The Mikogami Trilogy: The Trail of Blood, The Fearless Avenger, Slaughter in the Snow

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know me and old samurai movies.  I love them all.  The ones by the masters from the 50's and 60's are great pieces of art, and the ones from the 70's were often bloody, stylish, grindhouse flicks.  I can't pick favorites between the two.  They have samurais so they're all great.

In this entry, I'm looking at a trilogy of revenge films from the early 1970's, by director Kazuo Ikehiro, known as the Mikogami Trilogy. 

The Trail of Blood (Mushukunin Mikogami no Jokichi: Kiba wa Hikasaita), by Kazuo Ikehiro, 1972

The first film introduces us to Jokichi Mikogami, a fierce ronin mercenary.  At the beginning, he wanders into an inn, feverish.  While he's there, a gang of Yakuza jerks bust in and try to rape the girl, but Jokichi steps up to defend her, cutting the boss, Kyubei in the forehead.  He vows revenge and they take off.  Jokichi and the girl (sorry, names are tough when there's no Wikipedia for the movie I'm reviewing) soon fall in love, and he gives up his violent life in exchange for a peaceful one.

Three years later, Jokichi is still living with the girl, and they have a young son.  He gets a job opportunity, but must travel through the territory of the gang that still hates him to get there.  He promises not to fight them, and to keep his head down and get home alive.  Of course, he runs into them, and they hold him down and start bashing his pinky and ringfinger off with the hilt of a sword.  It's a pretty gruesome scene, even though the fingers are obviously fake.  When Jokichi can't stand it anymore, he swipes a sword off one of the guys, and instead of attacking them, he quietly slices off his two fingers, returns the sword, and thanks them as they all stare in shock.  Holy crap!

Unfortunately, Jokichi arrives home too late.  They already murdered his wife and son while he was away.  Aaaaaaand cue vengeance.  Jokichi finds out which bosses were behind the brutal act, and in true samurai tradition, becomes an unstoppable killing machine in order to bring them down.  He always has his wife's red belt around his waist, and he ties sharp little spikes to the tips of the remaining three fingers of his mangled hand and uses them as claws.  HELL YEAH.

It's a pretty standard revenge movie, actually, but very well executed and fun to watch.  Yoshio Harada is totally cool as Jokichi Mikogami.  There's also a mysterious one-eyed helper character named Hurricane Isaburo, but unfortunately, we never end up learning what his deal is.  The score is that weird but awesome funky music that pervaded 70's samurai movies such as the Lone Wolf and Cub series.  He even has sex with his lover with funky saxophones playing in the background.  Of course, this is an ongoing series, so he doesn't find all three bosses in this movie, he just faces off against the guy whose head he cut at the beginning (and all his men, of course).

The Fearless Avenger (Mushukunin Mikogami no Jokichi: Kawakaze ni Kako wa Nagareta), by Kazuo Ikehiro, 1972

The second film in the trilogy, The Fearless Avenger, is kind of the weak link of the three, but it's still pretty good.  This time around, Jokichi continues his relentless quest for vengeance, even walking right into a meeting of all the gang bosses and attacking them up front.  All this serves to do is get them angry, of course.

The main part of the story is about Jokichi being assigned by one Yakuza boss to protect another boss' runaway daughter and return her to him.  Of course, things end badly, and of course, Jokichi ends up butchering another army of guys.  This goes without saying.

The Fearless Avenger is lean and mean at only about 75 minutes, not including the 5-minute recap of the first film at the beginning.  It's still good, and there are some pretty surprising twists in the story, but it doesn't have a lot of character development for Jokichi, who had this great origin in the first film, and in this film just kind of spins his wheels.   I loved the final showdown, in a rocky river, with Jokichi submerging his sword arm underwater so his attackers can't see where he's pointing it.

Slaughter in the Snow (Mushukunin Mikogami no Jokichi: Tasogare ni Senko ga Tonda), by Kazuo Ikehiro, 1973

That title makes a pretty hefty promise, doesn't it?  Slaughter.  In the snow.  And let me tell you, it lives up to it.  Slaughter in the Snow is by FAR the bloodiest movie in the series.  It's also the best one, and I'm not saying that just because of the geysers of blood spraying out of chests, though that is a factor.

After the horrible events of the first two films, Jokichi has pretty much tossed aside all semblance of humanity.  As the movie opens, he just sits by his fire, quietly eating his pheasant, as a gang of bandits attacks and attempts to rape a poor girl.  He doesn't even look their way until they get in his face.  The girl follows him, despite his attempts to brush her off.

Soon, a similar scene plays out differently, as Jokichi witnesses a man save a girl from a gang without thinking twice.  Jokichi soon meets the man, an assassin named "Windmill" Kobunji, who is suffering from consumption.  He uses throwing knives with deadly accuracy, and throws them by twirling his arm like a windmill.  He's right upfront with Jokichi that he's already been paid a hefty retainer to kill him.  Despite this, they have a mutual respect for each other, and decide to travel for a while before they duel.

The strange, layered relationship between Jokichi and Kobunji is at the center of the movie.  When a bunch of men seek vengeance on Kobunji, Jokichi just sits back to watch the battle, reasoning that if they kill Kobunji, it's one less problem for him.  But when Kobunji begins coughing up blood during the battle, Jokichi steps in and scares the guys off, then takes the suffering assassin back to the inn where they met and helps nurse him back to health.

The reason I liked Slaughter in the Snow so much is the depth and complexity of the characters.  It's about Jokichi reacquiring a conscience.  The girl he rescued even calls him on his hypocrisy: He won't save a helpless girl being attacked by rapists, but now he's saving this guy who wants him dead?  I don't think Jokichi could even explain his reasoning, but I think it brought him back from the void.

The movie is also only 75 minutes long, and all the more intense for it.  The blood is a sharp red on the snow white scenery.  Kazuo Ikehiro must have liked the way red on white looked, because he pours it everywhere.  Slaughter is also the most visually stylized of the series.  Lots of really cool editing tricks and cinematography. 

There is a downside, though: The word "trilogy" is misused here.  A trilogy is when three movies tell a complete story.  Just because there are three Austin Powers movies doesn't mean it's the "Austin Powers Trilogy".  This is not the full story, and was clearly meant to continue for at least one more movie.  Jokichi never completes his vengeance on the third gang boss, and I guess he never will.  But still, Slaughter in the Snow is a great movie, even standing on its own.  I would recommend all three, but the third is by far the coolest.

The Bicycle Thief, Goyokin, and Jiro Dreams of Sushi

The Bicycle Thief, by Vittorio de Sica, 1948


Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief (or Bicycle Thieves, depending on who you ask) is one of the best, most important, and most moving films ever made. That's not up for debate, it's earned that. Having seen the film, I can now acknowledge all those things, but I don't know, it was just so sad.

The Bicycle Thief is the relentlessly soul-crushing story of Antonio, an impoverished man who gets a job opportunity that requires he has a bike. He and his wife trade all their sheets to be able to get one, and even then, just barely. Antonio and his family treat the bike as their most precious possession. His son polishes it and has memorized every detail, down to a small dent. When Antonio goes to work for his first day, he carries his bike into the office, refusing to put it down. Then, on the job, which is riding around the city and gluing posters to walls, a man takes off with his bike.

