Tag Archives: Yūsuke Iseya

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CASSHERN (2004)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Kazuaki Kiriya

FEATURING: , , , Kanako Higuchi, Fumiyo Kohinata, Toshiaki Karasawa

PLOT: Dr. Azuma uses experimental cell-regrowth technology to resurrect his son Tetsuya, transforming him into a reluctant superhero and inadvertently creating a group of rebellious new humanoids who are prepared to destroy all of humanity.

Still from Casshern (2004)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Ambitious to a fault, Casshern is glorious excess, ricocheting from elaborate action sequence to moody introspection and back again, all against one ornately decorated backdrop after another. Even in its most intimate moments, this is a film that aims big: in plot, in look, in performance.

COMMENTS: The year was 2004, and the digital backdrop was ready to make a splash. A quartet of films offered an early look at the green-screen extravaganza that would come to dominate the cineplex, each one of them in their own way showing a path to the future. One of them, Able Edwards, looks exactly like its $30,000 budget. Immortal captured our attention by emphasizing weird flourishes. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow opted for star power, plopping some of Hollywood’s biggest names in front of glorious sepia-toned Art Deco images and directly into the heart of one of the most boring movies ever projected. And then there’s Casshern, Japan’s entry in the digital sweepstakes and probably the film that best augurs the current state of the movies; creating a fusion of intense action, elaborately appointed CGI landscapes, and liberal doses of operatic philosophical discussions conducted with aching intensity. Each, in their own way, led us to “The Mandalorian.”

Casshern has so much plot. It’s adapted from a 1973 anime series and absolutely feels like it, with volumes of backstory condensed into short bursts amidst the action and impassioned reflection. For most films, the showdown between humanity and the new creatures it has unintentionally Frankenstein-ed into existence would be conflict enough. Shellshocked Tetsuya finds an appropriately flamboyant opponent in Burai, the white-haired leader of the Neo-Sapien revolution.The history here, however, just keeps going back and back: to Tetsuya’s father as the inventor of neo-cells, to the intractable war between the two great powers, to the coverup of the true origin of humanity. Sometimes, Casshern has so much it wants to explain that it feels like it’s retconning itself in real time.

It’s all very, very serious. Tetsuya and love-of-his-life Luna can barely take a moment for themselves without reckoning with all they have lost. The various powers manipulating the situation from behind the scenes are too bureaucratic and officious to waste a moment on mustache-twirling. Even Burai and his grand pronouncements of world destruction are weighted with pain and vengeance. You would think that dressing themselves in fabulous supervillain gear, donning a logo that looks like the Nazis co-opted a 45 rpm adapter, and stumbling with unbelievable serendipity into an old factory for constructing killer robots would merit at least a moment of wry acknowledgement. But no, there’s not a smile to be found.

Music-video veteran Kiriya puts together some spectacular set pieces, including a tense escape from a laboratory under heavy fire and an exciting sword duel on the grounds of a decimated city. He’s always careful to keep the story rooted in philosophical quandary, though, which means the film is wildly inconsistent in tone and pace. (Shiro Sagisu’s score, which often feels wildly out of sync with what’s happening on the screen, doesn’t not help.) What’s most curious about this mix of moods is that everything feels essential, but mismatched, as if two different takes on the same material had been stitched together. A North American edit supposedly tightens up the more philosophical sections (and reportedly makes the story less comprehensible in the process), but it’s hard to see how that would help. For all the introspective diversions, “too slow” really isn’t one of Casshern’s problems.

For a superhero film that, for its look and its weight, could sit comfortably alongside any number of MCU and DCU entries, Casshern is not particularly fun, but it is fascinating. If you wanted to show how an anime could become live action, this would be a strong point of comparison. If you wanted to demonstrate the full potential of digital set design to create impossible worlds, this film opens the door. If you just want to embellish familiar sci-fi settings with a layer of existential dread, this definitely does the trick. All these things and more are possible. However, you just might want to decide which of those things you want the most.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… so stunning and strange to behold, saturating the screen with such rococo detail, that it is impossible to believe it was made for under 6 million US dollars… Casshern really does represent a spectacularly stylised mutation of the way we look at the world of war.” – Anton Bitel, Projected Figures

(This movie was nominated for review by Andrew Milne, who called it “utterly inscrutable and deliciously mad.” Andrew also recommended it to Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending, who got to his review long before we got to ours. Well played, Tim. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

No Image

Casshern (DVD)

    Go to Amazon

    Capsules

    CAPSULE: SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO (2007)

    2 Comments

    366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Hideaki Itô, , Kōichi Satō, , , Masanobu Andô,

    PLOT: A nameless gunman rides into a town where two rival gangs of samurai scheme to find and seize a hidden cache of gold.

