Three Films Make A Post: The time has come to tell the tale.

A Classic Horror Story (2021): This Netflix horror film by Roberto De Feo and Paolo Strippoli starring Matilda Lutz (last seen here in the mind-blowing rape revenge film Revenge) does have quite a bit of fun with the whole meta horror genre shifting business, though never so much it seems more interested in patting itself on the back instead of being an actual horror movie. Consequently, the various set pieces are inventive in their nods to horror of the past but creative enough on their own to also feel organically threatening and creepy. The genre shifting is a fun enough game to play, though I do have to admit I was more than a little disappointed the whole affair decided on one of my least favourite sub-genres as its ending point. But then, it’s me, not the movie.

Ghibah (2021): I have a history of not getting along with Indonesian horror comedy very well (the language barrier certainly doesn’t help), so colour me very surprised about how much enjoyed this somewhat religious (again, not something I love in my horror) horror comedy by Monty Tiwa about an ifrit punishing a group of college kids committing the sins of gossiping and defamation (which is apparently worse than murder) quite a bit. There’s a charming wryness to the film’s comedy that even continues during its most moralizing moments, rather suggesting your mildly disappointed teacher rather than a fire and brimstone preacher (imam?), turning the comedy curiously companionable. At the same time, the horror set pieces are sometimes surprisingly vicious, confronting characters and audience with pretty traumatic images and nearly never playing the horror itself for laughs; which is why the laughs work so well and vice versa.

His Motorbike, Her Island (1986) aka Kare no ootobai, kanojo no shima: On paper, this is your typical mid-80s Kadokawa production made with a young audience and box office results foremost in mind, a romantic coming of age tale between a young and pleasantly awkward Riki Takeuchi (so young even his hair hasn’t quite reached its future epic form) and the motorcycle-loving Kiwako Harada. While it’s script is very much written to market, it’s not stupidly so, knowing quite a bit about the workings of the late teenage heart, fear of commitment and early fear of loss, just presenting it in a light and non-brooding way.

And that’s before director Nobuhiko Obayashi comes in, who, as is his wont, stylizes every single element of the film to hell and back again, intensifying, ironicizing, breaking and putting back together again, often in the same scene. Sometimes, this approach bogs Obayashi’s films down in irony and pop aestheticism, but when it works like here (not to speak of a masterpiece like Hausu), cheese turns into something more fraught, dangerous, exciting and strange, themes, plots and surface aesthetics going on a merry dance with one another that becomes riveting and singular.

Tokyo Mafia 4: Yakuza Blood (1997)

(Don't even try to puzzle out the continuity between this and the other three films. It'll only give you a headache and distract you from the best film of the whole bunch).

Young, inexperienced and rather dumb street thug Ryo (Kazuhiro Mashiko) becomes a bit obsessed by the story of the Legendary Assassin supposed to first have killed 300 yakuza in a single night to take vengeance for his murdered girlfriend and then become the best professional killer in Japan, as told to him during a cameo of the inevitable Ren Osugi. That assassin is obviously none other than the hero of the other three Tokyo Mafia movies, Ginya Yabuki (Riki Takeuchi!).

As fate will have it, Ryo is at a bar where Yabuki is performing one of his jobs and kinda-sorta saves the older man's life. Yabuki doesn't seem very thankful, yet still Ryo decides there and then that he's going to become a hit man like Yabuki, too, and - if possible - something like his new idol's apprentice. The young idiot begins following Yabuki around, trying to insinuate himself as a junior assassin with Yabuki's controller (Hirotaro Honda), Oh and he begins to shoot the corpses of the victims of Yabuki's hits (incidentally, corpses are the only things Ryo's able to hit) in what I can only interpret a declaration of love.

Ryo also nearly guns down a witness, a Chinese girl named Yuan (Ryoko Imamura), but Yabuki, who until that point had merely pretended not to see Ryo creepily stalking his every move and mutilating corpses, painfully dissuades him from nonsense like this.

