Dry Ice Factory

So I was watching this movie, aka Invasion of Astro-Monster, aka Godzilla vs. Monster Zero last night. Yes, it's a Godzilla movie, but the interest to me was that it was mid-'60s science fiction with cool '60s alien outfits and flying saucers and the usual great Toho miniatures and special effects. You see, there's another planet, called Planet X, lurking behind Jupiter, and the aliens who live there want to conquer Earth, but they tell us they are our friends, they want to help us cure cancer. When it got to the point where these clearly evil aliens (just look at them!) were professing their friendship to Earth, I immediately thought of Tim Burton's science fiction comedy, Mars Attacks! (1996). Croaking in an evil alien voice, "We come in peace. We are your friends," is a favorite past-time of mine. But check this out, the aliens from Planet X are of course technologically superior to Earth people, and when they finally stoop to conquer, what is it that finally defeats them? SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS: An irritating noise developed by a nerd inventor who thinks it will be useful as a personal alarm for women in trouble. This idea is treated as a laughingstock by everybody but his loyal girlfriend throughout the movie, but when the noise is played in the vicinity of the evil aliens, they shriek and fall to the ground writhing in agonizing pain! This is clearly where Burton got his idea for using Slim Whitman's "Indian Love Call" as a weapon against the aliens in his movie. Why, Wikipedia even reminds me that there's a scene in Mars Attacks! where the Martians are watching a Godzilla movie as they orbit Earth. QED.

Anyway, this important matter of influence aside, I was rather proud of myself when I saw the Japanese title of this movie on IMDb last night and recognized that the English title has nothing to do with it. I'd previously seen "daisenso" in the movie title, Yôkai daisensô, which is translated as The Great Yokai War. So this one would be something like The Great Kaiju War, which would make sense, since it features three kaiju (or monsters), Godzilla, Rodan, and King Ghidorah in a two-on-one battle. And sure enough, one of the alternate titles listed on IMDb is The Great Monster War. You see, Godzilla is teaching me Japanese!

Well, Mind Game is a head trip, there's no doubt about it. It's only available on a Japanese DVD, but as Ed Halter says in the Village Voice, "undoubtedly there are American otakus popping this one into multi-region DVD players right now amid the glorbeling of bong hits." You looking at me, Ed? I ain't no otaku, man!

The movie is based on the manga by Robin Nishi, which also happens to be the name of the protagonist, and there's an air of the confessional about some aspects of the story. I actually find the semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young man aspects a bit tedious. The first half hour falls into the genre of the fantasy of excruciating humiliation, never one of my favorites. Still, there's enough clever perspective to keep things rolling, and the second half of the movie is an amazing fantasia. Opening and ending the movie are two montages of scattered imagery that are connected to the main story, but after two viewings I'm still not sure how or if it all fits together. Not sure the story is supposed to make logical sense, for that matter. It's another adventure into dreamland, like Paprika.

The plot (SPOILERS ho!), such as it is, involves a twenty-year-old otaku and manga-artist-wannabe who pines uselessly for his beautiful, breasty childhood girlfriend. An encounter with two yakuza in a restaurant ends with him getting killed (in an extremely humiliating fashion), confronting G-O-D in the afterworld, and then apparently returning to life for a second try. This is where the movie really takes off, as Robin, his beloved, and her sister embark on a wild chase that leads them into the belly of a whale and a remarkable inner world.

Whether anything in the latter part of the film is real or not is hard to say and probably beside the point. The philosophy exhorted is basically "seize the day," which is banal enough in its own way, but the sheer vital exuberance of the visual creativity on display is a winning embodiment of the idea. As in FLCL (2000) -- to which this film may well be a response -- the animation style is all over the place, changing rapidly from scene to scene and even within scenes. There is a brilliant sex scene in which the bodies turn into abstract rivers of flowing, gushing paint, intercut with shots of a cheerful cartoon train busting through barrier after barrier on the way up a mountainside. The sequence inside the whale seems to be all about the creative process, and we get the feeling that we are exploring the pre-rational depths of the artist's mind, that it is exploding onto the screen in front of us, unleashed, primal, protean, but at the same time delicate, earthy, sweet, and funny.

