Tag Archives: Sex

Capsules

CAPSULE: GETTING ANY? [MINNA YATTERUKA!] (1994)

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DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Kitano

FEATURING: Dankan, Takeshi “Beat” Kitano

PLOT: A horny loser tries his best to get laid. He decides his main goal is to have sex in a car

Still from Getting Any? (1994)

and when that doesn’t work, he embarks on various escapades to gain money or notoriety; he even goes as far as becoming invisible to get some action.   Absurd situations and mistaken identities lead to one disaster after another.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It is slapstick comedy Japanese-style. While much Japanese humor leans toward absurdity, this film misses the mark completely. The ending comes off as slightly weird, yet the pointless and unfunny comedy bits which lead up to the finale make the ending just another misguided joke that falls flat (or in this case, splat).

COMMENTS: For as many movies I have seen in my life, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never seen the classic films by acclaimed director Takeshi “Beat” Kitano.  Films such as Hana-Bi, Sonatine and Violent Cop are all considered masterpieces in the yakuza films genre. Getting Any? is a straight-up slapstick comedy farce and is probably not the best place to start in exploring Kitano’s works.  His yakuza films are noted for their subtle use of deadpan acting and humor nestled snugly within the violent action.  If that is the case, Getting Any? acts as the polar opposite.  The humor is in your face with infinite gags and subtlety is thrown out the window with some goofy sound effect.  It is nonsensical, amateurish, juvenile and above all else… not funny.  The film satirizes iconic Japanese pop culture such as the Zatoichi films, Lone Wolf and Cub and even Godzilla pictures.  It also takes a stab at Western pop culture, although the references (Michael Jackson and Ghostbusters) were relevant 10 years prior to the release of this film.

The lead character Asao (Dankan) is a middle-aged man desperate to find just one woman to have sex with him.  He is a perpetual daydreamer who constantly fantasizes about an alter-ego who is always lucky in this department. In Asao’s mind, there must be a surefire way to get women to easily bare their breasts and succumb to his sexual advances.  His first inclination is to get a car because that seems like the most opportune place to do the deed. Continue reading CAPSULE: GETTING ANY? [MINNA YATTERUKA!] (1994) →

List Candidates

BORDERLINE WEIRD: 964 PINOCCHIO (1991)

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DIRECTED BY: Shozin Fukui

FEATURING: Haji Suzuki, Onn-Chan

PLOT: Pinocchio 964, a malfunctioning sex slave, is thrown out onto the street by his dissatisfied owner. Without speech or memory he stumbles, literally, into the lap of an amnesiac woman, Himiko, who takes him home to care for him. As her memory returns she undergoes a cruel personality change, returning Pinocchio to the mysterious corporation that made him.

Still from 964 Pinocchio (1991)

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: 964 Pinocchio is certainly weird, but doesn’t hang together as a totally coherent film.  However, days later, I was still thinking about it.  I don’t think that the film is a satisfying blend of the weird and the entertaining; in fact some sequences are seriously hard work.  Pinocchio deserves a second look in the future though, because odd and confusing as it was, distasteful as some scenes were, that sad sex slave worms his way into your mind.

COMMENTS: 964 Pinocchio is quite clearly a low budget film, but it is inventive, imaginative and uncompromising.  Many scenes are filmed guerrilla style, and I found myself looking sympathetically at the bemused bystanders during some of the full-on craziness.  A film which includes a three minute vomiting scene will not be to everyone’s taste; and it’s not as if that’s an uncharacteristic sequence.  964 Pinocchio is a wet, messy film throughout.  Pinocchio emits a flood of custardy mess from some unspecified point on his head; Himiko regurgitates mounds of porridgy vomit before rolling in it and re-ingesting it; the head of the company which made Pinocchio continually eats cherries from a bowl of spittle.  The film really screams in your face and refuses to apologize for any of its bizarre imagery.

