Category / Japanese Film

by Jonathan M

13 Assassins (2010) – Modernity Ain’t What It Used To Be

Ever since John Sturges remade Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Sergio Leone ‘borrowed’ the plot of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) to make A Fistful of Dollars (1964), there has been a profound sense of kinship between the American Western and the Japanese Chanbara.

This connection can be explained in purely historical terms. For example, one of the side effects of America’s post-War occupation of Japan was a flush of Americanophilia amongst young Japanese people. Young Japanese people who would grow up to be filmmakers, filmmakers who might have been tempted to interrogate their own history using the iconography and genre conventions of American popular cinema. Alternately, we could point to the fact that Japanese cinema began to reach an international audience just as the Western entered its revisionist phase, prompting Western filmmakers to look at the Western with a sensibility informed by a newfound awareness of the tragic character of many Japanese films. However, while one could argue that the link between the Western and the Chanbara Samurai film is due to the winds of cultural history and political chance, this is not the story that people want to hear…

The popular (and somewhat more poetic) view of the link between the Chanbara and the Western makes use of the idea of the creation myth. Indeed, while both America and Japan reached the height of their historical powers in the 20th Century, both cultures like to see themselves as products of an anterior historical period characterised by violence and conflict. According to this view, contemporary America was forged in the ashes of the Wild West just as modern Japan can trace its cultural roots to the Edo period in which a warlord known as the Shogun ruled over a feudal order controlled by a class of sword-wielding nobles known as Samurai. While the reinvention of an anterior historical period into a sort of mythic creative age is common in both Japanese and American cultures, contemporary attitudes towards these mythic ages are varied enough that neither the Chanbara nor the Western could ever be accused of simple-minded nostalgia. Indeed, for every scene in which an ersatz Butch and Sundance romantically throw themselves beneath the mechanised wheels of modernity knowing well that there is no place for them in the new world, there is a scene in which a more-or-less ‘wild bunch’ show us that the only thing to have changed between now and then is the efficiency of the weapons that we use to murder each other.

Steeped in traditional iconography and fully intent upon revisiting this same set of ambivalent attitudes towards modernity, Jusan-nin No Shikaku resembles much of Takashi Miike’s recent output in so far as it combines a strict adherence to genre conventions with an eye for human perversity and a desire to celebrate that perversity in as horrific a manner as possible.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Death Notice: Ikigami (2008)

Videovista have my review of Deah Notice: Ikigami, Tomoyuki Takimoto’s adaptation of Motoro Mase’s manga Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit:

There is something profoundly refreshing about Death Notice because not only does it seek to tug the heart-strings rather than quicken the pace, it also tugs the heart-strings in a way that displays a real depth of insight into the human condition and the different ways in which we face death. Each of Death Notice‘s episodes functions as a delicious and perfectly contained capsule of loss, grief and hope in the face of death.

In fact, I enjoyed the film so much that I went out and purchased a few volumes of the manga.

by Jonathan M

Tokyo Sonata (2008) – How To Live a Meaningless Existence and Not Be Overly Bothered

According to both the Romantics and the Moderns, we are all guilty children of a slain father figure. Standing over the corpse of God with blood on our hands and tears in our eyes, we look down upon slain divinity and weep for the way that his touches always made us feel special. Informed by this sense of loss but unsure of how to respond to it, 20th Century literature built upon 19th Century psychological realism by focusing its gaze inwards to the point where the external world seemed to simply fade away. Convinced that god is dead, science is boring and politics is useless, 20th Century writers wrote about themselves and their problems, coaxing thousands of novels and hundreds of films from the unbearable tragedy of being middle class and a little bit unhappy. Unhappiness framed in terms of the disappearance of God and so made to seem important and cosmic rather than irrelevant and self-indulgent. The truth is that we no more morn the death of god than we do the fall of the Roman empire, like most people who lose a parent, we have moved on and now live our lives not in the shadow of a fictional God but in the sunlight of the real world. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata is a film about the ultimate irrelevance of questions of meaning and consolation to the lives of real people.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Deadly Outlaw Rekka (2002)

Back around the turn of the millennium, Takashi Miike was the poster-boy for a new brand of cinephilia.  A cinephilia that used DVDs to traverse cultural boundaries in search of more sex, more violence and more extreme imagery.  Since then, Miike and his film seem to have fallen into relative obscurity, victims of a maturing DVD market and the director’s own refusal to abide by traditional genre boundaries.  However, as my Videovista review of Deadly Outlaw Rekka shows, there’s life in the old dog yet.