    Still from Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

    COMMENTS: A hawk grabs a snake in its talons and flies off into a painted sunset. A man wrapped in a Navajo blanket (Quentin Tarantino) rolls onto his back, shoots the bird out of the sky, catches the snake as it falls, and in one swift motion uses a knife to slit the body and remove a bloody egg from the serpent’s neck. While he’s absorbed in that operation, three Japanese gunslingers get the drop on him. Tarantino, using a fake Western accent, then describes a rivalry between the red Heike and the white Genji clans, as he slips into an even weirder take on a cowpoke with a southern drawl mimicking a Japanese accent. Not surprisingly, the nameless man turns the tables on the three interlopers and kills them all, without breaking the egg.

    This opening suggests a level of stylized surrealism that Sukiyaki Western Django doesn’t quite maintain. Tarantino’s character is not the non sequitur narrator he initially appears to be, and the rest of the movie generally takes a more straightforward tone. Essentially, it’s a series of spaghetti Western archetypes, clichés, and homages—a Man with No Name, a hidden cache of treasure, a weapon stashed in a coffin—wrapped in a gimmick: the action all takes place in a mythical version of feudal Japan where desperadoes pack both six-shooters and katanas. In the strangest directorial decision, the Japanese cast delivers their cowboy dialogue (“you gonna come at me… or whistle ‘Dixie’?”) entirely in heavily accented English (learned phonetically, in most cases).  Because the actors’ English pronunciation ranges from passable to difficult to understand to nearly incomprehensible, this odd, distancing choice will be an insurmountable barrier for some.

    If you can clear the dialogue bar, the rest of Sukiyaki‘s recipe will be familiar to Miike fans: fast-paced action, absurd comic violence, heavy doses of morphing style, and throwaway bits of surrealism. Holes are blown through torsos, through which crossbow bolts are then fired; bright flashback scenes are graded toward the extreme yellow and green ends of the spectrum; babies are found curled up in hybridized roses. We also learn that, in old West saloons, samurai were fond of interpretive dance performances scored to didgeridoos. All this nonsense leads to a heart-pounding, if hackneyed, finale that proves the old maxim that the more important a character is to the plot, the more bullets they can take without dying. After the gunsmoke clears from the village-sized battlefield, a silly closing epilogue will make Spaghetti Western fans groan.

    Tarantino’s involvement in Sukiyaki is a testament to the mutual admiration between he and Miike, and it’s noteworthy that his role here comes five years before his own revisionist take on Spaghetti Westerns in 2012’s Django Unchained. As for Miike, in some ways Sukiyaki marks the beginning of the winding down of his weird movie period; his next major work seen in the West was the excellent but entirely realistic Thirteen Assassins (2010), and since 2015 has been spending more time on Japanese television series aimed at elementary school girls than on making weird cinema.

    In 2020, MVD visual released Sukiyaki Western Django on Blu-ray for the first time (in the North American market). All of the extras—a 50-minute “making of” featurette, six minutes of deleted scenes, and a series of clips and promos—are also found on the 2008 DVD. The one thing that makes this release special is the inclusion of the extended cut that played at the Venice Film Festival and in Japanese theaters. The box cover claims this extended cut is 159:57 minutes long—a typo for 1:59:57, as the cut clocks in at almost exactly two hours. There are no significant differences between the two versions; Miike simply snipped away insignificant bits from many once-longer scenes, resulting in a shorter, faster-paced, and improved film. (A detalied list of the differences can be found at the always-excellent movie-censorship.com).

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…utterly deranged homage to westerns all’italia… dialogue is delivered in phonetic English so weirdly cadenced that self-conciously cliched lines like ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ approach surreal poetry.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

    Sukiyaki Western Django: Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]

    Sukiyaki Western Django: Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]
    •  
    Check Price