Kaiten Sushi Movie

Someone put a camera on the  conveyor-belt in a kaiten sushi joint. It’s simple but fascinating. I wish I thought of it.

Links 12/19/08

I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been shooting a short film. Very tiring. You can see behind the scenes pics here.

Gems from my regular trolling of the internets:

A poll to see just how much of a film geek you are. I polled a 77.6%.

It’s nice seeing your name in print.

The mysterious snow people of Peru.

A fascinating article about how that little war in Georgia this year might just be the beginning of the end of the American Empire.

Proof that romantic comedies will indeed ruin your life.

Oymyakon – the coldest place on earth.

Naked Pursuit (1968)

This independently produced pink eiga has all the hallmarks of a Koji Wakamatsu movie, like Go, Go Be a Virgin A Second Time — namely radical politics and naked women — but little of its poetry. The plot, as such, is a 60s radical sees a girl on the beach, he tries to rape her, and — after a whole lot of flailing around on the sand — she escapes missing a couple articles of clothing. Repeat until naked. Throw in some news footage of student protests and the Vietnam war and that’s pretty much the movie. It’s a pretty thin plot to be stretched for 73 minutes, and though the director, Toshio Okuwaki, does his best to pad it out with trippy sound effects, excessive use of slow motion, and bizarre unmotivated zooms. At it’s moments, it has a unhinged dream-like quality that reminded me a bit of Woman of the Dunes (perhaps it was all that sand) but for the most part it’s a dull, poseurish flick that pretensions of art, but in reality is flaccid crap.

Ugly Americans and the Wire

Hollywood cranks out products like Sex and the City, Hitch, and Gossip Girls that show the characters living fantastic lives that are completely divorced from economic reality. There’s no way Carrie Bradshaw, to name one example, could live in a lavish Manhattan apartment on the salary of a single weekly column. And while it’s easy to dismiss such criticism as “it’s only a movie,” the lifestyle portrayed in these films – filled with amazing real estate and perfect fashion – buttressed by fiendishly clever product placement — is completely aspirational. Viewers are implicitly told that not only they should strive to buy into this lifestyle, but that they deserve this lifestyle. Is it any wonder why the middle class have bankrupted itself to buy a plasma screen TVs, McMansions, and gargantuan SUVs? The road to middle-class respectability is now found through buying things that are beyond the means of most in the middle class.

More unsettling is the action spectacular where this same sense of entitlement pervades. Instead of getting a thrill of vicariously consuming, movies like Wanted, Déjà Vu, and Bad Boys 2 are all about the vicarious thrill of wasting things (and people). Because Will Smith is chasing the baddies, he is entitled to trash city centers, torture people, and destroy impoverished third-world shantytowns with a Hummer (if you can think of a better metaphor for the Bush administration, tell me). Both trends represent the worst stereotypes of Americans – thoughtlessly wasteful, thoughtlessly violent, shallow, and spoiled.

There is a counter-current roiling against this trend. Movies like Children of Men*, Idiocracy, Wall-E and books like The Road and Parable of the Sower detail the aftermath of pursuing this American dream. The environment is wrecked beyond repair. The underpinnings of civilization are atrophying away. And in some cases, the fate of humanity itself is in question. The delirious party of waste and consumption is long gone and those remaining have clean up the mess.

All of these works are in the sci-fi genre, but there’s one work more that I’d include that shares these elements. The Wire, hailed as the best show ever on TV, is sprawling narrative about a city, Baltimore, struggling under the weight of failing schools, funding cuts from the government, and rising crime. The show very vividly and very accurately details a dystopic world where the underpinnings of civilization have atrophied away and where every day citizens are forced to live in a world of random violence, police brutality and utter hopelessness. A less exaggerated version of the world found in Parable of the Sower, The Road, and Children of Men. It’s a far cry from the luxury of a world like Sex and the City, yet it exists right along side of it. The underclass neighbors are its shadow. This isn’t necessarily a cheap Marxist screed against class, either. We as Americans chose to create this world. By picking leaders who favored tax cuts for the rich, cutting benefits on the poor, the corporatization of government, and an outsourcing of blue-collar jobs, we, like the characters of Idiocracy and the humans of Wall-E have through our short-term greed and idiocy fashioned a world like the nightmares of our movies.

