Purchases benefit
this site.

It took Mother to wipe the taste of the abominable Tsubaki Sanjuro out of my mouth — which it did, and then some. Every year for over a decade now there’s been at least one wallopingly good Korean movie. This one ranks as the entry for 2010, at least until I see how I Saw The Devil holds up against it.

Mother is a fine example of how a movie can be both conventionally entertaining and unconventionally intelligent. The bare outlines of the film are a thriller, but the blank spaces between them have not been painted in by the numbers; they’ve been given the tics and quirks of both real life and artistic fancy. It makes sense when you realize the director is Bong Joon-ho, he of The Host and Memories of Murder, two other Korean films that were among the best movies of their respective years regardless of country.

Buy from Amazon.co.jp

I am not, in principle, against remakes. I am against them when they add nothing to a movie that was perfectly good all by itself. The problem is that the economics of moviemaking no longer favor storytelling, let alone individual expressions of ideas. They are, more than ever, all about pumping out a product that can be pre-sold on the basis of its name before a single frame is shot. Remakes are one of the easiest ways to accomplish that.

I’m also convinced every country’s moviemaking industry eventually enters a phase — maybe even a terminal one — where that kind of moviemaking becomes prevalent and drives out most everything else. Japan seems to have entered this phase in earnest. Why else would we have a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, a movie which proved that even when Kurosawa was not at his best he was still miles better than most other directors? Watching this retread was one of the most depressing experiences I have ever had in front of a screen.

Purchases benefit
this site.

Takeshi Kitano’s Takeshis’ was Kitano On Kitano, an attempt to turn a mirror on himself, and it works. Kantoku Banzai is Kitano On Kitano Yet Again, where he not only deconstructs his own career as a director but Japanese cinema in general as we have been forced to know it lately. The problem with the movie is simple: it isn’t funny.

There’s a good deal more that’s wrong with this film, actually. It’s gratuitous, insular, and boring on top of being not funny, but any one of those problems would have been solved by it being funny in the first place. Or entertaining, or even genuinely insightful for more than a couple of minutes at a time — something Banzai tries to do, fitfully, only to run aground over and over again. It’s clearly an attempt by Kitano to do a creative end run around his inability to bring an idea to fruition, any idea, but that doesn’t make this thing any more bearable. It’s the cinematic version of a beached whale, which thrashes about for 105 minutes and is then blown up to be put out of its misery.

Buy from Amazon.co.jp

So, picture this. Sometime in Japan’s future, while some great war continues raging somewhere, a law has been passed that allows the victims of violent crime to legally retaliate against those who have wronged them. The whole process is strictly managed and controlled. The aggrieved can only use approved weapons, for instance, and the one being targeted is given notice of the action. Those who don’t have the nerve to do it themselves can hire a government-licensed killer to finish the job. The victim can escape only by killing his killers, who can also hire bodyguards to protect them — unless, say, they’re too proud to accept the help.

Freesia is not the first example of a genre Japan seems to specialize in, which for lack of any better label I’ll call “sociological science fiction”. The great-god-emperor of all such stories is ostensibly Battle Royale, where a fight to the death was couched in a sociology that could only be called “Darwinistic” at the cost of making Darwin do barrel rolls in his grave. This film, adapted from a manga of the same name, fits comfortably into the same category without trying to be a one-upsmanship job. It’s more low-key and simmering than the explosion of the other film.

Note: I was unable to finish watching this film due to the DVD being defective. At some point I plan to find a working copy and update this review. Read for flavor.

Purchases benefit
this site.

Queen’s Blade’s is an adventure story with the plot of a fighting game, the heart of an X-rated dating sim, and no brain to split between them. It comes straight out of the same chainmail-bikini school of post-feminist storytelling that spawned the live-action Charlie’s Angels movies, where (to borrow a phrase from, I think, David Marsh) the best way for a woman to improve herself is by being flat on her back.

I know, I know — I shouldn’t expect much. The whole thing’s been derived from a series of fantasy RPG game books more notable for showing acres of skin than for their game mechanic. We’re not talking about anything that’s likely to cop a Japan Media Arts Festival award. What’s irritating is how the creators have compromised both the body and the brains of the outfit. The story is decently done and even gets incrementally more interesting as it goes along, but a) the real target audience for the show could clearly care less and b) the flesh parade makes it impossible to take the storytelling as anything but a sop to the Redeeming Social Value crowd. They needed to pick one angle and stick with it, for better or worse.

Purchases benefit
this site.