Yuan isn't easily pissed off by minor things like a guy trying to kill her, so soon enough, something as close to romance as you'll find in a yakuza movie starts between her and Ryo. It's enough for any sane guy to stop trying to imitate a man like Yabuki so obviously out for self-destruction, but fate (Ryo's dumbass-itude) has other plans.

This, the fourth, and, as it looks, last of the Tokyo Mafia films comes as something of a surprise to me. The film was again - like the third one - directed by Takeshi Miyasaki, but there's a huge difference between the highly entertaining, but generic competence of the director's last effort, and the free-form artiness of this one.

If you come looking for a bit of the old ultra-violence, Tokyo Mafia 4 will probably not make you happy, because there's not really that much action on screen, and the shoot-outs that do happen are over (I suspect realistically) fast. There's no impression of Miyasaki not being able to stage an entertaining gunfight here, though, it rather seems to me as if the director's just not interested in making a movie that is mainly about gunfights. Of course, there is a (comparatively) big, slow-mo gunfight with Riki snarling a lot at the end of the movie, but even that one will stay in my mind because a bunch of sword-fighting monks that up until that point looked to me like metaphors without any actual physical presence in the world of the film turn into Riki-gun-fodder.

What also will stay in my mind is the film's circling around the question about the difference between myth and reality, about what makes a man want to become just like another man, even when that man tries to dissuade him from this goal by any means necessary, because he knows he's just a drunk with a death-wish. This circling happens in the typical, sometimes semi-improvised style yakuza V-cinema often takes on when it's not about the shoot-outs or the honour or the boredom, in scenes that often border on the absurd, directed by Miyasaki with the light hand of a man willing to give his actors room. And - as is often the case with films like this - everyone plays his or her heart out. Not in a Hollywood "warning! star acts now!" fashion, but with a sense of spontaneity that produces authenticity even in a film whose budget doesn't provide the actors with any attractive settings to do their acting in (though the film has some - probably shot guerrilla style - outside locations).

It's all about creating a mood, looking at people, listening to people, and never quite outright saying what the point of the film is. So basically, it's the sort of film people produce who know that they don't have much money to work with, but can do what they want with the little they have as long as the end product contains three shoot-outs. As in pink cinema, so in the yakuza film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,reviews,yakuza,takeshi miyasaka,riki takeuchi,kazuhiro mashiko,ryoko imamura,hirotaro honda,ren osugi

Tokyo Mafia 3: Battle For Shinjuku (1996)

(This is supposed to be a prequel taking place before the first Tokyo Mafia film, but doesn't work too well with the continuity established in the first two films. After some confusion, I just decided to roll with it.)

After hiding away for three years in Thailand, ex-yakuza Ginza Yabuki (Riki Takeuchi!) returns to Tokyo. This comes as quite a surprise to some, because Yabuki is supposed to be dead. His former gang brother Saimon (Masayuki Imai) had been ordered to kill him, but wasn't able to go through with the highly un-chivalrous deed. Now, the returned Yabuki has decided to take vengeance on the corrupt Yakuza society of the Teitokai.

While he was away, Saimon has become the de-facto boss of his group whose nominal leader drools senilely away in his wheelchair. The Teitokai are working closely with non-Japanese gangsters, leading to the usual racist claptrap long-suffering Yakuza V-cinema viewers expect.

Yabuki doesn't like this too much, and plans to attack the Teitokai's secret bank, steal all their money and use it to buy the trust of the group's foreign allies. To achieve his goal, Yabuki puts together a team of random losers: an honourable old friend and now family man who will only do this one last job for him (uh-oh), a big guy who doesn't talk much, a seventeen year old trainee hitwoman with nowhere to go and a very sleazy private eye with a heart of gold. Whatever could go wrong?

If you are able to ignore the fact that the third Tokyo Mafia film and its predecessors don't combine into a shared narrative world that makes much sense character-wise or worldbuilding-wise, you'll probably discover that Battle for Shinjuku is a much more accomplished film than its two predecessors. I'd probably care more for the continuity problems if the first two films had been more memorable, but since they weren't, I see no reason not to just ignore their existence from now on, which is the technique the film itself prefers, too.

