Serdar | Genji Press

All About Lily Chou-Chou is one of those movies where the idea behind the movie is more interesting than anything in it. Director Shunji Iwai created a web site devoted to a fictitious Bjork-like pop star and asked people to freely contribute material about her. He also included ingredients about the murder of a (also fictitious) Lily fan, from which he derived enough material through other people's feedback to create not only a novel but to update an old screenplay he'd written about the coming of age of two boys in modern Japan.

This is a fascinating concept. The real shame of All About Lily Chou-Chou is that all of this energy and creative work has not produced a better film. Lily is an ungainly, fractured, bewildering movie that despite its massive collection of characters and incidents and concepts winds up being about nothing much at all. Like Blue Velvet, another psychically wounding movie that has been widely praised, Lily contains moments of such emotional rawness that it's not hard to see how it has garnered many staunch defenders. But the film is so abstruse and fragmented on every level it's nearly impossible to ascribe motives or experience any payoff. We're just looking at ugly behavior, like someone's morbid home movies. If some films are dismissed as being cinematic masturbation, Lily probably qualifies as cinematic coitus interruptus.

Satomi Hakkenden has been called the Star Wars of samurai movies, and it's not hard to see why — it's terrific fun. It's also one of the most roundly criticized films in its genre, for being an unabashedly pop-culture take on one of the pre-eminent samurai legends in Japanese folklore. Well, says I, there's no crime in that. As someone else once wrote about another movie with no pretensions to do anything other than have a good time, "It may not be Bach, but it is certainly Offenbach."

The story of the Hakkenden, or "Dog Warriors," comes out of Japanese mythology by way of China (there are many examples of Chinese folklore being imported and rewritten, this being one of the most enduring). In it, a young princess, the last of her clan, was endowed with eight spiritually-linked warriors to protect her from various supernatural menaces. The catch, of course, was that none of the warriors knew they had been so selected; each of them recognized the other over time via the presence of special magic beads. Each bead, and thus each warrior, was also linked with a specific Confucian spiritual virtue (a notion this movie doesn't bring out that clearly). The impact of the legend and its subsequently-derived entertainments is hard to over-estimate; almost every Final Fantasy game or anime with a loose-knit group of heroes probably has Hakkenden's mitochondria floating around in its cells.