The film introduces us to one of the two central characters, Pinocchio, as he flounders unwillingly in the middle of a M-F-F threesome.  It’s an unerotic sex scene intercut with shots of a man in vague surgical garb, a huge drill bit entering someone’s head, and a voice informing someone that their memory will not return.  The opening scene really lays the film’s cards on the table; it’s just going to get more confusing from here.  Thrown onto the streets for failing to perform sexually, Pinocchio stumbles into Himiko.  She’s sitting, looking through Continue reading BORDERLINE WEIRD: 964 PINOCCHIO (1991) →

Guest Reviews

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: LOVE OBJECT (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Robert Parigi

FEATURING: Desmond Harrington, Melissa Sagemiller, Udo Kier, Rip Torn

PLOT: In a deviant twist on the Pygmalion myth, a man’s infatuation for a life-like sex doll

evolves into a sinister love triangle when he becomes involved with a coworker.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Love Object, like Lars And The Real Girl which came after, is about a lonely introvert who buys a realistic sex doll for companionship.  Like Ken in Love Object, Lars comes to yearn for a coworker, but has trouble making a connection.  Lars and the Real Girl is a cute movie about the human spirit, and the socialization and evolution of a lonely man.  With the help of his doll and coworker, Lars comes out of his shell, grows and triumphs. In this way, Lars And The Real Girl, while employing a weird vehicle to make its point (the love doll) is more or less a mainstream comedy-drama, no more odd than a Cyrano de Bergerac theme such as Roxanne (1987).

Love Object, however takes a twisted path.  The weird idea of needing the love doll is used to define the protagonist’s nature, but it gets stranger from there.  Ken’s obsession with the doll is not a positive step in the evolution of his character.  It leads him down a dark perverse path toward madness, violence and ruin.  The plot is sick and creepy, the content perverse, and it is skillfully handled, making Love Object a good candidate for the designation of being truly weird.

COMMENTS: It’s tempting to insert some sophomoric humor into this recommendation, but the jokes would be all too predictable.  Despite delivering many elements of black comedy, the overall tone of this surprisingly violent sardonic yarn is serious.  Love Object grimly depicts a bizarre theme with good pacing and artfully blended visual continuity.

Kenneth Winslow is the kind of cold, compulsive dullard who alphabetizes his jock straps.  Taking more interest in the technical world than the human one, Ken writes instruction manuals for electronics —you know, the ones nobody reads.

A joker at work shows Ken a photo of an alluring girl named Nikki, and he is at once smitten.  Nikki is a life-like sex doll, so realistic that Ken can’t detect the substitution.  No devil with the Continue reading RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: LOVE OBJECT (2003) →

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS [Valerie a týden divů] (1970)

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The sixth submission in the June review writing contest: by “Kat.”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Jaroslava Schallerova, Helena Anyzova, Petr Kopriva, Jiri Prymek

PLOT:  13-year old Valerie lives with her grandmother in a small rural village in

Still from Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

Czechoslovakia; on the week of her menarche she drifts into a sensual, and at times threatening, dreamworld.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST:  This is a gently weird film, as close to representing a dream on film as I have yet seen.  Every shot is a thing of beauty.  The plot is loose but generally true to its own dream logic.  As she approaches adulthood Valerie finds herself the object of desire for men, women and weasel-men alike.  Responding to all the strange occurrences around her with unflappable calmness, Valerie is a passive heroine, but Schallerova oozes charm and is a complete eye magnet whenever she is onscreen.

COMMENTS: A tight, coherent plot is not the strength of this piece, it has to be said.  It’s very much like the moments when you first wake from a puzzling dream, before your conscious mind has started to add little bridging details to try and make sense of it.

Valerie lives with her grandmother, and at the age of 13 has her first period.  Her grandmother tells her that this is the same age as her mother was.  It seems to be an occasion for neither celebration nor shame.  Valerie tells her grandmother that she is excited at the prospect of a troupe of actors arriving in the village and is informed that she’d do better to be excited about the arrival of the bishop and his priests.  You’d be forgiven for thinking that her grandmother is a bit of a party pooper, but like everyone in this film she’s not just what she appears to be at first glance.  Throughout the film religion and sexuality arm wrestle for dominance, but it’s rather like both arms are on the same body.