It not being in continuity with the other films does not mean that Battle isn't built of clichés nearly every yakuza film post-Battles-Without-Honour-and-Humanity has adopted, quite the opposite. We are absolutely in the realm of snarling no-good men hiding behind a hypocritical code of honour that doesn't hinder them from being quite monstrous human beings at all, a realm where the few people who actually believe in that code are damned from the start, know that they are, and still can't help themselves, and everything else that comes with the territory.

But Battle takes these well-examined tropes and puts them together into a well-done piece of V-cinema that just knows what to do with them, as I wish more genre movies would be able to. There's also a finely developed sense of irony on display. The most chivalrous (in a yakuza sense) character is Yabuki, the guy who openly calls the code of the yakuza bullshit, while those touting it the loudest are the ones ignoring it for the slightest reasons.

New series director Takeshi Miyasaka just is a lot better at his art than his predecessor Seiichi Shirai. Where Shirai pointed and shot, Miyasaka composes shots and transitions like a real grown-up filmmaker. This - and the fact that the film has more than one action scene to break up the talking - leads to a film with a lively rhythm and a dramatic pull its predecessors mostly lacked.

The acting is also fine enough - everyone's favourite yakuza actor Riki is not in ultra scenery-chewing mood, and mostly works through cool snarling, but he is far from the bored William Shatner imitation he becomes in his less entertaining films. The star of the show this time is Masayuki Imai, though. Imai is very convincing as man caught between the political realities of his yakuza life and his belief in the traditional ninkyo values. He gives the classic dichotomy between duty and honour more dignity than it probably warrants. Everyone else manages to put a bit of personality into roles that aren't too original.

All this might sound as if I am damning with faint praise, but I did enjoy Tokyo Mafia 3 quite a bit, even though it is "only" a very competently done yakuza movie with a handful of good ideas that doesn't add anything to its genre I haven't seen before.

I'm sometimes condemning films for being "merely competent", in this case however, competence is all that is needed to make for a fine little film.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,yakuza,takeshi miyasaka,riki takeuchi,masayuki imai

In short: Tokyo Mafia 2 - Wrath of the Yakuza (1995)

When last we left our upstart non-yakuza hero Ginya Yabuki (Riki Takeuchi), he was forced to declare open war on the yakuza families making up the Teitokai.

Besides fire-bombing their offices, he decides that it's best to just let the yakuza's bosses be killed by professional killers he borrows from his triad friends. This plan works out rather nicely for him. Although there are some setbacks like a kidnapped girlfriend that leads to Ginya having to make use of his own paid police inspector, there seems to be no problem our hero cannot solve with a smirk and a phone call.

In the end, most of what has happened in this film and the film before turns out to have been orchestrated by the triads to drive all Japanese gangsters out of Kabukicho. And oh noes! They even have an agent among Yabuki's people.

In the end, Yabuki and his old friend Sho Saimon will join forces to punish the wicked by shouting excessively. And a bit of shooting too.

Since the first Tokyo Mafia film was all set-up for the inevitable yakuza war, I had hopes that its sequel would turn up the action and the madness a little. Alas, Wrath of the Yakuza is even more sedate than its prequel, without even the handful of awesomely stupid elements the earlier film had going for it.

Case in point is the whole "war" business. We are told that there are fire-bombings but don't even get to see the little footage the last film showed. The same goes for large parts of the assassinations or basically everything that could be entertaining to watch.

Instead there's lots and lots of talking and shouting by grim-faced men in mostly brownish and grey sets, which wouldn't be much of a problem if the characterization or the gangster politics were actually interesting or as complex as the film pretends they are. Too bad that they aren't.

It doesn't help the film that the racist claptrap about the evil Chinese and the heroic Japanese just doesn't work when we talk about people we never get to see doing a single decent thing, or that the eeeevil Chinese domination plans are all based on the yakuza being idiots who will fall for anything.

