Results tagged “Japan”

Purchases benefit
this site.

I’m used to Takashi Miike working on multiple levels by now. He did this before with Great Yokai War, which was a kiddy movie in the guise of a satire of same … or maybe the other way around, depending on how old you are and how conscious you are of the wink-wink approach to such material.

Tatsunoko must have liked Yokai, ‘cos they put Miike in the driver’s seat for a live-action remake of their show Yatterman and gave him a budget that was probably the GNP of several small countries. What he gave them back was a mostly straight-up adaptation of the original, with physical gags galore and terrific set / costume / prop design — but with his trademark nudges-in-the-audience’s-ribs dialed down a bit. It’s just subversive enough to be funny, but not quite transcendent in the way the best of Miike’s movies seem to reach by not only poking fun at the goings-on but squeezing them until they popped.

Purchases benefit
this site.

During the Sixties there surfaced in Japan a whole slew of films which expressed dismay for how that country’s newly-won material prosperity came at the expense of a great many other things the Japanese barely seemed aware they were losing. Some of those films were allegorical (the monster movie Matango), some were phantasmagorical (Jigoku), some political (The Bad Sleep Well). Pleasures of the Flesh combines all three, and then some.

When Nagisa Oshima created Flesh, as the first project for his independent production company Sozo-sha, it was nominally billed as a “pink film” — that peculiar Japanese subgenre which often contains as much hard-core emotional violence as it does soft-core sexual imagery. But it borrows just as much from Hitchcock’s psychological thrillers, film noir, and melodrama about doomed love; in the end it’s a movie that is the product of no one genre.

Purchases benefit
this site.

When I heard work had started on live-action film version of Osamu Tezuka’s MW — easily the bleakest, most nihilistic work ever produced by a man not conventionally known for his dark side — I was skeptical. How were they going to do justice to a story that features an antihero so repellent that discovering he engages in bestiality is one of the lesser shocks we get pummeled with?

They haven’t. The movie is a stripped-down rounding of the bases in Tezuka’s graphic novel, where a lot of details have been condensed or omitted entirely in favor of doing justice to the angry core of the story. This has not been a catastrophic decision, because the movie they made from those details isn’t a bad one. It looks great, it’s entertaining to watch, and it contains just enough of the troubling elements of the original to be worth it. It’s just that, as with all such adaptations, it’s impossible to not compare it detail-for-detail with the original.

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.

My most common lament about anime, manga and Japanese popular culture generally has been the language barrier. I’ve tried to learn Japanese but I was only able to make so much headway, and with my spare time at an even greater premium now it’s not likely I’ll ever develop the skill needed to read manga without a translator. A great many titles I know I want to delve into — Azumi, for instance, or Yoshiharu Tsuge’s works, or the endless one-shots I’ve collected along the way — are more or less off-limits for now. In this regard I have, and most likely always will, depend on the kindness of strangers.

The good news is the strangers are getting a little kinder with each passing year. Not just manga publishers like Dark Horse taking intelligent risks with titles like Hiroki Endo’s Tanpenshu, but Drawn & Quarterly bringing out Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s work, or Vertical, Inc. digging through most of Osamu Tezuka’s back catalog. Now joining their ranks are graphic-novel greats Fantagraphics, and their debut release in this category is a gorgeously-produced best-of collection from shojo manga creator Moto Hagio, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. (Even apart from the content, the book is a keeper — a large-format hardback, in color, one of the best productions of its kind since something like the domestic printing of Seiichi Hayashi’s Red-Colored Elegy.)

Purchases benefit
this site.

Let me start on as unambiguous a note as possible. Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo is the manga title of the summer, possibly the manga title for the whole of 2010. It doesn’t just break new ground for manga, it paves it and puts parking stripes on it. It is raunchier than the last issue of Penthouse Variations you found behind someone else’s toilet, violent enough to knock the teeth from your face, and entirely too funny for its own good. It will raise one hell of a noise. It ought to.

After writing and throwing away a dozen other drafts of this review, I think I’ve managed to boil down to three basic points what makes this book such a blast of fresh air. One, as has been discussed at great length elsewhere, it’s one of the first manga titles — if not the first — created by a non-Japanese native, but published over in Japan before being licensed in English. Two, it uses its outlandish seinen plot (which reads like an overheated portion of, say, Black Lagoon) to make some fierce points about the very audience that might well be lining up for this thing. It has at least as much to say about otakudom as it does its cultural inverse, the fetishization of all things American (or at least Western) by some Japanese. Three, it does all this in exactly the style — not visual, but emotional — of the best manga: on one panel you’re getting your face slammed into the pavement, and then on the next you’re getting tickled until you can’t breathe. There’s a kind of genius in being able to do that and get away with it.

