DON'T MOVE! IF YOU DO, I'LL KILL YOU! I am not sure how this fits into the general theme of what I am trying to do with the Café, but it does perhaps fit into a tag I have been toying with called Mondo Nippon, a sort of variation on the Asian Aberration Oriental Oddities tag, that focuses only on Japanese cult culture. Outside cinema and art from the sole super power of cool culture, the US of A, and the former imperialistic ruler of the known world and pop radio, Britian, I am most intrigued by what comes out of Japan, though much of it can be in very poor taste and a little too vile for the family style viewing promoted here at the Uranium Cafe. So this clip may be just the place to start the new tag. The highly acclaimed AAOO will still cover Japan but will aslo include Hong Kong, S. Korea and other such places as are found in the part of the world we policitically incorrectly term the Orient here at the Cafe. This is a wacky almost surreal little workout video that is all the more bizarre because I think they are utterly serious. What the hell is the big guy with the knife wearing over his face?! I have watched this over and over and am constantly perplexed by the thing. The lesson I guess is to learn just enough English to ward off the inevitable attack by barbaric white guys on demure Japanese girls. She runs to a British accented cop but the muggers sound like Americans. Are they in Japan? The segment where they chant “spare me my life” to the aerobic dance beat is so cute and yet very creepy at the same time. Well, all I can say is welcome to the new Uranium Café tag we call Mondo Nippon. Domo Arigato.
I am not such a student of film that I can explain why it is that the postwar period of film-making in Japan proved to be one of its most fruitful. Besides the astonishing samurai movies that came from that period there were also the touching and often tragic human drama films and the atmospheric horror films as well (and not only the great monster ones from Toho). Onibaba is sometimes classified as a horror film but if it is it is in the sense that Hitchcock made horror films as well, but it was the horror of the human mind and soul rather than ghosts and demons the characters have to deal with. Filmed in 1964 by Kaneto Shindo this film is unnerving and suspenseful with out ever being too graphic. The tone is set by incredible b/w cinematography, edgy music and excellent acting. The mood is claustrophobic as the action occurs mostly inside a large field of tall grass and reeds that is constantly undulating and swirling in the breeze and you cannot see beyond where you are at most of the time and you can never know what be laying only feet away in the tall grass. The themes are murder, lust, betrayal jealously, fears of death and insanity. How can you go wrong with this one? Also filmed in 1964, and also in stunning b/w, Horoshi Teshigahra’s Woman in the Dunes shares another quality of Onibaba’s; that is it is set in an unbearably claustrophobic situation. More so even as the drama unfolds in a huge sand pit where an educated Tokyo man is tricked while gathering butterflies for his collection into staying the night in the pit with a woman in a small hut, only to find the rope ladder he needs to exit as been removed the next day. There he is gradually forced oout of necessity into digging out buckets of sand to prevent the house from being buried as well as using the sand as a trade for food and water. The local villagers taunt him and torment him and the mysterious woman, who has long resigned herself to her fate, becomes dependent on him and infatuated with him. The mood is excruciating and it is never really explained who the villagers are or why the whole thing even happens. Rather we witness the man’s reluctant acceptance of his perpetual Sisyphus like task and even his inevitable immersion into it. The cinematography is fantastic and the acting tense and nerve racking. There is a steamy erotic quality to the film without it ever once being graphic or exploitive. Both films are masterpieces of postwar Japanese cinema and I do not have to be a film scholar to make that statement.
Imprint 2006/Director: Takashi Miike/Cast: Billy Drago, Youki Kudoh, Michie Itô, Toshie Negishi I really liked the movie Audition by Miike and have seen a handful of his other works such as Visitor Q, Gozu, Ichi the Killer and something called Izu I think. I guess I am getting a feel of what his work is about and it seems to be primarily shock style cinema. That is, jolt the audience with freaky and offensive imagery with an emphasis on anything taboo and deviant and blasphemous. No subtley. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that in my book. I guess nothing in his movies is any worse than some of the scenes from Saving Private Ryan in a way. I am an above average fan of splatter and gore cinema from way back. The problem I have with Miike's films is the same problem I have with some one like lets say Dario Argento. I just have no friggin’ clue as to what the movie is suppose to be about. Audition and Visitor Q seem to have some effective linear narrative going on but the other movies I've seen just seem to abandon plot for well photographed but ultimately pointless scenes designed to simply disgust or offend the viewer. The movie itself becomes nothing but a vehicle for these disturbing images rather than the other way around. The plot and story simply become secondary to the shock scenes.
