WITMOT?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alex Kerr argues that one of the main difference between Japanese and Chinese literature is that while Chinese literature is focused primarily on justice, Japanese lit is focused on debt. A sweeping generalization, yes, but there’s a grain of truth there. Watch any Hong Kong kung fu flick and nine times out of ten the plot will be about a pure, if physically fit, guy who runs afoul of some evil corrupt gangster/warlord/high-ranking bureaucrat. The hero loses face and frequently a trusted friend or mentor, but in the end the baddie gets his ass kicked and justice is restored. Watch any Japanese yakuza/samurai flick and nine times out ten it’s about a low level peon with integrity who has to juggle his sense of morality with his obligations to his group and superiors. The film ends with either the main character getting killed or disillusioned with the cupidity of his superiors.

Rarely have I seen the dichotomy as vividly illustrated as with Nobuo Nakagawa’s Snake Woman’s Curse. The film’s set in the waning days of the Edo period, in a backwater feudal estate. The landowners – the Onuma clan – are greedy, corrupt landlords, utterly indifferent to the suffering of the farmers tilling their field. One such farmer, Yasuke, grown too sick with TB to farm and has fallen deep into debt. At his funeral, Onuma orders that their ramshackle house be torn down and that his attractive wife, Sutematsu, and even more attractive daughter Asa work off their debt at their estate. The Onuma’s wife, fearing that her husband might seduce (i.e. rape) the beleaguered Sutematsu, she has her beaten for stealing an egg. The woman eventually dies. Asa gets raped by landlord’s thuggish son, ruining any hope of getting married. She eventually kills herself. No Jet Li-style ass-kicking here. No earthly justice.

Instead, justice is meted out in the form supernatural visitations. Onuma, his wife, and his son start having hallucinations of the dead family and, for some reason never really made clear, snakes. It really bums them out, so much so that they eventually off themselves. This has to be the most passive aggressive revenge drama I’ve ever seen. The poor family suffers all sorts of pain and indignities, but that’s OK in the long run because the landlord will feel really bad about it. It’s the sort of pathetic fatalism that bullied kid might dream of while planning a suicide.

Yes, this is a ghost movie in the spirit of Nakagawa’s Jigoku. And there’s some nicely surreal moments, like when Onuma’s son’s new bride turns slowly into a snake. Yet this strangely disempowering ending felt at odds with other elements in the movie. Nakagawa imbues the movie such a loathing for the rich upper class here that you are practically begging for a Marxist revolution. His critique of feudal economic disparity and in particular the hierarchical mindset that still shapes Japanese culture today was pointed and filled with barely contained rage. I kept hoping that the daughter would take the straight razor she commits suicide with and slash the landlord’s throat in his sleep. But no. The family had debt, as unjust as it might have been, and they paid it off with their lives.

Kimstim released a couple of months ago a mess of Nikkatsu Roman Porno and thanks to the glory of Netflix, I’ve been catching up with them. The other day, I caught Cloistered Nun: Runa’s Confession. The director Masaru Konuma is famous for directing some of Naomi Tani’s more popular S&M flicks like Tattooed Flower Vase and Wife to Be Sacrificed. No, full-body tattoos or forced enemas here though. Instead, this flick features what one might expect from a “nunsploitation” movie — habit-ripping acts of sacrilegious sexual congress. The star — the giggly Runa Takamura, the half-Japanese, half-German go go dancer for the girl pop band Golden Half — has little of the dark charisma of Tani and is only semi-plausible as a nun.

In the film, Runa freaks out and joins a convent after her evil step-sister Kumi doinks her boyfriend. Once cloistered, she gets manhandled by a salivating gaijin priest. In one scene, he throws her into pile of mud and spilled milk and proceeds to soil her and her habit. Three years later, Runa shows up at Kumi’s doorstep. She has forgiven Kumi for her previous transgressions and on top of that, has a business proposition. Her mission is selling off some land cheap. Soon Kumi and Runa’s callow ex have ponied up the money to buy. Along the way, Kumi gets her comeuppance from the nine or so guys that she’s engaged to in the form of lavishly produced gang-rape. Of course, Runa’s out for revenge and bilks the money out of not only Kumi and her weaselly ex, but also the evil gaijin priest (who speaks laughably bad Japanese).

The film should have ended with Runa and her lesbian ex-nun girlfriend on a boat to Australia, laughing at all their ill-gotten money. Instead, it ends with Runa and girlfriend are on said boat getting raped at gun point. They are naked and all smiles as wacky, kooky music gets played over top. Seriously, what the fuck? There isn’t even a remote attempt at making it make narrative sense. As I noted with Tattooed Flower Vase, the real point of pink eiga is not eroticism but a bolstering of the seemingly very fragile male ego, buffeted by modernism and changing gender roles. Kumi is victimized for being a duplicitous bitch and Runa is victimized early on for looking cute in a habit. Sex is almost always used as a weapon of power and control and the male culprits are never punished for it. Except for the end of this film. Both the ex-boyfriend and the priest are duped out of a pile cash. And for that reason, Runa gets raped at gun point.  And because she’s a character based on fantasy instead of anything close to human psychology, she loves it.