Antonio goes to the police, who just trivialize the theft, as though it's not important. To Antonio, of course, it's the most important thing in the world. He, his son, and some friends go on a desperate search, combing the city for the bicycle. There are thousands of bicycles, and so on. The movie is just really damn sad. There are uplifting moments, and there's actually a lovely message of empathy and understanding to the whole thing. Though Antonio's desperation is blinding him to it, we can see that everybody is struggling, not just him. This is what drives people to steal bicycles.

I'm not NOT recommending the movie, it really is great, but just warning you, grab your hankies. No wait, don't use hankies, those are so gross, use a tissue. And watch something happy or fun afterwards, like cat videos or a cool-as-hell samurai movie or something.

Goyokin, by Hideo Gosha, 1969


I feel like Hideo Gosha was the last great director of the Japanese New Wave of the 50's and 60's. I don't know if this is a fact, because my knowledge is incomplete, but this is how it seems to me. While most of the other important directors of the time began making films in the 30's and 40's and were already well into their careers when they produced their seminal works, Gosha made his first film in 1964. Japanese cinema becomes a whole different beast in the 1970's, and I feel like Gosha kind of bridges the gap between the two styles.

In Goyokin, the great Tatsuya Nakadai (The Sword of Doom, High and Low, Kagemusha, among many others) stars as Magobei Wakizaka, an honorable samurai who looks on in shame as his clansmen slaughter an entire village to steal a shipment of gold. He can't go on as a samurai anymore and quits, but also promises his master and best friend, Rokugo (Tetsuro Tanba of You Only Live Twice and The Twilight Samurai, also among many others), that he won't report this transgression as long as it doesn't happen again.

Three years later, Magobei, living a peaceful life, is about to give up his sword for good when assassins sent to kill him tip him off that Rokugo is planning on butchering another village. Magobei decides to stop it from happening. Along the way, he stumbles across the girl who was the sole survivor of the massacre three years ago, and wins over a mercenary sent to kill him.

This movie is awesome. It's fun, with lots of action and adventure. Tatsuya Nakadai is totally badass as Magobei Wakizaka. There's a great scene where he is tied up and dropped into a deep pit of snow and left to die. The exact details of his escape are left to the imagination, but we're given enough of a starting point to marvel at how cool this guy is. Rokugo's plan to run a shipment of gold into the sea is pretty diabolical, and Wakizaka's plan to thwart this plan is equally clever. And of course, we get a deadly showdown between the two at the climax.

I've seen five or six of Hideo Gosha's films now, and dug them all. Though the film that follows this, Hitokiri, is a lot darker, the rest of the ones I've seen, such as Secret of the Urn have all had this kind of spirit of adventure. Goyokin is tons of fun.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi, by David Gelb, 2011


We're going to stay in Japan for our next review, though this is a very different kind of movie than Goyokin. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary about Jiro Ono, an 85 year old man who owns a tiny sushi shop that purportedly makes the best sushi in the world. Jiro has spent close to his entire life making sushi, obsessing over every detail, honing his techniques, and looking for ways to improve it. He's like Van Gogh painting the same scene over and over again, trying to find the perfect colors to represent it. Or Stanley Kubrick obsessively looking through thousands of pictures of door frames, trying to find the exact perfect one to include in his film.

We also meet Jiro's two sons; the eldest is in his 50's and is still being primed to take over Jiro's restaurant someday. He has to live with the anxiety that even if his sushi is every bit as good as his fathers, people will somehow perceive it as lesser and thus put his business under. The youngest son has been encouraged to open his own sushi restaurant that is an identical mirror image of Jiro's place. Jiro was not the best father to his sons. He was too busy thinking of sushi, but I guess he's there for them now, in his way.

The documentary is fascinating, though it can be as repetitive and single-minded as its subject. Could you imagine living your life with your brain centered on all aspects of sushi and nothing else? Of course, he's not making the sushi alone. Along with his sons, he has several apprentices. They are given years and years of rigorous training. In fact, they said it takes something like ten years before they're even allowed to handle the eggs.

What's weird is, I'm not an adventurous eater in the least bit. I've never even had sushi, but I still could totally appreciate this movie and Jiro's work. I assume this sushi is the most delicious raw fish one could ever eat, if one were into such things as raw fish. It would be like if somebody in America would dedicate their entire life to cultivating the most perfect french fry in the world... Oh man, now I'm drooling. I've gotta go.

Ace Attorney (Gyakuten Saiban)

Extremely prolific director Takashi Miike's recent film, Ace Attorney looked to be right up my alley: It's an adaptation of one of my favorite video game series (I own all five games that were released in the U.S.), and it's a quirky and weird Japanese comedy. I'm obsessed with quirky and weird Japanese movies. After having an opportunity to see Ace Attorney, I'm torn. It's a film with many problems, and I don't think most casual viewers will like it. But, with a theatrical audience filled with even bigger fans of the games than me, I found myself laughing with and enjoying it.

The games and movie follow Phoenix Wright (Hiroki Narimiya, a rookie defense attorney thrust into the big time when the murder of his mentor, Mia Fey, leads to a much deeper conspiracy. Phoenix, along with Mia's little sister, a spirit medium named Maya (Mirei Kiritani), his no-good buddy Larry Butz (Akiyoshi Nakao), and his rival prosecutor and childhood friend Miles Edgeworth (Takumi Saito), must dig deeper to crack the case. The courtroom rules in the world of the game and movie work much differently than in real life. A trial must be completed in three days no matter what. It makes little sense, but it adds a ticking clock element.

Much of the movie's action takes place in the courtroom, as Phoenix stumbles his way through cross examining the often crooked witnesses, trying to pick apart their testimonies and find where they're lying. They also go to the crime scenes to investigate. It's all very faithful to the games (the first one, specifically), and is very silly.

There were some very big laughs in the movie, but I think they were just because of our familiarity with the games. My wife had fun and she's never played them, but she has a similar sensibility to me, so I don't know. Part of the fun is that it's just set in such a ridiculous world.

Between the laughs, however, the movie feels just kind of stagnant and dramatically inert. I think it might be that director Takashi Miike was trying to stay true to a video game that is comprised of a few static shots and lots and lots (and lots) of talking. There's little to no movement in the games, and unfortunately, the cameras play pretty still in the movie too. The characters are dead-on matches to their game counterparts, all the way down to their ludicrous, gravity-defying haircuts. There's just not enough energy to keep this looney world afloat.

The games are much better at building the energy of the courtroom scenes by heightening the intensity of the music and dialogue. If Miike had used more music in that way and made the dialogue banter faster and build to a crescendo as Wright approached the truth, the movie would have felt a lot more alive.

Still, I liked the characters, and the world the movie is set in, and some of the gags were awesome. Ace Attorney could have been a lot more fun, but as it stands, it feels like an honest and sincere attempt to translate the game to the big screen, that just didn't quite work out.

Fans of the game will get something out of it, though. The audience ate it up.

Grab Bag Movies that Start with 'The' Edition: The Sci-Fi Boys, The Twilight Samurai, The Baxter

I've been watching a ton of movies lately. Already 20 in July alone! It's because I'm moving in August and I won't have nearly as much time to watch movies once I get there. Anyway, here's another Grab Bag of mini reviews. Stay tuned for even more!

