Tag Archives: Japanese

Capsules

CAPSULE: PINK LADY’S MOTION PICTURE (1978)

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Pinku redi no katsudo dai shashin

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DIRECTED BY: Tsugunobu Kotani

FEATURING: Keiko Masuda, Mie, Isamu Ago

PLOT: A director, a producer, and a folklorist seek the perfect idea for a movie to promote the pop band “The Pink Lady.”

Still from Pink Lady's Motion Picture (1978)

COMMENTS: How to promote a pop band cinematically? Through a musical, of course, but what kind? This movie takes this question as its starting point, exploring it through three distinct tales that traverse genres and styles.

The subject here is the iconic, albeit obscure, pop musical duo “The Pink Lady,” mad up of two girls singing as one. According to Wikipedia, they were a short-lived, briefly popular act from the late-70s and early-80s, featuring Mie and Keiko Masuda (formerly known as Kei). The movie makes clear from early on—especially through its exaggerated acting—that it will retain a lighthearted comic tone, while at the same time being self-conscious and self-referential.

This aspect of self-parody becomes apparent as we watch a film director, a folklorist, and a producer come together to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming movie about the duo. Each one of them has his own idea of what this movie should be, and chaos ensues. For viewers, this results in a fun romp, a mix of genres, each depicting a different take on the musical they want to create. We have an old-fashioned romantic melodrama, a cheesy sci-fi monster movie, and a western. Mie and Kei are always the protagonists, with playful musical numbers accompanying the story beats.

Pink Lady’s Motion Picture isn’t afraid to embrace absurdism. It doesn’t always makes perfect sense, and it doesn’t need to. But it’s not subversive or transgressive in any serious way; it’s harmless, mindless entertainment for mass consumption by a local, albeit westernized, Japanese audience. The flick is also of sociological interest, depicting, through the juxtaposition of disparate cinematic genres, a society divided between tradition and foreign influence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the production] consciously emulated the breezy stream-of-consciousness aesthetic of A HARD DAYS’ NIGHT (1964), and can also be viewed as a forerunner to SPICE WORLD… The film overall is colorful and energetic, but bears the marks of a hasty and ill thought-out production… fans of Mei and Kei will likely be satisfied.  Everyone else, however, is advised to turn their attention elsewhere.”–Adam Groves, The Bedlam Files

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SONATINE (1993)

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DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Kitano

FEATURING: Takeshi Kitano, Aya Kokumai, Tetsu Watanabe, Masanobu Katsumura

PLOT: The yakuza dispatches an enforcer to Okinawa to resolve a dispute between rival gangs, but the ensuing conflict threatens the future of his clan and his very life.Still from Sonatine (1993)COMMENTS: If you made a checklist of essential gangster-film elements, Sonatine would check a lot of boxes. Lone assassin, shootout in a bar, car bombing, cute moll faithfully standing by, thoughts of retirement balanced with the inescapability of the criminal lifestyle… they’re all here, and yet not one of them hits in the way you expect. Sonatine is unquestionably a crime film, particularly the Japanese-yakuza-chronicle variety, but it operates at a wildly different pace than its brethren.

At the time he made Sonatine, Takeshi Kitano was as close as Japan had to a “king of all media,” having found success in film, television, and even stand-up comedy. This project, however, found him ruminative and depressed. So it’s probably no wonder that his mob middleman, Murakawa, is similarly disenchanted with his life. Audiences were well-trained to expect an antihero with deep emotions, but very little would have prepared them for the taciturn, blank-faced hitman presented here.

When Murakawa complains that he lost three men on his last assignment, his protest—“I don’t like it”—feels like it would be a threat for retaliation coming from anyone else. But as Takeshi delivers it, it’s a resigned grump. Faced with other threats or inflection points, his response at every turn is quiet contemplation. Rivals have bombed his headquarters? Quiet contemplation. One of his underlings shot in the head right in front of him? Quiet contemplation. He witnesses an ugly attempted rape? He slaps the perpetrator, then quickly shoots the surprised assailant in the belly before quietly contemplating the victim. Murakawa is tired and devoid of hope, a character well-past finding bursts of violence to be alarming or invigorating. Takeshi does more to point up the essential hollowness and indignity of organized crime than 20 film scoldings could accomplish.