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.

Attempts in Japan to overturn the dominance of newspapers via digital media have largely stiffed:

Ink Gushes in Japan’s Media Landscape (New York Times)

... it is not just the so-called citizen journalism sites that have failed here. No online journalism of any kind has yet posed a significant challenge to Japan’s monolithic but sclerotic news media.

“Japan just wasn’t ready yet,” said JanJan’s president and founder, Ken Takeuchi, a former reformist mayor and newspaper journalist who started the site in 2003. “This is a hard place to create an alternative source of news.”

Not much mention of 2ch-style anonymous boards as an influence. Which isn't to say they are, just that I do have to wonder how much of that sort of thing has already acquired a sizeable (if practically untrackable) audience of its own that more conventional, upscale sites can't steal away.

I mentioned earlier that Criterion has a BD of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in the works. Here's the skinny from The Digital Bits:

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence will include a new and restored high-definition master, The Oshima Gang (an original making-of featurette), new video interviews (with producer Jeremy Thomas, screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, actor Tom Conti and actor-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto), Hasten Slowly (an hour-long documentary about author and adventurer Laurens van der Post, whose autobiographical novel is the basis for the film), the film's original theatrical trailer and a booklet featuring an essay by film writer Chuck Stephens and a 1983 interview with director Nagisa Oshima by Japanese film writer Tadao Sato.

Follow the link in the movie title for my review. There's no Amazon product link yet but there should be before long.

Purchases benefit
this site.

Two things come to me on reading the second volume of Twin Spica. One, this is a gem of a series that deserves the broadest possible audience. Waste no time picking it up if a) you want to read a story that assumes the best and most ambitious in humanity, rather than its worst or most cowardly; or b) you have even the slightest interest in manga as something more than a way to show creative ways for people to get sliced in half.

Two, if Vertical Inc. editor Ed Chavez’s job description includes being on the lookout for titles like this, he has the best job in the world. He’s constantly scouring the planet (well, Japan) for manga that have that special Vertical something, and Spica has it in spades. It’s not so outlandish as to be alienating; it’s deeply felt without being sappy; and it plugs into something that people on both sides of the Pacific can tap into without needing a cross-cultural dictionary to decipher.

On a whim: five manga, from my previous reviews and my own personal-faves shelf, that I think would make good candidates for animated productions.

Kurohime. The first few volumes of this were rough going for me, and I confess I didn't see the appeal of the whole thing at first. But then it settled down into a story that was less tail-chasing and more relentless forward evolution, and I got pretty hooked. An animated version could clean up the mess of the first few books, tighten the chronology a bit, and give us a pretty wild ride.

Ochō the Ear-Cleaner. Another as-yet-untranslated series I need to discuss when time permits. It's part romance, part history lesson and part frothy comedy, all set in during the latter Edo period and revolving around a woman with a skill-set hinted at in the title. It's nowhere nearly as silly as it sounds, and in fact quite a bit endearing. Think of something halfway between Oh! Edo Rocket and House of Five Leaves, if that doesn't sound like too perverse a description.

Kataribe. I was very impressed with this Masayuki (Moyasimon) Ishikawa title, a single volume not released in English but with the scope and fierce energy of a Miyazaki production like Nausicaa. A movie version would be a knockout; the manga's imagery gives only the barest hint of how this could look as a fully-animated production.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi's shorts. An anthology production of his shorter works, recently reprinted by Drawn & Quarterly, would be a neat project. The artwork doesn't have to be faithful to the original, if you ask me; this would be more of a showcase for his storytelling as filtered through the sensibilities of different directors.

Red-Colored Elegy. No deep review of this has been forthcoming from me if only because it's been difficult to describe without lapsing into a fanboy gush that serves neither you nor me. Imagine an Art Theatre Guild film (something of the same lineage as Throw Away Your Books And Go Out Into The Streets) rendered as manga, about the pain and ambivalence of being young, in love and futureless. [And so imagine my astonishment when I found it was, indeed, made into an OAV.] [Update: AniPages Daily talks about the OAV here.]

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.

Bits and pieces from this week's AICN Anime, including a couple of shout-outs to yours truly (thank you, Mr. Green).

