Results tagged “Masato Tsujioka”

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Well, you can’t say I didn’t try. After seeing director Masato Tsujioka’s first feature Lost By Dead and writing it off as a dog’s breakfast, I found he had made another movie, Divide. From the trailer, it looked like it had a better budget and more competence behind the camera. Oh, why not, I thought; it would be nice to see a director maturing and growing in front of my eyes. And so into my queue it went.

Yes, Divide is better than Lost By Dead. Very, very slightly better, as it sports incrementally improved production values and a more compact running time (it clocks in at exactly one hour). But that’s like saying a head cold is a step up from a case of smallpox. What few good ideas there are swimming around in this porridge of a movie are so incoherent and underdeveloped I almost wish they hadn’t bothered. In some ways, it’s easier to deal with a movie that makes no pretense of making sense than one which tries and bellyflops into the shallow end of the pool.

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It’s a rare and wonderful thing when you see a film by a first-time director, made by people with no money and no moviemaking experience — and yet the passion they feel for what they do makes those limitations meaningless. The movie becomes both a receptacle and a transmitter for their energy, and you in turn become a receptacle for that energy as well.

I am not, however, talking about Lost by Dead, which leaves you feeling like a receptacle for something you flush away. It’s one shade off from being a full-blown spoof of bad indie filmmaking, but no: the director, Masato Tsujioka, was dead serious and completely earnest about making a gritty, downbeat noir in Tokyo’s underworld using a minimal budget. What he ended up with better resembles one of those dismal things on YouTube people Twitter about to each other with subject lines like Amateur Night in Japan?