The Sci-Fi Boys, by Paul Davids, 2006

This is a look back at the early days of special effects and science fiction movies, and how a generation of young fans revolutionized the industry. It has interviews with lots of important figures, such as John Landis, Roger Corman, Forrest J. Ackerman, Peter Jackson, Dennis Muren, Ray Harryhausen, and Rick Baker. Lots of neat moments, including footage from old home movies by these creators as young fans.

The Sci-Fi Boys is a very loving and nostalgic look back at the old days of science fiction, B-Movies, and special effects. I liked it, but it's a subject I'm already interested in. It could have been livelier. There are actually some documentaries on B-movies that I liked much better than this. Check out Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed by Mark Hartley.

The Twilight Samurai (Tasogari Seibei) by Yoji Yamada, 2002
This movie is sooooo moving! The Twilight Samurai is the story of Seibei Iguchi, a low-ranking samurai with no ambitions to rise in the ranks. His only priority is taking care of his two young daughters (they lost their mother to consumption) and his senile mother, who doesn't even remember him. When his master assigns him with the dangerous task of killing an exiled samurai who refused to commit ritual suicide, Iguchi must obey or face a similar situation for himself.

The Twilight Samurai is a really beautiful movie. It won best picture in Japan and was nominated for the best foreign film Oscar here in America the year it came out. It's a vivid and realistic portrayal of what life must have been like at the end of the age of the samurai. Everybody should watch this movie. Be warned, though: It just might make you cry.

The Baxter, by Michael Showalter, 2005
Wet Hot American Summer is one of my favorite comedies, and I like to check out any and everything by the guys behind it. I had heard mixed things about Michael Showalter's The Baxter, so I've been avoiding it in fear that I might not like it. Well, those fears were unfounded, because it was a decent little movie, with a lot of little laughs.

Showalter plays Elliott Sherman, a nice guy who lives to be what he called a "Baxter", the guy who women settle for when they can't get the guy they really love. He finds himself in that very situation when he meets Caroline (Elizabeth Banks), and gets himself stuck in a romantic entanglement with her, her perfect high school boyfriend (Justin Theroux), and the temp that he falls for (Michelle Williams). It's kind of a deconstruction of the tropes of the Romantic Comedy genre, and it's kind of just being silly.

The Baxter isn't a great movie, it's really just OK, but it has a very good cast, including the above mentioned people, and smaller roles by Paul Rudd, David Wain, Ken Marino, Michael Ian Black, and Peter Dinklage. Showalter is one of those comic actors who can make me laugh just by making a face or delivering a line a certain way, and he got me a lot in this. If you like Wet Hot American Summer, The Baxter might be worth your time, especially since pretty close to everybody involved in that turns up in this too.

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That will be all for today. Twilight Samurai is my recommendation this time. Thanks for reading!

Revenge (Adauchi)

Here's the thing: this is the last samurai movie that I can find on Netflix Instant that I haven't already seen. I don't know what I'm going to do. I need samurai movies to survive!

Tadashi Imai's Adauchi (Revenge, in English) is an effective movie that covers ground well traveled in the samurai genre: You guessed it. Revenge. You know, how revenge only leads to madness and destruction, and the undoing of not only you, but your loved ones, etc. To seek revenge is a hollow endeavor.

Revenge is the story of Shinpachi Ezaki, a young samurai at the very bottom of the military ranks of his clan. When approached and dressed down by a man from another family, higher in the social strata, he stands up for himself, and is challenged to an illegal duel to the death. His brother tries to stop it from going down, but arrives too late. Shinpachi has won the duel.

Shinpachi's family, fearing the consequences his victory will bring, argue with the clan leader that both men broke into a temporary fit of insanity when the duel broke out, and rather than have him executed, Shinpachi is exiled to a monastery.

At the monastery, Shinpachi grows paranoid and unstable, without purpose or direction. His situation only worsens when the younger brother of the man he killed seeks him out for his own revenge, and he kills him too. The only way to peacefully solve this whole ordeal and maintain his own honor and that of both families is for Shinpachi to face the third brother of his rival in a duel and allow him to win.

Wow, hey, revenge is exhausting.

Revenge is a really well done samurai movie, made in a period where, as far as I can tell, every samurai movie was really well done. I have not been let down by a samurai movie from the 50's or 60's yet. I always kind of wondered what the other studios besides Toho were up to at this time. I don't think I've seen many. Most samurai movies that get released in America begin with that Toho Studios logo. I know there were other studios in Japan, and it was nice to see that they were making quality films too during Japan's most creatively fertile cinematic period.

My review probably didn't do it much justice, but the characters in Revenge had a lot of depth and subtlety, and the story was filled with tension. I really liked the lead guy's performance and also the old man who played the monk he befriends. I don't think I ruined too much of the story, even though I went kind of deep into it. I promise you I didn't spoil the ending. Check it out.

I hope Netflix Instant puts out some more samurai stuff before I go into withdrawal and start watching Yojimbo on a permanent loop.

The Secret World of Arrietty

Nothing will keep me away from a new movie by Studio Ghibli on opening weekend. Like Pixar, they've earned that trust. One after another, they have released movies with lush, beautifully animated, fully realized fantasy worlds, and relatable, human stories.

The newest Ghibli film, The Secret World of Arrietty, is a little different. Written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Arrietty takes our own daily home environment and resizes it into a vast, dangerous world full of adventure and peril.

Based on the classic series of children's novels The Borrowers, The Secret World of Arrietty is the story of Arrietty, a tiny girl who lives under the floorboards of a country house with her stern, protective father, and her jumpy, fearful mother. They are Borrowers, a secret race of bug-sized people who live off of the items that human beings, or Beans, as they call them, don't need or will never miss.

On her first Borrowing outing with her father, Arrietty is mistakenly seen by Sean, a sickly Bean boy her own age, staying at the country home with his aunts while awaiting a heart surgery. Sean has long been told of the little people in the floor by his mother, who never stopped believing in them.

As Sean reaches out to befriend Arrietty, her parents realize that they've been made, and knowing the two worlds can never meet, opt to pack up and leave before Arrietty's curiosity gets the best of them all. Meanwhile, they must contend with Sean's aunt, who has been trying to prove their existence for years, and is believed to be a bit off her rocker.

My favorite scenes were just watching the way the Borrowers navigated the human world. Arrietty's first Borrowing was a lot of fun, because we got to see the way they utilized strips of tape to scale tables, and old lost earrings as grappling hooks, and so on. I also really enjoyed the house cat. Ghibli always does great work when animating realistic animal behavior, and the cat has some really funny moments.

Though not my favorite of Studio Ghibli's films, Arrietty is still quite good. It drags on a little bit too long, but a lot of Hayao Miyazaki's films have a slower pace than American kids are used to. I think American kids and Japanese kids might have different attention spans. Or maybe the kids in our audience were just particularly squirmy.

I would recommend The Secret Life of Arrietty as a good movie for the whole family, though if your kid is impatient or the type that wants something noisier, you might want to just wait to show it to them on home video. Still, I don't have any kids, I just like movies. My wife and I saw it on our own and we both enjoyed it a great deal.

High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku)

Every once in a great while, one has that feeling while watching a movie that they are watching one of the best movies they have ever seen. It's a thrill, and naturally, the older I get and the more movies I see, the less frequently I experience this rush. But as luck would have it, there are still a whole bunch of Akira Kurosawa movies out there that I have yet to watch.

