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petroniaSo yesterday was my first triple bill of the festival: three films over the course of nine hours. The grueling part of the schedule is not so much the film-watching - though I wouldn't want to do it every day - but the triple write-up on Monday. ^^; (Do I have to write up FantAsia films? Yes, actually. I think it's for the same reason ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
corneredangel writes con reports.) I'm sorely tempted to say "Ueto Aya is just as pretty but Matsuda Ryuhei sure acts better," and leave it at that, but well...
(Spoilers follow.)
Azumi first. I'm not familiar with the manga, but people have hinted that it's more complex and sexually suggestive. (I rather fail to see how it could be more bloody.) Out of the three I like this one the least, because - though you might assume otherwise from my Miike fandom - I don't inherently enjoy films in which most of the cast dies gruesomely one by one. ^^; You have to pitch it to me from a different angle. This one I sold to myself on the basis of Kitamura "520-degree rotating shot, mofo, and this time I do it vertically twice as fast!" Ryuhei's direction, but I like Versus and Aragami much better. For one thing, all the actors in the latter films effectively faked the ability to handle their swords/guns/miscellaneous weaponry, which is one of those criteria you only take into account when it's missing. Never mind Ueto Aya and her determined pouting in defense of the Tokugawa Shogunate - I couldn't believe any of those kids were real ninjas. They looked and behaved too much like the pop/dorama idols I'm sure they are: cute and utterly inoffensive. The script didn't do anyone favours either. In the end it could have been pleasurable kitsch - the cape? the giggly psychopathic roses dude? the depiction of "moral conflict" about on par with Weiss Kreuz's? - but the protracted wholesale massacre of cute and inoffensive characters took the pleasure out of the exercise.
9 Souls, then. The one I liked best out of the three. It will make you laugh; very possibly it will make you cry, even if you're not the sort who falls for stock emotional manipulation. And it's got a kickass soundtrack by this guy I've never heard of (but sounds quite a bit like Supercar, not to say New Order again.Go forth and download, Ced!). I'm now looking forward greatly to Aoi Haru, with which it shares a director (and Matsuda Ryuhei, whom I was not expecting to see...).
Basically it's an on-the-lam-from-the-law road movie, a subgenre one thinks of as primarily American - Thelma and Louise is the first example that comes to mind, with Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? running a close second. Nine convicts make an unplanned prison break, hijack a hulking rust-red truck/van hybrid and take off for Mount Fuji, nominally in search of a stash of counterfeit banknotes but really *drumroll* in a quest for redemption. They're a motley crew of reprobates: the biker, the drug dealer, the thief, the porn king, the mad bomber, the euthanasiast, the "general loose cannon"... Led by the gruff fallen paterfamilias Torakichi (ran his own son over for refusing to attend school), they adopt a series of improbable disguises and rob convenience stores to finance their impromptu road trip. Of course it's all fun and games and sheep-molesting (don't ask) until someone bites a bullet.
Very little time is actually spent sketching out the characters' pasts, but the dialogue is well-written enough that it's easy to fill in the blanks. These guys are lifers, not nice people. Not a one of them sauntered vaguely downward into a criminal record: you've got the guy who dumped his cheating girlfriend in the river, and the guy who offed his cheating girlfriend's lover. You've got the guy who nearly blew up a pachinko parlor, and the guy who went on a murderous rampage at his high school. The Matsuda character - Michiru - is a spring wound up to breaking point: a recluse who only emerged from his room to knife his loan-sharking father. They've got no future, and only a few days to look for their own definition of grace. Some of them don't find what they're hoping for; some of them find it only to lose it again. It's a credit to the script that no whitewashing is involved, nor are easy answers given. As the biker Kazuma put it, "Kill four of your friends and you'll pay for it with more than hard time." In the end, each one gets as close as he's able to come, and that will have to do.
