Past Misdeeds: Don't Look Up (1996)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Director Toshio Murai (Yurei Yanagi) is shooting what looks like a stylish, old-fashioned melodrama on a very tight schedule, but doesn't seem to have much of a problem coping with the latter.

Something about the dailies of the first day of shooting isn't right, though. At one point, the face of the movie's lead actress Hitomi (Yasuyo Shirashima) is suddenly superimposed with the face of another actress, then the whole film disappears and turns into an older movie, complete with a long-haired woman lurking in the background. Obviously, the film stock they are using are outtakes that were supposed to be thrown out, but somehow landed in the wrong place. Murai thinks he remembers the film from his childhood, but apart from asking someone working in the studio's archive to take a look at it, he just shrugs and continues his work.

Not completely surprisingly, the filming seems to be haunted now. It's mostly minor things, like people having the feeling of someone standing behind them, voices that might just be in someone's imagination, a shadowy long-haired woman standing in the distance or lurking at the ceiling of the studio, and some only vaguely defined past sometimes seem to take hold of the present. At least Murai and Hitomi are beginning to feel decidedly uncomfortable, but there's not much they can do.

Then Saori (Kei Ishibashi), the actress playing Hitomi's sister in the movie, falls to her death in what might have been an accident or might be down to supernatural interference.

Although there's enough footage of Saori to finish the film without major problems, the shooting has to stop for some re-writes. Murai - now more frightened than he'd care to admit - uses the time to do some more research, but what he finds out is neither reassuring nor helpful in the long run. The actress in the film snippets he saw fell to her death in the same studio lot he is making his own movie in and what's even more disquieting, her film was never finished, so there's no way he could have seen it as a boy.

Still, somehow, the dead actress and her last film touch the present like a malevolent echo.

This is the Hideo Nakata's first long-form film, and possibly his first one not made for television (the English-speaking Internet at least says so, my eyes suggest it to be a cable TV movie like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Seance). Watching it after his later masterpiece Ringu, parts of Don't Look Up seem like sketches of ideas Nakata would realize more fully in his later, higher budgeted and more concentrated movie. There's the mix of very traditionally styled ghosts with a very contemporary world, the concept of haunted media, as well as the directionless malevolence of Nakata's ghosts, who are so enraged by the things that happened to them in life that they have become creatures of pure wrath.

Nakata doesn't explain his dead actress as precisely as he would later do with Sadako, though. The audience never learns what exactly the reasons for her death were, how it was connected with the film she was starring in and how and why she latched onto Murai when he was a child. Friends of exposition and explanations of the inexplicable will certainly be infuriated. Although I agree that a few more concrete explanations would actually help Don't Look Up become more effective as a horror film and would enrich it on a thematic level by virtue of making its themes just a little less vague, I don't think this is a big problem for this particular movie. After all, a central part of the philosophy of horror directors like Nakata and Shimizu have popularized is that the supernatural isn't completely explicable or understandable, and that the slow seeping of ghosts into our world is terrible not just for what the ghosts do, but for the entry of the truly unexplainable and alien (and therefore wrong in a sense that has in my eyes clear parallels to Lovecraft) into a logical and orderly world.

This early in his career, Nakata is already quite brilliant when it comes to characterization through incidental detail and small gestures and in creating a creepy mood through the slightest occurrences. The best moments here, be it in the characterization or the attack of the supernatural are small, a little blurred and insinuate much more than the economical director is ever willing to explicate. However - as in his later work - Nakata isn't a director who unwilling to show something terrifying when he thinks it is more appropriate and effective than just insinuating it.

The director is also already a master of planting hints about the larger picture of his movie in small details. There's some clever - and rather disquieting - stuff going on with dialogue about looking up and looking down, for example.

Although the connection is never explained, Nakata left me with a feeling that there was something beyond vague parallels and the location that connects Murai, the old film, the actress and the new film, something that (and it could just be my excitable imagination speaking here, but who cares?) might just be too terrible to actually explain.

Quite unlike in Nakata's later films (and I'm just pretending the US The Ring 2 has never happened), Don't Look Up's moments of outright horror are unfortunately the moments when the film is at its weakest. Frankly, when seen clearly, the ghost looks just too much like a girl in pale make-up to be as frightening and strange as she should be (I wouldn't be surprised when this is what gave birth to the by now clichéd jerky movements of Sadako in Ringu), so that the scenes that should be the pay-off to a long and creepy build-up are a bit disappointing.

Still, I didn't mind this on paper quite distracting problem much when watching Don't Look Up. Nakata has a way of getting at the (my?) imagination that isn't disturbed by some blunders when it comes to more concrete frights. The subtleties and small fears evoked aren't going away again just because ten minutes of the more shouty stuff aren't as good as they could be.

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

On WTF: Don't Look Up (1996)

I know, I know, Japanese horror has fallen out of fashion like cheerleaders to a masked killer, but I still think that Hideo Nakata is one of the best genre directors working.

Having said that, it won't come as a surprise that I have some rather nice things to say about Nakata's early film Don't Look Up aka Ghost Actress in my write-up on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,horror,hideo nakata,yurei yanagi,yasuyo shirashima,ren osugi,other places

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

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

In short: The Guard From Underground (1992)

I don't think art expert Akiko Narushima (Makiko Kuno) has pictured her new job in an only slightly older department of a Japanese firm this way: her boss Kurume (Ren Osugi, once more supporting my theory that he is in every single Japanese movie made in the last twenty years) is a leering creep and ineffective sexual harasser, the rest of her colleagues has not the slightest clue about art (which could be a problem in the art trade, I think), the Human Resources manager Hyodo (Hatsunori Hasegawa) is by turns weird and asleep. But the brand new security guard Fujimaru (Yutaka Matsushige) soon turns out to be even more strange than everyone else. At first, the giant only kills people his colleague in the security office has problems with, but he soon develops a slight fixation on Akiko and a very strong dislike for everyone else.

One night, he and his trusty iron pole begin to lower their employer's overtime costs.

The Guard From Underground is part of the early phase of its director's Kiyoshi Kurosawa's career. As such it is quite different from, although not a lot more commercial than, his later works. We can already see the beginning of the framing techniques that became so important for Kurosawa's films later on, as well as his interest in/obsession with alienation in modern (Japanese) society and the life of incurably sad people. The plot may belong to much more of a thriller than we are used to in Kurosawa films, yet the way the film is told seems quite disinterested in it being thrilling.

Much of the film is carried by the strange, surrealist (or is it just non-realist?) kind of humor you may remember from Doppelganger or even Charisma, while never really leading into the disturbing or near-incomprehensible areas those films touched. That of course is Guard's problem - it is already too far away from the standard horror film its script wants it to be and has at the same time not arrived at the crossing of genre and art house its director's later films inhabit better than just anybody else's.

Still, Guard is a kind of treasure trove for Kurosawa nerds like me, as long as one doesn't expect it to be a masterpiece or a very effective thriller.

 

Technorati-Tags: ren osugi,kiyoshi kurosawa,japanese movies,horror,in short