Grethiwha Reviews

Butcher's Crossing (2022)

Into the Heart of Darkness

[9/10 · 31 December 2023]

The end credits of Butcher's Crossing inform us that the American bison population was hunted down from 60 million in 1860, to fewer than 300 by 1880. Madness. This film is a visually-stunning, impeccably-acted, slow-burn descent into madness.

I do love a good cinematic descent into madness, as evidenced by my adoration for the films of Werner Herzog. I couldn't help but notice Herzog's name listed amongst the 100+ names in the "Special Thanks" section of the credits; he was surely an inspiration on this one. I also adore Nicolas Cage, who again demonstrates his incredible talent and range as a actor in a role that calls for him to lose his mind, but not to go over-the top with it. It's a mesmerizing performance, reminiscent in a way of Klaus Kinski in "Aguirre, The Wrath of God", if I may extend the Herzog comparisons.

Earlier this year, "The Old Way" was noted as Nicolas Cage's first Western, but Butcher's Crossing came out before that on the festival circuit, and now that I've finally had a chance to see it, it's most definitely a Western, and a much less clichéd, more artful one too. Nicolas Cage's real first Western is one that I wouldn't hesitate to rank as one of the top Western films of the 21st century.

This may be a difficult film to watch for some people, given the mass slaughter and butchering of buffalo depicted in the film, which all looks perfectly real. While this film does not feature the boilerplate "No animals were harmed" disclaimer in the end credits, it is noted that all buffalo were handled by the Blackfeet Tribe Buffalo Program, an admirable Native-run conservation group that invited the filmmakers onto their land to tell this story.

While I'm sort of assuming we aren't actually watching buffalo be killed, it is clear that the Blackfeet Tribe hunt a small number of animals each year in the sustainable way of their ancestors, and presumably some of the scenes of animals being skinned are real. I would love to know more about how some of these scenes were achieved, because some of it is quite grim. Nonetheless, this is a movie I would recommend to animal lovers, given its portrayal of the evil of the buffalo hunt, and its admirable conservationist messaging.

Blonde (2022)

Pop-culture Bio-pic as Schizophrenic Nightmare

[8/10 · 28 October 2022]

Blonde is a relentlessly dark, disturbing movie presenting a portrait of Marilyn Monroe as deeply traumatized, and brutally exploited for her sex. It's a very remarkable movie, in the way it innovatively uses film technique to evoke a kind of schizophrenia - the plot is very jarring from scene to scene, shifting suddenly between realism and surrealism; it jumps frequently between black & white and colour, 4:3 and 'scope ratios, and tight camera compositions make you feel claustrophobic throughout. All of this has the effect of putting you into the psychotic mind-space of the main character.

As a work of art, as something that challenges you to rethink your preconceptions, that forces you to see the pop-culture icon - or even more broadly the "dumb blonde" archetype - in a new and different light, I think it will be very interesting viewing for a lot of people. It's a very feminist film but I can't speak to the level of revisionism versus reality in the overall portrayal of her life. It is so disjointedly nightmarish and bleakly humourless as to be overwhelming, and I think most people will reject it as such, but I'm inclined to think that it IS a more honest depiction of Marilyn's celebrity in the final evaluation, and perhaps the most boundary-pushing film about the brutality of Hollywood since Sunset Boulevard.

I'm not sure I'd want to watch it more than once, though, Ana de Armas' performance is fantastic, and the inspired direction includes at least one moment of light in the most artistic sex scene I've ever seen. The "Assassination of Jesse James" director Andrew Dominik has a unique cinematic voice and vision and I'm glad he's back after an extended (decade-long) hiatus from making feature films - with what will probably go down as the most controversial movie of 2022.

Detective vs. Sleuths (2022)

Madder Detective

[9/10 · 22 July 2022]

In 2007, Ka-Fai Wai wrote and co-directed, along with his much more internationally-famous colleague Johnnie To, the absurd crime thriller "Mad Detective", one of my all-time favourite films.

Now, after a 13-year absence from directing, Ka-Fai Wai is back, this time without Johnnie To or To's production company Milky Way, but with a film that seems like a new riff on "Mad Detective", almost a sequel. Ching Lan Wau is back, playing again an insane detective with some apparently supernatural crime-solving abilities lying underneath his madness.

It might sound derivative of the former film, but Detective vs Sleuths has some new tricks up its sleeve, and it honestly feels extremely fresh. Its twisty plot comes together beautifully in the end, the action scenes are some of the best in recent memory, and Ching Lan Wau's performance is bloody brilliant. His antics are crowd-pleasingly hilarious, but it never undermines the film's commitment to its increasingly outrageous narrative.

This film feels like a throw-back, to a level of creativity in Asian cinema that was much more common in the 2000s than what we've seen in the last decade. Certainly, I enjoyed this more than anything Johnnie To has directed since "Mad Detective". That film inspired me to check out more of Johnnie To's work, but now I'm realizing that Ka-Fai Wai deserves equal attention, and I'm very glad he's back after such a long absence.

Don't Look Up (2021)

A perfect satire for our times.

[10/10 · 28 December 2021]

Some astronomers have raised the alarm about our unpreparedness to deal with the existential threat of an eventual comet collision with Earth of the kind that killed the dinosaurs. And while this is a real threat that an advanced culture would be able to allocate the resources to prepare themselves for, the sad reality is that we can't even muster the will to deal with the two major SELF-IMPOSED existential threats - global warming and nuclear war - now both more dire than ever, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and others. This movie hilariously (and I think quite accurately) depicts how we might respond to the news that a comet was definitely on course to end life on Earth in six months time, that is: in about the same way we're dealing with those other urgent threats to our existence right now...

We have a corrupt political class and corporate media manufacturing a culture of intense partisan division, or else of medicated apathy and social media distraction. We lionize the same profit-motivated billionaires who condone coups of foreign governments to steal their lithium and other resources, and we seem to be relying on these billionaires to be the ones to solve all our problems for us. In summary, without serious grass-roots reform, capitalism has doomed us all. And the comet is a brilliant device to highlight these problems. By making the existential threat that much more concrete and objective to where we can literally calculate the exact date and time we are all going to die, it highlights the absurdity of our inaction and our reliance on inept and illegitimate authorities.

"Don't Look Up" is a perfect satire of the times we are living in. In fact it is on a par with "Okja", one of my favourite movies of recent years. While Okja is a satire of the food industry more specifically, and Don't Look Up is more broadly about the topics I mentioned, both films are wild roller coaster rides, juggling drama with dark comedy and ridiculous over-the-top characters. They are fantasy films one crazy step removed from our real world, but otherwise so refreshingly blunt and honest about our real world. The scripts are frankly anti-corporate in a way that you usually wouldn't expect to emerge from a big-budget Hollywood production unscathed. And yet, the end products are as incisive as they are entertaining. I have to commend Netflix for producing both of these films. "Don't Look Up" captures the zeitgeist of our current era better than any film I can think of.

Bad Film (2012)

Guerrilla Filmmaking at its Best

[9/10 · 29 October 2021]

Shot in 1995 and edited in 2012, Bad Film is, as the title suggests, a Bad film, at least in a technical sense. Sono, now an accomplished professional filmmaker, can look back on this movie he shot with no budget and 90s era home camcorders and have the sense of humour to name it "Bad Film". But the truth is, Bad Film is kind of an amazing film, a mind-boggling achievement in guerrilla filmmaking, as well as a beautiful memento of Tokyo GAGAGA.

Before Sono was a filmmaker, he formed what I would loosely term a "poetry collective", that staged marches through the streets of Tokyo, shouting their angsty poetry through megaphones. The group's name, "Tokyo GAGAGA", is meant to be onomatopoeia for the sound of the screaming soul. This film appears to have been made at the height of the group's existence, as the end-credits inform us that the film was made with the co-operation of over 2000 (!!!) Tokyo GAGAGA members.