The non-relationship between filicidal Torakichi and patricidal Michiru - the "odd couple" as one of the others put it, in a characteristic touch of rueful black humour - is arguably the emotional centre of the film. Insert a paragraph essay here on how Matsuda's beauty is of a peculiarly fey and isolating type - something you don't get all that often with actresses, let alone actors - and how the films he acts in make use of the fact. Michiru is maladjusted in his purity (not to say unbalanced and schlepping serious repressed anger toward his parents and the world at large, which is another way of looking at it): one eventually realises he kills his father because his feckless younger brother promised to use their inheritance to build a special-needs school. The film opens with an overhead pan of Tokyo from his perspective, in which buildings disappear one by one until Tokyo Tower alone is left in a blasted landscape (Sabina: "...CLAMP? CLAMP, is that you?"). Torakichi meanwhile is a man who snapped like a rubber band a long time ago - if you're a TeniPuri fan, picture a fifty-something Sanada Genichirou who's been in jail for the last decade ^^; - and is only now attempting to glue his ends back together. Harada Yoshio deserves some kind of award for his performance. The character's not a revealing talker and the script doesn't make him one, but every gesture and line delivery tells his life story. The more I think about it sitting here and writing, the more impressed I am... I could say patly that the two characters salve each other's damage, but once again it's not nearly that easy. Watch and find out.
(I've failed to emphasize how funny this film is, I think. ^^; It's bittersweet and occasionally stomach-wrenching, sure, but a damned lot of it is cross-dressing and midget gags. Or best of all: gags about cross-dressing midgets. How can you go wrong?)
Last Life in the Universe after I've gotten something to eat. _O_
Last Life in the Universe, then: out of the three the most consciously indie. XD All the markers of hip Asian filmmaking are present and accounted for. Muted oneiric pacing check, dilapidated setting check, Asano Tadanobu check, Christopher Doyle check, characters speaking in an international mish-mash of languages check, Miike Takashi in a speaking role - check. So it's pretty damned brilliant, but at the same time it's nothing you haven't seen before. The parallel I feel tempted to draw is not with the films I caught earlier in the day, but with a French flick of which I watched the last half with my family last week: And Now Ladies and Gentlemen, starring Jeremy Irons and Patricia Kaas. That one was rather less understated and more picture postcard from Post-Colonial Land, but it had the same feel of "coulda been a romantic comedy in another, non-indie life". (Which is not to say it wasn't a worthwhile 90 minutes. For one thing, Jeremy Irons played a gentleman thief and spoke French all the way through. What have you got to lose? XD)
Asano plays Kenji, an expatriate yakuza librarian who lives - or rather fails to die, suffering as he does from profound mal de vivre - in an obsessively tidy apartment in Bangkok. (If you're thinking that one of those qualifiers doesn't play with the others, you're quite right. The film's most unbelievable element is that this guy somehow managed to learn to fire handguns and pummel opponents as effectively as we see him doing on the rare occasion. At least no one will ever need to remind him to wipe his prints off the gun. ^^; The role also feels more Johnny Deppian than usual, prolly for the superficial reason of the long-hair-and-glasses look.) Kenji's kept from offing himself mostly by a series of interruptions, ranging from falling coconuts to horrific highway accidents. Yes, there's a wry humour to it, but not as much as the guy sitting next to me seemed to think (one of those people who find everything knee-slappingly hilarious). One interruption comes in the form of his blustering yakuza brother, who's on the lam from the big boss. No sooner does he arrive than he's terminated with extreme prejudice by - yay! - Riki Takeuchi. (Unnamed assassin, so we'll go with Riki Takeuchi.) A shootout ensues, and Kenji ends up with two corpses in his apartment. [tbc this evening]
corneredangel writes con reports.) I'm sorely tempted to say "Ueto Aya is just as pretty but Matsuda Ryuhei sure acts better," and leave it at that, but well...(Spoilers follow.)
