iPad Round-Up 2 - TATSUMI

TATSUMI is a wonderful animated film that works on two levels.  Most obviously, it is the life story of Japanese manga artist Toshihiro Tatsumi, based on his award-winning graphic novel/memoir, "A Drifting Life".  It shows him growing up in war-torn Japan, making his name as a young Manga artist, and finally pioneering a new type of comic for adults, dealing explicitly with sexual frustration, ennui and social issues in post-war Japan - in sharp contrast to the Astro Boy comics of his idol Osama Tezuka. To that end, the movie works as biopic for manga fans, interspersing the impressively frank autobiography with short animated films of some of his most famous short stories. This was interesting, and elegantly done, but as a person who has never read a single manga story, I found the movie more compelling as a document of social history. Thanks to Tatsumi's keen eye and honesty, we learn a lot about the social, sexual, political and economic changes in Japan, from the horrors of the nuclear bomb, to deprivation, to the economic boom. There were all sorts of little facts that shocked me - I was shocked at my own ignorance - such as the fact that the Japanese couldn't travel abroad until 1964 and even then with only a dollar's worth of Yen. So, for me, this film was entertaining, moving and educational, and I would recommend it even to people who have no interest in manga at all.  The visuals are beautiful, elegant and powerful, and have prompted me to start reading "A Drifting Life".

TATSUMI played Cannes 2011 and opened last year in Singapore and Hungary. It opened earlier this year in Ireland and the UK and is currently on release in the USA. It is available to rent and own. 

London Film Fest 2011 Day 5 - HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI

Writer-director Takashi Miike, the master of gory violence, is in altogether more sombre mood with his remake of Masaki Kobayashi's iconic 1962 feature "Harakiri". Takashi Miike's film takes the form of a highly formally controlled, slow-paced, beautifully depicted tragedy.  The form is particularly complex and satisfying - a tale within a tale within a tale, book-ended by acts of wince-inducingly graphic and stunningly choreographed violence.  It is both a personal, family tragedy, and a lament for the unbearable burden that the honour code of the samurai places on its follower.  

The movie is set in seventeenth century Edo, where peace has left the samurai caste impoverished and unemployed. The desperate ronin (samurai without master) apply to local lords to commit ritual suicide in their courtyards "to restore honour", but hoping the lords will pay them to leave.  As the film opens, Hanshiro Tsugumo (Ebizo Ichikawa) is making just such an application and the Senior Retainer warns him not bluff this particular house.  This is the outer layer of the story.  The retainer tells the tale of the previous applicant, Motomo Chijiwa (Eita) whose bluff was called.  The second layer of the tale.  And then, we get to the very heart of the film, Tsugamo's reply to the Retainer, which reveals that he knew Chijiwa well.  In fact, the boy was his son-in-law - husband to an ailing wife and son, desperate for a few pennies for medicine.  

In the telling of the three tales, Takashi Miike depicts with unflinching gaze the truth behind the exotic myth of the samurai - that their fortunes are swept up in wider feudal conflicts - a knife-edge walk between poverty and glory - the lack of humanity in their strict honour code.   This is done not just through the graphic depiction of ritual suicide, but more subtly in the colour palette of the film.  The reality of life is depicted in shades of grey.  Real life is dark, unlit, unwarmed, grim and bleak. This contrasts with the burnished red coat of armour lovingly given pride of place in the courtyard - the only shock of colour in the film, constantly in the glow of candles.  It's as though society has been up-ended, inverted - and the prison-like samurai code is being given the upper hand over life itself.

HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF SAMURAI is an amazing film.  Moving, never melodramatic despite the tragedy, formally beautiful, with set pieces that are unbearably tense and vividly depicted.  It is not the typical film one has come to expect from Takashi Miike and his long-time fans may be disappointed at its serious, almost lyrical tone. But I found it to be his best, most mature, most artistic work to date.  The only quibble is that the 3D adds very little to the experience. 

HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI played Cannes 2011 where it was the first film to be shown in 3D.  It opened in Japan on October 15th and opens in France on November 30th.

Late Late review - London Film Fest 2010 Day 11 - 13 ASSASSINS

13 ASSASSINS is a fantastic film. I literally bounced out of the cinema having watched it! On one level it's a brilliantly lavish Samurai film in the classic mould - beautiful costumes, whole villages created as sets, codes of honour broken, elegantly choreographed sword-fighting - and it reminded me how much I loved Samurai films. On another level, it's typical Takashi Miike mischief - satirising the violence of Samurai movies with a level of gore and blood that is quite simply ridonkulous - and making the village idiot actually a better sword-fighter than the pompous Samurai.

