Kurosawa followed up on No Regrets for Our Youth with this remarkably bleak comedy about a young couple that simply wants to have a pleasant Sunday together. Yuzo is a disillusioned soldier who is valiantly trying to maintain his dignity and integrity in the ruins of postwar Tokyo. Masako is his relentless chipper girlfriend. They are too poor to live together much less marry. They only have 35 yen between them for the day.

The day goes from one failure to another, each one underlining their yen-less existence. When Yuzo tries to contact an old war chum who owns a dance hall, the management assumes his looking for a handout. When they go to the zoo, they get caught in the rain. When they try to go see a concert, scalpers swoop in and by all the cheap seats, beating Yuzo up when he complains.

Kurosawa has dealt with postwar deprivation in movies like Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, but in neither of those films are as emotionally raw as this one. After Yuzo drives Masako away in an act of misdirected fury, he sits there sullenly in his own apartment, listening to the rain piss down. His desperation is almost unbearable. Kurosawa leaves the shots long in this scene and the camera static. It would have made Andre Bazin swoon.

For the first two-thirds of the film, you could say this is Kurosawa’s most Neorealistic film. Instead of a bicycle, these characters are wandering around a cruel and indifferent city simply looking for some relief from their grinding poverty. A lot of the movie is shot on the streets of Tokyo too, giving Sunday a documentary feel like Rome, Open City and Bicycle Thieves.

Then the last third kicks in. Kurosawa suddenly veers uneasily from gritty Neorealism to a strange mixture of Capraesque whimsy and Peter Pan-style appeals to the audience. Following yet another petty defeat, this time in a coffee shop, Yuzo regroups his shattered spirit and starts looking towards the future with an inkling of hope. When that wisp of a silver lining slips away, Masako turns to the camera and beseeches the audience to clap for our broken hero, shrilly begging “Onegai Shimasu” over and over until your eyes are as dewy as hers. Breaking the fourth wall is a movie like this is really bizarre and jarring. But by doing so Masako, and by extension Kurosawa, is pleading with the postwar audience to think about the future ahead of them and not the yawning abyss below them.

From my regular trolling on the interweb:

Here’s this insanely clever clip about spaghetti by PES. [ h/t Joan]

And there’s this groovy Santigold/N.E.R.D. video.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Remember Troy King, that douchebag Attorney General from Alabama who wanted to criminalize dildos? Yeah, well, surprise! Surprise! He’s gay. He was reportedly discovered by his wife. Weirdly enough, Troy King was nailing the homecoming king from Troy University.

Freddie Mac+Fannie Mae = We’re fucked. More on the banking crisis from a less excitable source.

Courts rules that it is in fact not constitutional to strip search a thirteen year old under suspicious of having Advil.

Jackass local TV reporter gets called a jackass.

Here’s an article about the logistics of sex in space aka the “Human Docking Procedure.” But here’s a passage that leapt out at me:

[Dr. Kring] believes that Nasa could learn from the operation of bases at the South Pole, where researchers who are separated from their families for months at a time take “expedition spouses” as sexual partners for the duration.

He said: “You have an exclusive relationship with them for six to nine months but when the expedition is over, so is the relationship and you return to your normal lives and families.”

I can’t wait to use phrases like “Human Docking Procedure” and “Expedition Spouse” in every day conversation.

Finally, this insanely cool new video from Radiohead. Nary a camera was used for the production and it looks like it was directed by robots. [via BoingBoing]

I’m not going to rehash what everyone else has said about The Graduate. It’s a brilliant film. Exceptionally well acted and directed. I was particularly struck how director Mike Nichols filmed the graduation party in the beginning of the film. Shot entirely in medium close-up, the party shows the the adults pawing and pulling at Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) like a band of zombies.