So, the other day, I get an invitation at work to go to a screening of Dirty Harry at the Director’s Guild in honor of its DVD re-release. It promised that oodles of famous people would be there, including Clint himself. Of course, I signed up.

The day of the event was an immensely annoying one. Weird tech failures. Pigeons paid tribute to my newly washed car with little white bird bombs. Work associates had hissy fits about things that have already been resolved. And to top it off, traffic from Santa Monica to Directors Guild in West Hollywood, even by low expections of rush hour traffic in Los Angeles, was unbelievably awful. Old women in walkers literally hobbling past my car. Every attempt at finding a better route merely got me even worse traffic. By the time I got there, I needed a beer. So after checking in, I made a bee-line to the wet bar. I didn’t realize til a full half-hour later that not only had I blown right into the VIP lounge, but that I didn’t have the requisite black paper wrist band to enter. I dressed reasonably nice and I suppose my single-minded determination for alcohol must have convinced everyone that I was a producer or agent.

So I knocked back a few beers. Free beer always tastes better when it’s ill-gotten. I saw Chris MacDonald who was holding court. I knew him from a ill-fated TV show I worked on that got yanked after five episodes. I tried to get his eye, but he seemed to be ignoring me, no doubt assuming that I was an agent or producer. I ate as many of the DGA hors d’oeuvres as I could. The mozzarella and sun-dried tomato on a stick was quite tasty. I talked to one guy who just finished work on G.I. Joe, who told me about Harrison Ford getting a hair cut on set; I introduced my self to Paul Haggis and somehow didn’t tell him that I thought Crash was the cinematic equivalent of George W. Bush — racist, cynical, and utterly undeserving of its laurels, and I inadvertently insulted Steve Guttenberg by mentioning his discotastic starring role in Can’t Stop the Music. If you’re out there Steve, sorry.

Having downed three beers and three dozen satays, I saw Clint make his regal entrance. Soon after, we all headed for the theater. There I found my co-worker who was apparently denied access to the VIP lounge. I told him about Steve Guttenberg. The lights dimmed, Clint, looking exceptionally well preserved for his 78 years, said some self-deprecating things about his hair to the audience.

And then the movie started. If Crash is the cinematic equivalent of the Bush admin, then Dirty Harry is the equivalent of Richard Nixon — seemed fascist at the time but now seems almost moderate. Sure, Harry Callahan is a shoot first, read Miranda Rights second kind of cop, but he’s grudgingly tolerant of gays in the early 70s, is concerned about the common good, and is unsparingly honest (unlike Nixon). Indeed, his one big mistake in the movie was that he is unable to lie on his police report. If he, like pretty much every other cop in the world, fudged the report to not include the whole police torture scene, a criminal wouldn’t have walked and you wouldn’t have had a second half of the film.

When the film was over, as custom, the studio handed out schwag. Usually its a T-shirt, or a picture book, or a back pack. Occasionally there’s something really cool like an iPod but not this time. I don’t get invited to parties that cool. No, instead I got a model of Dirty Harry’s trademark 44 Magnum pistol, done in chocolate. The perfect gift not to take through airport security.

I’m not going to write anything terribly original about 300. I finally saw it yesterday after spending a year and a half avoiding. 300 was booed at the Berlin Film Festival. And rightfully so. I don’t think I’ve purer example of Fascist art since I was forced to watch Triumph of the Will. It seems that Zack Snyder and Frank Miller read Susan Sontag’s essay on Facist Art and used it as a check list. Hyper-masculinity? Check. Fetishization of the male body? Check. Subjugation of the individual to the group? Check. Glorification of death? Check. An unabashed othering of the enemy? Check. That last one is really striking. The “Persians” were portrayed universally as grotesque, gender-confused, homosexual, crippled, ethnic, or just plain subhuman. On the other hand, the Spartans, in part from their crude brand of eugenics they practiced, are gym-sculpted Aryan adonises, manly men who are more brave than smart. This is not only wildly inaccurate, historically speaking, but pretty baldly racist. How the hell did this shit get made?

300 seems to have three divergent target audiences. 1) Fanboys who are into Frank Miller’s work and/or Lord of the Rings like sagas (and times, 300 seemed also like a parody of LOTR). 2) Gay men who would no doubt enjoy looking at all that rippling male flesh. The rampant homosexuality and pedarasty in Spartan culture, incidentally, was completely ignored in the film. And 3) Neocon fundamentalist crazies who desperately want to stay in Iraq for a 100 years and who want to invade Persia, er, Iran. Why not? According this film, they’re are all perverted, malformed subhumans.