The movie aspires to be a Godfather-esque gangster epic, or at least what one might look like if you and your 2000 closest unemployed university-aged friends decided to make your own styled gangster film for the fun of it. There are warring gangs, divided along lines of ethnicity (and later by sexual orientation), and there's a lot of violence and bloodshed, but at the heart of the story is the tragic romance between a Chinese woman and a Japanese woman caught in the middle of it.

It would be extremely difficult even for a big-budget film to obtain shooting permits for such locations as the Tokyo subway, which is where the appeal of guerrilla style filmmaking comes in (that is, risking arrest to shoot in unauthorized locations). But whereas most guerrilla filmmakers would take a skeleton crew and try to avoid being noticed, what makes Bad Film so astonishing is the sheer scale of the stunts they pull off in well-known locations. The movie opens with a huge clash between gangs on a packed train car on the Chuo line, and perhaps the most impressive scene takes place on the Shibuya scramble, with the participation of probably hundreds of extras who split up and run down various alleys when we finally hear the police whistle.

I think what I like best of all though, are the scenes that are spontaneously light and playful, such as when the gangsters run past a building and notice an aerobics class going on inside, stop, and start doing this crazy dance in imitation of the people inside. Another scene has them playing with their unloaded guns like children, having a pretend shootout. It's moments like these that not only makes you like the characters, and gives weight to the tragedy of their needless bigotry ending in bloodshed, but these are also the scenes that make me think: they were having soo much fun making this film! What I wouldn't give to have been a Japanese teenager/friend of Sion Sono in the 1990s!

Sion Sono made two other films kind of similar to this: his feature debut titled "A Man's Flower Road" (1987) and its followup "Decisive Match! Boys Dorm vs. Girls Dorm" (1988). Both have the same kind of chaotic amateur energy as Bad Film, but both are way messier, and that's saying something because Bad Film is all over the place, and almost 3 hours long to boot. Bad Film, if I have my timeline right, was made after two experiments in comparative cinematic coherence (Bicycle Sighs and The Room), and I think of it as Sono going back for a third, much more successfully realized attempt, at whatever those first two films were... Unrestrained Tokyo GAGAGA cinema, inviting the collaboration of as many members as possible.

Bad Film also benefits from being edited and finished (and narrated!) by 2012 Sion Sono. With over 150 hours of footage shot, had this film been completed in 1995 I can't imagine it would even be the same film. 2012 Sono's brilliant editing and music choices make this feel almost like a modern Sono film. Sono, I should also mention, plays one of the main gangsters ("a closeted homosexual!", 2012 Sono hilariously explains). There's a lot that's fun about this film, but as a huge admirer of Sion Sono and his art, the biggest appeal of Bad Film for me is getting a small window into Sono's past pre-professional life. When, penniless and rejecting society, he managed to form a giant almost commune around himself, of like-minded social outcasts, and together create some kind of transgressive art that was an expression of themselves, the likes of which a studio filmmaker could never dream of. GAGAGA! My own soul screams to be a part of it.

Burst City (1982)

Effortless Aesthetic Perfection

[9/10 · 10 December 2020]

I went into Burst City not knowing what it was. I hadn't seen footage or read much about it, and I hadn't seen any of Sogo Ishii's other films, to get a sense of the director. But from a glance at some of the director's filmography, posters and screenshots I may have seen out in the ether, I could tell there was a punk aesthetic in some of his films, that I personally found immensely intriguing, and there's a few of his films that I know by name and by poster art if nothing else and have long desired to see. I guess the reason I went this long without watching any of his films, was because I couldn't find any of them in any kind of half-decent quality.

Burst City it turns out, is some kind of insane 1980s Japanese punk rock concept album music video. Like "Tommy", but with ridiculous teenage Japanese punk songs with lyrics that make no sense, directed by way of a young Shin'ya Tsukamoto. What skeleton of a plot there is, you might sometimes sense occasionally, like an underdeveloped V-cinema Takashi Miike dystopian Mad Max sci-fi script, bobbing just below the surface, drowning under the enormity of the film's aesthetic. Basically, the story of the film, or the "concept" in the sense of the concept album music video, boils down to being about youth rebelling against "the man". But when Burst City is at its best is when it blocks out all pretence of a plot and with seeming effortlessness, becomes pure aesthetic perfection.

The first scene of Burst City, the first song on the album, which has no lyrics and sets the mood for the album to come, would be, from a directorial perspective, a masterfully brilliant opening to any film with a genuine narrative script that might be able to accommodate such an opening. Many of the other scenes in Burst City, too, feel like they could make really heart-pumping moments in a more conventional film. But the fact is that they're all together in this one nonsensical film, which may make the whole thing feel somewhat hollow in the end - like there's no substance here - OR it could be seen as freeing the film up from slavish adherence to a narrative that would diminish its aesthetic credibility.

The best comparison for Burst City would be another 80s cult Japanese musical film that was curated out of obscurity recently, "The Legend of the Stardust Brothers" released on blu-ray by Third Window Films. Another film that's more a full album music video than a narrative feature film, Legend of the Stardust Brothers, like Burst City, is also an extremely campy strange cultural artifact - or time capsule - of a film. I think the main difference is, where Stardust Brothers' camp is just funny, Burst City's camp, while undoubtedly funny, is, to be honest, kind of pretty cool at the same time. Kind of satisfying. How liberating it would be to be a ridiculous Japanese punk in the 80s. I'm kind of really really endeared to this aesthetic.

The Arrow blu-ray release, I have no doubt, presents this film looking true to how it was intended, and shown in theatres. Given the limitations of the source material, the blu-ray could frankly have been an upscaled DVD a lot of the time, and I probably wouldn't notice the difference, but I am confident nonetheless that this represents an enormous upgrade over any previous home release this film may have had. This is a hell of a gritty film all shot handheld at night in high-ISO high-noise super-grainy 16mm film, and watching it in any kind of digitally over-compressed, bad transfer, or compromised way, would murky and confuse the aesthetic and greatly diminish the experience, so I think it's fantastic that Arrow is offering this restored version.

The allure of discovering Sogo Ishii's punk rock aesthetic on blu-ray persuaded me to blind-buy the Arrow blu-ray when it was announced, but I wasn't in a hurry to watch it, as I had no particular expectation for it. As it turns out, this is the surprise blu-ray release of the year, and the best film I've newly discovered in some time. I hope some of Ishii's other films like Crazy Thunder Road and Electric Dragon 80,000V get similar releases soon.

Roger Ebert once said of the 1995 film Fallen Angels by Wong Kar-Wai "It will appeal to the kinds of people you see in the Japanese animation section of the video store, with their sleeves cut off so you can see their tattoos. And to those who subscribe to more than three film magazines. And to members of garage bands. And to art students." Well, none of those examples describes me exactly, but maybe I would fit right in with the types of people Ebert was talking about, because Fallen Angels is one of my most beloved movies. I wonder how he'd describe the hypothetical target audience for this film...

The Holy Mountain (1973)

The Ultimate Cult Film

[9/10 · 14 September 2020]

The Holy Mountain sometimes feels like it's from another world or timeline. It feels like a big Hollywood movie, only if the dominant film culture wasn't Hollywood, but somewhere very foreign. Maybe a culture from a different time period - if ancient people made films in technicolor cinemascope. At least until it becomes a satire of modern western culture. The scenes in the tower are especially dazzling. In whatever world this came from, this movie is as big as Star Wars.

