7 Days film posterImagine an intense French version of 2009’s Law Abiding Citizen; with less Jamie Foxx and more insane torture sequences, and you will get Seven Days. When a surgeon’s daughter is raped and murdered, he kidnaps her assailant and tortures him for seven days. The set-up is pretty basic, but it’s all about the execution (uh thank you) for a film centered on wretchedness. The film manages to come up with some original methods of maltreatment, including sphincter-relocation… but I will let you figure that one out on your own. The pacing is solid and it does not shy away from its major themes. Check it out, and let me know what you thought.
Election film posterIf you can’t tell, I geek out on Asian cinema, specifically their gangster pictures. Yakuza and triad films usually follow the same basic plot path of any other gangster picture, but always seem more appealing. Election is one of those films. When a local Chinese triad elects its newest biannual chairman, the symbolic baton that is usually passed on has been stolen. Badass-machete-wielding triad thugs have to go find it and bring it back. That’s the movie, at least what you need to know. Its not the best film, but its one of the better genre films on Instant Queue right now, so check it out and let me know what you think.
The More the Merrier is a 1946 film that turned out to be a lot more entertaining than I had anticipated. The story is charming considering how tame is. It focuses on what could be a giant sex-scandal (remember this is 1946), but ultimately tells a sweet, yet hurried love story. For anyone who digs classic romantic comedies, or finds pre-60’s American morality interesting, try to catch up with The More the Merrier.
***No trailer, but I thought it was pretty funny that this picture came up when I googled "The More the Merrier." And yes, that is a woman with 3 breasts***
A misunderstanding begets bloodshed, and so the world turns in a Takashi Kitano gangster film. It may be an impossible task trying to decode the plot from this exercise in bloodletting, and in fact I have a feeling Kitano wants it that way. I could tell you the basics, that there are two feuding yakuza families that are instructed to kill each other over what was essentially a misunderstanding at a strip club, but I promise you it does not matter.
What does matter is Kitano’s new genre film Outrage has a point, it wants you to walk away feeling something. I am just not sure what the feeling is supposed to be. With an influx of attention over the passed decade thanks to overseas releases of films he has directed and starred, Kitano has come out with a movie that seems to be laughing at anyone who dares to enjoy it. Feeling more like a satire of the ultraviolent Japanese and Chinese gangster films that have flooded American shores of the last decade, Outrage cynically paints its yakuza tropes by the numbers. We are provided the banal yakuza gang, strapped with samurai swords and automatic weapons, dressed in the same black suit and tie ensemble seen in every gangster film since Tarantino took over.Outrage poster
Outrage’s plot is more of a means to an end. It provides Kitano with enough structure to facilitate his main ambition, mutilation. When an opposing family blackmails a horny yakuza clan member for $600,000 yen, apologies must be made. Kitano it seems only accepts body parts in exchange for forgiveness. The guilty clan member of the opposing family must offer his finger to the offended mob boss. There is no pan of the camera, Kitano wants us to look because he knows deep down, the audience wants to watch. Offered only a dull box cutter, the poor gangster punishingly pushes the weak blade deeper into his flesh until the finger is completely separated.
Darrell Williams Davis breaks down the violent genre in a more traditional sense in his article Japan: Cause for (Cautious) Optimism. In the essay, Davis describes yakuza pictures to all be invariably structured the same, even comparing them to classic American genre films, “Like westerns, yakuza pictures are ‘rationalized,’ with their standard moments of ‘return,’ ‘identification,’ and naturally ‘revenge”(201cac). So, if a genre can become as structured and rote as the yakuza genre has in the last 20-years, it is easier to understand Kitano’s position. The genre that made him famous, that he made famous, has been diluted into a sopping puddle of blood and clichés. How better to retaliate than removing the “rationalization,” and instead incorporate a convoluted mess of a plot. By eliminating the “rationalization” Kitano can build a film around the “return,” the “identification” and most importantly, the “revenge.” The revenge scenes in Outrage come quickly and fiercely. One gang member after another is sliced, diced, shot, or chopped in any number of delectably violent methods. In the more traditional yakuza films, “Climactic vendettas would be carried out after a series of escalating humiliations” (201cac). Outrage is built around escalating humiliations, both for the gangsters on screen and the audience. What I mean by that is Kitano gave fans the type of movie they really want. Not the classic yakuza picture that sticks to a samurai code of honor, but instead a film that focuses all on revenge. Is the audience intelligent enough to understand what they are watching is not a yakuza picture at all, but rather some exercise in maniacal breakdown?
