Three Films Make A Post: What was once in the deep is now in the shallows

Terra Formars (2016): When he isn’t making fantastic remakes of classic samurai films, or doing some really off-beat movie that harkens back to his really wild times as a director, Takashi Miike somehow finds time in his insane schedule to direct stuff like this big budget adaptation of a popular anime and manga series. Because this is Miike, the thing absolutely feels like a live action manga, so except acting so broad you could fit Gamera through it, absurd hair, special effects that really don’t care if they look “realistic” or not, a plot that manages to be straightforward and linear yet also difficult to parse to anyone who has no idea what this Terra Formars business is about (like me), insane moments of gore, kitsch, a Kane Kosugi cameo, Rinko Kikuchi, insect super powers, and a tone so chipper it becomes absurd. It all comes together – as far as this stuff even can come together – into the sort of film I can  joyfully let wash over me, be pleasantly entertained and only mildly freaked out, and love Miike for making this sort of pop art nonsense in between more serious, and (even) more weird and personal stuff, treating all these different types of filmmaking with the same vigour.

Hard Eight (1996): Paul Thomas Anderson’s Reno-set debut feature length film is a gambling movie, a film about guilt, a film about lies, a film about people who are all a lot more dysfunctional than they seem at first look, and a film about people trying to live in the backwaters of Americana,so it’s basically laying the foundation for every film Anderson made after. This one’s a comparatively small movie, concentrating on a handful of characters – played wonderfully by Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson, and a few moments in their lives. While he knows how to organize large swathes of characters, Anderson has always been just as good at more intimate portrays of the lost and the lonely, so there’s great richness, depth and texture to these characters and their relations as well as to the unglamorous (Reno is basically Las Vegas without the pretence of class, right?) places they inhabit.


Les glaneurs et la glaneuse aka The Gleaners and I (2000): It is educational to compare great Nouvelle Vague director Agnès Varda’s late career documentaries with those of her lesser peer (sorry, Godard admirers, I’m half joking) Jean Luc Godard. Where Godard’s documentary work is formal and abstract, Varda’s philosophical approach concentrates on the personal and the concrete, treating ideas through their connection to people and seeking truth(s) about the large in the small. Consequently, this digitally shot – often playful in the best of ways - documentary about gleaners and gleaning (very much in the sense of people who pick what is left), their connection to art and the role of the artist – particularly Varda - as gleaner is full of a warm interest for the experience of people – particularly the poor, the destitute and the somewhat damaged who aren’t usually allowed to speak for themselves (even the people honestly fighting for their rights prefer to speak about them and rather prefer to treat them as abstracts).

Ace Attorney (2012)

Original title: Gyakuten saiban

(I'll go with the accustomed names of the characters from the western translations of the videogames here; I'm sure there won't be any objections).

Turns out the Japanese judicial system is just as weird as I have always expected. To cope with overburdened courts, a rather more duel-minded court system has been established, because who needs things like judicial fairness, logic, or a proper chain of evidence when he can instead have people dramatically pointing their fingers while shouting "OBJECTION!", holograms, confetti rain and lawyers with manga character fashion style? Not me.

Phoenix Wright (Hiroki Narimiya) is a rookie lawyer trying to establish himself in this glorious style of court battles, and he's already breaking down to cringe in moments of crisis with the very best of them. Just after winning his first case against hot-shot dandy prosecutor, as well as his former co-student,  Miles Edgeworth (Takumi Saito), Phoenix's mentor Mia Fey (Rei Dan) - of the Fey spiritist family if you need to know - is murdered; supposedly by her younger sister Maya (Mirei Kiritani), but that's a case of judicial error Phoenix takes care of fast enough. This murder is only the first step in a series of events that will lead the attorney to defending Edgeworth against the excellently named prosecutor Manfred von Karma (Ryo Ishibashi) in another murder case, lighting up the murky shadows of his and Edgeworth's fathers' pasts, and learning to cringe even better.

It's a natural law that 99 percent of all videogame movie adaptations are terrible shite. Fortunately, beloved (by me!) Japanese director Takashi Miike does not believe in natural laws of any way, shape, or form as little as the "Ace Attorney" videogames themselves do believe in real-world logic, due process, or a confetti-less court system, so he just went and made a good videogame movie.