Deadly Outlaw Rekka is about a culture clash within the Yakuza.  A culture clash between the gangsters who see themselves as business men and the gangsters who cling to the old ways.  Ways of honour and blood.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler (2009)

Videovista have my review of the beautifully produced but appallingly written and conceived Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler directed by Toya Sato.

The film is based on a manga and an anime TV series and it constitutes an entry into one of my most favoured of sub-genres: the gambling movie.  Unfortunately, while the film’s first game works beautifully, the other games it comes up with are nowhere near as interesting and rely instead upon torrents of psychobabble and hysterical over-acting for their tension and drama.  Add to this toxic melange a socially regressive metaphor about the heroism of always playing by society’s rules regardless of how unfair they are and you have a film that is not only dumb but also quasi-fascistic.  Ugh.

by Jonathan M

Ponyo (2008) – Soft Round Belly or Bloody Fangs?

Hayao Miyazaki is, by any reasonable definition of the term, an auteur.  He directs, he produces, he writes and his films not only share a certain look but a certain set of themes and visual motifs (airships, bustling port towns, young female protagonists).  One of the central themes of Miyazaki’s work since the founding of Studio Ghibli has been the relationship between the technological world of humanity and the magical realm of nature and in particular the encroachment by the former upon the latter.  However, while these broad themes pop up in pretty much all of Miyazaki’s films, they do not always possess the same degree of emotional spin.

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by Jonathan M

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) – Ozu for Beginners

There have been some interesting rumblings recently over on the Guardian Film blog.

The Guardian’s film-related output tends to be dominated by the work of Peter Bradshaw.  Reportedly one of the few British film critics whose reviews still have the power to make a film.  However, despite Bradshaw’s prominence, I have never warned to him as a writer.  His reviews generally lack either theoretical or historical foundation, they are seldom funny and they are generally pedestrian enough to be predictable.  I also think that he gets it wrong a lot of the time.  Especially when it comes to films that cause a stir.  Anyway, beneath Bradshaw’s prominence, there are a number of other film writers whose work I do have a lot more time for.  Indeed, while I tend to ignore the Guardian’s reviews, I almost always read its film-related op-eds.  Which brings us to the inspiration for this particular piece.

Since the beginning of January, it has become de rigueur for Guardian film writers to reference the works of Yasujiro Ozu.  Indeed, back on the 9th of January we had a piece about Ozu’s work itself by Ian Buruma entitled “An Artist of the Unhurried World”.  Then, on the 15th of January David Thomson produced “Ozu vs Avatar”, an impassioned piece that framed Ozu’s work as a natural antithesis to mindless effects-driven films such as District 9 and Avatar.  Then, on the 16th of January, John Patterson gave us “John Woo, Ang Lee, Jet Li, enough of the Hollywood Kung fu movies”, a piece that ends with a plaintive :

“I’m all through with this genre, thanks. I’m heading back to Ozu and Mizoguchi”

There are two good reasons for Ozu being present in the minds of these film writers.  The first is that Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953) has been re-released at the cinema.  The second is that the first great film to emerge this year at British cinemas is Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking (2008), an extended homage to and updating of the family drama genre that Ozu made his own.  While I broadly agree with the sentiments animating these pieces, I was struck by the extent to which they go out of their way to Other the works of Ozu.