At the same time, what it really is, is just the ultimate cult film, for aficionados of nonsensical gonzo absurdity. There are a lot of crazy cult films. What I mean by 'ultimate' is, this film literally never goes 30 seconds, without being genuinely astonishing. Howard Hawks once said that a great movie has three good scenes, and no bad ones. The Holy Mountain has only insane scenes.

By way of example, there's a brief scene illustrating a drug that "turns harmless people into wild beasts": An armless dwarf wearing a crested steel helmet and a diaper and nothing else repeatedly kicks a toppled stone mannequin while making a steady constant screaming noise, for about 20 seconds straight. This is a truly astonishing scene: What are the chances of finding someone who is both armless, and a dwarf? I would imagine it is statistically impossible. Yet, this may not even phase you, given the relentless pace at which this film bombards you with such marvels.

Most films follow some kind of formula. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Boy loses girl. Etcetera. This movie is a bit different. Boy wakes up in desert, with his face covered in flies, pissing himself. Boy goes into town and acts like a chicken while the conquest of Mexico is being reenacted by small costumed reptiles. Boy is knocked out by fat Spartans and used to cast a statue of Jesus. Boy wakes up in a room full of papier-mâché Jesuses, freaks out, and destroys them all with his bare hands... And so on in that manner.

The film is full of religious imagery, tarot, mysticism and other confounding symbolism none of which I frankly understand. I don't think it matters. A lot of it is satirical, and I understand that much. The rest basically falls into the realm of the sublime, where the film is understood through feeling and intuition rather than intellect. I think a lot of the best films are like that; they have more in common with music and painting than literature. The Holy Mountain is also very funny, though rarely in a laugh-out-loud way.

It isn't my favourite Alejandro Jodorowsky film. That would be his 2013 comeback film The Dance of Reality. That film marries his shock aesthetics and boundless originality to a personal and touching script with some genuine profundity; a dimension that's absent from this film. It also features the important disclaimer: no animals were harmed in the making of this movie. As in El Topo, there is some animal cruelty in The Holy Mountain, and I have to hold that against it. Harming real animals for a movie is always a bad choice, not only morally, but artistically, as it pulls me right out of the film, breaking the hard-won spell that the film had worked to achieve.

That said, I personally don't find anything in The Holy Mountain too hard to stomach. And I have to give credit to Jodorowsky, who not only wrote and directed the movie, but produced, edited, starred in it, and composed the soundtrack too. It's one of the most singular and visionary films of the 70s, and one of the grandest cult films ever made. I might even be understating things. It would probably be on my shortlist of films that I'd select for inclusion in some kind of time or space capsule, à la Voyager Golden Record, along with probably Koyaanisqatsi and something like Star Wars, if I was trying to distill human and film culture down to a handful of movies, for some future alien civilization to puzzle over. There's just something about it.

Throw Down (2004)

Playful, Charming, and Creative - One of Johnnie To's Best

[9/10 · 31 August 2020]

My all-time favourite movie from Hong Kong is "Fallen Angels". I am in love with that movie. Filmed only at night, the neon-lit photography and dreamy pop soundtrack captures the vibe and the romance that those big Asian cities have for me. There is a playfulness to all the characters and the way the plot progresses, that I find extremely beautiful and magnetic.

Few films come close to capturing that same feeling that Fallen Angels evokes for me, and I've seen a few films that almost feel like cheap knockoffs (Johnnie To's own "Fulltime Killer" comes to mind). However, one film that does come close, while very much being its own unique thing, is Johnnie To's "Throw Down".

A crime movie where all the gangsters appear to be in an apathetic trance. A martial arts movie with only one fight move - the "throw down". A romance with no relationships or hint of sexuality. An obscure tribute to Akira Kurosawa. A musical? Throw Down is completely unclassifiable, and definitely one of To's most original movies.

Like Fallen Angels, the film captures Hong Kong in an atmospheric, almost mythical fashion. The neon-lit streets, the smoke-filled arcades and nightclubs. The characters are charmingly nonchalant, and the film is playfully paced, with attention not on telling any kind of a story, but just having fun with its characters.

Cherrie Ying is beautiful and magnetic here. Louis Koo and Tony Ka Fai Leung are hilarious in the way they seem to be sleepwalking through the movie, spaced out from reality. The film is full of odd, humorous, and playfully charming scenes. There is a surreal bar brawl (once again involving only "throw downs"), where all the sound is cut out except a Japanese Kabuki-theatre-type song being performed on the stage.

My favourite sequence is a most unconventional chase scene in which a lot of cash is dropped on the street. The music makes the film. Here, the score reminds me of some of Joe Hisaishi's best work with Takeshi Kitano. The soundtrack is phenomenal. The film, which I viewed in its new 4K restoration on blu-ray, is an exceptional work of audio-visual art.

Of around 20 Johnnie To films that I've seen, Throw Down is easily in my top 3, after the masterful absurdist police procedural "Mad Detective" and the insanely stylized actioner "Exiled". Highly recommended to fans of creative Asian cinema.

Okja (2017)

A Wildly Awesome Dark Comedy and Much-Needed Satire on the Food Industry

[10/10 · 10 May 2020]

Bong Joon-ho's first English-language feature, Snowpiercer, was an absolute home-run for me, and possibly my favourite film of the decade. A wild satire of class inequality set on a post-apocalyptic science-fiction train, Snowpiercer is one of the most creative films in recent memory, completely unpredictable, with each new train car introducing a new twist, elevated by Bong Joon-ho's dark sense of humour and the completely insane characters he populates his universe with. Tilda Swinton's performance is particularly notable.

And Snowpiercer isn't even Bong's best movie; Memories of Murder and Mother are bonafide classics, at this point. Suffice it to say, that I was incredibly excited for Okja, even though I purposely avoided reading anything about it prior to watching it. I had no idea what Okja was going to be about, and, well, I was completely blown away by what it turned out to be.

As it turns out, Okja is, I would say, a close sister film to Snowpiercer. It is every bit as creative and unpredictable, darkly hilarious and filled with Bong Joon-ho's classic insane characters, as Snowpiercer was. Tilda Swinton even returns, to give her performance in that film a run for its money, and this time she has some competition from the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, who has never given a performance as wild as this one.

But whereas Snowpiercer satirizes class inequality, Okja is a satire of the food industry, a subject matter I think is long overdue for satirizing, which I never would have expected from Bong (or any Korean filmmaker), but which he absolutely nailed. I would like to focus the rest of my review on this point, because I think it's extremely important.

Okja is about a little girl, Mija, who's grown up on a small Korean farm in the mountains with her grandfather, and her best friend, a genetically-modified "super-pig" given to them by a big American company to raise, as part of a marketing campaign. When it comes time to introduce this new "environmentally sustainable" super-pig meat to market, unbeknownst to Mija, her super-pig is to be flown back to America for a promotional event, and ultimately to be slaughtered. When she finds out her grandfather relinquished the pig behind her back, Mija - a precocious, determined child - sets out on her own to get her friend back. Her journey ultimately puts her at the crossroads between a slew of crazy characters from the American company, "Mirando Corp" (including Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal) and an extremist animal rights activist group called the "Animal Liberation Front" (including Paul Dano and Steven Yeun).

Although Bong Joon-ho is in top form here, I feel that Okja has been largely overlooked, even dismissed by many of Bong's fans as his worst film, and the "criticism" that I've heard about it is that it's "anti-meat", or even "vegan propaganda". I was taken off-guard when I first heard this, since I really didn't see it this way at all, and the attack essentially nullifies my recommendation of the film, as someone who happens to abstain from animal products. That said, I think this perspective is absurd for all kinds of reasons, that are easy enough to reel off.

