Buy from
Amazon.co.jp

If No Longer Human somehow managed to take Osamu Dazai's furious little novel and make a bloated bore of a movie out of it, Picaresque ends up doing the same thing with Dazai himself. It's a biopic that touches on all the usual beats in the man's life — his literary successes, his turbulent relationships with women, his suicide attempts, his drug habits, etc. — and doesn't manage to do much more with them than subject us to them.

There's some milking of the controversy involving his death (did he jump or was he pushed?), but there's no sense of what would have made him worth hanging out with, or even reading. Get the books instead, especially Self Portraits, where Dazai's cynicism and wit lances out at you from most every page (and where he tells his own story, in "Seascape with Figures in Gold", far more convincingly than you're likely to get it here).

Buy from
Amazon.co.jp

Not long ago I wrote an essay on why some bad-to-mediocre books make good movies, and also why some good-to-excellent books get made into terrible movies. It is, I fear, far easier to do the latter than the former, because what makes a book great on the page almost never translates directly into action on the screen. This goes double for any novel where the majority of the action is in the narrator’s head (The Killer Inside Me), or where perspective and point of view matter to the telling (The Handmaid’s Tale). There are some things you simply can’t show, and any good movie (along with any good book) will know what’s worth telling and what’s worth showing.

No Longer Human is not so much unfaithful to its source material (the Osamu Dazai novel) as it is unjust to it. No adaptation should be this poor at communicating what it was about the original story that compelled several consecutive generations of Japanese to take it to heart. It does not make sense to take a work this inwardly-directed and turn it into a glossy period piece — all glittering Ginza back alleys and chintzy nightclubs — when the original could have cared less about such set dressing. It does not make sense to omit completely the narrator’s voice and inner monologue, which is what allows us to understand him, and where most of the story lie in the first place. It does not make sense to take one of Japan’s most significant postwar literary works, about a man’s alienation and psychological disintegration, and turn it into a story about a confused, aimless rich kid slumming it.

Purchases benefit
this site.

Answers the question: What would happen if Yoshihiro Nishimura (of Tokyo Gore Police and Machine Girl infamy) remade Neil Marshall's Doomsday on a tenth of the budget but with two hundred times the gore, about as many political allegories, and with art direction that's somewhere between a vintage Dario Argento picture and a jumble sale?

Purchases benefit
this site.

Painfully long-winded (three hours and change), this docudrama about one of Japan's most notorious and violent political factions wouldn't be worth the attention if it wasn't for the fact that longtime director / agent provocateur Kōji Wakamatsu was at the helm. The movie itself, though, could have been directed by anybody. The first hour's a jumble of stock footage, uninvolving re-enactments and title cards, as the turbulent political world of student groups in 1960s Japan is laid out for us in numbing detail, and it leaves us with little sense that the film will matter for anyone who wasn't actually there.

The second hour is slightly more absorbing, as the United Red Army of the title starts as an earnest splinter group from another faction but gradually degenerates into paranoia and self-persecution with many of its own members murdered for being not ideologically pure enough. The only people we get to know well enough are the instigators of the purge; everyone else is just a name and a date of death.

The home stretch re-constructs the infamous "Asamasanso Siege" (as documented in Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan). Here there are hints of the movie this could have been as the revolutionists barricade themselves in a mountain lodge, stand off against police for days on end, and face both physical and psychological warfare. But by that point the film has long since worn out its welcome. It's all good intentions for so little real payoff, one-and-a-half hours of movie in a three-hour bag. Then again, maybe Wakamatsu's point is that this revolutionary political stuff is supposed to be boring, but I'm dubious. Bonus points for Jim O'Rourke's mournful soundtrack, though.

Purchases benefit
this site.

“Incoherent” is the nicest thing that can be said about Zack Snyder’s ode to the confines of his own overheated imagination. Or: A failed experiment, emphasis on failed.

What starts as a poor-little-Gothic-girl horror story (girl is institutionalized by mean old dad and doomed to be lobotomized) then becomes a senseless, overblown — and, in too many of the wrong ways, creepy — attempt at multilayered storytelling that the movie just doesn’t have the sophistication or wit to pull off. Some of the interstitial fantasy sequences are technically sophisticated; a WWI-style trench battle involving zombie soldiers is a real highlight. But there’s no discernible way these characters could be having these fantasies; it’s all Zack Snyder’s idea of what’s interesting (steampunk! pop Japonisme! dancehall decadence!), forced to coexist whether or not the pieces actually complement each other in the first place. It just makes us lament him not wanting to get out of the way of his own material.

The list of what's wrong threatens to become a catalog. The music calls attention to itself in all the wrong ways. The you-figure-it-out-yourself ending adds insult to injury. In the end, two object lessons present themselves: 1) “empowering” a woman does not mean sticking a gun in her hand, and 2) there’s nothing more interesting than your own fetishes and nothing more ludicrous than someone else’s. (Sorry, but arguments to the effect that the movie is a comment on this concept are laughable.) There’s a director’s cut of this thing, but I can only see it working if it were about seven minutes long.

Purchases benefit
this site.

After the visionary (if ponderous) future-robopocalypse Casshern, Kazuaki Kiriya drops back several hundred years and punts with Goemon, a fantasia that is oh so very loosely based on Japanese history but so much fun to watch that historical accuracy or fidelity to the word of legend can just go take a walk. The heroic thief of the title was a figure of legend in Japan, even if no two of the legends can agree on who he was or what he actually did; Kiriya's approach is to use his infamy as a springboard for the sort of visual-synthesis-by-greenscreen that seems to have become all the rage for mid-budget SF and fantasy epics after 300 left its mark.