Miike is pretty much the ideal director for this sort of thing, for the mixture of hyped-up yet straight-faced absurdism and pop culture references of the - heavily manga, anime and tokusatsu culture based - videogames plays to some of the directors strengths, namely getting distracted by any shiny thing and then filming it, and not giving a crap about realism of any shape, kind or form.

What strikes me as slightly surprising - but works out very well for the film - is how much Miike avoids the stylistic and narrative excess Ace Attorney suggests. The film may be full of ridiculous nonsense and look like a real-life comic book, but it's also restrained enough not to become annoying, generally avoiding to shout into its audiences faces how CA-RAY-ZEEE it is, though it is, in fact, plenty crazy. Ace Attorney's craziness, however, has a very effective internal consistency. Rather like the mirror image of US superhero movies that usually ask how elements of a comic strip would work in the real world, Miike's film asks how elements of the real world would work in a comic strip, and builds its sense of fun on that basis.

For my tastes, Miike keeps up this sense of fun for the whole 130 minutes of running time of the movie. I'd even call the film tight, for, atypical for the director even in his more commercial mode (though you got me if you ask if this is, in fact, made in Miike's commercial mode), there's nary a moment that's pure digression here. Even the many, many moments when the film seems to digress later turn out to be important parts of a rather well-constructed - at least if one is willing and able to accept the film's internal logic - plot.

This makes Ace Attorney an easy to love film for me, for what could be more entertaining than concerted weirdness that still makes its own sort of sense in the end, combined with absurdly-haired people shouting "objection" (or rather "OBJECTION!!!!!")?

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Detective Story (2007)

Private detective Raita Kazama (Kazuya Nakayama) is a typical representative of his profession. He's a slob, a wearer of highly dubious fashion (or "vintage clothing", as he likes to call it) and obviously poor as can be, even though he somehow manages to have two employees in his agency.

One evening, when he insinuates himself into the alcohol reserves of his new neighbour, his perversely straight-laced namesake and IT expert Raita Takashima (Kurodo Maki), a distraught woman seeks his help. Unfortunately, Kazama's too drunk and lazy to be of any use and asks her to see him the next day at his office.

She'll never arrive there, though, because she is murdered on her way home from Kazama's. The killer absconds with her liver to do who knows what with it.

Kazama is hit hard by the poor woman's death and decides to find her killer. That's easier said than done when your talents as a detective mostly consist of the ability to wear an absurd wig and when even your ex-colleagues in the police force call you the worst detective ever.

Nonetheless, someone feels threatened enough by our intrepid hero to deposit Kazama's fountain pen close to the next murder victim. That's enough for the police to make Kazama their main suspect, but not enough for the detective to give up on the case, even if it means dodging cops and trying to rope information out of a serial killer whose nemesis he somehow managed to become.

Soon, all trails lead to the eccentric artist Aoyama.

I doubt that Detective Story is a film that could convince someone not already enamored with director Takashi Miike's body of work to fall in love with it. That does not mean that it is not a film worth watching. It's just a difficult film to comprehend and I have a hard time imagining what someone not familiar with Miike's style would make of it.

The film seems to be a re-imagining and sympathetic parody of a late 70s TV show I know nothing at all about (and the Internet won't tell me), so I bet that some of its jokes were going right over my head. But - the film mainly being a comedy of sorts and all - there's quite a bit of humor in it that I did get. Tonally, said humor jumps merrily and with the kind of abandon one is used to from Miike between really unfunny slapstick, that dead-pan Japanese humor which is so dead-pan that you're often not sure if it is in fact humor or just plain weirdness and the sort of left-field stuff one has come to expect from Miike. Because only having his way with one old TV show alone would probably bore our directorial maestro shitless, we also get little routines that play with the mystery genre in general and a truly strange variation on Silence of the Lambs' Hannibal Lecter (but with more maggot farming).

Just making a comedy would of course also be way too boring, and so the humor rubs against some gore, some maggots and a tale about the negative influence of Rudolf Steiner's theosophy on a too impressionable mind in a way that I would probably find infuriating if it wasn't exactly what I expected of Miike. This is not one of the films where disparate elements are carefully entwined until they make a beautiful tapestry, instead, they are cut up and cut open with a certain amount of glee and a strange intensity and stitched together in new ways to become a sometimes shambling, sometimes hopping monstrosity with its own kind of beauty.