Like Leni Riefenstahl’s toxic masterpiece, 300 is frequently beautiful to look at. Yet it is one of the most morally repugnant works of art to be belched out the of plastic asshole of American culture in a long long time.

Summer Palace is film I always suspected would get made. The events of Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were so dramatic and cinematic that it naturally captures the imagination of artists. During the protests — starting from Hu Yaobang’s death on April 15 through to the government’s bloody crackdown on June 4th/5th — youth in China experience a sort of condensed version of the 1960s. Imagine the Free Speech Movement, Woodstock, and Kent State all jammed into six weeks and you get the picture.

Not unlike the American government in the ’80s, the post-Tiananmen Square government distracted its citizens with a heady combination of economic boom times and virulent nationalism. The Chinese government had to as the protests called into question its very legitimacy. Almost 20 years later, most of the main student leaders of the protests are still exiled. Though the romantic sweep of those spring months still command the imagination, talkin about the protests publicly carries grave risks. Director Lou Ye — who graduated from Beijing University in 1989 — was banned from making movies for five years as punishment for making this film.

Summer Palace was screen in competition in Cannes and was hailed not only for its political daring, but also frank sexuality. As J. Hoberman of the Village Voice noted, not only is this movie the most sexually explicit film to come out of China, it’s more explicit than the six runner-ups combined. Though the pairing of sex and politics is a long one in cinema, Lou Ye’s film is not Closely Watched Trains or even The Dreamers. It’s a portrait of a lost generation.

Yu Hong (played by Lei Hao) is a willful sullen lass from the North Korean border who, once she gets to a Beijing university, plunges headlong into the messy abundance of life. This includes exploring her sexuality with (among others) her fellow student Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo). At first, the two are insanely happy, stealing away into an empty dorm room for frankly depicted quickies. But as the protests start ramping up in the background, doubt and suspicion seeps into their own private eden. Yu Hong becomes jealous and Zhou Wei starts sleeping with Yu Hong’s erstwhile best friend Li Ti. As the crackdown explodes around them, Yu has a nervous breakdown and flees Beijing, leaving Zhou behind. Up until this point, the film mirrors the youthful energy of the characters with a tone that’s both giddy and nervous. The camera, frequently hand-held, feels voyeuristic.

After the crackdown, the movie speeds past other major Chinese historical milestones — like the Hong Kong handover — before catching up with Zhou and Yu in the present. Zhou lives as an intellectual in Berlin and continues to make unfulfilling love to Li Ti. Yu sports a bad haircut and shacks up with a married guy out of loneliness. Both seem still seem traumatized by these unhealing scars from the past. The parallels between these two wounded ex-lovers and between China and its intellectuals are clear though not overbearing. Thankfully, Lou Ye roots the drama in the characters rather than an allegory. The regret and dull existential panic these Yu and Zhou felt of hitting your 30s and feeling your life slip out of sight is both palpable here and universal. And that’s what lingered in my mind days after watching it.

Summer Palace is not a perfect film. It sometimes veers close to the self-indulgence and the structure gets unwieldy in places. It is, though, a haunting and glorious mess.

Akira Kurosawa’s first post-war film, No Regrets for Our Youth, is a strange uneasy movie. The story, which is loosely based on real life events, details the transformation of Yukie, the daughter of a leftist college professor — played by Japanese film icon Setsuko Hara — from a spoiled brat, to dedicated wife of an anti-war dissident (based on Hotsumi Ozaki who worked with Richard Sorge — of Spy Sorge fame — and was the only Japanese to be hung during the war) to a dutiful hardworking farmer girl.

Though Regrets is not of the same caliber as Kurosawa’s later masterpieces it’s always interesting. The rhythm and pacing of the first half of the movie is restless like youthful energy unsure where to channel itself. The student demonstration montage sequences seem lifted straight from Eisenstein. By the end of the film, the pacing slows to match that of rural life and to match Yukie’s new found maturity.

But what’s really interesting about the film is Kurosawa’s struggle to understand what happened to his country. How could left-thinking intellectuals allow Japan to be hijacked by the military? Of course, the US occupying forces, terrified of a return of the crazed nationalism that pushed Japan into war, was very much encouraging this sort of cultural introspection. (For more on this, I really recommend Embracing Defeat by John Dower) And you argue that this movie is as much a propaganda film as his wartime films Sugata Sanshiro or Most Beautiful. Given Kurosawa’s trademark humanism, as seen in Ikiru and Rashomon, I think that part of this film is a real heartfelt working through of guilt and pain of the past decade.

Perhaps because I have this sort of thing one the brain, Regret reminded me of some of these Iraq war movies that have been coming out (and bombing). They also seem to be working through many of the same issues. Both Regret and movies like Redacted or Stop Loss, seem raw and uneasy. The tone brittle and lacerating, asking how the hell did we get here?