petronia

I'm reposting these in Xanga, whence they're imported into Facebook. So apologies to people who see them 2-3 times. ^^;

Silk: brilliant handwave concept derailed by the (peculiarly Asian?) contractual obligation to feature an idol actor from every country that funded the film. So there are underdeveloped roles, unlikely casting choices, and a lot of random switching from Japanese to Mandarin etc. in a way that any experience with multilingualism tells one doesn't happen in reality. These days my rule of thumb is that each additional language featured in the script halves the believability of the cast's acting. XD;

It really is a great concept, though (a material that acts like a black hole if a black hole were "sponge-like" - able to absorb and re-emit the energy involved in supernatural manifestations, among other things). The "physics" are roffle-worthy but that isn't the point, the point is to assume the existence of the technology and extrapolate the effects.

Sun Scarred: gruelling and highly uncomfortable. Miike pulls few stylistic shenanigans in this one, unless you count the chara settei of the villain (my first thought was, confusedly, "Oh god, he's found another psychopathic bishounen to do his bidding"). It is what it is, a three-hour hi-def-video revenge drama shot in grey daylight colours about a guy who suffers so many injustices and gets screwed by the system to such an extent that the audience has to empathize with him going bugfuck nuts. The point of a movie like this is to get you to bay for blood and brutality as a morally cathartic finale, which I find way more disturbing as a filmmaking exercise than mere entertainment via stylish ultra-violence. Basically Miike is working within a tradition for the hell of it, though.

One element I remember being stressed cinematographically was the idea of - not absence, I just realized, but blind spots. Which makes more thematic sense. Hidden faces, obscured lines of sight. Entire scenes where the character who's the current focus of the drama isn't inside the frame at all, so the viewer sees everyone else looking but not what they're seeing.

This was an international premiere and preceded by a 40-minute-long interview-heavy documentary on Miike hisself, by the same guy who did the Chris Doyle documentary Ced went to see (I would've too, but was out of town). From this we learnt that Miike grew up in a famously rough Osaka neighbourhood and ~~his elementary schoolmates~~ the local yakuza are rather proud of him, and that he and Shinya Tsukamoto read so many manga as kids it irreparably warped their mentality even if they're not actually into manga anymore (this explains a lot).

Dance Machine: is it true that if you score 100,000 points on every stage of the DDR arcade game, you will unlock the Ultimate Dance of Death that you can only beat if you have mastered the secret (disco) techniques of the Shaolin monkhood? ...I think I've pretty much summed up this movie. XD Everyone loves a good cliché; like the dude said, people resonate with the cheap philosophy found in cheesy movies because people are cheap and cheesy. All the more so if "Dam Dariram" is what passes for a climactic soundtrack moment. It would've been better if they got actors who could DDR at competition levels, though (I assume such a thing exists).

I also kind of took it as a parable of the hidden historic connection between italo/eurodisco and Avex parapara (though it's funny how Europe cannot manage to be politically correct by North American standards even when it's being weeaboo). XD Either way I hope Konami funded this since it's essentially feature-length publicity.