The main problem with the movie is that Robin is not a very interesting character to hang this all on, and the philosophy of life he develops is not very profound. But the fountain of brilliant, playful imagery and the sense of creative possibility at the core of the film more than make up for it. If I were a true otaku, I'd probably go through the final montage frame by frame to try to figure out how each image connects to the main story. Hm, that's not a bad idea ...

holyoutlaw came over last night with the DVD of Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance, and we ordered a large Agog from Pagliacci and sat back to watch the carnage. I can see that the image of a samurai pushing a pram has a built in frisson. The bit where he has to have sex with the prostitute to save her life was a masterstroke of something or another. Not wish-fulfillment exactly -- or perhaps it is that exactly, but it's so odd and unexpected. I mean, did Clint Eastwood ever have to do that? The movie is full of odd little details like that, amidst the more formulaic business of vengeance and limb-lopping. I enjoyed it. And I immediately started thinking about which exploitation samurai film I should shower on Luke in return. I'm thinking Samurai Reincarnation, which features a Yagyu in a different role. (The Yagyu Clan are the bad guys in Lone Wolf and Cub.)

Continuing a mini-exploration of Japanese Pop-Art films of the '60s (I also watched Seijun Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter (1966) again), I return to this minor gem of cool style and killer female ninjas, Black Tight Killers. I've watched it two-and-a-half times now, and I still don't really know what the plot is. A war photographer named Hondo gets involved with a stewardess and all hell breaks loose when she's kidnapped by the female ninjas, who are the titular black tight killers. This movie just explodes with artificial color and crazy camera angles and go go dancing. The theme song is a corker. These '60s Pop-Art movies always have the greatest theme songs and credit sequences (see also Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik (1968).) Everything is about the style, with swank furniture and cars with fins and, oooh, the colors! There's a great dream sequence where the female lead is chased by the ninjas through lurid colorscapes that keep tearing away like a paper backdrop and revealing a new saturated colorscape behind. Everything looks extremely artificial, like it's all an off-shoot of the "Broadway Melody Ballet" from Singin' in the Rain (1952). To the extent that there's a plot, it seems to be yet another spoof on the spy craze of the era, with various agents and counteragents chasing after some lost Okinawan gold or something.

The director, Yasuharu Hasebe, worked with Seijun Suzuki, and the cinematographer, Kazue Nagatsuka, also worked on a number of Suzuki's films, so that could be why it feels similar to something like Tokyo Drifter, although this movie is even campier in its spoofing. Hasebe went on to make violent sexual exploitation movies in the '70s, which isn't my cuppa, but the Stray Cat Rock series sounds interesting. The one that's available on Region 1 DVD, Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter apparently also involves a girl gang and explores racial issues. I'm very curious about the latter, as Kinji Fukasaku also touches on the issue, particularly in the semi-Pop-Art Blackmail Is My Life (1968), which features a character whose father was a Black American soldier. The same actor plays a tragic mulatto of sorts in Fukasaku's Black Rose Mansion. Seems that Japanese cinema was beginning to delve into the troubled waters of Japanese racial attitudes around this time.

Well, I'm certainly developing a taste for '60s Pop-Art films. I like the heavily stylized lysergic hyper-artificiality of them. More please! (Just ordered the Stray Cat Rock DVD.)

Yesterday I joined about a dozen of my neighbors in landscaping the two new traffic circles on 36th Street. These concrete, dirt-filled circles in the middle of intersections are intended to slow down the traffic, and hanging out in the middle of them certainly teaches one how much traffic there is in this neighborhood these days! So I got to meet some of my neighbors, and we planted a bunch of native plants, including a Western Red Cedar in the big circle in Woodland Park Avenue at the base of the hill. I worked for about three hours, including some pretty heavy physical labor, and my legs are sore today, although not as bad as I thought they might be. Thankfully, my back is fine despite much bending and some gang-lifting of heavy trees.

Then I watched the University of Oregon lose to the University of Oklahoma at football, boo hiss argh! Well, except that after I gave up on the game when Oregon went down by 13 points in the fourth quarter, they apparently managed some kind of miracle comeback in the last minute and won 34-33 when Oklahoma missed a field goal as time ran out. Don't think my heart could have stood the excitement, so it's probably just as well that I gave up.