*I know that Children of Men is a movie set in Britain. But it’s themes perfectly fit within an American context. It’s also a really freakin’ good movie.

Links (9/3/08)

A handy diagram of what to say and what not to say during sex.

A Japanese company, catering to women who want to divorce, employ professional seducers on their soon-to-be ex-husbands.

The top 25 movies about LA in the past 25 years according to the L.A. Times.

‘Camoflague’ by Chinese artist Liu Bolin.

A great article from k-punk about Wall-E and sci-fi. [h/t Ted]

Really no idea what to make of this blog called “The Pryamid at the Center of the World.” (sic)

A fascinating article about the future of English.

2000 AD: We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly…

3000 AD: *ZA kiad w’-exùn ya tijuh, da ya-gAr’-eduketan zA da wa-tAgan lidla, kaz ‘ban iagnaran an wa-tAg kurrap…

[Via Boingboing]

And then there’s this heart-warming tale.

By The Associated Press

MODESTO, Calif. – Police say a man tried to cut off his own arm at a restaurant in Modesto, Calif., because he thought he had injected air into a vein while shooting cocaine and feared he would die unless he took drastic action.

Authorities say 33-year-old Michael Lasiter rushed into the Denny’s restaurant late Friday and started stabbing himself in one arm with a butter knife he grabbed from a table.

They say that when that knife didn’t work Lasiter took a butcher knife from the kitchen and dug it into his arm.

Police Sgt. Brian Findlen says Lasiter told officers he thought he needed to amputate his arm to keep himself from dying from the cocaine injection.

Lasiter was taken to a hospital for treatment of severe cuts.

The Denny’s closed for the night.

That last line is the clincher for me.

Finally, a youtube clip that’s been posted a lot but deserves to be seen more.

Erotic Diary of an Office Lady (1977)

Continuing my way through Kimstim’s Masaru Konuma collection of Nikkatsu Roman Porno, I watched his Erotic Diary of an Office Lady the other day. (See my postings on Tattooed Flower Vase and Cloistered Nun: Runa’s Confession.) Compared to his other work, this film feels slight. With a couple exceptions, there’s little about it that boffo or over top. No comedic rapes at gun point or tattooed nymphomaniacs here.

Instead of surrealistic kink, the plot that unfolds is comparable to a Sundance coming-of-age flick. Asami (Asami Ogawa) is an OL — a female office worker. Like nuns and perfectly coiffed beauties in kimonos, OLs are another often fetishized feminine archetype. When she’s not operating a very unweldy Japanese typewriter, she has regular trysts with a married middle-management type. At home, she dutifully cares for her widowed, borderline alcoholic father. In short, she’s not too different from a lot of single Japanese women.

One day while out with her friends, she happens upon a mysterious young man who sells baby chicks on the street. When they run into each other again, there’s is clear romantic tension, though the guy ruins the moment by trying to jump her. Judging by movies like these, seduction in Japan is basically limited to the guy throwing himself at the girl. Later, they finally do hook up. During their fevered groping, the coop door gets kicked open and soon the copulating couple are surrounded by chicks. It’s a beautiful and memorably bizarre image, the kind that Konuma is brilliant at stringing together.

Afterwards, he asks her to run away together. She demurs and soon regrets it. Her father has shacked up with a boozy older co-worker and her subsequent encounter with her middle-management lover goes sour. She breaks up with him and he responds by (of course) raping her. Though this is more or less a requirement for the genre, it’s the film’s only false note. Whereas the rest of the film was, uncharacteristically for the genre, clearly shot from her point of view, this scene the POV shifts to that of the male audience. Only Ogawa’s skill as an actress keeps the tone of the scene from killing the rest of the movie.

The film ends with her lighting up a cigarette and staring into the distance as a hard rock ballad to freedom blares underneath. Her dad is no longer dependent on her, she dumped her middle-management manfriend (which in these sorts of movies isn’t always a given after a rape), and her chick-raising lothario disappeared. She is indeed existentially free. And this would be a great ending if the film set up that she wanted to be free to begin with. We know so little of the character and the camera is always kept at a distance that I was surprised and perplexed when the credits rolled. Did I miss something here or did the film make a left turn into a completely different narrative?

One Wonderful Sunday (1947)

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.

The Graduate (1967)

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.

Hancock (2008)

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.

Machine Girl (2008)

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.