Not even Riki looks all that enthusiastic. Before the slightly entertaining finale, he's not even really chewing the scenery but limits himself to a bored looking smirk. It's a fitting look for the non-action going on around him, but probably not the facial expression someone whose girlfriend has just been snatched by his enemies should wear.

Certainly, the third Tokyo Mafia film will be better.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,in short,yakuza,riki takeuchi,ren osugi

Tokyo Mafia 1 - Yakuza Wars (1995)

Three years ago, Ginya Yabuki (Riki Takeuchi) had a falling out with Isagami (the inevitable Ren Osugi), the number two of the yakuza group he was a member in. Being roughed up by your superior for no good reason is one thing for someone like Yabuki, but then being mistreated with an ashtray obviously quite another, so his natural reaction (besides mugging, grunting and eye-bulging, of course) was to shoot Isagami in the leg, crippling the man forever.

As an honourable man, Yabuki followed his act at once with biting off his own little finger to atone and went into exile in Hong Kong.

Three years later, the former yakuza returns to Kabuki Cho with his own gang, the Tokyo Mafia. While small in numbers, Yabuki's contacts with the triads and the decentralisation of his organization give him a leg up when doing business in a part of Tokyo that is fought over by groups who are theoretically united under the banner of the Teitokai and two triad gangs.

The Tokyo Mafia isn't interested in the usual drugs, gambling and prostitution affairs of their peers anyway. Instead, the group makes its money by smuggling whale meat and committing high tech crimes.

Thanks to the diplomatic help of Yabuki's former yakuza brother Sho Saimon (Masayuki Imai) and quite a bit of money, the gangster manages to buy himself a peaceful working environment - for a time at least.

Alas, Isagami still hates his guts and some of the yakuza don't understand why they should let Yabuki have any business at all, if they could just take it away from him. It only needs one hasty attack on the life of the Teitokai leader by one of Yabuki's underlings to turn the situation into an all out war our hero neither wants nor thinks he can win.

Seiichi Shirai's Tokyo Mafia is probably more typical of the dozens of V Cinema (that's Japanese for direct to DVD movies) films adorable over-actor Riki Takeuchi starred in than those we usually get to see outside of Japan.

This is a case of a classical piece of middle-of-the-road exploitation filmmaking. It's cheap, it's confusing and it's very far from what many people understand under "art". Most of the film consists of grim men talking gangster politics which are look more complicated than they actually are, a bit of intense manlove thrown in for good measure, and a few bouts of ridiculous violence very much in love with hacking off innocent body parts.

Neither the plot nor the characterisation is all that interesting, but it's impossible to be too hard on a film that contains the utterly awesome/ridiculous scene in which an insanely mugging, grunting and screaming Riki Takeuchi bites off his own finger, like Elvis on a really bad day. It is one of the few moments where the film really dares to let loose, but it's enough for me to make it worth my time. There's also a conceptually very fun moment where Riki and two of his gang members - dressed for no good reason in army fatigues - "visit" a yakuza boss via helicopter for a nice little chat, commando style. It is as gleefully silly a scene as one could wish for, and probably just came to pass because someone in the production department managed to get a helicopter for an hour or two. One of the iron rules of exploitation cinema has always been and will always be that you shall not let a good helicopter go to waste.

I'm also quite partial to the whale meat smuggling idea that really drives the utter amorality of even our supposed hero in the film home. Still, it's not too difficult to root for Yabuki and his gang of international crooks, since he and his guy and girls are among the few people with a sense of personal loyalty - and therefore humanity - in the film. And, you know, Riki Takeuchi is turning on the intensity even in a film as routine as this one.

It's just too bad that Shirai's direction is a little on the conservative side, especially compared to the visuals someone like Takashi Miike or even "just" someone like Atsushi Muroga produce on an equally small budget. On the plus side, Shirai isn't actively undermining his own film.

I should also add that this is truly the first part of a serial and just stops right in the middle of what little plot it has. Since all four parts of Tokyo Mafia are sold together, that shouldn't be much of a problem, though.