What I found interesting about this movie — in terms of script structure — is that it’s a perfect example of a reluctant hero. Your classic hero — Indiana Jones for example — has a clear goal and pushes the story of the movie along with his actions. He wants to get to the Ark before the Nazis do and the Nazis try to stop him. Braddock’s ambitions are murkier. He’s almost entirely reactive through the first two-thirds of the movie. His parents foist a party on him, his parents’ friend button-hole him about the joys of plastics, and, of course, Mrs. Robinson, that archtypical cougar, forces herself on him. Braddock only really makes one decision for himself in the whole movie, but it’s a big one. He decides he’s going to marry Elaine. And in spite of the fact that she hates him for doinking her mom and causing the break up of parents’ marriage, she’s in Berkeley and that’s she’s already sort of engaged, he relentless pursues his goal.

This makes him a hero. A lot of movies, especially coming-of-age films, try for a reluctant hero but off fall flat because the character winds up to passive, like The Wackness for example. The Graduate shows how to do it right.

My regular culling from the interweb:

Well, this is long overdue. The Inalienably Rights Enforcement Initiative is looking to legalize marijuana for pretty much everyone in California and looks like it might make it on November’s ballot.

A great article about my favorite film so far this year, Wall-E. And here’s the way too clever site for Buy and Large, the corporate overlords of Wall-E’s Idiocracy like future.

A list of Michel Gondry’s favorite music videos.

Weird ways to predict the future.

Mother Goose was a goth.

Doraemon speaks Thai!

And then there’s this really cool British Channel 4 ad for a Stanley Kubrick retrospective. [via Defamer]

July is…

Recreation and Parks Month
National Baked Beans Month
National Blueberries Month
National Ice Cream Month
Lasagna Awareness Month
National Culinary Arts Month
National Hot Dog Month
National Picnic Month
National Pickle Month
National Vehicle Theft Protection Month

My regular culling from the interweb:

Zyzzyx Road, the least profitable movie in the history of cinema. Box Office take: $30

A handy guide to napping. [via 43 folder.]

From the Insane Projects from the 20th Century category: Behold!: Atlantropa. That’s right, the proposed damming of Gibraltar which would create a land bridge down Italy to Africa.

A customer so sick of Bank of America’s greed and idiocy that he placed a huge banner on his building reading “I Hate Bank of America.” BoA’s response? They called the cops. Bastards.

Repo! The Genetic Opera. This is either going to be really bad or brilliant.

Troy King — the douchebag Attorney General of Alabama who will throw your ass in jail for having a dildo.

And here’s the latest missive from crank/prophet of Peak Oil, Jim Kunstler.

Who knew that John McCain could vogue?

This weekend I read this horrifically disturbing article in the New Yorker about a woman who couldn’t stop itching.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

There’s the link.

All han, no cock. This film is going to be panned. The reasons are primarily poor direction and a lousy sense of tone. For a film billed as a big blockbuster, Hancock lacks any sense of the spectacular. Instead it feels remarkably small, introspective and slight. That said, Hancock did pass the minimum standard of a Hollywood mall movie, I was reasonably entertained during the course of the film, no doubt because of Will Smith’s very bankable charisma. During the walk to the car, however, my estimation of the flick starting taking a nose dive.

The premise is that Hancock (Smith) is the only superhero in the world, and as a result, he’s a drunk hateful slob. The first quarter or so of the film shows Hancock drunkenly trashing half of Los Angeles to save the day. It’s big budget slapstick and at times pretty damned funny. He’s a superhero with terrible PR but fortunately Ray (Jason Bateman), a PR guy, steps into reform the hero’s image. This includes getting him to don a superhero suit, learn to be nice to the cops, and to go to jail for a spell to serve out the 600 or so warrants for his arrest. In jail, he goes to AA and generally learns to stop being a jerk. At this point, with the film’s slapstick beginning souring into a redemption drama, I grew worried that the film wouldn’t have the energy to make it across the finish line. But no fear, there’s a twist. SPOILER ALERT: Ray’s wife Mary (Charlize Theron) is like Hancock a superhero and an immortal. And apparently they were lovers for a few thousand years but Hancock doesn’t remember that. He’s had amnesia for the past 80. So they fight, which includes trashing Hollywood for some reason. Ray finds out, of course. Suddenly, the movie becomes a domestic drama. By the time the movie ends, all of the energy of the first 20 or so minutes have completely dissipated.