High and Low, my eighth Kurosawa film, and the first I've seen set in the present day (1963, that is), is many different films at once. A kidnap thriller, a police procedural, a morality tale, and an examination of class disparity, and it's all filled with the same compassion and humanity that Akira Kurosawa brought to everything he made.

The story opens with Gondo (the legendary Toshiro Mifune), an executive for a shoe company, who is poised to take over the company and oust the other men on the board, who want to make cheaper shoes and charge more money for them. After a meeting with these men goes sour, he gets a telephone call, where an unknown voice tells him that his son has been kidnapped and demands a ransom of 30 million Yen. It quickly becomes apparent that it was not his son that was kidnapped, but rather the son of his chauffeur. The kidnapper tells Gondo that he must pay the ransom anyway, and Gondo must now come to the decision: must he give up his entire fortune for another man's son?

The first hour of the movie is almost like a play, the drama rarely leaving Gondo's home. What is truly amazing about this first hour is the way it's shot. Kurosawa uses long takes, sometimes 5 minutes or more, each shot carefully composed to maximize the emotional impact of what the characters are going through. He shows a mastery of spacial dynamics between the characters, often making social statements just with where they are positioned compared to each other in the frame.

Then, an hour into the movie, it makes an abrupt and complete change. The action leaves Gondo's home, and the focus shifts almost completely away from Gondo, over to Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai, the star of Kagemusha), the man tasked with hunting down and arresting the kidnapper. He and his team are good detectives, and what follows is a fascinating police procedural, as we watch them solve the mystery.

Amidst all this is a very large social statement. We learn that Gondo's large, air conditioned (a luxury at the time) home is located high atop a hill over the city of Yokohama, seemingly arrogantly looking down on the poor people below, sweating and suffering during a summer heatwave. There is a sense of local resentment toward Gondo and his place in society. Eventually, we follow the detectives and the kidnapper (played brilliantly and almost silently by Tsutomu Yamazaki) into the lowest place in the city, where heroin addicts lay in the gutter and writhe in agony.

I could go on and on how incredible High and Low is, but then you wouldn't really have any reason to watch it yourself. Kurosawa is, in my estimation, the greatest filmmaker who ever lived, and this is right up there with Seven Samurai and Rashomon as one of his greatest achievements. And those are just among the ones I've seen!

Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (Shuriyuki Hime: Urami Renga)

The original Lady Snowblood is, for my money, one of the greatest revenge movies ever made, and also one of my favorite movies. If you are unfamiliar, it was one of Quentin Tarantino's primary inspirations for his Kill Bill movies. Major narrative elements, such as The Bride's "kill list" and the division of the story into novelistic chapters were lifted directly from Lady Snowblood. He even copied specific shots from it and included the end credits song on the soundtrack. I was aware that there was a sequel, but for some reason, it took me about 8 years before I finally got around to watching it.

The first film follows Lady Snowblood (in Japanese, Shuriyuki Hime), born in prison and spirited away to be raised as an instrument of vengeance, to be unleashed upon the criminals who murdered her mother's family. It's a complicated story, and I won't go into the details, but it ends with a whole lot of blood, a large amount of it Lady Snowblood's own. In fact, were there not a sequel, one would assume that she was dead.

At the start of the second film, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, Shuriyuki Hime is alive and kicking, and it's never really explained how. I guess we can just assume she's a fighter. With her vengeance served and no purpose remaining in her life, Lady Snowblood spends her time running from the authorities, indiscriminately killing any who attempts to take her in. This is demonstrated in a single shot scene where she mows down one after another without displaying any emotion on her face.

Finally overwhelmed, she gives up and turns herself in, and is promptly sentenced to death. She gets a stay of execution when she gets kidnapped by a government official and recruited to go undercover as a servant in order to steal a document and assassinate a known anarchist. Things go further awry when she becomes sympathetic to the anarchist's cause and turns the tables on the corrupt government official and his cronies. And of course, there's lots and lots of blood. Bright red, thick blood, unrealistically and gloriously spraying from bodies like fountains. Limbs go flying, eyes get stabbed out, there's a black plague outbreak, what more could you ask for?

The first movie was a revenge story set upon a political backdrop. This time around, the politics of the period in Japan (early 1900's) are in the forefront. It's an interesting story, and well executed (pun intended HAHA), but nowhere near as visceral and personal as the simple "I need to kill the people on this list" premise of the first one. Both films were directed by Toshiya Fujita, and both are dark, stylized, and smartly plotted.

Lady Snowblood is played by Meiko Kaji, star of the Stray Cat Rock series. She's tough, complicated, a total badass, and way sexy. If the first film was about her vengeance, and how a lifetime's pursuit of it leaves her empty and without identity, the sequel is about her finding something outside of herself to fight for and be willing to die for.

While not as great as the first film, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance is still worth looking into if you're a fan. I would recommend watching the first Lady Snowblood and deciding from there if you want more.

Kagemusha

This review is nine months in the making. I bought Kagemusha on Blu Ray in February. It took a long time to find three hours to watch it, but we finally got around to it in May. But then, every attempt to watch it was thwarted by my PS3. And now, in late November, after replacing my Blu Ray, getting my Playstation repaired, and buying a brand new damn Blu Ray player, I bring you, with great relief, my review of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

Kagemusha is a sprawling samurai epic, set in the 1500s, following the Takeda clan, led by the feared and respected warlord Shingen. The film opens with a long, uninterrupted shot of what appears to be three Shingens having a conversation. In actuality, one is Shingen, one is his nearly-but-not-quite identical brother, Nobukado, who acts as his decoy (or Kagemusha). The third is a lowly bandit that Nobukado has discovered and saved from execution because of his uncanny resemblance to Shingen. He believes that this bandit could serve as Kagemusha better than he can.

His belief is soon put to the test, when Takeda Shingen is shot by a sniper and dies. If their enemies were to find out Shingen is dead, the clan would be done for, so the Kagemusha is made to replace Shingen. He must fool Shingen's clan, his family, and his enemies. Inspired by the kindness Shingen showed him, the double soon begins to carry on the ruse by choice, out of loyalty to the clan.

The legendary Tatsuya Nakadai plays the dual role of Shingen and his decoy. You may remember him as the gun-wielding gangster in Yojimbo, or maybe as the cold hearted protagonist/villain in Sword of Doom. He couldn't be more different in his roles here. Shingen is a smaller role, but must cast a huge shadow on the rest of the film. The decoy, stripped of any identity before the start of the movie, is never given a name. Where Shingen is regal and stoic, the decoy is crude and low born. It's kind of a The Prince and the Pauper situation.

Kagemusha is actually pretty delightful for the first couple of hours, before taking a dark turn, culminating in the true historical event of the Battle of Nagashino. Watching the decoy having to learn how to be another man, winning the love of Shingen's grandson, charming Shingen's mistresses, and ultimately earning the loyalty of Shingen's clan was really enjoyable and quite funny at times. The double is surrounded by many characters, and though they are not as colorful as those in Seven Samurai or some of Kurosawa's other early masterpieces, they are still interesting.

The pacing is slow and deliberate. There are many scenes played out in a long sustained single shot. Kurosawa also puts a heavy focus on the nonverbal interplay between his characters. It amazed me that sometimes he'd have like 10 different characters in a shot and you could just look at all of their faces and body language and feel like you could read them all. Pretty complex stuff.