Azumi first. I'm not familiar with the manga, but people have hinted that it's more complex and sexually suggestive. (I rather fail to see how it could be more bloody.) Out of the three I like this one the least, because - though you might assume otherwise from my Miike fandom - I don't inherently enjoy films in which most of the cast dies gruesomely one by one. ^^; You have to pitch it to me from a different angle. This one I sold to myself on the basis of Kitamura "520-degree rotating shot, mofo, and this time I do it vertically twice as fast!" Ryuhei's direction, but I like Versus and Aragami much better. For one thing, all the actors in the latter films effectively faked the ability to handle their swords/guns/miscellaneous weaponry, which is one of those criteria you only take into account when it's missing. Never mind Ueto Aya and her determined pouting in defense of the Tokugawa Shogunate - I couldn't believe any of those kids were real ninjas. They looked and behaved too much like the pop/dorama idols I'm sure they are: cute and utterly inoffensive. The script didn't do anyone favours either. In the end it could have been pleasurable kitsch - the cape? the giggly psychopathic roses dude? the depiction of "moral conflict" about on par with Weiss Kreuz's? - but the protracted wholesale massacre of cute and inoffensive characters took the pleasure out of the exercise.
9 Souls, then. The one I liked best out of the three. It will make you laugh; very possibly it will make you cry, even if you're not the sort who falls for stock emotional manipulation. And it's got a kickass soundtrack by this guy I've never heard of (but sounds quite a bit like Supercar, not to say New Order again.
Basically it's an on-the-lam-from-the-law road movie, a subgenre one thinks of as primarily American - Thelma and Louise is the first example that comes to mind, with Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? running a close second. Nine convicts make an unplanned prison break, hijack a hulking rust-red truck/van hybrid and take off for Mount Fuji, nominally in search of a stash of counterfeit banknotes but really *drumroll* in a quest for redemption. They're a motley crew of reprobates: the biker, the drug dealer, the thief, the porn king, the mad bomber, the euthanasiast, the "general loose cannon"... Led by the gruff fallen paterfamilias Torakichi (ran his own son over for refusing to attend school), they adopt a series of improbable disguises and rob convenience stores to finance their impromptu road trip. Of course it's all fun and games and sheep-molesting (don't ask) until someone bites a bullet.
Very little time is actually spent sketching out the characters' pasts, but the dialogue is well-written enough that it's easy to fill in the blanks. These guys are lifers, not nice people. Not a one of them sauntered vaguely downward into a criminal record: you've got the guy who dumped his cheating girlfriend in the river, and the guy who offed his cheating girlfriend's lover. You've got the guy who nearly blew up a pachinko parlor, and the guy who went on a murderous rampage at his high school. The Matsuda character - Michiru - is a spring wound up to breaking point: a recluse who only emerged from his room to knife his loan-sharking father. They've got no future, and only a few days to look for their own definition of grace. Some of them don't find what they're hoping for; some of them find it only to lose it again. It's a credit to the script that no whitewashing is involved, nor are easy answers given. As the biker Kazuma put it, "Kill four of your friends and you'll pay for it with more than hard time." In the end, each one gets as close as he's able to come, and that will have to do.
The non-relationship between filicidal Torakichi and patricidal Michiru - the "odd couple" as one of the others put it, in a characteristic touch of rueful black humour - is arguably the emotional centre of the film. Insert a paragraph essay here on how Matsuda's beauty is of a peculiarly fey and isolating type - something you don't get all that often with actresses, let alone actors - and how the films he acts in make use of the fact. Michiru is maladjusted in his purity (not to say unbalanced and schlepping serious repressed anger toward his parents and the world at large, which is another way of looking at it): one eventually realises he kills his father because his feckless younger brother promised to use their inheritance to build a special-needs school. The film opens with an overhead pan of Tokyo from his perspective, in which buildings disappear one by one until Tokyo Tower alone is left in a blasted landscape (Sabina: "...CLAMP? CLAMP, is that you?"). Torakichi meanwhile is a man who snapped like a rubber band a long time ago - if you're a TeniPuri fan, picture a fifty-something Sanada Genichirou who's been in jail for the last decade ^^; - and is only now attempting to glue his ends back together. Harada Yoshio deserves some kind of award for his performance. The character's not a revealing talker and the script doesn't make him one, but every gesture and line delivery tells his life story. The more I think about it sitting here and writing, the more impressed I am... I could say patly that the two characters salve each other's damage, but once again it's not nearly that easy. Watch and find out.