For a start, Bong Joon-ho, who wrote this movie, eats meat, and comes from a culture where veganism hardly exists. The characters we're meant to sympathize or identify with, the rural Korean farmers, are seen eating chicken and fish, sustainably, off their farm. Moreover, the only presumably "vegan" characters, the animal activist characters, are depicted as completely ridiculous and impossible to take seriously (Paul Dano's best scene has him kicking the crap out of an incapacitated Steven Yeun, Goodfellas-style, for betraying their group's commitment to non-violence). Finally, the word "vegan" is never uttered and the concept never comes up in the script.

What the film does do, however, is what all good dark comedies do (and Okja is above-all a good dark comedy), and that is to ground its fantasy in harsh realities; to look at reality head-on, without illusions, and create something from out of that reality to make me smile. This is not a cartoon, where the funny talking farm animals go on an adventure, and every effort is made to avoid us making any connection between those farm animals, and our dinner. In Okja, when the journey eventually takes us to a slaughterhouse, Bong, who visited a slaughterhouse in research for the film, depicts the slaughterhouse, roughly, as a slaughterhouse. Some people find these scenes upsetting; since I personally have no illusions about what slaughterhouses are, I wasn't upset just by being reminded that they exist; I was simply engaged in the insane drama unfolding there. If a film depicting a slaughterhouse as a slaughterhouse makes you feel you're being moralized to, I can't help you. If you think a film is "vegan propaganda" because it depicts a slaughterhouse like a slaughterhouse, I think that says more about your own insecurity about your food choices that it does the film.

But maybe more importantly, I think it says something about the way this subject matter is just kind of a taboo across Hollywood and media generally. How often does food sustainability come up in the realm of non-documentary movies? Some basic facts: the animal agriculture industry is the biggest polluter in the world by far, animals in factory farms are often treated far worse than anything depicted in Okja, and a drastic reduction in global meat consumption is necessary to have any chance of halting climate change. (A properly-planned whole-foods plant-based diet is also the healthiest way to eat, by the way). These are just basic facts that everybody should know, and which shouldn't be controversial in any way, and yet which are so omitted from the conversation, that when you even approach this subject matter it is somehow contentious. And I think that's a strength of Okja, that it's about the only fiction film I can think of that even approaches this important subject matter.

Interestingly, another film came out in the same year as Okja, with a strikingly similar plot: The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro. The Shape of Water is also about a girl (or woman) who develops a relationship with a fantasy creature, only to have to rescue the creature from an evil corporation (and an over-the-top villain) that "owns" the creature and plans to do it harm. I loved The Shape of Water and found it extremely engaging for many of the same reasons as I did Okja, although I generally found Okja to be a bit more wild and enjoyable. Where The Shape of Water differs thematically from Okja, however, is in what the creature represents. While Okja, the super-pig, satirizes the food industry, the creature in The Shape of Water is a parable for racism, if anything; at any rate a more "safe" subject matter. It's interesting that that film went on to win the top prize at the Oscars, while Okja was pretty much ignored at awards season.

Following Okja, Bong Joon-ho returned to the "more safe" (but equally important) class inequality theme from Snowpiercer with a much more toned down, scaled back (but still flawlessly executed) film called Parasite, which, also quite interestingly, became the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. I couldn't be happier for his win, or the spotlight it's put on Korean cinema, however I can't help but wish he'd received this attention two years earlier, when he really, really deserved it, for making a truly original and phenomenal film on a topic nobody else is apparently brave enough to touch. Okja was easily my favourite film of the year in 2017, and as I'm still thinking about it and writing about it three years later, I have to say it's another strong candidate for my favourite film of the decade.

Joker (I) (2019)

Review #9,529

[9/10 · 25 February 2020]

I don't watch many superhero movies. "Batman & Robin" is my favourite Batman movie, because it seems to be the only one that acknowledges how childish and ludicrous the whole premise and all these ridiculous characters are, and has fun with it by having a sense of humour about its own stupidity.

I think that probably illustrates how much serious thought I've put into the deeper "meaning" or "themes" behind this franchise.

I thought "The Dark Knight" was well done, but after seeing "Joker", now I think I hate it. Because Joker is a movie I actually have continued to think about, maybe more than any other movie of 2019.

The Joker in The Dark Knight was written as a psychopath who "just wants to see the world burn", and who blows up hospitals and passenger ferries for no reason. He commits arbitrarily contrived terrorist acts apparently for the sake of making Batman's brand of vigilante justice seem unquestionably heroic. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire advanced-weapons-enthusiast who considers himself above the law, but in the morally unambiguous world of The Dark Knight, that's a good thing, because Batman is the hero, and he stops the Joker, who is obviously the bad guy.

It's suddenly dawning on me that most superhero movies basically reflect the worldview of your average NRA member.

The Joker in "Joker" is a far more sympathetic character, a mentally ill man made victim of an uncaring society that doesn't have adequate measures in place to help people like him. Those who don the plastic clown masks are not mindless thugs for the hero to leave strung up to a lamp post, but rather they're the working class, protesting rampant social injustice and inequality.

The way these extras are depicted as anonymous criminals in previous Batman movies, and suddenly humanized in this movie reminds me of the facile way that corporate media characterizes protest movements around the world with different vocabulary, according to patent ideological biases. Hong Kong demonstrators against communist China are part of a "pro-democracy movement" and above media criticism even when they're hurling molotov cocktails. Those in Chile protesting a US-sponsored fascist government with a 10% approval rating are automatically "violent rioters".

What is so impressive about the way "Joker" was written, and what makes the movie so unsettling, is that it IS morally ambiguous. The Joker, and the movement he inspires, do very bad things. They become the violent rioters. But they are also pro-democracy protesters, the 99%, and I sympathize with them more than I do the Waynes - the billionaire mayor who doesn't give a s**t about these people.

The movie is a cautionary tale, I think, about the use of violence to achieve political ends: if we're going to have revolution, it needs to be non-violent, or else we're walking a dark path. But perhaps more crucially, the movie is a cautionary tale about capitalism: a system of incredible wealth inequality, with a massively underserved underclass, is eventually going to blow up, and maybe violence is inevitable. So we'd better change the system.

I'm so sick of comic book movies, I wasn't really expecting very much from Joker. It's very well done, and Joaquin Phoenix gives an incredible performance. But what's most surprising to me is that I'm still thinking about it, chewing on some of its themes, now weeks after watching it. I guess that's the mark of a great movie.

Twin Peaks (2017)

The Stars Turn and a Time Presents Itself

[10/10 · 24 February 2020]

After the first two feature-length episodes of the new Twin Peaks, I jotted down on a notepad the following impressions:

"The new Twin Peaks is absolutely sublime and the most mesmerizing work of filmmaking since 1976's Heart of Glass. It has nothing in common with anything else on television or in the movies, and might as well be pioneering a new medium. Its only antecedents might be the absolute creative high points of Lynch's previous works.

For one hour, it will be nothing but the most pure, visionary audio-visual art. Then for the next hour it will contain only the most superlative absurdist comedy. It is the most uncompromising commercial work I've ever seen.

Is it too early, or too hyperbolic to call this humanity's greatest artistic achievement? Because that's where I'm at right now. If this keeps up, for eighteen entrancing hours, this is set to become my new favourite thing."

This review, which I wrote for no one in particular, was left unfinished. I had some naive intention of trying to describe WHY David Lynch's strange world was so hypnotic to me, to explain that it seemed to me to be situated in what Aldous Huxley (in his mescaline-inspired 1956 essay Heaven and Hell) describes as the "antipodes of the mind": David Lynch didn't go to Washington or South Dakota or New York or Las Vegas to shoot this; he went to the other side of consciousness.

