Three Films Make A Post: in her eyes...DESIRE! in her veins...the blood of a MONSTER!

Gantz - Perfect Answer (2011): In the second Gantz movie (that in truth is the second half of one very long movie) Director Shinsuke Sato still ignores the fanservice part of the manga he is adapting, and concentrates on the characters and a lot of melodrama that's from time to time broken up by pretty fantastic fight scenes, as well as by a handful of pleasantly weird flourishes. The general tenor in reviews of the film seems to be that there just aren't enough of the fight scenes, but I really prefer the two tour-de-force set-pieces the film does have to the "more blood, more tits" approach; you know, there's nothing wrong with trying to stay classy. The problem the film has in my eyes is one of pacing - it takes a bit too much time to get going (and a bit too much time to actually end once the plot is over and done with), and then hasn't quite enough time left to develop the huge swathes of manga it has decided to adapt. I still enjoy the two Gantz films quite a bit more than most films of the blockbuster league, though.

The Black Sleep (1956): In theory, it must have sounded like a good idea to make a Gothic horror movie about the usual mad science stuff featuring Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine and a heartbreakingly ill looking Bela Lugosi. In practice, it's one of those films where most of the old stars are just carted out for a few minutes to remind the audience of better films, and the only one of them with a substantial role - Rathbone as the mad scientist - has the difficult job to not upstage Herbert Rudley too much while still acting like the prototype of Cushing's Baron Frankenstein.

The film's main problem is that there really isn't anything remarkable about it except for Rathbone's performance - the script is tame and lacking in imagination, Reginald Le Borg's direction is characteristically bland, and little happens that could not have happened in a film twenty years earlier in exactly the same way. "Pure retro" was an approach to art with as little power in 1956 as it has today.

Investigation Into The Invisible World (2002): I know, it's an incongruous position for someone like me, who always praises Werner Herzog's documentaries for their respect for even the strangest people and ideas, to take, but I find the same approach taken by Jean-Michel Roux talking to a bunch of eso crackpots and schizophrenics in Iceland pretty offensive. It might have something to do with Roux's visual style too, or rather the way he tries to turn Iceland into the cover of an Enya record (though at least the film's score by Biosphere and Hector Zazou is much above the Enya-level) using post-production effects so aggressively manipulative I was at first thinking something was wrong with my DVD player. To me, the whole project feels like kitsch with pretentions to be art, which is always the worst kind of kitsch as well as the worst kind of art.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,french movies,in short,sf,action,horror,gothic,documentary,shinsuke sato,reginald le borg,jean-michel roux,bela lugosi,lon chaney jr,basil rathbone,john carradine

Three Films Make A Post: From Embryo To Woman in 4 1/2 Weeks

One Million Yen Girl aka One Million Yen And The Nigamushi Woman (2008): Yuki Tanada's indie drama/comedy (you know the type) with the fantastic Yu Aoi is at its best when it's just calmly and with inconspicuous elegance watching its characters and letting the audience sort out for themselves what to think about what they see. That method kept me pretty happy for about ninety minutes of the two hour running time. Then, the director suddenly seems to remember that she actually wants to make a specific, moral point and calmly and inelegantly begins to just tell the audience what that point is and what they are supposed to think and feel about it in the most mawkish way imaginable.

It's not enough to ruin the film for me (especially since there's a well-meant attempt at breaking up the mood of moral pedantry again at the movie's end), but it drags a film that up to that point was silently brilliant into the realm of the merely good.

Gantz (2011): Somehow, director Shinsuke Sato takes a manga and anime that's so testosterone-driven, sexist and gory that I'm pretty sure it's not written by a human being but by a penis, surgically removes about half the sexism, all the nudity, a lot of the gore and two thirds of the dumbness, and turns it into a pretty entertaining, even clever(!) bit of big budget mainstream action/science fiction.

Sato keeps the story's ruthlessness, as well as the elements that can be read as critical of the juvenile power fantasies that are the basis of Gantz's violence, so that one might at times get the impression that he's just about to really mess with the genre he's working in.

It's still a very mainstream affair though, and so the more deconstructive side of the film has too make room for some J-drama inspired melodrama and rather unconvincing character development for much of the film's last act. I didn't mind, though, because the action's pretty awesome and Gantz still is much cleverer than it needs to be, which is more than you can expect from this sort of affair.

The Task (2010): A bunch of clichés takes part in a reality show where they have to do stupid tasks in a haunted prison. As you'd expect, there's more going on in the prison than the TV crew (who, by the way, are so hard up financially they're making a reality show without having security personnel or a paramedic in place) expected, and the ghost of the prison's warden (trademark: does not like to wear shirts though he really, really should) gets stabby. It all ends in the usual dumb double twist ending. Of course.

If you're burning to see a movie where a total absence of originality and interesting ideas meet overly broad acting and vague technical competence, this will be just the thing for you. Not bad enough to deserve at actual derision, The Task is horror cinema so mediocre it's not even exciting enough to bore properly. Watch this, watch nothing, watch anything - it's pretty much all the same.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,american movies,drama,comedy,sf,action,horror,in short,yuki tanada,yu aoi,shinsuke sato