The performers arrive, as do the clergy.  The bishop has come to deliver a sermon to the virgins of the village, and it’s a pretty inappropriate one.  The bishop himself is a tad inappropriate at times, and has a face not designed to inspire confidence, looking like the hideous love child of Graf Orlak and Bergman’s Death, but with some of the most terrible teeth ever committed to film.  Again though, by the end of the film you’ll see him in different light.

During the course of the film Valerie will see transforming weasels, a hairy priest striptease and the nubile young women of the village will invite her to join them in a game of “hide the fish down your bodice” in the sun dappled river.  She will cure a young women of a strange vampiric ailment by sleeping with her, spy on her grandmother in a odd sexual situation while the toothy bishop lurks at her shoulder and will laugh in the face of being burned at the stake.  Throughout it all Valerie is protected by her mother’s magic earrings and is watched over, in a slightly creepy way by her brother (or would be lover?) Eagle.

Films about girls “coming of age” are few and far between and this is a gorgeous example.  Valerie is surrounded by sexuality both threatening and inviting.  She is on the receiving end of aggressive approaches from the hairy priest and her domineering female cousin, but also sees a guiltless, inviting sensuality in the form of the women in the river, the young woman she spends the night with and the gentle Eagle.

In the end Valerie seems to have explored both the dark and the light of impending womanhood and emerged into the sunlight, where even the toothy bishop seems a bit of a sweetie.

This would make a perfect double bill with Neil Jordan and Angela Carter’s Company Of Wolves, if you fancy an evening of oestrogen-heavy weirdness.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a collection of dream adventures, spurred by guiltless and poly-sexual eroticism. Virtually every shot is a knockout…”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader (rerelease/screening)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE WAYWARD CLOUD [TIAN BIAN YI DUO YUN] (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Ming-liang Tsai

FEATURING: , Shiang-chyi Chen, Sumomo Yozakura,

PLOT: During a nationwide drought, a Taiwanese porn star courts a shy and lonely apartment dweller obsessed with watermelons; characters occasionally burst into fantasy song-and-dance numbers.

Still from The Wayward Cloud (2005)

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As a romantic, pornographic, hallucinatory musical that makes sure you will never see watermelons or Taiwanese sex movies quite the same way ever again, The Wayward Cloud is audacious and, yes, weird. The powerful downside is the fact that, outside of the musical sequences, Tsai’s minimalism—long takes, a motionless camera, and the absolute minimum amount plot and dialogue he can possibly get away with—is the most acquired of acquired tastes.

COMMENTS: There are seven memorable scenes in The Wayward Cloud—three bizarre sexual encounters (and a couple of ordinary ones) and four outlandish musical numbers.  Given all that’s going on, it’s amazing that writer/director Ming-liang Tsai still managed to keep the script so arid, and to convey an overall feeling of malaise rather than excitement.  Without these seven scenes, the movie would hardly exist; the wisp of a plot involves a boy-meets-girl-and-never-quite-loses-her story that’s told in nearly dialogue free episodes of long takes of actors reacting to nothing.  The meet-cute (or in this case, meet-mute) involves Shiang-chyi coming upon Hsiao-Kang while he’s napping, then sitting down across from him and taking a nap herself.  It’s five minutes of hot napping action before they exchange their first words.  (It’s helpful to know that these characters have met before, in Tsai’s What Time Is It There? [2001], and in a subsequent short film.)  Hsiao-Kang doesn’t divulge his job as a professional video gigolo to his new girlfriend, but there’s no cover story, no sense of urgency that she might discover his vocation, and there’s nothing divulged about her to suggest she would care either way.  There is a quiet, believable sort of intimacy in scenes where Hsiao-Kang smokes a cigarette held between Shiang-chyi’s toes; the lovers are so comfortable together they don’t have to say anything to each other.  But we, the viewers, still wish they would say something for our benefit.

Fortunately, there is the sex.  It’s graphic, but not explicit: there’s no visible genital- Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE WAYWARD CLOUD [TIAN BIAN YI DUO YUN] (2005) →