Instead, I watched a very odd Japanese movie called Black Lizard [Kurotokage] (1968), directed by Kinji Fukasaku and based on Yukio Mishima's stage adaptation of a novel by the Father of the Japanese Detective Story, Edogawa Rampo. It stars the apparently renowned female impersonator Akihiro Miwa as the decadent jewel thief, Black Lizard, and the bizarre, florid-and-yet-formal romanticism of the movie seems very fin de siècle and Frrrrrrrrrrrench, but transposed to the psychedelic Pop Art '60s. Not as camp as I expected it to be, but very stylized and almost cold. Quite entertaining, and Mishima also plays a statue in an important cameo. Now I can watch the "sequel", Black Rose Mansion (1969), again and try to figure out if there really is any connection.

Then to crown a very rich day, holyoutlaw and juliebata hosted a birthday party for Art Widner, who turned 89 yesterday and had come to town to see his new great grandson -- his sixth great grandchild. People have gotten the idea that Art has a taste for single malt whisky, so there was a large variety on hand. I brought Bunnahabhain, but akirlu and libertango brought an interesting Irish single malt, and the best one I tasted was an 18 year old Glenlivet. I of course roomed with Art at Worldcon, and he told me that I was the best roommate he'd ever had because I was so damned mellow. Maybe that's because he kept pouring single malt into me and telling stories about Francis Towner Laney.

Great day all around, even if I'm feeling pretty beat this morning. Think I'll be skipping the dim sum at 11am, but I hope y'all had fun without me.

When I was in college, my girlfriend, Molly, told me about the Japanese concept of "wabi," as she called it. I think she learned about it in a class, but she might have learned it on her own since she had an interest in things Japanese and covered our bedroom floor in tatami mats and wanted to learn how to do the tea ceremony. In any event, what I brought away from our conversations about wabi is that it was a technique of purposefully introducing an imperfection into a work of art as a way of accentuating the beauty of the whole. I was fascinated by the thought that imperfections could be beautiful.

( It turns out that my understanding was incomplete ... )

Oh, okay, maybe this isn't a fricking brilliant movie, but it is funny (sometimes howlingly so), sweet, clever, and silly, with a spicy touch or two of the surreal, the grotesque, and the postmodern. It's an uplifting kid's movie with many knowing winks to the adults in the crowd, and it even has something interesting to say about heroism.

( Much ado about Zebraman ... )

I don't think I can even begin to approach the level of Robert Keser's review at Bright Lights Film Journal, so I encourage everyone to read it. I only wish he'd talked a bit more about the mythical and/or literary roots of the story. Is this based on a famous story or play? All Keser says is it's "the oft-filmed tale of a tanuki — a raccoon-like creature known for its shapeshifting — who assumes the human form of a beauteous princess who loves an exiled prince."

This is an amazing film. I finally got all the way through to the end last night after being interrupted in two previous viewings (once right before the end, as it turns out) and showing the first half hour to friends twice as well. I've seen two other Seijun Suzuki movies, Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill, and while I liked the candy-colored surrealism of the former, I found both of these gangster films a bit too abstract and frenetic to connect to. Princess Raccoon is still fairly abstract, but somehow more generous of humanity -- even raccoon humanity. It goes even further than Moulin Rouge down the road of the postmodern musical, although it skips insouciantly through the tragic heartbreak and into a calm, even comic, view of death. But it plays similarly with the artificiality of the stage/screen and with the pop music mash up.

There are levels other than story-origin that I think I'm missing, particularly the way it plays with kabuki forms. I don't know much about kabuki. But the thing is, it plays with everything. The playfulness of the visuals, the music, the acting, the editing, the sound effects, the staging, the production design, etc., etc. is just delightful. It's all lighter than air. There is such a sense of joy that it gives me hope for my own old age. If Suzuki can make something like this at age 82, there is something right with the world.

Also, Zhang Ziyi is building a very strong case for being the biggest international star of the day. Nicole Kidman is the only other star I can think of offhand who is so determinedly working with every great director she can. Maybe Johnny Depp is another.

As a final note, IMDb only has this under its Japanese title. Pretty sparse entry, with two out of three of the user comments being idiotic.