If the sequel has more moments of insanity, I'll be perfectly happy.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,yakuza,riki takeuchi,reviews,ren osugi

Blood (1998)

(This is the Japanese one with Riki Takeuchi, and not one of the bazillion other films with the same title.)

The professional killer Kizaki (Riki Takeuchi) tries to assassinate his former boss, the triad leader Ri (Sho Aikawa), which only seems fair to me, since we later learn that Ri first tried to have Kizaki killed for no reason we will ever be made privy of. Kizaki fails and is caught by Ri's men, tortured a little and then driven off into the woods to be disposed of.

Killing his two would-be executioners, the killer escapes nearly fatally wounded yet manages to get to a hospital. As luck will have it, his doctor there is Kamiyama (Noboru Takachi), a highschool friend of his from the time when was still called Takuya. Both men haven't seen each other in more than a decade. The last time they saw each other was in their late teens, when enemies of Kizaki were trying to rape his then girlfriend Yuki to get at him. The boys took to defending the girl but went a bit further than self defense by killing at least one of the attackers. Kizaki took the fall for both of them, and Kamiyama let him.

Now, Dr. Kamamiya is married to Yuki (now played by Mai Oikawa), who is pregnant. The doctor is still caught in feelings of guilt over what happened. Those feelings are strong enough for him to risk a lot to protect his old friend from the interest of the police and even help in Kazuki's escape when Ri's men attack the killer (through an old lady who is a professional killer like Kazuki, no less) in the hospital.

When Kizaki realizes that the physician is now married to Yuki, he urges Kamiyama to keep away from him in the future to protect the woman he obviously still loves.

Kamiyama, driven by a mixture of self-hatred and bitterness, agrees, but keeping out of Kizaki's trouble is more difficult for him than anyone could have imagined. Two mean jokes of destiny have provided further connections between the two men.

Firstly, the police officer investigating the case is the same one who was responsible for the rape revenge case years ago and is bound to realize what is going on betwenn Kizaki and Kamiyama sooner or later.

Secondly, Kamiyama is also treating Kizaki's enemy Ri for an inoperable and lethal cancer, and when the gangster boss learns of the men's connection, he does the obvious gangster boss thing and kidnaps Yuki to convince the physician to kill his old friend.

Of course, these problems can only be solved in a blood bath.

Before watching Blood, I only knew its director Kosuke Suzuki from his rather extreme sexploitation films in the Stop the Bitch Campaign series, so I didn't expect his earlier Yakuza film to be less interested in bodily fluids and much more in classical notions of tragedy.

Usually, I would complain about the heavy weight Blood's scripts lays on fateful coincidences, but if you read the film as a tragedy (like many yakuza films are between the shouting and the shooting), those really aren't coincidences but fate's way to fulfill a destiny a long time in the making for all of the characters, from Kizaki to the cop.

I think Suzuki manages to keep his film's tone earnest enough to make this reading as a tragedy instead of a melodrama tenable. There is something deliberate and consciously slow about many of the film's scenes. Blood is very - not as atypical for a film made for the V cinema market as one would think - focused on the feelings of its characters, or rather the part of their feelings that is readable in their eyes and in their posture. These aren't people really used to giving voice to their feelings, and when they do, their death can't be far away.

There is of course room for the genre-necessary violence, but much of the action is wilfully occluded through Suzuki's often elegant choice of camera set-ups.

When in doubt, Suzuki prefers Riki's angry "I EAT THE CAMERA!" face to spurting blood. In Blood's case, this technique doesn't have the unpleasant whiff of a film too cheap to have any action or a director too amateurish to show it, but works as a hint that the film's main action takes place not through gun play but in the lost places hidden in its characters' heads.

Instead of expositing the characters' inner lifes directly, Suzuki chooses to let the viewer fill in most of the blanks herself, a good method to infuriate everyone in dire need of having everything spelt out, and endear a film to people with an overactive imagination like me.