Anyway, I aborted my review and soon enough, there were more episodes released, and I found myself tuning in weekly with great anticipation for the new misadventures of Dougie Jones and his family, Janey-E and Sonny Jim. And then I got to Part 8. And it's important to note that everything I wrote above was BEFORE I watched Part 8, because Part 8 totally blows everything else out of the water. It is the most radical and mindblowing hour of television ever made, to put it lightly.

If there's any flaw to it, it's that Part 8 sets the bar impossibly high for the back half of the series (and maybe entertainment in general), and the finale in particular felt kind of unsatisfying, compared to the pure perfection that was the original Twin Peaks series finale, let alone the astronomic promise that Part 8 sets up for it.

Nonetheless, watching Twin Peaks: The Return again a couple years later, there's nothing to be disappointed by. This is a monumental work, completely directed by David Lynch over 140 days of principal photography, as if it were one enormous movie - its an incredible achievement, and I retract none of my hyperbole.

Wolf Guy (1975)

The Pinnacle of Film-Viewing

[8/10 · 8 May 2019]

After spending the better part of a decade doing very little with your life but watching movies, you eventually check out of life. You also lose all your interest in film as an artistic or storytelling medium, and shift your focus towards ever more cheap and schlocky bottom-shelf B-movies. Eventually, you arrive at Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope.

For those who would rather nothing more than to stare, braindead, at a screen through 90 minutes of gratuitous nudity, violence, martial arts, and random surgery, loosely held together by the most senseless werewolf narrative imaginable, this is the place.

The story goes that Shin'ichi Chiba one night witnesses a man apparently mauled to death by an invisible tiger after running through the street rambling incoherently about a tiger and a curse and a woman named Miki. A very non-threatening-looking tiger is superimposed on the screen briefly to suggest that Shin'ichi Chiba can see the tiger too, I guess.

Upon investigating the case further, he discovers that the woman, Miki, who cursed that guy with being mauled by said tiger, is actually a stripper who got syphilis, and the yakuza boss responsible for arranging her infection with syphilis is intentionally directing her tiger curses against his enemies by telling her they're the ones who gave her syphilis.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with Chiba's character. Is he supposed to be a police detective investigating the maulings? I don't even know. Half way through the movie, we're informed that he's a werewolf. Presumably you knew that from reading the title, but it's easy to forget by that point. We're told on the 15th day of the lunar cycle, he will transform into a werewolf.

Well, "transform" is a stretch. No attempt is made to make him look like a werewolf. In the final climax, well, he just kind of jumps high and a funny sound effect plays when he jumps so you know he's changed. Also he's impervious to bullets. The two defining attributes of a werewolf: invulnerability and jumping!

It's hilarious to hear the director and producer interviewed on the blu-ray edition, basically trashing the film, amused and bemused that it's being sold in the West now. Basically, the studio wanted an adaptation of the Wolf Guy manga, but wouldn't put up any money to do it properly, so neither the producer nor the director took the project seriously at all. The writer of the manga walked out of a private screening after 15 minutes, swearing never to let Toei adapt one of his properties again.

Most people viewing Wolf Guy I expect, will react to it like the director says: "What the hell is this?". But perhaps, if you're coming to Wolf Guy following the natural progression I described in my first paragraph, you will be in a state to take in the film's convoluted plot uncritically, at which point, I believe you will have achieved a kind of film-viewer's nirvana.

Hazard (2005)

My Favourite Movie

[10/10 · 24 March 2018]

There's a scene in Sion Sono's magnum opus Love Exposure, in which the emotionally abused and alienated protagonist, Yu, feeling fed up, screams and runs out into the night rain, still wearing his school uniform. He comes across some shady-looking teenagers trying to shake some free food out of a vending machine, and without hesitating, runs up and joins in their attack of the snack dispenser. They stop, then he stops, and they all look at each other for a second, and then resume, pushing over the vending machine, at which point a security guard calls out and they all run away together... And just like that these guys become Yu's new amazing friends who turn his whole life around.

It was at this moment that I fell in love with Love Exposure - I felt connected to Yu, to his feeling of suffocation in his home life, and then to see him suddenly drop his inhibitions, and change his life, in an instant, in the most ridiculous and audacious way imaginable... It got me excited, motivated; it made me feel pumped up. Well, if Love Exposure is, rightly, seen as the summation of every movie Sono had made up until Love Exposure, Hazard is the film in Sono's filmography that metamorphosed into that scene; in a way it's a complete film about Yu and his friends - that whole aspect of Love Exposure.

Hazard is a film about a college student, Shin, who feels suffocated by his dull life, trapped by his surroundings. He is sick to death of "sleepy but restless" Japan, and wants to go somewhere that's alive; when he happens to read about high crime rates in New York City, he is actually attracted by this idea of danger (of "Hazard"), and decides to leave everything behind and go. Once in New York, he sort of wanders aimlessly for a while, failing to fit in and managing only to get himself mugged, until one day he meets a couple charismatic Japanese guys his age in a convenience store. A minute later, these guys pull out some guns, rob the convenience store (of a few snacks only), and the three run away together. Shin is invited to live with these new best friends of his, and together, they make New York their "paradise".

I've often felt that Sono's films are not "realistic", but hyper-real; the scenarios are exaggerated and he works on an emotionally elevated level, but underlying that exaggeration is something deeply relatable, and through that exaggeration he conveys this in a much stronger way. So, taking this convenience store scene for example, well, it's the same as that scene in Love Exposure: seeing this character, who I relate to, have his life turned around in the most insane way... It's exciting; it pumps me up, and even inspires me to be more bold in my own life.

I don't take it literally - I'm not about to hold up a convenience store - but I never got the sense that the violence in Hazard was ever meant to be taken literally. In real life, I've never even seen a gun up close; there's nothing particularly relatable to me about violence or crime, yet these are completely ubiquitous, practically obligatory elements of entertaining cinema. I see the guns and violence in Hazard then as sort of a way of Sono subverting the traditional form of an urban crime film, to create a movie that has the same entertainment value, but beneath the surface is really a film about friendship, and a marginalized youth finding his place in the world.

The last time I watched Hazard now, was almost a year and a half ago. It is the one movie I took the time to watch while I was in Tokyo. My trip to Tokyo was in part inspired by Hazard, actually. Yes, Shin wanted to get away from "sleepy but restless" Japan, but I don't think the film is a commentary on any specific place or nationality - and I think the ending reinforces this - it's a universal film about a youth, desiring to experience life someplace else, and taking back out of this experience a revitalized outlook on life. For me, having never left the country, I was completely fed up with Canada, a country that's not "restless", but rather, just always asleep, and Tokyo was a place that had the same alluring sense of otherness to it, that maybe New York had for Shin.

Like Shin, I went alone. I wasn't interested in tourism - I wanted to know what it was like to actually live in Tokyo. I stayed for a month. I went out every day and every evening, to explore different parts of the city. Like Shin, I wandered aimlessly. Sometimes I would get lost and it would take me hours to find my way back to the nearest train station. I took language classes while I was there, and met some people through that, but mostly I remained on my own. I spent countless nights just hanging out around fairs and convenience stores, or around the smokers at Hachiko Square in Shibuya, watching the lights and the people. I felt lonely and discouraged one night and that's when I decided to watch Hazard. Feeling inspired again by the movie, I ran back out to the train station to continue exploring the city (though it's interesting how that "pumped up" feeling I leave a Sono film with can be hard to hold onto while waiting for a train with a handful of bored-looking people). When I returned that night, I met a Taiwanese guy staying in the same guesthouse as me, who recognized me from the language school, and (even though our only mutual language was extremely broken Japanese) I finally made a substantial friendship there.

