Author: tedmills

Dir: Akihito Shiota
1999
A tender coming of age story masked as a psycho-sexual treatise on sado-masochism…or vice versa? Akihito Shiota’s film is based on a manga by the same name, and came out in 1999. I got to watch it on a VHS copy taped off a Chinese VCD (with English subs).
The film starts off with a typical young high-school love relationship beginning during the spring semester. The nervous few months of Takuya and Satsuki’s relationship rang very true and for a brief moments I felt like I was watching a very good realist film (it certainly brought me back to memories of my first girlfriend in 1986). But soon after she gives up her virginity to him, she discovers his true fetish.
Remarkably, Aota doesn’t push the switch in our faces, and doesn’t try to make us feel bad in a true miserablist way (such as a Solondz would do). Satsuki is pissed, but Takuya is persistent and won’t give up after being dumped and humiliated. In fact, he likes being humiliated, and Satsuki begins to realize she loves to humiliate.
By the end, Shiota even brings us back to a world of innocence, only shifted to accomodate a relationship beyond the norm of society, and does so without reducing anybody down to something less than human. The movie is a good lesson for filmmakers in how to explore the most outre material without resorting to snarky nihilism. Fascinating.
Equally fascinating: lead actress Tsugumi, with her moony face and a bullet-bra that couldn’t help reminding me of the cold war.

Dir: Hideo Nakata
1996
Got around to watching this after having friends tape it off the Sundance Channel last year, during their “Japanese Horror” week, where I was able to tape “Cure” and “Spiral” as well. “Don’t Look Up,” given the absolute straight-to-landfill title of “Ghost Actress” for some reason, is Hideo Nakata’s first film and the one that presumably got him the gig to make the original “Ring” film.
At a very speedy 75 minutes, it’s more like an extended TV episode than a movie, but there are plenty of chilliing moments here, almost from the beginning, when the mysterious outtakes of an old movie turn up superimposed on recent footage shot at a studio. These initial scenes, when the crew watch the dailies in silence, are very effective. The look of terror in the actresses eyes when she glimpses something awful offscreen shocked even me. The movie deserved to have a script that fleshed out the characters a bit more, and music that matched its mood of creeping menace. Instead there’s some terrible cod-reggae that pops up in all the wrong parts.
The parallels between this film and Ring are certainly there in the mysterious footage and the slow unconvering of the truth as well as the subtle way that Nakata has history double over on itself. Much more could have been made with theme of acting and identity, and of the film that’s actually being shot, the story which seems to be about supressing the horror of the Second World War. The ghost is particularly frightening, especially because it doesn’t give you all the goods at once. At first it looks harmless, then the more we see it, the more we want to look away. That’s good–most filmmakers would give you the money shot immediately.
On a greater level, the reason why Japanese horror is so effective is that it really is about death. American horror isn’t about death in any tangible sense, just artifice and actors exiting the screen in spectacular ways. The recent Cabin Fever was awful because it couldn’t even begin to look at disease and death in any real way.
Anyway, the film so freaked out Jessica, who takes these ghost stories so seriously that she can’t even say the word (she says “G” instead), that she refused to speak to me about it afterwards.

Dir: Olivier Assayas
2002
Certainly one of the strangest films I’ve seen this year, I caught this in Pasadena at the Laemmle, sure that it will never come to Santa Barbara. What starts out as a chilly tale of big business quickly turns into something broader in scheme. This isn’t a film about pawns caught in capitalism’s game, this film is capitalism itself. It’s a relentless blurring of identity until characters get reduced to units to be fucked or killed. Connie Nielson plays Diane, who at the beginning of the film, drugs her coworker, an event that allows her to take her place in a multinational corporation that is shuttling back and forth between Tokyo and Paris to buy shares in an anime company specializing in porn cartoons and 3-D CG porn. There’s Hervé (Charles Berling), who Diane may be involved with, and a subordinate, Elise (Chloe Sevigny), who hates her guts. Then there’s the American representatives, one of whom is Gina Gershon. There’s a secret website called “The Hellfire Club” that offers live snuff feeds for a price.
About halfway through I kind of gave up on the plot and, like giving up on trying to pick out notes and melody in a wash of feedback, just let the movie roll over me. (Soundtrack is by Sonic Youth, and I’m glad I saw this in the theater, as the effective sound levels are something that would get me evicted.)
The film is intentionally hard to listen to, hard to watch, and hard to follow. Here and there you start to pick up on clues that Assayas has left. Why so many shots of credit card machines? Why a scene similar to the hotel scene in Assayas’ own “Irma Vep”–and why does Diane’s costume in that scene return as a PVC Emma Peel suit? (Emma Peel–Avengers…wasn’t one of the episodes in which she nearly got tortured to death called the Hellfire Club? And wasn’t the Hellfire Club a front for the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the XMen comic book…and didn’t Storm get captured by them? And doesn’t a character at the end of the movie request a victim dress up like Storm? And by making all these connections, does that make me closer to an understanding, or does that make me a sad, sad man?)
Nobody has any background or connection to anybody or anything. Though the movie teems with lascivious sex, there’s barely any to be had, and nothing to come of it in terms of humanity.
“demonlover” alludes to the website, but also to the multi-phallused and tentacled demons of Japanese porn anime, able to send out their tendrils to fill every orifice of their young nubile victims. Tattoo “21st Century Capitalism” across the demon’s chest and you have a rough and ready metaphor of the film.
Following up, there’s a short essay over at The Film Journal on the film that brings up an interesting point regarding video games and the scene in which Nielson fights Gershon (a “level boss” in videogame terms). That the film is one big video game is suggested, and reminded me of my friend’s worry that in fact The Matrix Revolutions will end with this po-mo joke (they wouldn’t be so blatant or so bold, methinks, but the trailer for that film looks like the makers are cashing in their chips for a full-on Death Star like battle to the death).
In a later conversation with Jon, I added that those critics who think the whole thing is a videogame fall into the same apathetic trap as the teenager at the end–that nobody is worth caring about because they’re on the computer screen.

Dir: Michael Mann
1986
I picked up the two-disc DVD of this at the rental store, and made the boneheaded mistake of watching the original, clumsily edited version, completely oblivious to the fact that the other disc contained the remastered director’s cut. And after two hours of “Manhunter” I wasn’t going to watch it again.
A lot of critics regard this film highly, and like to drag it out in reference when they want to go on about how much they didn’t like “Hannibal” or whatever. And I can’t really say too much not having seen the director’s cut, but here Mann plays the serial killer genre as a straight police procedural, with much focus on the job of the profiler, played here by William Petersen, who often pounds his fist and addresses windows or televisions, vowing that he’ll find the killer before he does it again. Showing a profiler coming to conclusions in his head, showing the thought process itself, is difficult, but Mann does it well in a scene with Petersen and two television monitors. The music here is all wrong, either naff Yamaha DX-7 wanking or blaring “hard rock” stupidity.
I didn’t feel particularly gripped by the film, and the ending really fell apart in the editing room. But who knows what the director’s cut was like?
Brian Cox was okay as Hannibal Lecter, but maybe a bit too “normal”. He felt more like an imprisoned mafioso than a cannibal serial killer.