Visually, Kagemusha is gorgeous and rich with detail. This is the first color Kurosawa film I've seen. I could tell from his earlier work that he composed every one of his shots like a painter would a painting. It turns out he paints them like a painting too. The colors are so vivid in Kagemusha, the reds and greens just leap off the screen.

I'm not sure if I would recommend Kagemusha to just anyone, however. It's probably not so much for the uninitiated. If somebody I knew hadn't seen any Kurosawa films, I'd certainly point them towards Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo, etc. and if they were still coming back for more, then I would show them the less accessible Kagemusha. Still, it's another great film from possibly the greatest director.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro)

Hey, everybody! Sorry I haven't updated with any reviews in almost a week! But there's a reason for that. It's because this one is sort of special.
That's right, this is the 100th review that I've posted on I Probably Liked It since I began on January 1st. Up there is my deformed, lumpy, MS Paint counterpart. I call him Jalm. I don't have a mouse, so this was the best I could manage on one of those laptop touchpads. Believe it or not, the pictures actually do get a little better.

So, a couple weeks ago, I was following a thread on Twitter where director Edgar Wright was discussing important or awesome films he hasn't seen yet. In that discussion, he mentioned such classics as Gone with the Wind, which I also haven't seen yet. But another title grabbed my eye: Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell. Unlike "Gone with the Wind", that title just screams out "WATCH ME". I did a little research and found out that Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is kind of hard to come by, but I eventually found an affordable copy on eBay, and here we are.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, or Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro, is a Japanese horror film directed by Hajime Soto, and it is completely awesome. I can't believe this movie doesn't have a bigger cult. It is not only one of the craziest vampire movies I've ever seen, but also one of the best alien invasion movies I've ever seen. That's right, folks, alien vampires!

No, not like that! You'll see. It's also loaded with a strong anti-war message and social commentary. Yayy, substance!

Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro opens up on a plane in transit to Japan. We meet some of the passengers, the pilots and the stewardess (it's the 60's so she's not a flight attendant, duh!). Everyone is unsettled by a strange ominous phenomena: the sky has inexplicably turned blood red.

That sky might be familiar to you: Quentin Tarantino used it on The Bride's flight to Japan in Kill Bill Vol. 1. To add to the apocalyptic portent, birds keep splattering onto the windows of the plane, as though they've lost all sense of direction in their need to escape from something.
To add to this doom and gloom, the pilot gets word on his radio that there's a bomb on his plane. He must go down the aisle and search everyone's luggage to find it. Though a bomb doesn't turn up, the pilot does find a sniper rifle hidden in a secret compartment in one of the suitcases. Turns out that the owner of the luggage is a political assassin who just killed the Prime Minister of England or an Ambassador, someone important, I'm tired. He hijacks the plane, but before he can do anything about it, an object glowing with a blinding light shoots by overhead and malfunctions the plane, causing it to crash.

Now, stranded in the middle of nowhere, the survivors of this plane must deal with each other until they're rescued. The immediately clash. The survivors are as such: the level-headed copilot, the stewardess, an American woman whose husband just died in Vietnam, a corrupt senator, an arms dealer and his wife, who he treats like property, a detached psychiatrist, the suspected bomber, the assassin, and, incidentally, a space biologist (what luck!).

When the assassin, thought dead, comes to, he takes the stewardess hostage and leaves the plane. The copilot runs after them to save her. Little does he know what the assassin is going to find.
That's right, a spaceship. What you can't tell? Sorry, yeah, that's an orange, glowing spaceship. He falls into a trance and walks toward it like a moth to a flame, silhouetted and shimmering by the light. When he gets up to it he sees something approach. An oozing, pulsating blob. It's exerting its mind control on him.
The Space Turd throbs and then something crazy happens!
His forehead pops open! The Slime Monster disgustingly squiggles its way into the hole in his head. Then, as the assassin struggles to fight it, balls of light flash all over half of his face, and the Space Turd takes control, turning the assassin into a Space Vampire. YEAH!

The movie gets even cooler from there. The survivors argue and backstab each other and wish harm upon each other and just generally act like jerks, as the copilot and the stewardess try to keep them in line. And then we get to watch them get picked off one by one by this creepy monster with a hole in his head.

The filmmaking and effects are really cool. Hajime Soto uses all sorts of neat tricks with lighting and colors to draw us in. As you see above, he flashed a kaleidoscope of little circular lights on the assassin's face as he was being taken over by the alien. Another really cool little lighting trick happens when the Space Vampires drink people's blood.

He changes the lighting in the shot to a blue light, making it look like all life and color has been drained from the passengers' skin.

The monster, specifically the Assassin as possessed by the Alien, is truly iconic and badass. As if that gross, bright red hole in his forehead wasn't enough, he is clad all in white; turtleneck, jacket, pants, shoes, even white gloves. And not a speck of dirt of blood gets on him. This guy is good.
I'm not going to tell you who lives or who dies, and I'm not going to tell you the awesome, awesome ending, but I will leave you off with one more tantalizing glimpse into Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell.
So, this is a pretty amazing movie. I recommend you hunt down a copy and check it out. I can't believe it doesn't have a bigger cult following in America. Let's do something about that, shall we?

So, that's all, folks! Thanks to everyone who has been reading my dumb little reviews for the last 10 months. Thanks to everyone who just read it once, too. I hope you liked my drawings, it was super fun to do. I definitely want to do more in the future, but this was insanely time consuming for such crude pictures. No, I'm not much better with pen and paper. And hey, I'd love to hear what you think, so feel free to leave comments on this or any of my other entries.

Bye!

Secret of the Urn (Tange Sazen: Hien Iai-giri)

Secret of the Urn is the tale of Tange Sazen, a one-armed, one-eyed Samurai character famous in Japanese literature. There have been many adaptations of this story and others featuring him, in manga, in movies, etc. But look at me, speaking like I'm knowledgeable of the subject, when actually, this was the first time I've ever heard of Tange Sazen. This particular version of Secret of the Urn was made in 1966, by famed director Hideo Gosha.

Hideo Gosha is a Japanese director who never really got a lot of attention here in America. A few of his movies are available here, most famously Sword of the Beast from the Criterion Collection (which I have yet to see), but for the most part, you have to find them by other means. Secret of the Urn is one of his early works, more fun and less dark than his films were eventually to become. I was elated to find it on Netflix Instant Watch.

The story begins with a samurai named Samanosuke, who is told to execute a man who is married to a girl he grew up beside. Loyally doing his duty, he is tricked and betrayed, first by the man he is executing, then by his own people. He loses his right eye and his right arm. In the scene, his arm actually flies through the air and lands in a flock of birds, scattering them into the sky.

The story picks up one year later, with Yokichi, an over-the-hill bandit overhears the lord of the Yagyu clan talking about how they need 300,000 Ryo to pay for a shrine renovation for the Shogun. Obviously, the clan would go broke with that much Ryo (I mean, obviously, right?), so the lord asks his man to retrieve the Earless Monkey Urn, which is said to contain a million Ryo.

Hearing this, Yokichi goes to his cohort, a music teacher/prostitute named Ofuji, who is really calling the shots, and they hatch a plan to snatch that can. They go to the river where the Urn is being picked up, and surprise! The samurai transporting it are attacked by ninjas! There's this really great sequence where the urn is passed back and forth between ninja and samurai as they all get cut down one after the other. Finally, a dying samurai manages to get the urn to a little orphan boy. Ofuji and Yokichi try to get it from the boy and he runs off, only to meet... Samanosuke.