The desperate blankness of Murakawa brings brief moments of diversion and happiness into stark relief. As he and his underlings are stowed away at an Okinawan safehouse, he finds moments of pleasure that are surprising in their simplicity. A game with folded-paper sumo wrestlers is transformed into a live-action version, and Takeshi’s smile is captivating. He also has fun shooting fireworks and prankishly digging sandpits on the beach. But he knows all too well that death is close at hand; no pleasant distractions or pretty admirers can solve the fundamental malaise.

The climactic showdown is the ultimate proof of Takeshi’s concept: cornered on all sides, Murakawa plans and implements a bloody revenge on his foes. True to form, we see almost none of it, save for distant flashes of light and smoke and brief intercuts of bloody reprisals (set to the Tangerine Dream-esque score of legendary composer Joe Hisaishi). There’s no joy in it, no escape, no “one last showdown” to give him a brighter future, even if the plot conspired to provide him with one. Filmgoers expecting a gritty crime drama must have found this slow, grim-faced character study a strange proposition. But say this for Takeshi: his checklist might have been different than his audiences, but all his boxes are checked.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sonatine doesn’t encourage a straight reading, where logic dictates meaning and importance. When our normal responses are broken down, we relate more directly to the film… at a time when action movies typically hand us a canned experience, [Kitano’s] pictures carry a charge of originality.”–Patrick Z. McGavin, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by film izle. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Sonatine

Sonatine

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    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ADOLESCENCE OF UTENA (1999)

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    Shôjo kakumei Utena: Adolescence mokushiroku (Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse); AKA Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

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    DIRECTED BY: Kunihiko Ikuhara

    FEATURING THE VOICES OF: Tomoko Kawakami, Yuriko Fuchizaki, Takehito Koyasu; , Sharon Becker, (English dub)

    PLOT: Newly arrived at school, Utena finds herself in a duel for the freedom of the beautiful and mysterious Anthy, and must fend off multiple challengers while navigating her new-found betrothal.

    WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: For an ostensible transfer of a popular TV series to the big screen, Adolescence of Utena delights not only in jettisoning any obeisance to its source material, but moves in strange and unpredictable directions. Whenever you think you’ve got Utena’s number, you definitely don’t, right up to its outrageous conclusion.

    Still from Adolescence of Utena (1999)

    COMMENTS: The first moments of this big-screen successor to the popular manga and TV series “Revolutionary Girl Utena” suggest a fish-out-of-water story, as the impossibly wide-eyed title character is led on a tour of the architectural wonder and human-interaction Petri dish that is the Ohtori Academy. Who will she meet? What will she learn? Who will become friends and enemies? A classic shōjo manga in the making. And as soon as those moments end, you can forget all about them, because Utena’s encounter with the cheekily devoted Anthy will shortly become the only thing of importance.

    The two girls have an unusual meet-cute, with Utena wandering onto a flower-festooned platform and inadvertently instigating a duel for the rights to Anthy’s hand. It turns out this kind of  accidental heroism happens to Utena a lot; for such a powerful champion, Utena is remarkably unsure of herself. We soon learn why, but the careful crafting of her character lends great potency to her developing relationship with Anthy, empowering what could easily be reduced to cliché. A scene in which the two girls have to create life-drawings of each other, far from feeling obvious or superfluous, develops real romantic power.

    All of this takes place in a lush and fantastic design that adds another layer of surrealism and wonder. The school is a wild mashup of Roman architecture and civic planning by M. C. Escher. Places and people are all decked out in a wild palette of colors, with heightened military costumes complemented by crazily flowing hairstyles of pink, magenta, and green. Director Ikuhara supplements these visions with intriguing abstractions, like the radio hosts who only appear in silhouette. Even when the plot and backstory become too dense to be certain you’re following, the visuals are never less than striking, often gasp-inducing.