All this doesn't mean that Blood is a very subtle film. As you know, Jim, Riki Takeuchi is one of the great scenery-chewing, shouting and scowling actors that grace cinema and just doesn't do subtle like normal people understand it. Riki isn't so much acting as pushing a persona made of hair, rage and an underlying odour of being lost through the screen right into one's living room. Good thing that he's usually not playing the sensitive poet type but violent, angry and lost people like Kizaki. And he's as good at it as I can imagine. Noboru Takachi nicely manages to hold his own beside Riki without getting into a shouting competition, staying believable as someone driven by an unhealthy mixture of self-hatred, unspoken rage and the feeling to live someone else's life.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,yakuza,sho aikawa,riki takeuchi,kosuke suzuki,noboru takachi,reviews

In short: Blowback 2 (1991)

The yakuza Joe (a comparatively skinny looking Riki Takeuchi) and Baku are on the run, carrying a suitcase full of money.

Their flight has led them to the Philippines, but their driver, a certain Lopez (Keishi Hunt), leads them into a trap.

The guerilla boss Yameneko (Mike Monty, known from more Italian genre movies than should be humanly possible) likes money, and he likes dead gangsters, so poor Baku's film life is cut quite short. Killing Riki is of course a different proposition. Getting riddled by bullets and falling down a cliff leaves the exceedingly manly Joe in pain but very much alive, perfectly able to make his way to Manila on foot until he finally loses consciousness in the bar of Baku's ex-girlfriend Rei (Mie Yoshida).

Just a little later, the pissed-off Yakuza begins to snarl, shoot and punch himself through Manila to take vengeance on his friend's killers, supported by Rie and the bounty hunter Ratts (Shun Sugata, whose hobbies are wearing sunglasses, grunting manly and throwing dynamite sticks) who wants to get at Yameneko too.

Atsushi Muroga's Blowback 2 is a typical early 90s direct to video Riki vehicle bound to the action film standards once brought down from some mountain or other by Charlton Heston himself, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Muroga (who would go on to direct the zombie film Junk and the first two Gun Crazy films - the watchable ones) clearly likes the genre he is working in, and while his film diligently hits all the required manly man cheapo action flick beats, it does so with more verve and style than would be strictly necessary.

I am not about to call the film big art here, or even a masterful little genre flick, but the sort of cheap and fun film that is made without the hatred for its own audience that marrs too many of its brethren and with clear knowledge of what it can afford to do and what it can't afford - artistically and financially.

The setting outside of Japan helps the film to a mood which is quite different from the typically claustrophobic and stage-bound Japanese direct to video standard of its time, with scenes full of astonishing things like daylight and mud. Obviously, Muroga uses this copious amount of outside locations for some time filling tourist shots and to stage a large amount of explosions, as it should be.

While all the shooting and bleeding to death is going on, there's also time for some well-placed homages to the Spaghetti Western (especially Django and the Dollar trilogy), the exploding huts of the Italian action film post-Rambo and even a bit of John Woo, all presented mostly in the spirit of good fun.

Add to this Riki doing what Riki does best (scowling and mugging), and the friend of a well-placed explosion will have a fun time here.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,action,riki takeuchi,atsushi muroga,in short,mike monty

Three Films Make A Post's Daughter

Deadly Outlaw Rekka (2002): Takashi Miike in his Wild Director-Man of Japan role. The film merrily hops between ultra-violence, subdued Yakuza drama and weird humor, adds a wonderful scenery-chewing performance by Riki Takeuchi and a near magical bazooka. Somehow Miike gets a rather brilliantly fun film out of it that does not feel even remotely as random as it sounds. Extra bonus points for the ecstasy-inducing use of the Flower Travellin' Band's "Satori" as the rhythmic backbone of many scenes.

 

Ekusute (2007): Sion Sono directs a strange mix of Japanese horror parody, the grotesque and a story about child abuse with this tale of cursed hair extensions which fuck up the problematic life of a young Japanese woman (Chiaki Kuriyama) and her battered niece even more. Thanks to the director's incredible hand for tonal shifts, inventive grotesqueness and some rather great acting by Kuriyama, Miku Sato as the abused child and the inevitable Ren Osugi at his most exalted as the misogynist hair fetishist from hell, the film avoids every pitfall its ideas could set it up for.