And while that is more than fine with me, I don't find Detective Story to be one of Miike's strongest efforts. The comedy is sometimes a little too pedestrian, the acting a little too unrefined in the wrong way to make the film completely satisfying and some of Miike's carefully amateurish jump cut tricks just don't seem to lead anywhere all that interesting. Still, I'll take a not completely satisfying film by Miike over films by directors who are always playing it safe any time.

 

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Three Films Make A Post's Daughter

Deadly Outlaw Rekka (2002): Takashi Miike in his Wild Director-Man of Japan role. The film merrily hops between ultra-violence, subdued Yakuza drama and weird humor, adds a wonderful scenery-chewing performance by Riki Takeuchi and a near magical bazooka. Somehow Miike gets a rather brilliantly fun film out of it that does not feel even remotely as random as it sounds. Extra bonus points for the ecstasy-inducing use of the Flower Travellin' Band's "Satori" as the rhythmic backbone of many scenes.

 

Ekusute (2007): Sion Sono directs a strange mix of Japanese horror parody, the grotesque and a story about child abuse with this tale of cursed hair extensions which fuck up the problematic life of a young Japanese woman (Chiaki Kuriyama) and her battered niece even more. Thanks to the director's incredible hand for tonal shifts, inventive grotesqueness and some rather great acting by Kuriyama, Miku Sato as the abused child and the inevitable Ren Osugi at his most exalted as the misogynist hair fetishist from hell, the film avoids every pitfall its ideas could set it up for.

 

Demonoid - Messenger of Evil (1981): One would think that a Mexican-American co-production of a film about the Devil's hand doing classical crawling hand mischief and possessing people while pining for Samantha Eggar couldn't be anything but great (fun at least). One would be oh so very wrong. Apart from a handful of moments of hand-wrestling hilarity this is just dreadfully boring. It drags, it is charmlessly incompetent, has a stocky mid-70s TV movie soundtrack - what a waste!

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,mexican movies,japanese movies,horror,yakuza,comedy,sion sono,chiaki kuriyama,ren osugi,riki takeuchi,in short,takashi miike

In short: Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

A stranger comes to the Old Western town of Nevada (at least that's what the subtitles tell us the Japanese town sign says). He is as Japanese as everyone around him, but do not be afraid, person too dumb to read sub-titles! He and everyone else (even the cameoing Quentin Tarantino) speaks English, sort of. Most of the time it's even comprehensible.

Nevada the town has a problem, well make that two problems, in form of two hostile clans, the Genji (aka "The Red") and the Heitei (aka "The White"), both graced with leaders madder than the proverbial hatter, both with an unhealthy love for color-coded Western/Mad Max chic. These groups are both on the lookout for a legendary gold treasure that is said to be hidden somewhere in the area.

But we all know what happens when a lone stranger rides into a town like this, so there's no need for me to tell you.

 

I don't know how Takashi Miike does this stuff, but he does. What should by all rights be a silly, badly tied together knot of clichés, played by actors who had to learn their dialogue phonetically, turns out to be one of Miike's best films.

Sukiyaki Western Django is as much a homage to the Italian Western as it is a loving parody (sometimes even critique) of its clichés and blind spots. It is one of the films that shows so much love for its chosen genre one has to have a heart of stone not to love the film back for it. Every element of the films of the two Sergios (Leone and Corbucci) is lovingly reproduced, sometimes to be twisted, sometimes to be broken and sometimes to be laughed at; often all three things at once. Amazingly, most of those elements suddenly feel new and vibrant again when they are used by someone from a very different culture than they initially came from. In this way, Miike does with the Italian Western what the Italian Western did with the American Western; looking at things from a perspective they haven't been looked at from in quite this way (the influence Chanbara and Italian Western had on each other notwithstanding).

Of course the film is also extremely silly and loose, while still keeping more coherence than Miike sometimes bothers with.

One of the most loveable aspects of Miike's work for me has always been his ability to be at once absurd, gruesome, silly, cliched and emotionally poignant; Sukiyaki Western Django is no exception.

Plus, there's lots of shooting, you know.

 

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