The plot is straight out of Shogun Total War 2. It's mid 19th century Japan with the Shogunate on its last legs but still rich enough to hire Shinzaemon (Kôji Yakusho) to assassinate the evil pretender, Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki). The first half of the film is a Kurosawa style "putting the band back together" narrative, with the cool twist of having Yusuke Iseya play the provincial dolt who gains a place alongside his hard-core Samurai team-mates. And in the second half of the flick, they turn the town of Ochiai into an A-Team style booby-trap setting up a brutal, bloody massacre.

The first thing to say about 13 ASSASSINS is that it looks amazing. The production design is lavish in style and flawless in its period detail, creating a look typically associated with epic historical drama. The photography (Nobuyasu Kita) echoes this lavish style with Kubrick-like deliberate framing and slow, stylised camera movements. Interior scenes are lit by candelight to give an authentic feel and the detail of the costumes is breath-taking. The second thing to say is that beyond the historic detail, Takashi Miike remains the Director of the Egregious - from the audacious sadism of Naritsugu (e.g. the women crippled so extremely by "total massacre") -  to the egregious and dogmatic code of honour of Shinzaemon -  to the balletic, operatic, monumental final display of bloodshed in the village. Miike creates a film that is utterly modern in its gorging, self-indulgent, obese display of blood and violence - but also a film that is curiously nostalgic for the age of the Samurai when that bloodshed was part of a self-sacrifice for honour. His film is, then, a bravura performance - modern, nostalgic, bloody, but with depth. Undoubtedly one of the finest films of the London Film Festival.

13 ASSASSINS played Venice and Toronto 2010 and was released in Japan in September. It opens in the UK in May 2011.

NORWEGIAN WOOD

Sweet tap-dancing Christ, NORWEGIAN WOOD really is the most boring, self-indulgent, opaque, pointless film I have seen in a long time. I didn't care about any of the characters. I didn't find any of their actions authentic. I didn't understand any of their motivations. All that was left was a series of ponderous still shots and a fascinating soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood.

Not having read the widely acclaimed and popular Murukami novel, all I can judge is what the movie gives me.  And from what I can tell the story is basically about a boy called Toru (Kenichi Matsuyama), whose best friend committed suicide in high school. A few years later he's at college in Tokyo in the 60s and meets the best friend's ex girlfriend Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi). They start hanging out, maybe to rekindle memories of the dead boy - they fuck - and this precipitates a nervous breakdown for the girl, who goes off to a rural sanitarium where she share s a room with another patient called Reiko (Reika Kirishima), who will later throw herself at Toru. Toru continues to believe he is in love with Naoko but starts hanging out with Midori (Kiki Mizuhara), a pretty flirtatious student who apparently already has a boyfriend. Her easy sexual banter contrasts strongly with Naoko's frigidity. 

But of course, this is pop psychology 101. Toru clearly has issues. He's wandering through life passively falling in with any girl who toys with him - bland and banal and acted upon. The three girls he fucks might seem superficially different but they are all essentially the same - emotionally unavailable and inordinately needy. This could have made for a fascinating psycho-sexual drama, and I suspect that's what the novel delivers. But given the opacity and lack of interiority shown in the movie, what we get is an truly uninteresting, banal story: a plastic hero and his three emotionally needy, unavailable women. 

What this film needs is a sense of humour. It also needs to offer us some explanations of why people do what they do. It needs to be firmly embedded in its time and place. Beyond some period costumes and a particularly cheesy use of the Beatles' song, I want to know why students are marching - to feel more of the sixties vibe. And, most of all, what this film needs is a sense of interiority - of Toru's emotional journey through various love affairs toward maturity. It lacks any kind of beating, bleeding centre that might elicit our empathy, let alone sympathy. 

NORWEGIAN WOOD played Venice and Toronto 2010 and was released last year in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Russia, Vietnam and Hong Kong. It was released earlier this year in the Netherlands and the Netherlands. It is currently on release in Thailand and the UK. It opens this weekend in Sweden; on April 14th in Singapore; on April 21st in Hungary; and on July 7th in Germany.