 

Demonoid - Messenger of Evil (1981): One would think that a Mexican-American co-production of a film about the Devil's hand doing classical crawling hand mischief and possessing people while pining for Samantha Eggar couldn't be anything but great (fun at least). One would be oh so very wrong. Apart from a handful of moments of hand-wrestling hilarity this is just dreadfully boring. It drags, it is charmlessly incompetent, has a stocky mid-70s TV movie soundtrack - what a waste!

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,mexican movies,japanese movies,horror,yakuza,comedy,sion sono,chiaki kuriyama,ren osugi,riki takeuchi,in short,takashi miike

Yakuza Demon (2003)

The smallish Yakuza group of the Date has taken on more than they can handle when they trespass onto the turf of the considerably larger Tendo group. One things leads to another, and the Tendo start attacking some of the Date's lower tier of members in retaliation.

The leaders of the Date think that it will all work out like it usually does in their business - both sides killing off some footsoldiers and then making up again with slightly redrawn borders between their territories.

Times like this are also a very fine opportunity to milk one's underlings dry "to finance the war". One of these underlings is Muto (Koichi Iwaki), himself the leader of a small sub-"family" of the Date group, consisting only of himself, Seichi (Riki Takeuchi) and Yoshi (Hideki Sone). Their little family unit once was completed by Muto's bar-owning girlfriend (Yoko Natsuki), but she left them a short time ago, wanting her man to go legit.

Trouble is, Muto hasn't the money his superiors want from him. With not much of a way out, Muto promises to assassinate a higher-up member of the Tendo to keep up his reputation. Seichi is dismayed at the thought of his father-by-choice going to jail for fifteen years (that's the typical muder sentence in modern day yakuza films) or dying in a futile effort to kill someone, and gets Muto jailed for two years for some smaller crime. He also delivers the money they want to his bosses, money that he has stolen directly from the war chest of the Tendo group. Of course, that's not enough for them to make up for Muto's supposed cowardice of landing himself in jail, so Seichi makes up for it the only way he knows and kills the highest boss of the Tendo (the Emperor of the Universe, Tetsuro Tanba).

Which obviously leads only to a further escalation of the conflict into an all-out war the Date never wanted and most certainly will not be able to win. It won't be long until the Date group is going to expell Seichi to somehow finagle out of their little war.

Yakuza Demon is supposed to be one of Takashi Miikes weaker films, but I don't think it weak at all, unless one only appreciates Miike's films when they're trying to be as mad as possible.

This one's a very different sort of film, a classicist Yakuza film that replaces most of Miike's typical absurdism with classic, stoic gangster film existentialism. Yakuza Demon is mostly a film about love and family as seen through the eyes of people who are nearly completely unable to express their feelings through anything else than violence or the seething anger and frustration Riki Takeuchi is so good at showing through his glare.

It is also a very slow film, with many static camera set-ups that often position the viewer as an audience sitting one or two tables away from the characters. Miike consciously ignores many possibilities for kinetic violence. This time around he's more interested in watching his characters when they are not spilling anyone's guts (and noodle soup) on the floor. In many aspects, it is much more painful to watch the characters never directly express anything they feel than watch them kill and die (although there will be more than enough dying before the film is over).

As much as I like Miike's madder outings, Yakuza Demon is something very special, akin to Kinji Fukasku's Graveyard of Honor and similar classics of the jitsuroku eiga or the bleakest, saddest film noir you could imagine.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,yakuza,riki takeuchi,takashi miike,tetsuro tanba,reviews

Ichi (2008)

A young blind woman called Ichi (Haruka Ayase) wanders through ancient Japan as a traveling shamisen player. She was cast out of a goze house for having an affair with a customer, never mind that it wasn't an affair, but rape. In her mind, she hasn't got much to live for anymore. There is only reason Ichi is actually still making an effort to live. She wants to find the blind man who brought her to the goze house and returned from time to time to teach her to use a swordcane and who was as much of a father to her as anyone ever was. It is in fact possible that the man is her biological father.