After the fingers have been severed, and the teeth have been pulled out, all we are left with is a movie about nothing but torture. The experience is uninspired, recycled, and mostly dull, as dull as the box cutter employed in the first scene of mutilating excess. Sadly, everyone loses, the audience and Kitano included. Outrage could have been a satirical look into not only the genre, but fans of yakuza pictures as well. The film devolved into less philosophy about the nature of sociopathic behavior, and became a heartless killing machine, thoughtlessly punishing everyone involved.
Aftershock film poster Xiaogang Feng’s 2010 epic disaster film Aftershock is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. I sat down in the South Korean theater prepared for a gruesome reenactment of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in the Rolland Emmerich style, but was instead duped into a two-hour melodrama usually reserved for the Lifetime channel.
Aftershock opens with a swarm of dragonflies forcing their way through a portion of Tangshan, China. Desperately trying to escape the impending devastation, these insects are perhaps the only warning to the Tangshan community of the pressure slowly building beneath their feet. The film dismisses the swarm, but introduces Yuan Ni, a mother of twins Fang Deng and Fang Da, and her working class husband. After a few brief moments with the family, the fated earthquake hits with complete recklessness. The small town’s meager buildings begin to crumble, as if made of breadcrumbs. Hearing the terrified screams of their children, the parents make their way into the collapsing apartment building when a block of cement lands atop the father and instantly ends his life. Yuan Ni, without a second to consider her husband’s fate, presses on to find her children. She does find them, trapped precariously underneath what was once their ceiling. It is here Yuan Ni must make a choice between saving only one of her children, and with this choice the film actually starts proper.
The earthquake is over quickly, but takes many lives, and destroys countless more for generations to come. It is filmed with respect and does not selfishly sacrifice integrity for false heroics. I could only imagine what this sequence would turn into if helmed by a Hollywood director like Emmerich or Michael Bay. Unfortunately (and this may say more about me than about the film), once the earthquake lost its momentum, so to did this film lose my interest. There is a reason why the ship sinks at the end of Titanic.Aftershock film poster
Imagine if in Titanic (1997) the movie began with the doomed sinking of the ship. The first 20 minutes would be filled with spectacle and excitement, and then we come to find out the rest of the film is solely concerned with how the sinking affected those aboard. We would then be forced to watch characters we do not care about miserably meander throughout their existence, without having any emotional connection to them or the terrible event that devastated their lives. Aftershock, for me, unfortunately fell into this trap. After the excitement of the opening scene, I was waiting for the film to build up to a moment that matched its exhilaration, but all I was offered was scene after scene of women crying. I love a good cry in the theater, but I felt no emotional connection with Yuan Ni or her children throughout the picture. I was enthralled by their survival, but I was left wanting by the outcome of their lives. Why did Feng choose to follow this family’s struggle for his film? I am sure this movie could have kept my attention if one of the characters actually did something. Other than fight with one another and cry that is.
I know I am in the minority in regards to my feelings for Aftershock. I saw it with a packed house, including several other Chapman students and from what I could tell everyone loved it. They were sucked in by the horrible decision Yuan Ni had to make in the first act, and were captivated by the life Yuan and her children led after the quake. It reminds me of my experience with Sopyonje earlier this semester. I was physically uncomfortable by the gut-wrenching boredom I felt while watching the South Korean classic in class. I can appreciate the cultural relevancy of both films, but perhaps it is that culture that alienated me in each experience. Both films, Sopyonje and Aftershock, are concerned with the existence and the outcome of a brother and sister. Each set of siblings is forced into a lifestyle they are unfamiliar with, and in both films the children must overcome their respective hardships and attempt reunions in the final act. These films have many themes and plot points similar to each other, but they also have one other thing in common: I hated them!
I am sure there is some psychological reason I have shut myself off from enjoying films like Aftershock and Sopyonje. Perhaps it is because of my upbringing? Yeah! I remember my mom holding me too tight while she cried, forcing me to watch Terms of Endearment with her on Sunday mornings while she slowly stroked my hair. It has to be my mother’s fault that I am so emotionally closed off! Man, I feel a lot better now, thank you so much Xiaogang Feng! Not only have you introduced me to Asian blockbuster cinema has nothing to do with ancient China or Japan, but you also taught me something about myself. Great, now I am crying!