Only Samanosuke no longer goes by that name, he goes by Tange Sazen. No longer the loyal and noble samurai he was only a year before, he is now bitter, grouchy, and foul mouthed. He is homeless, and supports himself as a hired sword. Sazen helps the boy, Ofuji and Yokichi get away with the urn, and joins up with them. He's pretty much doing all this to stick it to the system that threw him away like yesterday's trash.

Over the course of the movie, Tange Sazen forms sort of a family unit out of these people, and becomes the leader of the Thieve's Temple Gang, a comical group of thieves. He also gets justice for himself, gets the urn into the right hands, and uncovers corruption in the very top level of the government.

Secret of the Urn was a really enjoyable movie. The characters are all likeable. Tange Sazen is clearly a hero of the post-Yojimbo era, the flea-bitten, gruff samurai with a hidden heart of gold. The little boy doesn't care about the urn, he just wants Sazen to teach him the sword. Ofuji is sort of a scheming love interest, where you can't immediately tell if she's loyal to Sazen, or to the urn. Yokichi and the thieves are comic relief. It was interesting to me, because I've never seen a Hideo Gosha film with such light-hearted elements before.

Hideo Gosha's action sequences are always impressive. Unlike many other samurai movie battles, which were slow builds of tension as the fighters size each other up, and then suddenly over as fast as one stroke of the sword, Gosha's were more modern, fast paced, choreographed sword fights. The great twist, of course, is that Tange Sazen is only able to use his left hand. There's a scene where he's holding the urn and tossing it up in the air and mowing a couple guys down before catching it.

I have to admit, there were a couple of dangling plot threads, like when the Urn turns out to be empty with writing inside it, they never really explain what the writing means, and where the million Ryo is. It's surely addressed in some of the many other versions of the story, right? Maybe they didn't explain it all because the story is so well known in Japan that everybody there just knows the answer. I don't know, I'm no Japan expert, just a real big fan of their stuff.

So check this movie out. It's on Netflix for all to watch. And if you're interested in digging deeper for other Hideo Gosha fare, might I recommend the two films he made after this, Samurai Wolf and Samurai Wolf 2? Those are also a whole lot of fun, and have a pretty awesome lead character.

The Sword of Doom

It's been a while since I've done an old samurai movie, hasn't it? To be perfectly honest, that last one I watched, Samurai Rebellion, was such a downer that I was a little reluctant to watch another. Well, enough time has passed for me, so here comes The Sword of Doom, a 1966 classic directed by Kihachi Okamoto.

The Sword of Doom is dark, intense, and brutal, but it's much less of a downer than Samurai Rebellion for one reason: you are not supposed to like the main character. I'm not sure I've seen a samurai movie told from the perspective of such a bad guy before.

The Sword of Doom stars Tatsuya Nakadai, best known to westerners, perhaps, as the gun-wielding villain in Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Nakadai plays Ryunosuke Tatsue, a stone cold bastard of a man who is introduced to us by killing a harmless old grandfather for no real reason (OK, the old man was praying for death at a shrine, but it wasn't Ryunosuke's place to carry it out), and not registering a bit of emotion for doing so.

He goes back to the village, where he is participating in a Kendo tournament. A woman visits him, begging him not to defeat her husband in the battle. He scoffs, claiming swordsmanship is to a man what chastity is to a woman. He tells her he'll lose the battle if she has sex with him. She complies, her husband finds out and divorces her on the spot. The friendly, no-strings-attached tournament battle has now become a grudge match. Ryunosuke kills the guy and is exiled from his clan (killing many more guys on the way). The lady he nailed catches up to him, and says she has nothing and asks to go with him.

Two years later, he's living with her in exile, under assumed names. They have a baby from their initial encounter. He runs into an old servant of his family's who tells him that his own father, on his deathbed, regretting having unleashed such an evil man onto the world, has sent the brother of the man he killed to find and kill him.

There's way more, but I'll stop there. It's pretty complicated, right? I wasn't expecting such a complex story, most samurai movies tend to be pretty straight forward. But it was also engrossing. There are a whole bunch of characters surrounding Ryunosuke and his heinous acts, and they're all connected to each other somehow. It actually feels quite Shakespearean. There's the granddaughter of the man he slaughtered in the opening, her uncle who raised her, and Toshiro Mifune as a master swordsman of another school. Mifune doesn't have a huge role, but it's a very important one, and he owns it, and yes, he does get to mow some people down.

There's a whole lot of slaughter in The Sword of Doom. More than I've seen in most 60's samurai movies, but way, way less than the crazy ones of the 70's. In fact, the last 10 minutes or so is non-stop samurai sword action (my favorite kind of action).

The ending was a little confusing to me at first. There have been all these interwoven, complicated stories going on, and none of them pay off! I thought maybe they were trying to make a statement about something. I then did a little of research on Wikipedia and found out that The Sword of Doom was meant to be the first part in a trilogy of films, based on a classic piece of Japanese literature. The ending was a big cliffhanger that never got resolved. What a letdown it was to get so wrapped up in a story only to find out that I was never going to see it end.

Lack of resolution aside, I kind of loved The Sword of Doom. I got very involved in it, and never had any idea what was going to happen next. The cinematography, sound design, acting, and action scenes were all top notch. And the ending wasn't a total downer, because there wasn't really an ending! I hear the story was adapted a couple more times before this version was made. I'm wondering if those versions were any good, and if I can find them anywhere, so I can get a better idea of the full story.

Samurai Rebellion

Masaki Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion is a powerful 1967 film about the spirit of defiance. It stars the great Marlon Japando himself, Toshiro Mifune as the obedient patron of a samurai family, who, through a series of horrible injustices acted upon his family by his lord, is slowly pushed to act out in open rebellion. Like many samurai films of this era, it's a pretty dark story, and, well, these things just don't tend to end well in Japanese stories.

The story is actually pretty dense. As stated above, Mifune plays Isaburo, a low man on the samurai totem pole who has spent his entire life laying low and doing as he's told. He is regarded as a great swordsman, but has always lacked the drive to really stand out. He married his wife out of duty and political convenience, and has thus spent the last 20+ years in a loveless marriage.

His circumstances change when the lord he serves under demands that his son take a girl as his wife. The girl in question is considered damaged goods, as she was a former concubine of the lord, who, after bearing him a son, physically attacked the lord. Isaburo tries to refuse, despite the political repercussions these actions would have on his standing and his family. His son, raised with his father's sense of duty, steps in and volunteers to take the girl as his wife.

Cut forward two years, Isaburo's son and now daughter-in-law have fallen in love and had a daughter of their own. Things are going well, until the lord's own son and heir dies, and the son the girl bore is now his heir. Seen as dishonorable that the heir to the realm does not have a mother, the lord demands the girl back.

Moved by his son and daughter-in-law's love, and the threat of her being taken away, Isaburo is pushed to take a stand, along with the two of them. This tears his family apart, and puts all of their lives in danger, but for the first time in his life, Isaburo feels alive. I don't want to spoil the whole thing, but it gets pretty dark.

Kobayashi's filmmaking is superb, from the very opening scene, pulling focus from Isaburo's sword in the foreground to Isaburo himself in the background (likening him to his weapon), to his first subconscious act of rebellion, walking off the stone path in his yard, and leaving a trail of footprints in the neatly raked zen garden. The tension builds slowly and then bursts at the end with two bloody, fast-paced action sequences. I also loved the flashback-within-a-flashback utilized when Isaburo's son tells him of when his wife told him her side of the whole ordeal with the lord.