When she comes to the area around a small inn town, she meets a charming but seemingly cowardly ronin named Touma Fujihira (Takao Osawa). During their first meeting, Touma rather heroically tries to protect her from a group of outlaws, but is a wee bit hindered in it by his own inability to draw his sword. Ichi doesn't have those kind of problems and slaughters the outlaws in a few seconds.

Touma is intrigued by Ichi, even though she acts about as emotive and warm as a stone. She probably reminds him of his mother, whom he accidentally blinded in a sword training accident. That accident is the reason for his trouble with swords. As long as he fights with training weaponry, everything is fine (we'll later see that he is an even better fighter than Ichi), but drawing his actual weapon to fight is beyond his abilities.

The ronin, who is an aimless wanderer like Ichi, stumbles into the conflict that makes this inn town so special. The town is run by the Shirakawa group, the sort of honorable yakuza you'll mostly find in ninkyo eiga. It's just too bad that they are terrorized by the gang of outlaws of which Ichi's would-be rapists were only a small part. These people, the bakin gang (second in command: Riki Takeuchi, oh yes!) once were of a much higher position in life and have now made it their job to make everyone else as miserable as they are themselves. They are quite effective at that.

As things go, Ichi and Touma are drawn into the conflict for different reasons, both bound for some kind of change with the way they live with their trauma.

As a fan of the classical Zatoichi films with Shintaro Katsu, I was quite skeptical about a re-boot/re-think of the series with a female protagonist. To my delight, I found a film that may not reach the heights of the best of the original series, yet is very serious about being a chambara in the spirit of the older films. It also isn't a real re-boot, but more of a sequel with a new character. The film never outright says that Ichi's father figure is the original Ichi as played by Shintaro Katsu, but hints strongly and effectively at it.

After a relatively slow and not all that promising beginning, the film soon starts to hit one of my personal narrative kinks really hard when it turns into the story of two heavily traumatized people (Ichi herself does in fact suffer some of the classical symptoms of PTSD), who don't "get over their traumas" (because one does not), but start to live and change again. It's also not a film about love as the all-conquering power that makes every trauma go away (as taught by Hollywood), yet it also doesn't say that love and human kindness aren't necessary and helpful. In other words, Ichi is one of the few films that gets this aspect right.

I'm also quite taken with the fact that the film grants its minor characters a little more depth (and good lord, even character arcs! some of them even not ending in death!) than usual in the genre, enough to keep the less than original plot fresh and put everything on the character base that is fitting for a Zatoichi film.

The acting itself is mostly alright. You'll know just about everyone here from one Japanese direct to DVD production or the other, so you'll probably know that everyone here is perfectly capable to give a solid to good performance, with Osawa's Touma and Yosuke Kobuzuka's young yakuza leader as the stand-outs.

Ayase (being an idol, not an actress) is technically the least convincing actor, but she delivers what she is supposed to deliver, which is mostly to look pretty in rags and try to emote as little as possible since she's shut herself off from most of her feelings. She is also quite fantastic in her few action scenes, giving her Ichi a threatening, nearly ghostly presence through body language alone.

The action sequences aren't overtly spectacular, but effective and quite beautiful in their way. Director Fumihiko Sori does some interesting things with a rhythmic use of speed-ups and slow-motion I don't think I have seen before.

The only thing I found disappointing (and probably the part of the movie that keeps it below the Zatoichi films of - for example - Kenji Misumi) is the general look of the picture. Colours, lightning and film stock have the usual (quite ugly) look of a Japanese direct to DVD production - probably inescapable in this context, but we're at least not talking Onichanbara-ugly here - making it not as interesting to look at as one would wish.

But honestly, with this script and the respect for the classic samurai films of the chambara sub-genre the film breathes, I would probably not even complain when you could see a microphone arm smack dab in the middle of the picture for the complete duration of the film.

 

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