Takashi Miike’s newest film Thirteen Assassins is perhaps the director’s most violent outing, yet traditional (dare I say normal) enough to convince this viewer that the divisive filmmaker may be evolving into a mainstream auteur. What he creates is a beautiful meditation on the samurai code, its shortcomings and facades, and dares to question the Bushido’s demand of loyalty to one’s master.
13 Assassins PosterSet during a time of peace in 19th century Feudal Japan, Thirteen Assassins tells a common “men on a mission” genre story while at the same time conforming to Miike’s more twisted inclinations. When the absurdly evil younger brother of the Shogun tortures, maims, rapes, and murders one too many innocents, an out of work samurai is hired to form a posse and assassinate the sociopath. What follows resembles what perhaps the unwanted lovechild of Miike’s Ichi the Killer and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan might look like.
Thirteen Assassins was the first film I watched while attending the Pusan International Film Festival and it was easily my favorite film of the show. It fills Miike’s disturbance quota while at the same time producing one the greatest action set pieces I have ever seen. The last 45-minutes of the movie are dedicated to the assassination attempt; a non-stop samurai showdown complete with booby traps, trapdoors, and blazing stampeding steer. Having been weaned on his more deranged films, Miike has successfully made a Japanese epic that is similar in tone and pacing to his 1999 breakout film Audition, while at the same time remaining mostly accessible to a mainstream audience.13 Assassins
I do not want to give a false impression that this film is devoid of Miike’s usual bloody flair. The evil Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira comes from a long line of unhinged Miike villains. His is a dysfunction that leaps past frightening (like when he rapes a servant and murders her husband), unassumingly crosses the considerably heinous (employing a child’s body for archery practice), and ends up somewhere around completely absurd (slicing off the arms, legs, and tongue of a female servant, and then forcing her to keep working). There is no doubt that Matsudaira deserves to die, but his lunacy is so obscene you almost have to respect it . . . almost!
In Mika Ko’s article The Break-up of the national body: Cosmetic multiculturalism and films of Mikke Takashi, the author examines the idea of the body-metaphor within the director’s films. Ko explains, “…the relationship of the body (both real body and filmic body) to a myth or ideology of ‘Japaneseness” (35). She goes on to relate this metaphor to the ancient kokutai ideology, which was created in the 19th century, claiming that all Japanese are united and linked by blood to a single imperial family. When considering the graphic imagery of the mutilated bodies in Miike’s Thirteen Assassins, I argue the film offers these scenes as an allegory to the unity of the once noble and mighty samurai and the feudal system they honored. There are two scenes in particular that I feel best fit into this allegory. The first scene was previously mentioned, when Lord Matsudaira cruelly cut off a servant girl’s arms, legs, and tongue. This removal of each limb could symbolize the systematic dismantling of the samurai way, the code they live by, and the seemingly blind obedience and loyalty they have for their masters. The second scene takes place during the film’s second act, and involves a voluntary allowance of sodomy. The man in the receiving position is not a samurai, but a village operator that had offered his services to the samurai. The man performing the act was the final thirteenth assassin, a forest dweller that begged to tag along with the other twelve samurai, although he was not one himself. I feel this fits with Ko’s body-metaphor simply because of the direct violation involved. The operator, not a samurai but still a supporter of the “old-school” way of the samurai, is literally objectified and injected with this “new” type of warrior. The woodsman lives by no code, he has no master, he only looks out for himself (at least at first) and only wants to joint the fray because he is interested in a good fight. This man that follows no code is regarded as an equal to the samurai, and it is this changing of the guard connected with the sexual intrusion associated with sodomy that I feel best ties into the body-metaphor.
13 Assassins (what, you don't read Japanese?)I cannot wait to watch this film again, and I hope it receives a theatrical release so I may experience it with a crowd one more time. It is quintessential Takashi Miike, and yet proves that even an auteur that has directed as many films as he has can still mature and improve his trade. Thirteen Assassins was a fantastic way to start off a film festival as huge as PIFF, and the best way I could have kicked off my weeklong adventure in South Korea.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 11:10PM 
7 Days film posterImagine an intense French version of 2009’s Law Abiding Citizen; with less Jamie Foxx and more insane torture sequences, and you will get Seven Days. When a surgeon’s daughter is raped and murdered, he kidnaps her assailant and tortures him for seven days. The set-up is pretty basic, but it’s all about the execution (uh thank you) for a film centered on wretchedness. The film manages to come up with some original methods of maltreatment, including sphincter-relocation… but I will let you figure that one out on your own. The pacing is solid and it does not shy away from its major themes. Check it out, and let me know what you thought.