As tragic as Samurai Rebellion is, it does end with a little bit of hope for the audience to latch onto, but man, it's a bit of a tough ride getting there. I don't mind downbeat movies once in a while, but generally, I'm a happy ending kind of guy. I certainly couldn't watch movies like this one all the time. That said, I'm glad I saw it. I just wish they would make a movie called something like "Three Happy Samurai on a Sunshine Mission of Love and Blood-Spurting Decapitations" once in a while.

Good Morning

I feel like we American moviegoers don't see enough of Japan's cinematic gentle side. When we think of Japanese cinema over here, we think of violent Samurai epics, intense, hyper-stylized anime, or men in monster suits pummeling each other over miniature cityscapes. There are, of course, all kinds of movies in Japan; it's just rare that a small, heartwarming domestic comedy finds it's way across the Pacific.

Yasujiro Ozu's 1959 classic, Good Morning, is just that, a gentle satire about communication and the way we all fit together. It follows the day-to-day lives of several families living in a tiny suburban cluster of homes. The wives spend their days gossiping about each other, the husbands fret about their jobs and getting by, and the local boys practice farting on command on the way to and from school.

When I said the living area is tiny, I mean tiny. No room for yards, no driveways, the homes all face each other with nothing but a narrow pathway between them. There is hardly an interior shot in the movie that isn't shot through at least one open doorway, sometimes with more in the frame. With the close proximity, crowded living areas, and paper-thin walls, there's no room for privacy either. The neighbors walk right into each others' houses to talk. One husband mistakenly comes into the wrong house after a night of drinking.

Anyway, the story kicks into gear when one of the families gets a television set, and two of the boys go over to watch sumo wrestling. They decide then and there that they want a TV too. When they ask, their parents say no. When they demand, their parents still say no. When they yell, their parents say no, and be quiet. They then resolve to do just that. Minoru, the older boy, says that adults talk all the time and don't ever say a thing that matters, so he and Isamu, the younger, decide not to speak again until they get that TV.

The two lead boys are excellent. The younger one dresses in the same brown sweater and mimics the older one's every move. I love that little boys loved farting in the 1950's. I had an inkling that that was the case, but you can't find a trace of evidence that people even farted in American movies until, let's see, the earliest movie fart I'd ever heard before this was Blazing Saddles, so let's say 1974?

The movie is loaded with little stories and subplots, all about communication, and sometimes miscommunication. The wives are in a tizzy about a new washing machine that they believe was purchased with stolen dues from the neighborhood group they're in. A pushy salesman won't leave them be. The boys' teacher has a crush on their aunt, and can't express the words for it. Everything and everybody is tied together by life. Ozu expresses this very poetically with an ever-present network of telephone wires in the background. You see them in just about every external shot, crisscrossing the sky.

Another theme of the movie is poking fun at the onset of television. The boys, of course, love it. The father worries that TV is going to create a nation of idiots. This was especially interesting to me, and even prescient, because, in modern times, Japanese culture is probably the most willing in the world to embrace new technologies. The father's hesitance almost marks the end of a generation. Then there's the issue of the boys' insistence that adults make no conversation but meaningless chatter. Isn't that just what the father is trying to prevent by keeping the TV out of the house?

That is the essence of Good Morning. Sometimes more significance can be found in chatter than in meaningful words. Sometimes a world can be communicated by saying nothing at all. Sometimes talking just leads to misunderstandings.

In some ways, Good Morning reminded me of the last movie I reviewed, Summer Wars. Despite also being a hyper-stylized anime, that, too, explored the internal workings of family, and also, mirrored it with a burgeoning new technology. I can't help but wonder if Mamoru Hosoda was in any way influenced by this movie in making his film.

I wholeheartedly recommend Good Morning. It's a nice, simple story with a theme that transcends cultures. I also think it would be a great film to show a class of, say, 10 or 11 year old kids. There's a lot to talk about in it, and it would be a great way to introduce kids to the concept of subtitles, something many Americans grow up way too afraid of. Besides, what 10-year-old doesn't laugh at fart jokes?

Summer Wars

Mamoru Hosoda is quickly cementing himself as one of the best anime directors in Japan. Besides some movies best on cartoon series like Digimon and One Piece, he has directed two of his own films. First came an animated adaptation of a novel called The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which took Japanese moviegoers by surprise upon release, and actually beat a Studio Ghibli film for the top spot in the box office. Now comes Summer Wars, his second feature.

Summer Wars begins by establishing the concept of OZ, which is basically a super-internet, where people have their own avatars and can do anything they want on it. Basically, it's the regular internet, made much more visually interesting. It follows Kenji, a teenaged math genius, who agrees to go on a long weekend trip with Natsuki, to see her extremely large, old, and respected family on her grandmother's 90th birthday. While there, using OZ on his phone, he is tricked into giving his avatar to an experimental virus, who then uses it to take over the internet, and wreak havoc on the world outside. Kenji and Natsuki's family must work together with their not inconsiderable resources (one happens to sell powerful computers, one is a government agent, etc.) to contain or defeat this virus that Kenji mistakenly let loose on the world.

Don't let the poster mislead you. More of the movie takes place in the real world than with the avatars in OZ. In fact, the Japanese poster is, unsurprisingly, a much more accurate representation of the movie.



Something I really like about Hosoda's first two films is that he takes these out there science fiction concepts and imbues them with emotional realism. The fate of the world depends on what goes down on OZ, basically an abstract dimension, and while Kenji and a few members of Natsuki's family spend much of the movie trying to solve this, the rest of the family continues going on with their day to day life. The OZ situation just feels like a game to them. One member can't tear herself away from a televised high school championship baseball game that her son is pitching in; to her, the fate of the world depends on this. In the end, the movie is a pretty good, uncynical portrayal of the way a family comes together and supports each other in a time of both emotional and external crisis.

The OZ stuff is visually spectacular. The world is populated with all kinds of avatars, from two-dimensional 8-bit people to animal people to floating logos. It's moderated by two giant floating whales named John and Yoko. There are all kinds of things to do, like games, shops, and classes. Very cool world-within-a-world. I also like that it's not one of those sci-fi movie where the characters jack their brain into the net and experience it first hand. What we're seeing as viewers is just a more vivid cinematic representation of what these characters are doing on their computers.

I liked Summer Wars about just as much as I liked The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Mamoru Hosoda is a filmmaker worth looking into. Both of his films so far are pleasant, positive science fiction metaphors for how we deal with the obstacles we encounter every day.

Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter

Sometimes, it's 2:00 in the morning on a Saturday, and I find myself scouring Netflix for something to watch. At these times, stumbling across a title like "Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter" is a message from the cinema gods: WATCH ME.

Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, translated from the Japanese Noraneko Rokku, is the third part in a five movie series about a street gang of tough-as-nails girls, led by Mako, played by the legendary cult movie actress, Meiko Kaji. This is the series that made her a star in Japan and cemented her status for the rest of the 1970's.

We open on the gang of girls robbing someone at knife point and celebrating at a bar. They're drinking and smoking and talking about sex, so we know they're tough. One of the girls in the gang challenges Mako, their leader, and they go outside and have a knife fight. Mako wins, of course, and stays behind as the girls go back to their business. While laying outside, she runs into a man. They have instant chemistry, and she finds out he's looking for his sister. She and the gang decide to help him on his quest.