Late, late review - HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK/YAMIUTSU SHINZO (2005)

With HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK, Japanese director Shunichi Nagasaki remakes and reimagines his own 1982 movie of the same name. Filmed on both 35mm and Super-8 the movie attempts to recreate the punk energy and moral ambiguity of the original tale of a murderous couple on the run from their own consciences. That film was short (seventy minutes), grimy, claustrophobic and bleak. The remake is about people who are trapped even moreso than the original. Not only do we see the original dilemma - a young couple on the lam - played out, but this new couple meets the characters from the original film, still trapped by their past. And it's as though the director himself seems mired in the earlier version, incorporating actors and clips from that film. The resulting movie is an intellectually involved film about the nature of movie-making and taking a point of view, as well as about the original fears that coloured the first film. I found it an exhilarating and provocative movie, but I'm not sure how far it will make sense to anyone who hasn't seen the original. 

YAMIUTSU SHINZO/HEART, BEATING IN DARKNESS played London 2006.

London Film Fest 2010 - Day 15 - COLD FISH / TSUMETAI NETTAIGYO

COLD FISH is basically insane. It's an insanely conceived movie about insane people. It's hilarious, sexually explicit, ultra-violent, horrifying and ridiculous. It's the sort of movie that you sit through, alternately laughing and nauseous, and when the lights come up you think, 'what the hell just happened here?!'

J-horror director Shion Sono based the movie on a true case of a serial murderer in 1980s Japan, but this is very much just a nod to past history rather than a straight re-telling. In the movie, Sono transposes the action to modern Japan, and turns the serial killer into a Fred and Rosemary West-style couple who get high on sexual power-games and butchering people with an attention to detail that is pretty impressive in a fucked up way. They lure in unsuspecting idiots with their over-the-top courtesy and generosity, find their weakness and then exploit it for kicks. In this case, the killers, Aiko and Murata, alight upon the weedy, emasculated middle-aged man, Shamoto and his dissatisfied wife Taeko, offering to give their teenage daughter a job and a place to stay. Pretty soon, the mischievous old Murata (Japanese comedian Denden) is porking Taeko and forcing Shamoto to be help dispose of corpses. 

There's something brilliantly, finely-balanced in how we are often grossed out and laughing our asses off at the same time in this movie. I loved the gore, the chavvy outfits, the lo-fi gonzo look of the film, the day-glo colours, and the screetching sound-track. This is angry, funny film that sticks it in the eye of bourgeois sensibility, with its social satire of repressed domesticity and inter-generational misunderstanding. I loved it. Even when it made me want to vomit. But at its heart, there is something much more profound going on - a sort of demonic argument for repressed people to act on their impulses and, crudely put, "man the fuck up". What else can we make of a scene where Murata literally forces Shamato to have sex with Aiko, or the fact that Shamato's journey in the film is ultimately one of forced self-empowerment. In order to get to the point where he can physically and psychologically save his wife and daughter he has to become, for a moment, as evil but also as powerful as Murata. Shamato is the cold fish, and he is freezing his wife in suburban hell as the movie opens. Is it better to live, frozen, or die, alive?  Unpalatable truth, maybe.

COLD FISH was released in Japan earlier this year and played Venice and Toronto 2010.

Overlooked DVD of the month - TOKYO SONATA

Japan is the only country where the unemployment rate has a positive correlation with the suicide rate. From such a statistic, J-horror director turned dramatist, Kiyoshi Kurosawa carves a story of a contemporary Japanese family in emotional crisis. Typically authoritarian father and salary man, Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) cannot bear the loss of face involved in telling his family that he has lost his job. Similarly, repressed housewife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) cannot bear to tell her husband that she knows he now has a job as a lavatory cleaner. Their sons try to find meaning in a society based on rules of appearance and repression. Elder son Taka (Yu Koyanagi) is so desperate for purpose he joins the US Army and younger son Kenji (Inowaki Kai) deceives his parents by taking piano lessons.

The direction and framing capture the ennui and embarrassment of modern life - of people psychologically buckling under the weight of societal expectations. It's a simultaneously beautiful and disturbing film - anchored by a searing performance from Kyoko Koizumi as the mother. The only mis-step is a third act filled with action that borders on absurd, but all is forgiven with a painfully beautiful resolution of sorts, with perhaps the best use in film of Clair de Lune.

TOKYO SONATA played Cannes, where it won the Un Certain Regard prize, and Toronto 2009 and was released in Japan last year. It is available on DVD.