A couple weeks after coming home from Japan, I returned to college, and, finally reunited with my old friends (after an 8-month co-op/break), we drank and ran through the snowy night streets, as the scene from Hazard of Shin, running through the street with Lee and Takeda flashed in my head. Well, that's what Hazard means to me. I absolutely love those characters. Lee is amazing - his total lack of inhibitions and sheer ecstasy of existence (Jai West's performance is unbelievable), the way he takes Shin under his arms... And Shin... Never have I felt more connected to a film character than him, the "boy who only wanted to fly". Sion Sono has said he would like to see his movies "have the power to change people's lives for the better". Well, I certainly think that power is in Hazard, for me, as it continues to inspire me to be a little less bashful around people, and to strive towards finding my own "paradise", like they make for each other in the film.

Woman in the Dunes (1964)

How can I explain - without spoiling the premise - what makes this one of the most utterly engrossing films I've ever seen?

[10/10 · 25 August 2016]

Kobo Abe's "The Woman in the Dunes" feels like it should already be part of the popular consciousness - like it was required reading in high school or something - part of everyone's shared cultural iconographic understanding. But what a delight it is to discover it unexpectedly, a little later in life when I can fully appreciate it! Humans' ability to adapt - like an insect - in harsh environments, one's gradual acceptance of one's circumstances and comfort in a routine which stifles ambition... These ideas get under the skin, the setting seeps into the unconscious mind like sand - sand which I can never look at the same again!

Teshigahara's film adaptation - in which Abe was directly involved - is faultless; it has to be the most successful realization of a seemingly unfilmable book ever made. That they managed to bring this location to life, and make it absolutely believable and real, is an astounding feat. With perfect cinematography, a perfect score by the legendary Tôru Takemitsu, and fantastic performances, this is one of the greatest films of all time.

I first watched the film four years ago, and I was blown away. I was absolutely glued to the screen; I'd never seen anything like it before. Now I've recently finished reading the novel and subsequently watching the beautiful new blu-ray version of the film. And I am further convinced: there is absolutely nothing like "The Woman in the Dunes". The novel or the film.

The film moves briskly through the events of Part I & II of the novel (which is about 200 pages), spending more time on covering the crucial Part III (which is only 30 pages); it inevitably misses a lot of the psychological side of the book, as well as the sense of how much time is passing. So I highly recommend both, novel and film. I won't go so far as to recommend starting with one or the other, but in either case I do suggest you try to go in knowing as little as possible.

I've done what I can to avoid giving away the plot in this review. Let it surprise you, and you may be as blown away as I was.

Why Don't You Play in Hell? (2013)

Thank You, God of Movies

[9/10 · 14 February 2015]

Beneath all my suffocating inhibitions, my inability to share my true feelings, my fear of doing what it is that I really want to do - there is a character somewhat akin to 'Hirata', in Sion Sono's 'Why Don't You Play in Hell?'. Here is a ridiculous and frankly insane character - a wannabe film director (and leader of the 'F**k Bombers' cinema club) who'll go to literally any length to realize his dreams and is not remotely discouraged by his complete lack of accomplishments over the past ten years. He's nuts, and yet my soul is frankly screaming for me to live my life with the same liberated, unashamed, energetic, joie d'vivre, that Hirata maintains in the face of it all... The spirit of the F**k Bombers!

Before Sion Sono was a filmmaker, he was part of a poetry collective called 'Tokyo GAGAGA', that took their poetry screaming into the streets. 'GAGAGA', Sono's explained, is the 'sound of the soul'. By that same token, I've often felt that Sion Sono's characters are the soul, personified: their actions are crazy, over-the-top, and usually comically violent - they're not realistic, normal characters - and yet I see my own soul realistically reflected in his characters, more strongly than anyone else's.

Like Kurosawa's 'Dreams', 'Why Don't You Play in Hell?' is autobiographical in the most uniquely and completely outlandish way. Hirata is Sono, from his early amateur filmmaking days, when he really did go round with his gang, calling themselves the F**k Bombers, playing Bruce Lee in the park, and being called an idiot by young children. That just about everything else in this movie is heavily fictionalized is pretty obvious, but just as Sono's characters don't reflect normal people, but capture their spirits, his story, if you consider it autobiographical, captures the spirit of his experience becoming a professional filmmaker. It's a movie about the spirit of movies, the spirit of filmmaking, and as Sono says, the 'love of 35mm'.

It's also about a yakuza turf war. And there's some romance as well: a meek boy falls in love with a girl after seeing her shove a piece of broken glass through another guy's cheek with her tongue, and shortly gets over his own shyness. The movie is a crazily-ridiculous breathlessly-paced action-comedy, capturing the same punk rock energy as Sono's Love Exposure, and it's his most polished-looking film yet. It's a lighter affair than most of the movies he made before - the psycho-horrors and the Fukushima-dramas - but it's no less good; it's thoroughly entertaining from start to finish, and especially, everything after the F**k Bombers finally cross paths with the yakuza is pure genius.

It's a movie that had me laughing, had me tapping my feet to the music (all written and composed by Sono himself), and had me grinning cheek-to-cheek the whole way through. And, like Sono's very best movies (Hazard, Love Exposure), it might have even inspired me, to loosen my inhibitions a little bit.

Love Exposure (2008)

On Sion Sono

[10/10 · 10 January 2015]

Writer/Director Sion Sono is my favourite filmmaker of this century. Though some of his early stuff, from the 90s, is a little shaky, everything he's made since Utsushimi (2000) has been phenomenal. He is bold and visionary, and his films are always memorable, confident and flawless in their direction.

Sono's dialogue is not realistic, but hyperreal. Emotions are cranked up to eleven in a Sono film. But it does not feel so much like a melodrama, as it does, somehow, a complete externalization of the internal, like the characters are literally turned inside-out, and there's a lot of blood, and it's kind of horrific and kind of funny, but through all the gore and craziness their inner feelings, their souls, are put on full display and ours are reflected in them.

There's a lot of screaming in Sono films. My favourite example is in Hazard (2005), where the main character, Shin, fed up with his dull life, runs screaming across his high school recreation ground. I could not scream in front of people like that, but I'd love to, and somehow this sequence, in amongst a montage of frenetically-conveyed backstory, expressed his character more clearly to me, connected me with the character more quickly, and deeply, than any more subtle approach could have.

These characters wear their emotions on their sleeves; their feelings are conveyed intensely and immediately through the acting, dialogue, scenario. Take for example Himizu (2011): When the parents of both main characters, Yuichi and Keiko, feel they'd be better off without their children, they have no qualms about telling them so: Yuichi's father drunkenly tells him again and again about the insurance he would have collected if Yuichi'd drowned in the tsunami... Keiko's mom even builds her a snazzy little construct with a noose for her to hang herself, and decorates it for Christmas! And when Yuichi gets fed up, he sets out into the city, carrying a knife in a shopping bag to punish all the terrible people out there.

Sono's films are the opposite of subtle: they are over-the-top, ridiculous. Consider his breakout hit Suicide Club (2001), in which the schoolgirls impulsively and joyfully commit suicide, after hearing it's become trendy to do so. Or, consider the absolutely stunning depths of insanity reached by the end of Strange Circus (2005) and Guilty of Romance (2011), films I can only categorize as darkly-comic psycho-sexual horror films. Yet, beneath the surface, there is an underlying, ecstatic truth to these films, these characters and situations.

Before Sono was a filmmaker, he was a poet. It's not enough for Sono for a poem to be written, it must be yelled in public, repeated, made to sink in. Consider the repetition of poems in Guilty of Romance or Himizu. In another one of his films, it may be a bible verse. Poetry is intrinsic to Sono's films. His entire scripts, his films, are effectively a form of poetry he is sharing with us. All of his films are written himself, they are his art, and they are never compromised.