(I've failed to emphasize how funny this film is, I think. ^^; It's bittersweet and occasionally stomach-wrenching, sure, but a damned lot of it is cross-dressing and midget gags. Or best of all: gags about cross-dressing midgets. How can you go wrong?)
Last Life in the Universe after I've gotten something to eat. _O_
Last Life in the Universe, then: out of the three the most consciously indie. XD All the markers of hip Asian filmmaking are present and accounted for. Muted oneiric pacing check, dilapidated setting check, Asano Tadanobu check, Christopher Doyle check, characters speaking in an international mish-mash of languages check, Miike Takashi in a speaking role - check. So it's pretty damned brilliant, but at the same time it's nothing you haven't seen before. The parallel I feel tempted to draw is not with the films I caught earlier in the day, but with a French flick of which I watched the last half with my family last week: And Now Ladies and Gentlemen, starring Jeremy Irons and Patricia Kaas. That one was rather less understated and more picture postcard from Post-Colonial Land, but it had the same feel of "coulda been a romantic comedy in another, non-indie life". (Which is not to say it wasn't a worthwhile 90 minutes. For one thing, Jeremy Irons played a gentleman thief and spoke French all the way through. What have you got to lose? XD)
Asano plays Kenji, an expatriate yakuza librarian who lives - or rather fails to die, suffering as he does from profound mal de vivre - in an obsessively tidy apartment in Bangkok. (If you're thinking that one of those qualifiers doesn't play with the others, you're quite right. The film's most unbelievable element is that this guy somehow managed to learn to fire handguns and pummel opponents as effectively as we see him doing on the rare occasion. At least no one will ever need to remind him to wipe his prints off the gun. ^^; The role also feels more Johnny Deppian than usual, prolly for the superficial reason of the long-hair-and-glasses look.) Kenji's kept from offing himself mostly by a series of interruptions, ranging from falling coconuts to horrific highway accidents. Yes, there's a wry humour to it, but not as much as the guy sitting next to me seemed to think (one of those people who find everything knee-slappingly hilarious). One interruption comes in the form of his blustering yakuza brother, who's on the lam from the big boss. No sooner does he arrive than he's terminated with extreme prejudice by - yay! - Riki Takeuchi. (Unnamed assassin, so we'll go with Riki Takeuchi.) A shootout ensues, and Kenji ends up with two corpses in his apartment. [tbc this evening]
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Ah, the return of the FanTasia tickets black market
Date: 2004-07-12 02:24 pm (UTC)-Ced
Re: Ah, the return of the FanTasia tickets black market
Date: 2004-07-12 02:28 pm (UTC)Re: Ah, the return of the FanTasia tickets black market
Date: 2004-07-12 02:33 pm (UTC)Re: Ah, the return of the FanTasia tickets black market
Date: 2004-07-12 02:39 pm (UTC)Ill be seeing Doopleganger tonight as well. See you in the queue?
-Ced
Re: Ah, the return of the FanTasia tickets black market
Date: 2004-07-12 09:34 pm (UTC)http://smurfmatic.net/blog/comments.php?id=119_0_1_0_C
-Ced
Re: Ah, the return of the FanTasia tickets black market
Date: 2004-07-12 03:23 pm (UTC)Re: Ah, the return of the FanTasia tickets black market
Date: 2004-07-12 09:32 pm (UTC)(Call me a couple of hours/minutes before the movie, so we can arrange for pickup/meetup)
-Ced
Re: 9 Souls
Date: 2004-07-12 10:40 pm (UTC)(Indeed, from the samples, I can say it's ~= Supercar)
-Ced