Reportedly, this script has been bouncing around Hollywood for a long time and it has the feeling of having been reworked way too many times. Thematically, it hints at more interesting subtexts that never really materialize. Is Hancock a metaphor for American power in the cold war? Is it a reworking of the superhero genre? Is this a satire about power of PR? There’s so much fertile ground here that never gets mined, which is too bad. Instead, we get a movie that’s shallow and incoherent.

Director Peter Berg can’t seem to decide what kind of flick he’s making here. A farce? A family Drama? The tone of this movie is all over the map. Perhaps the low point of this incoherence was when Hancock was in prison and threatened by a couple thugs. The hero in turn threatens the thugs with jamming the head of one up the ass of the other. And then he does. Not only does Berg show the grizzly aftermath — which is both crass and completely unbelievable — but he then, inexplicably, has the Sanford and Son theme song kick in. WTF?

His sense of Los Angeles geography is similarly sloppy. This is a pet peeve of mine, especially after watching Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself. In the beginning of movie, Hancock is battling some baddies downtown who make a left turn and suddenly they’re all in the LAX area, some 15 miles away. Some explosions happen and then they are suddenly back in downtown. If this were the movie’s one sin, I wouldn’t beef. But this seems to speak to a higher level of sloppiness that permeates the film. But his most obvious — and damning — mistake is his directing style has been lifted straight from Paul Greengrass or Michael Mann (who produced the film). It works for Greengrass and Mann because they aren’t trying to be funny. Hancock, in theory, is. The Bourne Ultimatum-style shaking camera is plainly wrong for this script.

Will Smith manages to almost keep the movie watchable. But if you possess even the barest of critical faculties, you will probably have an annoying walk to the car.

Brian Eno and Kevin Kelly published a list of unthinkable futures 15 years ago in the Whole Earth Catalog. Now you can read in here. [via Boing Boing]

A very cute cartoon series about pandas and the recent Sichuan earthquake.

You all will be glad to know that the 61-year old British grandmother who started running around the world in 2003 has returned back to the UK in spite of being approached by a drunken guy with a bloody ax in Siberia, encountering a polar bear, and receiving 29 marriage proposals.

Really cool animation of a John Lennon press conference.

Continuing with Hilarious McCain blow ups — a funny viral video about John McCain dropping the C bomb on his wife.

I should have been a lot nicer to Steve Guttenberg.

East-side Angeleno culture in the Far East. [via LA Curbed]

The top ten political sex scandals in US history.

A helpful guide to the shadowy groups that run the world.

Now, THIS is a resignation letter.

Geek gets a 15 inch tall robot girlfriend.

There’s a Monty Python sketch called “Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days,” which starts when someone from a group of upperclass Brits innocently lobs a tennis ball at Michael Palin. The ball strikes him in the head, sending a geyser of blood into the air. He casts his tennis racket aside, which impales the woman next to him. Soon the entire group is missing limbs and writhing in puddles of blood.

I was reminded of this while watching Noboru Iguchi’s The Machine Girl. The plot, as such, is simple. Ami (Minase Yashiro) is the picture perfect Japanese school girl – cute, perky, kind, and serious. But when her kid brother Yu gets thrown off a building by a group of school bullies, she wants revenge. When she confronts the family of one of the kids, she is attacked by the parents. The father hurls chairs at her while the seemingly meek mom turns into a knife wielding banshee who fries Ami’s hand in tempura batter. Ami, however, proves to be a unexpectedly fierce fighter, and soon their kid is lacking a head and the banshee mom – in one of the grossest scenes I’ve seen in a long time – has a knife blade sticking out of her mouth. But that’s just for starters.