The plot's no groundbreaker, but you won't mind. Goemon loots the corrupt aristocrats of 17th-century Japan and spreads the wealth from the rooftops, but his dark past as a ninja for the Shogunate looms up once again when he discovers the truth behind the death of his former master — which also separated him from the princess he loved from afar. It's all little more than a setup for two basic kinds of scenes: lush tableaux that frames the actors as they fire impassioned emotional countercharges at each other, and action sequences that are as cheerfully fake-looking as they are insanely kinetic. (Goemon's standard attack is to charge up the middle of his enemy's ranks and scatter them to both sides by slashing hither and thither.)

Come to think of it, there isn't a realistic-looking moment in the film — even the grass underfoot is a CGI fake — but it all works because the illusion is so consistently maintained. Even wilder are the scenes inside the Shogun's castle, where his fetish for all things European runs not only to furniture and clothes but a bit of self-portraiture that shows him off in the style of a conquistador. Historically accurate? No. A daring re-invention of how a period Japanese film can look? Absolutely. The film may be all style over substance, but it has the saving grace of being a style that's been invented from scratch for this production and not just recycled wholesale from a dozen others. Bonus points are awarded for the always-excellent Kitano-gumi Susumu Terajima in a crucial supporting role.

Purchases benefit
this site.

In my book, Shinya Tsukamoto can never completely stink. This is the man who gave us the original Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a film so deranged the first time I watched it I thought it was gonna melt inside my VCR all on its spontaneous own. But this is the third time he's been over this particular territory, which makes that ... what? First time tragedy, second time farce, third time sheer redundancy? I don't object to Tsukamoto remaking Tetsuo; what I object to is how in the process he somehow reduced the primal scream of the original into a mere cat's yowl.

The plot this time around borrows from pieces of Tetsuos 1 and 2: a half-American, half-Japanese man (Eric Bossick) with a Japanese wife and kid leads a happy life until the day a stranger (Tsukamoto, once again credited as "The Guy") runs over his son with his car. Dad's rage fuels his mutation into a giant walking metal scrapheap, and there are complications involving his own dad, his wife, a possible future baby on the way, his own genetic heritage, etc. The amazing experimental cinematography of the first film is now reduced to a mindless blur that looks like Tsukamoto pounding nails with the camera, and the visual callbacks to the original films — including a redux of the title sequence — play less like homage and more like someone who's just plain run out of ideas.

The biggest mistake is how Tsukamoto tries to assign an explanation or motive to everything. The whole charm of the original Tetsuo was its very raggedness and inexplicability. It wasn't supposed to make a lot of sense; it was just supposed to bite your face off and scream in your ear. Tetsuo: The Bullet Man is so mercilessly explicable it even has a happy ending. Even in the face of all this, I aver that Shinya Tsukamoto can still crowbar more sheer neurological overload into 75 minutes than most people manage in an entire trilogy.

An animated adaptation of a Serbian graphic novel, very much in the mold of Moebius and Enki Bilal, with plenty of acerbic humor and wit that for a lack of a better word is strongly Eastern European in flavor. Set some decades hence, young Edit resorts to biotechnology to cheat on one of her exams and finds herself becoming a host for an artificial entity that coexists within her flesh. Rather than focus on the somewhat ropey SF plotline, Technotise is more interested in Edit and her relationships with her no-good friends or her perpetually dismayed parents, and that makes it both funnier and more human than the more typical “let’s see what we can blow up this time” approach. The animation’s only okay, but some of the backgrounds and environments are downright dreamy, and the quirky flavor of the whole thing buoys it up past needing to look good in every single shot to be worthwhile. As distinct from anime in its flavor as Western animation is from that; let’s see more productions like this brought out domestically. (No Western distributor exists, but the import DVD has English subtitles.)

IMDB entry

Purchases benefit
this site.

A red herring, sadly enough. What originally looked like an attempt to pick up where Bruce Lee left off when Game of Death was cut short — a philosophical martial-arts movie — has turned out to be nothing much at all. 3 continues where 2 left off, with the hero (Tony Jaa) being nearly broken by his captors but eventually rehabilitating himself via Buddhist mind training. He eventually faces off against his diabolical nemesis (Tony Jaa, again) but only after too few fight scenes and too much plotless weirdness that doesn’t add up to much. The connection with the first film is established, but only in a very backhanded way. It’s frustrating how little of this turned out to be worth the wait, even though there are some individual fights that show Jaa can still dish out (and take) a punch like few others alive right now. Maybe next time he’ll do it in the context of a story worth caring about.

Purchases benefit
this site.

Gaspar (Irreversible) Noé’s death-trip film is a visually stupendous execution of, well, not much at all. American-born Tokyo slacker Oscar smokes DMT and hallucinates while his sister bumps and grinds for salarymen in a stripclub. When Oscar’s drug-dealing buddy sells him out to the cops, he's gunned down in a filthy toilet stall, and spends the rest of the movie floating between his past, present and possible future. It sounds great on paper — a CGI VR treatment of the Tibetan Book of the Dead! — and many of the individual effects sequences are indeed astonishing on both technical and aesthetic levels. But it’s all in the service of a deeply prosaic story (Oscar has sister and mommy issues), and the people in it are so fundamentally dull and unpleasant that following them for even twenty minutes is a chore. Two and a half hours? No thanks. At least Noé's Irreversible cast had charisma and sophistication. Also, watching a rendition of a drug trip eventually becomes as listless as just watching other people tripping. If death and rebirth is this boring, I’d hate to see Noé’s idea of nirvana.