Kanto Wanderer, he's beginning to see the expressive potential of cinema, and he starts to experiment--not too much yet, but enough. I don't think the similarity between the title of Kanto Wanderer and Suzuki's later Tokyo Drifter is an accident. They explore the same kinds of existential anomie, but they ALSO share an exploration of cinema as abstraction. In any event, watching these two movies back to back is like watching the light bulb go off in the director's head.