Somerset, New Jersey's AnimeNext will host Kenji Kamiyama, director of Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex and the to be released by FUNimation Eden of the East ... Black Lagoon creator Rei Hiroe (also known as doujinshi artist Tex-Mex) will be at Anime Expo for the premiere of the new anime OVA Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail.

See the trailer for the latter here. Kamiyama is also responsible for the excellent TV adaptation of Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit.

Catsuka reports Studio 4°C has developed a short adaptation of Masamune Shirow's battle of religions, Orion to be shown at the Short Shorts Film Festival in Tokyo this June. Batman: Gotham Knight's Yasuhiro Aoki directed the 3D work.

Orion (see the link above for a review) was not one of my favorite of Shirow's works, but it at the very least stands out by dint of being so impossible to follow and insanely over-designed that you can't help but marvel at it.

Kinji Fukasaku's son, and director of Battle Royale II will be supervising a 3D converted re-release of original Battle Royale movie.

... get that man away from the camera now.

A UK DVD of live action Sleeping Bride has been released Synopsis: From Osamu Tezuka, godfather of manga, and Hideo Nakata, godfather of J-horror, comes this quirky romance between a boy and the comatose girl with whom he falls in love.

Tezuka + Nakata = sold. Any chance of a US release?

DC Comics has announced that it will be shutting down its CMX manga division

Part of me wants to tag that #andnothingofvaluewaslost, but I know better. CMX had some good titles in the middle of a great deal of dross, although I hope with them out of the picture the more dedicated players like Dark Horse and Del Rey will step up that much more.

Purchases benefit
this site.

I’m going to start this review with a position I fully expect others to find irritating at best and indefensible at worst. I hated Axis Powers Hetalia so much that for a long time I didn’t dare tell anyone how much I despised it.

The show has a strong fanbase, but I know better than to try and lecture people about taste. I only know that the show makes my stomach bubble and my temples pound in rage. Hetalia reminds me way too much of exactly the sort of nationalist, race-baiting propaganda produced by the very countries depicted in the show during WWII — including, I must add with no small amount of chagrin, the United States itself. That it tries to be cute and inoffensive only makes it all the uglier to me. And yes, I’m intimately familiar with the whole “Japan has very little political correctness as we understand it in the West” argument; it doesn’t make the damn thing any less uncomfortable for me to watch. There’s plenty of other stuff out there that I know I want to check out, and that I know isn’t going to give me a case of the sociological squicks.

(Pause for deluge of hate mail. Delete. Onward.)

Purchases benefit
this site.

Much as I hate to admit it, at this point Sayonara Zetsubo-Sensei has hit something like a comfortably formulaic plateau. What was funny and startling in the first couple of volumes has been reduced to a set of dance steps. They’re well-executed, but they’re a far cry from the wild fandango that kicked off this series, and so a comment like “How I laughed!” now carries with it a “but…”.

And yet, at the same time, there really isn’t anything else like this right now. Would that I had to find shelf-space partners for Zetsubo-sensei, they would consist of a very small, oddball list of other comics — the riotous Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga!, or maybe Usamaru Furuya’s indescribable and hilarious Palepoli. All of which, now that I think about it, are united in that they tap into humor that’s as peculiarly Japanese as it is a tough sell for people who are not already fans. I’ve talked before about this, and with each passing volume SZS gets no easier to stump for, even as it becomes that much more predictable.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.

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.

The Japan Society's newest newsletter brings word of this event:

Japan Society, New York - Authors on Asia Tsunenari Tokugawa: The Edo Inheritance

The Tokugawa Era (1603-1868), brought three centuries of peace to Japan. In The Edo Inheritance, Tsunenari Tokugawa, the eighteenth head of the Tokugawa family, argues that the unique cultural values fostered during the Tokugawa Era have much to offer the world in an age of globalization and uncertainty.

I haven't read the book, although a cursory examination of reviews from various places (e.g., The Japan Times) make me think it is more inspired by an impulse towards cultural rehabilitation than scholarly thought — more Shintaro Ishihara than G.B. Sansom, if you get my drift. I'll probably check it out at some point, but I plan to keep a 55-gallon barrel of salt handy.

The title brought to mind The Shogun Inheritance, a glossy book issued in conjunction with a BBC-TV series on Japan back in 1980 or so. A decent introduction for beginners, but more notable for the photography than for its insights or analysis, which are already dated in more ways than one.

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.