You know within the first few seconds of Yakuza: Like a Dragon that you’re watching a Takashi Miike movie. That is, if you’ve seen his movies before, you’ll recognize all his amusing little hallmarks here: the dazzling, fast-moving cinematography, the stable of actors he draws on regularly (e.g., Sho Aikawa), the bizarre off-center humor that blooms in every scene like weeds coming out of concrete. They’re all on parade in a movie based on a videogame franchise that felt like it was itself a Takashi Miike movie — no small feat since many of Miike’s movies already feel like they’re video games. What’s the term for this? Circular one-upsmanship?

No, I haven’t played the video game, although my friend Eric has more than made up for me in that department. Although from everything I can gather, Yakuza has little enough to do with the game that it won’t matter — it draws on the game more for situational inspiration than as an attempt to make it a live-action walkthrough. Fine by me, since it is possible to be faithful to a fault: I don’t think Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children appealed to anyone but fans of the game, and I’m not sure it was designed to do anything but that in the first place.

Purchases benefit
this site.

The first five minutes of K-20 feature, get this, the theft of Nikola Tesla’s wireless-power transmission device by the masked-and-cloaked Fiend of Twenty Faces. If that description makes you grin, then you are most likely the right audience for this film. If you didn’t grin, then you, sir, are no fun.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen something this unpretentiously fun that wasn’t weighted down with irony and too-hip-for-the-screen injokes. K-20 bears most direct comparison to something between the recent redux of Sherlock Holmes crossed with Casshern. It even shares a few cast members with the latter, but it’s far more lighthearted than that film, with swashbuckling and good-humored adventure instead of global destruction and general gloom. I still adore Casshern for what it is but if you’re new to this sort of material, grab K-20 first, then graduate to the other film as your 200-level course.

Buy from Amazon.co.jp

If it weren’t for Michael Arias’s name on Heaven’s Door I might never have bothered to say anything about Heaven’s Door. When I heard the director of Tekkonkinkreet was directing his first live-action feature, I was intrigued. Then I actually started watching the movie, and intrigue gave way to disappointment and finally annoyance. All the imagination that fueled the former movie has been siphoned out and replaced with clichés.

Door’s premise is simple enough to fit on a gum wrapper. Two young people, garage mechanic Masato (Tomoya Nagase) and hospital aid Harumi (Mayuko Fukuda), are both dying of cancer. They walk out of the hospital where he’s currently staying (after a very funny scene where they both get drunk on tequila left by a former patient who died of alcoholism), steal a car, and decide to live a little before they’re dead. Unfortunately the car belongs to a corporate mogul, and it contains his stash of dirty graft money — which the two of them spend on hotels and boutique clothing. They then end up with both the cops and the businessman’s henchmen after them, and their whole life boils down to not getting shot or arrested long enough to sit together at the seaside for the first time.

Purchases benefit
this site.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo isn’t just a movie for children; it’s a little like one made by them as well. It doesn’t have the epic emotional scope of Nausicaä or even Spirited Away, but I’m not sure it’s supposed to. At heart it’s a loose retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, but its spirit is entirely Miyazaki’s, and its way of seeing the most absurd of happenings through the eyes of a child has infectious charm.

Ponyo opens with the daughter of a deity of the ocean sneaking away from her father, Fujimoto (voiced by Liam Neeson in English). After a mishap with a glass bottle and a trawler’s net, the fish-girl ends up in the hands of five-year-old Sosuke. He’s your typical boy of that age, wildly curious and only too happy to adopt as a pet what to him appears to be a goldfish. But it’s not, and one of the old folks in the neighborhood can see the all-too-human face on “Ponyo” (as Sosuke) calls her: “Fish with faces cause tsunamis!” (There’s a clever bit of filmmaking sleight-of-hand here: we see the face on the fish, but it’s clear Ponyo and his mother don’t. Give them time.)

Purchases benefit
this site.

Long Dream isn’t a great movie, but it takes an intriguing idea and plays it out in a way that makes me curious for a more ambitious adaptation of the same source material. The movie was inspired by a manga by Junji Ito, he of Uzumaki and Gyo, and was directed by the same man who gave us a filmed version of Uzumaki, Higuchinski. The director’s affinity for the original author/artist’s ideas inspired him to do good work on a tiny budget — the whole thing’s a direct-to-video product and it shows — but this feels like a test run for something far larger.

Tucked away inside one of the wards of a private medical clinic is a patient with a most unusual illness: he’s having dreams which feel progressively longer. One night’s dream might feel to him like several days in real life, or even a week. Eventually the dreams grow to months, years, decades, and even more — and the patient begins to undergo ghastly changes, a by-product of spending centuries in a kind of alternate time. Then one of the other doctors in the clinic hits on the idea of artificially inducing the same state in someone else … for instance, himself, as a way to reunite himself with his dead girlfriend, whom he imagines is waiting just behind the wall of sleep.