For example, in his article, Buruma states :

“Ozu’s style would surely strike action-loving westerners as boring and slow”

and

“To young Japanese brought up on lurid comic books and animated science fiction, Ozu’s world looks as alien as it might to uninformed westerners”

and

“Surely, foreigners preferred to see more exotic creatures, rushing about with drawn swords, wearing colourful kimonos”

Meanwhile, Patterson and particularly Thomson’s pieces set up the idea that over here you have mindless action films and over there you have works such as those of Ozu.  My problem with these articles is that I do not think that this distinction exists.  There is only one meaningful spectrum along which works of art can be placed and that is one of quality.  Ozu’s films are not qualitatively different to District 9 or A Quantum of Solace, they are simply better made, better written, better thought out, better acted and better shot.  Ozu made great films, it is as simple as that.

The idea that there is some other kind of film is one that draws its strength chiefly from the dialectics of marketing.  Kevin Smith once said of Jersey Girl (2004) that it was “not for critics” and most of the people who have been defending Avatar from its high-minded detractors have taken the line that it is simply mindless fun.  But why should fun be mindless?  How can fun actually be mindless?  People in marketing are fond of the idea that we live inordinately hectic lives.  Lives lived at break-neck pace.  Lives spent wading through dense data-schoals that leave us exhausted at the end of the day.  If you buy into this vision of your life than a) I suggest you think about the people currently trying to survive in Haiti and b) maybe you’d like to spend just a little bit more on dinner?  Maybe you’d like some gourmet chocolate?  Don’t you deserve a 50” 3D TV?  You work hard, why shouldn’t you have it?  There is no such thing as mindless entertainment, but there are rubbish films that people get tricked into going to see.

So it is in this spirit that I have decided to visit one of Yasujiro Ozu’s more accessible and instantly lovable films – Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) in order to demonstrate why it is that appreciating Ozu should come naturally to everyone, even those people who cannot help but spend money on Hollywood blockbusters.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Love Exposure (2008)

Videovista have my review of Shion Sono’s Love Exposure.

I simply adored this film.  In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I don’t think that my review does it justice.  It very nearly made it onto my film of the year list as it did sneak out in cinemas in the UK earlier in the year despite being initially released in 2005 2008.  Love Exposure is, quite simply, potty.  Potty in the ideas it puts forward.  Potty in the way it is shot.  Potty in the way it is acted.  Potty in terms of its subject matter.

EDIT : As pointed out in the comments, this film was made in 2008 and not 2005.  The sad thing is that it’s entirely feasible that a film made in 2008 might only find its way to UK cinemas in 2009.

by Jonathan M

Kairo (2001) – Hedgehogs meet the Internet

There is something faintly Proustian about sitting down at a keyboard in order to write about Japanese Horror.  As though biting into a madeleine, I am suddenly transported back to the horrible ICA seating I put up with in order to see Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998).  I am swamped by memories of girlfriends past, trips to out of the way cinemas, sequels rented on VHS tape and vindictive reviews of terrible American remakes.  It all seems like so long ago and yet it was only the early 00s.  Tempus Fugit.  Sic Transit Gloria Mundi…

Though historically accurate, mentioning Ringu seems somehow inappropriate as,  despite having been a product of the J-Horror bubble (it even earned itself a terrible 2005 American remake), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo is no mere genre copy-cat.  Clearly influenced by Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), the film uses genre formulae as a spring-board for exploring philosophical ideas with an almost poetical elegance and softness of touch.  Kairo is, in every way, a remarkable film.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – 20th Century Boys (2008)

VideoVista have my review of Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s 20th Century Boys.

Watching this film put me in mind of archeology or anthropology.  It is based upon a series of manga which, while hugely successful in Japan, have yet to acquire much of a cult status in the West.  Because of the popularity of the source material, the film and everyone involved in t seem to be making a real effort to produce a film as close to the source material as possible.  So in effect, the film is this huge homage to this pop cultural deity that I have never heard of.  It’s like some weird and incomprehensible religion; to those within the sphere of influence of the manga, clearly the film is a big deal.  To the rest of us all of the slavish respect seems irrational and incomprehensible.  Which is probably a good state to be in when it comes to popular culture.