I will not, in this review, explain what Love Exposure is about, except to say that it is the ultimate Sion Sono film. It's the summation of everything that came before. It's gory, it's insane, it's frenetic, it's wildly entertaining and extremely funny, it's completely ridiculous and intimately relatable. There's truth and poetry underlying every outrageous scene. I feel, simply, that it is the greatest film of my generation.

Yume no naka e (2005)

There's No Such Thing as a 'Minor' Sono Film

[9/10 · 6 January 2015]

When I first watched Into a Dream, I must have been as sleepy as the main character, because, though I thought it was a good and interesting film, I sloughed it off as a 'minor' Sion Sono film, and sort of forgot about it. This isn't fair. What a uniquely fascinating and funny film this is! It may not rank in the upper echelons of Sono's filmography, but then, since Utsushimi in 2000, I don't think Sono has made a less-than-great movie.

This is, admittedly, some Takashi Miike-level low-budget strangeness. Released in 2005, the same year as three other incredible Sion Sono films, Into a Dream gets understandably overshadowed, lacking both the production values of Noriko's Dinner Table or Strange Circus, and the extreme energy of Hazard. However, Into a Dream isn't quite like any other film, by Sono or otherwise, and it wonderfully demonstrates his range and talent as a filmmaker.

The film features three parallel stories, three worlds that the main character occupies. In one, he is an actor, who has contracted an STD. In another, he is a member of a terrorist group, with a vague ploy to destroy Japan's cell phone networks. In the last one, he is being interrogated by the police. The different characters play different roles in each of these worlds. In theory, the one where he is the actor is his true, waking world, in which he dreams his friends and family into the others, however, just the same when he is the criminal, he believes the actor world is something he dreamt. Dream worlds feed into the real world, and encounters in the real world begin failing to make any objective sense. "Maybe this is a dream right now," he admits to his sister later in the film, "It seems like I'm always in a dream state."

Though not Sono's most visually accomplished work, this film is remarkable for its use of long takes; especially in the 'real' world, lengthy scenes will take place without a single cut. Moreover, this is the kind of story with a lot of opportunities for absurdist humour, and Sono does not fail to capitalize; this is a very funny film, with some very Sion Sono, insane and memorable sequences. The film's particular style and humour apex in a sequence on a train that is just fantastic.

Into a Dream is one of Sono's least accessible and lowest budget works, but the marriage of its multiple levels of reality and unreality, with its absurdist humour... it's just my kind of thing. It may not be one of Sion Sono's best, or possibly even one of his ten best (and even I needed two viewings to properly appreciate it), but it's an overlooked gem of his filmography, and it's a real shame that it hasn't even been released on DVD outside of Asia.

The Raid 2 (2014)

Empty Violence

[6/10 · 20 December 2014]

Is ultra-violence cool? Is seeing someone's head bashed in awesome? Don't get me wrong: I don't shy away from these movies. Given the right tone, I think violence can be funny (Kill Bill). Or in the context of an engrossing story it can be quite stunning (The Chaser). I'll try to think of a more serious-toned and prototypically-genre film I love. Another Korean thriller: I Saw the Devil. That movie has some fantastically violent scenes. But it's tense, engaging, and an interesting exploration of the 'revenge' theme.

Maybe The Raid 2 was going for something like that - they certainly dedicate enough screen-time to telling the story - but it's uninteresting and over-complicated in its execution, and I've no doubt the film's appeal to fans is almost solely in its action scenes. But it's not fun like other martial arts films that put action above story, nor is it trying to be. Judging from its relentless violence, and propensity for having its humourless characters wearing pimpin' shades, the conclusion I've drawn about the filmmakers' philosophy: the more violent, the cooler the movie will be. But I don't find it cool so much as tiring.

I was not a big fan of the first 'Raid', but I thought, given the additional freedom of this film (it's no longer confined to one location), they could do a lot more with it. And they sorta did; there are some pretty impressive sequences and far more colourful visuals - it isn't bad - but it's still hampered by the same dour tone as the original.

Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970)

Zatoichi Meets Mifune

[7/10 · 22 May 2014]

In making my way through the Zatoichi films, I was both trepidatious and excited to arrive at 'Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo'. On the one hand I was worried, once we get into the crossover films, that's a sign they're starting to run out of ideas. On the other hand, how can you go wrong with a film that unites Katsu and Mifune? It's also directed by Kihachi Okamoto (The Sword of Doom, Kill!), the only real name director the series has had besides Misumi. And besides, after nineteen instalments there has yet to be one I thought was less than great; the series hasn't shown any sign of slowing down yet.

Alas, though, I think this is the first Zatoichi film I thought was merely 'good'.

The movie sees Zatoichi returning to his home town, a town that looks very similar to the one in Yojimbo, and here he meets the titular bodyguard. For a while at the beginning I was trying to figure out if this was in fact supposed to be the town from Yojimbo, if the old man in this movie was supposed to be the same old man from that film, and just what the hell Mifune's yojimbo was doing still there considering the ending of that film. Mifune's character also seemed quite different from his character in that film, despite some surface similarities; here he plays kind of a drunken bastard. I soon realized, the best way to approach this film is, it's a different town, and Mifune plays a different character: it's just another Zatoichi adventure, with no connection to Kurosawa's film save a few nods here and there.

Really, this is what I was hoping for. Those less familiar with Zatoichi may have been hoping for a true crossover that takes place as much in the Yojimbo universe as the Zatoichi universe, but in the context of the Zatoichi series, this wouldn't feel right. But even just as a regular Zatoichi flick, I was still slightly disappointed in this effort. At nearly two hours this is, I believe, the longest Zatoichi film, but it just lacks the storytelling economy that makes the other entries so enjoyable; this one seems over-complicated and uncompelling by comparison.

Further, there were other little things that bothered me about this movie. Katsu seemed less competent than usual - struggling with normal stairs, and apparently unable to gauge the distance of a sound... This film continues the trend of the last few entries towards a darker side of the character, but Zatoichi's aspiration to becoming a 'villain', and simultaneous contempt towards 'spies' just seemed kind of random. And as much as I love Mifune, his performance here really didn't impress me.

There are good points to the film though. It's one of the more visually stunning entries in the Zatoichi series, with some beautiful sequences. And the finale is quite satisfying (even if it borrows a bit too blatantly from Treasure of the Sierra Madre). It's a solid film, but considering the talent involved, it could have been something really special, and instead it gets my vote as the weakest entry in the series so far.

Edo Porn (1981)

Eccentric Portrait of an Eccentric Artist

[8/10 · 4 March 2013]

I first noticed this film amongst the more popular Japanese films on Hulu, but I didn't pay much mind to it, cause I figured I could guess how it got there (being titled "Edo Porn" and all). But when I realized that this was a film by Kaneto Shindô (Onibaba, Kuroneko, The Naked Island), I couldn't pass up a chance to watch another one of his films.

This film is a portrait of the Japanese artist Hokusai, who I knew nothing about going in, but whom this film has piqued my interest in. He created the famous "Great Wave off Kanagawa". Apparently, he also created what could probably be considered the earliest example of tentacle porn. The sequence in the film where he draws that is... amazing.

This film starts off a generally well-made, albeit somewhat odd biopic of an eccentric man. In the last act however... I can understand the criticisms. There's a lot of Hokusai and his friend stumbling around - the actors in unconvincing 90-year-old man makeup doing their best half-crazy half-senile old man impressions. There's a lot of Hokusai talking to himself about death. Things get really strange, but I have to admit, that's kind of what I love about this film.

In a strange way, I think this is a good companion film to Kenji Mizoguchi's "Utamaro and His Five Women". That film is also about a famous Japanese woodblock printmaker of the same era, Utamaro, who is mentioned and briefly appears in "Edo Porn" as something of a rival of Hokusai. Made 35 years earlier, it's a completely different style of film, but, y'know, they're completely different styles of artists.