Meanwhile, there's a rival gang of men targeting "halfbreeds", which is never specified, but I think might be people of mixed Japanese-Korean descent.

The plot doesn't matter with this movie, though. What matters is how badass Meiko Kaji is. She's totally awesome. At one point, she's lured away from a party by a man, who tells her he just wanted to get her out of there so his men could rape her gang. Not only that, but they'll blame her for abandoning them. Well, she comes to their rescue, busting back into the party armed with a bunch of Molotov cocktails, firebombing the place.

Meiko Kaji is the heroine of one my favorite Japanese movies ever made, the revenge thriller, Lady Snowblood. It was much of Quentin Tarantino's basis for the story of his Kill Bill series. In Stray Cat Rock, she looks totally sexy and stylish and iconic. I mean, look at her:

She's the one in the awesome hat. Seriously, that hat is amazing! I could write a review about that hat. And the suit too!

As exploitative as that poster and that title look, the movie is actually pretty tame, content-wise. Not much violence, no nudity, or very little, I've possibly forgotten some. There's sex, but not very graphic. Maybe it was enough of a shock in Japanese culture watching women act like this. There's pretty much an entire girl-gang genre in 70's Japanese films. These weren't even the originals.

There's some pretty cool stuff targeting the Japanese youth culture, circa 1970, too. A girl group performs several great musical numbers at the club. The music in general is pretty great.

As much as I'm talking up Meiko Kaji, I didn't think the movie was as great as I'd hoped it would be. I can't tell if it's because it was after 2:00 in the morning and I was tired, but I wasn't as into the story as I would have liked. Also, the fact that it's the third in a series, and I hadn't seen the first two leads me to believe that there were maybe some established ties between the characters that I was unaware of. Maybe I would have cared more if I had seen those first. I might hunt those down in the future.

Still, it was worth watching, if only because I saw Meiko Kaji in that hat! That hat!

Tokyo Drifter

Tokyo Drifter is another cinematic oddity from director Seijun Suzuki, made in 1966, not long before his super-weird Branded to Kill got him pretty much thrown out of the studio system. This one is not as weird as Branded was, but it's still pretty weird, and apparently, the studio revoked his privileges to film in color after they saw it.

From what I gather about Suzuki, he was employed by Toho Studios to mostly make standard low-budget Yakuza crime movies. After about 40 pictures, though, he must have got pretty bored, so he started breaking rules. His movies got more and more surreal and absurdist, while still using the framework of the crime genre to tell his stories. Critics apply a lot of analysis to the wackiness in these movies, positing that there's some sort of commentary being made on the crime genre itself. I'm not too sure. I kind of think he was just doing it with no intention other than to keep himself interested in his job.

The movie opens in black and white, with our hero, Tetsuya, a former hitman, taking a beating from a group of Yakuza thugs. They want to employ him, but he's gone straight. To prove this, he refuses to fight. Waiting in a car is the crime boss, saying it's only a matter of time before he gets back up and returns to form. Then there's a jarring cut into a color shot of Tetsuya standing up and shooting a gun. Just as quickly, it reverts to black and white for the rest of the scene, as the beating continues.

After this scene, the rest of the movie is in color. Very vibrant color, in fact. Suzuki is clearly having a lot of fun with it. The interior set designs have a very Warholian pop-art kind of feel. Tetsuya is identified by a sky blue suit, though it occasionaly changes to other light shades, and ultimately becomes white, in the good vs. evil showdown at the end.

Tetsuya's boss sees that the Yakuza is going to keep dogging them for Tetsuya, so he sends him away. He becomes the Tokyo Drifter, roaming Japan, and evading various attempts on his life. Eventually he comes back to Tokyo for the big final battle. None of this really matters, though. What matters is the weird stuff. Suzuki throws in a wacky, slapstick saloon fight straight out of a Hollywood western. There's a scene where the Drifter suddenly breaks into song while walking in the snow.

The final battle is set in a strange room washed entirely in black, with the exception of a statue holding some glowing red light thing. That is, until Tetsuya shows up, entering through a white tunnel, clad entirely in white. The lights go up in the room and suddenly everything is white but the bad guys in black. It's all pretty cool.

OK, it's not all pretty cool. The weird stuff is pretty cool, but there's some pretty draggy stuff in there to advance the plot. I could relate to Tetsuya, because at times, I found myself drifting too. Still, it has a short, 80-minute running time, so it didn't have a chance to get too plodding. The action sequences make the movie entertaining enough, but the interest in Branded to Kill is found in watching the director trying to break out of the claustrophobic box of genre conventions that he was trapped in.

Gojira

I didn't even take into consideration the recent events in Japan when I decided to watch the original 1954 Gojira, directed by Ishiro Honda. It was late at night, and I was looking for a movie to watch on Netflix. But once it started, it was hard not to think of all the terrible things happening there right now.

By the way, I'm calling it Gojira, but if you want to read it as "Godzilla", that's cool. I just like Gojira better. The way it sounds. Godzilla to me reeks of a bunch of cultureless old white guys in an office trying to come up with a title for a Japanese monster movie that would A: imply the movie will put the fear of God into a 1950's audience, and B: be easy enough to dub into the mouths of the Japanese actors.

This version is the original Japanese version, with subtitles, not the release Americans are familiar with with the white guy edited into the movie.

Okay, back to the movie.

So, Gojira is a live dinosaur that had been living in the Pacific, mutated by radiation from nuclear bomb testing. I'm sure we all know that. He stomps all over Japan causing destruction everywhere. And as cheap as the model Tokyo sets look, you know what? It's pretty stirring. This was a film made when the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh on the nation's collective minds. It's a movie made by people who remember. There's one shot after Gojira goes back into the sea, where we just get a view of the wreckage of Tokyo. It looks like the sky is on fire.

Another fascinating facet of Gojira is the way it is also serving to educate. There are scenes of exposition that are scientists literally instructing the audience of the effects radiation can have on land, the world around us, and living things.

The most interesting human in the movie is Serizawa, a brilliant young scientist with an eyepatch who has invented a device that can destroy Gojira with a power equal to that of an atomic bomb. He feels guilty having created such a device, and wants to make sure it never falls into the hands of anyone else.

Overall, I'm not sure if Gojira was a great movie or not. It's very interesting from a historical perspective, and I don't think it's importance can be denied. And it's certainly a good deal of fun at times . But there are actually some pretty long stretches where the movie just dies, and some of the shots are so dark that it's hard to figure out what's happening in them. It's still worth watching, though, and it does stay with you. B


Hey, March is over! I just thought I'd tack on a little update on how the blog is going. I'm quite happy with it. My hit count is going up a little, but not really that much. Obviously, I get more hits on current movies, which I'm slowly beginning to see more of. We're going to see a bunch of new stuff in the next couple weeks.

I think my writing has gotten better. Sure, sometimes it's not up to snuff. Sometimes I can't think of anything to say about a movie, but I force myself to write on it anyway. Sometimes I'm watching something on TV while I'm writing, or I wait too long to write it and the movie isn't fresh on my mind. Hopefully there will be less of that, but I can't guarantee it.

Thanks for reading, all (on average) 12 of you! Comments are encouraged, but not required.