This film was originally to be aired on cable TV's Showtime’s Masters of Horror but was banned (as the DVD cover so proudly advertises) due to the films excesses. It is no freakier than his other films but this was suppose to be made for mass consumption on prime time cable. I understand that Argento also had a film banned, or extremely edited. In any case I guess they took a look at this stuff and wanted nothing to do with it. I suppose my mind is numb now from a thousand and one gore films in my life and though it bothered me somewhat I was more perturbed by the lack of logical direction with the narrative. The basic plot is this; Billy Drago is an American who goes back to Japan looking for a prostitute named Komoko (Michie Itô) he fell in love with. After long searches he winds up on a haunted island full of ghosts and cutthroats and, well, whores. He finally finds some people who knew his prostitute lover Komoko and then the movie goes off into these conflicting story flashback things and you never know if it is the truth or not. The woman (Youki Kudoh) telling the story has a congenitally deformed face and later we discover that an evil, even more deformed twin lives on the side of her head up under her bun of hair and that it likes shiny things. The flashbacks go into images of violent wife beatings, incest, child rape and abortions and images of fetuses falling on the ground or floating in rivers. I guess that would about do it for American TV censors. A really intense torture sequence goes on longer than you think it needs to as the envious whores ram all sort of rods and pins into Komoko under orders to not damage her face. The torture is to suppose to extract he truth about a stolen ring, but it was stolen by the evil twin that no one knows about. Drago goes insane with rage as the convoluted and confusing story evolves and it seems as though the mutant whore murdered Komoko. He blows her brains out and winds up in a Japanese prison babbling over a fetus in a bucket. Anyway, that’s about the gist of it. You can decide if you can handle that stuff or not. What is harder to handle than the gratuitous gore and torture is the way nothing is resolved in the story, and one has to wonder what the story was all about. I do not seem to like the dialog being in English (this comes from living in China now for 2 ½ years maybe and knowing no one in this movie excpet Drago could speak English.)Furthermore Billy Drago’s acting is really hammy in a weird sort of way. Over the top, like he is not even going to try take the role seriously. The ending simply made no sense. For some unexplainable reason the mutant prostitute turns into Komoko after he shoots her in the head. You think maybe he is imagining it in his moment of insanity but the shot stays with Komoko now and the deformed whore is gone. So who is who and what is what? Was the deformed woman really Komoko? After all the blood and brains and rubber fetuses we are treated to an ultimately disappointing and confounding finale. Not for kids or people who have never taken anti-depressants. I was very disappointed but will still say it is worth a peek if you like shock cinema or need help with your bulemia. Just wish the story had not been so hallucinogenic.
Found this nice little trailer of Miike's Audition (see my so-called review under Movie Recommendations). There are some other clips available on the net from the film and some may reappear here later. While I seem to be not a huge fan of Miike's other films, though I have seen quite a few, I still bleieve this is one excellent horror film. Not for everybody, but that then that becomes a sort of recommendation in itself. Try it if you have the chance.
I have never seen any of these movies. I can't really find DVDs like this here in Beijing and seldom risk buying them when I do as the quailty can be so poor as to make the viewing experience the only real nightmare I will have later. But they sure look great. If I see anything of this, er, quality I will snag them up. I have found a couple good (well, good to me) Japanese zombie movies. Seems they really dig zombies in Japan these days. Have seen some similar stuff coming out of Thailand here as well but again the quality of the pirates is often abysmal. This last one is not Asian I think but was in the same section as the others and the cover looked like it was possessed of some small amounts of pure uranium.
Audition 1999/ Director: Miike Takashi/ Cast: Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Tetsu Sawaki, Miyuki Matsuda, Renji Ishibashi, Jun Junimura I saw this a couple times in Seattle, once with my movie mate Matt and he just loved it. I can't beleive I had a copy of this movie here and turned it back to the shop because the subtitles did not work in English. Later I would realize that I simply did not know how to use the Chinese remote and that the subtitles most likely did work fine. I have some of Miike's other films on DVD here like Visitor Q and Gozu and Ichi the Killer and some other Yakuza style adventure films, but I have not found a new copy of Audition. Damn me! Damn me to hell! Needless to say it is one great movie, a real stunner. It's the kind of movie that if you were a girl and your boyfriend sat around watching it over and over you may want to question the direction the relationship is headed. It is hard for me to give a thorough review being as I have not seent he film in years. I prefer to critique a film with a day or so of the viewing, or a week at the most, while the images are still fresh and vivid. Suffice to say a fan of shock cinema will not be dissapointed at all. But shock cinema (and Miike is a shock film maker, there is no doubt)is a little misleading here in this case as the movie is a well and well acted and the best of Miike's work that I have seen so far. The basic story is about a film maker who is still grieving over his recently departed wife and decides to act on the advice of a friend to stage an audtion for a film and in the process possibly meet a nice girl. There is a long series of audtions that transpire and most are rather comical. He does eventually fall for super lovely and waifish Ryo Ishibashi. Unfortunately she is a totally psychotic kook who interprets his later game of "aloofness" as the acts of a man who uses auditions to seduce innocent girls and she exacts her unique and gruesome revenge on the guy, who is really simply a nice guy trying to find a wife. He was actually reluctantly following the advice of his friend to play it cool in order to attract her even more. This brutal revenge stuff is apparently not new to the girl considering she keeps some mutilated, though very much alive, previous victim in a duffle bag in her place. I do not want to tell you anymore, excpet that it may sound like a typical stalker, psycho obssessed girl flick in the vain of Play Misty for Me or Fatal Attraction and it is that, but it is quite different as well. It has a fatalistic and dark mood to it and it is unrelenting in the violence department. It is the slasher girl getting even, and it is scarier just becasue she is so frail and demure on the one hand, but viscuosly calculating and without remorse on the other. Acting and filmwork is marvelous. The violence is gruelling and unnerving and there are strange, disturbing flash back sequences. Not a movie for everyone but I am still looking for a new copy. Horror/suspense films just don't get much better than this!
November 2009January 2010
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