Sincere Heart (1953)

Excellent (Very) Early Kobayashi Film

[9/10 · 21 January 2013]

Masaki Kobayashi's first couple films, this and his 45-minute debut "Youth of the Son", were highly influenced by Kobayashi's mentor, Keisuke Kinoshita, who supervised the whole production of "Youth of the Son" and who wrote the screenplay for this film, "Sincere Heart". Kinoshita's films, as I understand, were more sentimental, and that shows in these films. But already with this one, I see Kobayashi starting to come into his own.

"Youth of the Son" was a cute film. It's such an overly joyous affair, it's so corny, that I should have found it cringe-worthy, but I have to admit, it made me smile. It has a similar appeal to that of an Ozu film such as "Good Morning" (and even features favourite Ozu actor Chishû Ryû), but sillier, and not quite on that level of quality. Still, it was a good film. There was just nothing in it that I recognized as Kobayashi. It lacked an edge. It was too benign. There was no angst!

"Sincere Heart" is quite a bit more interesting. The same baby-faced lead actor from "Youth of the Son" is back -- Akira Ishihama, who I did not realize until afterwards was Motome Chijiiwa in "Harakiri" (!) -- and for much of the film, "Sincere Heart" feels very much like "Youth of the Son". But then, in the second half, the film reveals its edge. There's a certain cynicism in the film, about class differences, and in this I recognize Kobayashi. But the film is still sentimental, its Kinoshita influence is still strong, and the result of this hybridization of styles is quite an effective little tearjerker.

The film is not as good as Kobayashi's masterpieces "The Human Condition", "Harakiri", "Kwaidan" or "Samurai Rebellion", nor is it the best of his less widely-seen works, but it's an excellent early film that deserves to be seen by more people.

Vampire's Kiss (1988)

The Funniest Movie I've Ever Seen -- A Masterpiece of Comedy -- Cage at His Very Best and Craziest

[10/10 · 11 January 2013]

HOLY CRAP this is the funniest movie I've ever seen! Nicolas Cage, who I already knew as easily the greatest actor working today (if you have a problem with this statement, we'll talk, you will see that it is objectively insane not to hold this belief), is unbelievably amazing. I thought he was crazy in some of his other films, like Bad Lieutenant and Matchstick Men, but that was nothing. By comparison to Vampire's Kiss, his acting in those films was understated. THIS is Cage unhinged. It is INCREDIBLE. I would say that about 95% of the time he was on-screen (or so), I was laughing. This movie had me literally rolling on the floor. Throughout.

At the time of this writing, this film holds a 5.5 rating on IMDb; are you kidding me? I was expecting with this film to like Cage in the context of a bad movie. Instead, I immediately (from about the time when the bat flies in the window), recognized it as a brilliant parody of bad movies - like Nicolas Cage was playing like he was a bad actor in a bad movie, but exaggerated in such a self-conscious and pitch-perfect way that it doesn't itself become one of the bad movies it's parodying.

But as the film goes on, it becomes so much more even than that! It is such a violently maniacal parody of the whole vampire craze that it's not only masterful as a spoof - it becomes easily the best thing to do with vampires at all that I've ever seen! Some people use the term "so bad it's good" for films like this, but I'm beginning to think I have some kind of defect where I can't differentiate "so bad it's good" from just regular "good". If I genuinely enjoy something, how can it be bad? Okay, I can sort of get it with something like "C.H.U.D.", which I slightly enjoy for its campiness even though it's not actually that good. But THIS, no. THIS is a genuine masterpiece of comedy.

The Wicker Man (2006)

Parody-Remake

[7/10 · 11 January 2013]

So I watched the original "The Wicker Man" the night before, in preparation for the Cage version. And in watching the new one I am left with the impression that the filmmakers wanted to make a parody, but, parodies of 30+ year old movies having as they do, rather limited audiences, they masqueraded it as a remake, to get it produced.

The end result is somewhere in between a parody and a remake, and it's pretty weird. The audience for this film is probably even tinier -- those expecting a remake will be disappointed by a slew weird changes from the original film, and those who haven't seen the original will probably find it to be an incoherent mess. But with the original fresh in mind and having no especial fondness for it, I found the remake highly entertaining. And as a vehicle for Cage to do what he does best, that is, go a little bit crazy, this film is ideal.

Take for example a scene early in the film where Cage visits a school classroom. The scene is ripped directly from the original film, but exaggerated and made funny. "Phallic symbol, phallic symbol" chant the children, as if quoting the original film, and stripping it of context and meaning. Then there's the crow in the desk. And then there's Cage's dramatic point at the empty desk. All of these moments are funny if you remember the original. The teacher's slip of the tongue in this scene is particularly funny, because you realize that she's just revealed something the film wasn't supposed to reveal yet -- but the dramatic tension isn't lost because having seen the original you already knew what was going to happen.

From there it gets worse if you've not seen the original. The whole pagan thing is never actually explained and instead there's this weird women vs. men thing going on. On reflection I have no idea what the point of the beginning was. Other important details that made the narrative of the original cohesive are brushed over. And there's an added twist to the original twist ending that obviously doesn't make sense. Good film.

The Island (1960)

It is what it is. Maybe more.

[9/10 · 24 September 2012]

I just watched this film and feel strangely compelled to describe my experience with it.

This is a film with no dialogue, and, for the great majority of it, nothing resembling a plot. It's about a family of farmers, whose lives are pretty much so routine that they don't have anything to say to one another. We observe their routines.

Since so little happens, and it's not incredibly engaging, my mind wandered a lot. But I didn't think about other things; I was never bored. I thought a lot about the movie.

Mostly at first I thought about why the movie didn't work. The no dialogue thing pretty much ensures that nothing happens that's interesting enough for the characters to talk about. And I felt like I more than got the point after twenty minutes - how is this going to go on for another 80? Later I pondered what the modern equivalent to the film would be. Someone going to an office building, nodding to the doorman, and then staring at a computer screen for the rest of the film, before going home and barely acknowledging his family? I wondered if that's any better a life.

As the film went on, and it showed more and more aspects and finer details in the farmer's lives, I realized that Shindo must have experience in this lifestyle; probably the film is at least semi- autobiographical, and one of the children is based on him. And it's nice to have this film to document this kind of now-obsolete lifestyle. Certainly I'd much rather have this film, with its great music and cinematography and acting, than some lame cinema verité-style documentary with interviews and crap. But still I did not think it was a good film. I couldn't fault it though. It just is what it is. An ode to that sort of lifestyle, which no longer really exists in that form.

Anyway, in the last quarter of the film, a traditional plot element does come up, and it is engaging and great. The characters even have things to say, though the film cuts away before they talk - we knew what they were going to say; the visuals speak for themselves. And the ending works because the first three quarters of the film were what they were. And I can't help but like the film after all. I still don't think it's great. I think something like, for example, Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff is far more powerful.

It is slow and certainly not for everyone, and it takes social realism to a bit of an extreme - so don't expect something greatly stylized and fanciful like Kuroneko or Onibaba (although, in a way, the extremeness is stylization in itself. Also, both The Naked Island and Onibaba have similarly memorable senses of place, I found) - but in a unique way it's pretty good. It was certainly worth my giving it a look anyway.

Edit: Though I haven't seen the film again, nearly a year later it still sticks in my head. And I've bumped up my score by a point. There are times when I'm in the mood for a silent film – something free of the harshness of sound and dialogue – just music and images. But even silent films contain words, action sequences, the occasional harsh sound effect... and in a way The Naked Island is better than any silent film, when I'm looking for the ultimate mellow film experience. It is beautiful and emotionally involving – it puts me in a state of reverie without ever trying to shake me out of it. I think I love it. I must see it again, to find out.