    Adolescence of Utena is already unusual, but the final third raises the bar significantly as our heroine begins to suspect that the universe is hiding a fundamental truth about its nature. She’s right, in a way that rhymes thematically with fellow 1999 release The Matrix; but where ’ Neo had to be flushed out of a simulation to find clarity, Utena makes her escape by turning into a uterus-shaped hot rod and doing battle with a city-sized monster car. It’s a remarkable visual, and it’s hard to undersell the surprise generated by the pivot the movie takes at this juncture. The film’s final image, with the two lead characters in a nude embrace and riding their sex luge into the horizon, is a fitting denouement for a film that has committed fully to following its own path.

    Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

    Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie

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      WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

      “…for fear of spoiling the most wild moment in a film made up of wild moments, I would be very reluctant to say what happens in the film around the 65-minute mark, except in general terms, but it is both the most intensely, if fuzzily, symbolic event in the film, involving an extraordinary physical transformation that allows the full scope of Utena’s revolutionary potental to express itself… When it gets to the actual visionary moments, where Utena starts to perceive the greater world than just herself (and this is, basically, the arc of the plot: it’s a coming-of-age story, though one that has been buried deep below the expressive dream imagery), it turns into full-on surrealist explosions of roses, clouds, spaces defined purely in terms of line and shape with no sense of what kind of space they are, though they come across as fundamentally Gothic in their ancient weight and richness.”–Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending

      “A film of absolute beauty, it’s also the weirdest thing I have ever seen. Now that’s a pretty big statement, but I’ve racked my brain, and I can’t think of anything weirder… Yes it’s weird, but all of that weirdness is in the form of metaphor, allusion, and illusion.” – Stephen Porter, Silver Emulsion

      (This movie was nominated for review by Jenn. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

      Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

      IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976)

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      DIRECTED BY:

      FEATURING: Tatsuya Fuji, Eiko Matsuda, Aoi Nakajima

      PLOT: A concubine starts a passionate affair with her master in 1930s Japan.

      Still from In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

      COMMENTS: When a movie starts with a girl trying to force her way into another girl, you know you will probably have a sexually explicit tale. And while Senses is not hardcore pornography, sex and eroticism play the major role here. One sexually charged encounter follows another, as we follow our young prostitute heroine and her relationship with her master, a middle-aged nobleman and owner of the house where she lives and works with other girls. The development of this relationship proves increasingly disturbing as sex transforms into power play, a game of submission and dominance, while the young girl gradually reveals her more possessive self.

      Oshima’s infamous sexual psychodrama shocked on release and remains today a classic of provocative cinema, a transgressive and bold narrative portraying sexuality as a power play. While we cannot consider this movie weird, there are elements of the bizarre. Sexual activities increasingly take on a riskier and more sadomasochistic bent. A few intrusive scenes expressing the characters’ states of mind offer a dreamier aesthetic and a healthy dose of Freudian symbolism. And the graphic climax still shocks sensitive spectators.

      In today’s cinematic landscape, however, none of the above is too extreme. Contemporary Asian extreme cinema  approaches similar subjects, namely erotic obsession and the relationship of the two sexes, in more shocking ways. Kim Ki Duk’ s movies, especially Moebius, come to mind, featuring similar imagery and then some. Keeping that in mind, Senses feels a bit dated and mild. The underdeveloped characters and their simplistic or incomprehensible (or just unexplained) motives do not help anything.

      In the Realm of the Senses is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

      WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

      “The film invites scorn not only because it depicts almost every sex act you could ever want to imagine taking place—God help us—between a man and a woman (right up to and including a woman inserting pieces of mushroom into her vagina and letting them marinate in her lady juices before serving them up to her man; because if he wants more, it must be true love), but also because it dares to couch the entire hedonistic-masochistic exercise as a cinematic cipher, an oozier version of what, deep down, happens in every relationship.”–Eric Henderson, Slant

      (This movie was nominated for review by “Der Ubermolch.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)