Ami learns that the leader of the bully group is the scion of the positively psychotic Hattori yakuza/ninja clan. The father is sort of guy who, as punishment for a minor error, forces a servant to eat sushi made from his own fingers. Ami’s first attempt at taking out the gangsters ends with her own amputation — Hattori lops off her arm. But thanks to the help of Miki (Asami), an ex-biker whose son was also murdered by the bullies, Ami’s stump gets outfitted with a Gatling gun. Soon she’s tracking down and blowing bloody holes into every single one of the bullies. Along the way, there are some ninja attacks, a drill bra, a flying guillotine and the letting of buckets and buckets of blood.

Clearly, Iguchi was aiming for the sort of unhinged lunacy of Takashi Miike’s notorious Ichi the Killer, but the movie never captures that’s movie’s wit or fever-dream visual poetry. Instead, it’s labored and strangely dated, as if it should have been made in 2003. But Machine Girl is interesting because of what it lacks — sex. If you strip away all the weird Tetsuo: Ironman-like flesh and machine fetishization , the plot is not unlike many of the old pink eiga revenge thrillers like Sex and Fury — beautiful yet formidable woman wronged and gets revenge. Many of the conventions are almost identical. The heroine is forced to prove her mettle by facing down a band of rapist thugs. The heroine is captured by the baddies and tortured. But where as Reiko Ike in Sex merely has her flesh exposed, Ami has hers violated — but never exposed. Even in scenes where it would have made sense for Ami to be partially or fully stripped, she remains chastely clothed. Yet this isn’t prudity; the rampant spurting blood, limb slicing and general bodily mutilation border on the pornographic. Instead, this film is shaped by a different aesthetic than traditional pink eiga. Machine Girl is a post-human exploitation flick where blood, not semen, is the bodily fluid of currency.

Another thing interesting about this flick is the strong female characters. The women in movies like Cloistered Nun: Runa’s Confession and especially Tattooed Flower Vase are portrayed as being at the mercy of their own sexual desire, ready for whatever advances from men. Ichi the Killer treats women as sex objects and punchlines. But women here — between Ami, Miki, and Hattori’s drill bra wielding wife — are so powerful and dominant that the men almost disappear into the background. I wonder if this is tied to the filmmaker’s fetishization of damaged flesh and machines?

Anyway, here’s the Machine Girl’s trailer.

]]> http://projectorhead.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/machine-girl-2008/feed/ mondale http://projectorhead.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/links/ http://projectorhead.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/links/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:57:16 +0000 mondale http://projectorhead.wordpress.com/?p=177

Links from my compulsive trolling of the interwebs:

Behold! The future eco-city. Some very very cool stuff in there.

And then there’s this. Stereoscopy photographs turned into animated GIFs. [h/t Joan]

A new law in Japan declares any guy with a 34″ waist to be overweight and will force anyone not conforming to these national guidelines to “guidance” and possibly “re-education”. Average waist size for Americans? 39 inches.

Speaking of strange stories coming from Japan, try this one. Hiroshi Nozaki killed a Filipina hostess and stuffing the body parts in a coin locker. Eight years ago, he was charged with, you guessed it, chopping up a Filipina hostess and trying to flush it down the toilet. Link

And even more from Japan, Diet member Yukihisa Fujita has publicly questioned the official version of the events of 9/11. He’s one of a number of politicians now doing so and one senses more will in the future.

An article about Objectum-Sexual, featuring a woman in love with the Berlin Wall. [via Boing Boing]

A hilarious review of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. [h/t Ted]

A fascinating article about the dangerous world of artificial diamond production. [via Boing Boing]

A blog entry on Watanabe Kasumi’s photo book Gangs of Kabukicho. [h/t Ted]

Tony Jaa quite literally kicks ass.

Speaking of that, here’s a list of action heroes that probably should be brought up on murder charges.

This is depressing. [h/t Joan]

Who knew that laughing babies in slo mo would be so disturbing.

The reason why your life is going to hell, if you’re white, middle class, and straight.