Tag: Masaya Kato

Hope (望み, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, 2020)

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What would you prefer, that your son is alive but a murderer, or that he’s dead but blameless? That’s the dilemma faced by the family at the centre of Yukihiro Tsutsumi’s Hope (望み, Nozomi) who find themselves wondering if they really knew their son at all or had been deluded by an image of familial harmony that was only ever superficial. Meanwhile, they’re also at the centre of a media storm, on the receiving harassment from the press and neighbours, along with the potential financial strain of lost business and fracturing relationships in the local community.

Teenage daughter Miyabi (Kaya Kiyohara) tells her father that she’s read online some families have to move after a relative becomes involved with a crime, that they lose their jobs and place in the community. She’s been studying hard to get into a top high school and is worried that they may not now accept her even if she passed the exam because of something her brother may or may not have done. Some might say that a being a part of the family means that you live or die together, but there is a persistent sense of unfairness felt by all they are being made to suffer because of something over which they had and have no control.

Tadashi (Koshi Mizukami) never explained of this to them and it’s true that he had been behaving differently, was sullen, stayed out all night coming home with bruises, and had in fact recently purchased a knife but it’s difficult for them to believe that he could really have gone on the run after murdering a classmate. At the beginning of the film, architect Kazuto (Shinichi Tsutsumi) had shown off their warm family home to some prospective clients remarking that they wanted to ensure close relationships with the their children and that the design is a good opportunity to plan ahead for the next 10 or 20 years but perhaps there’s something a little hubristic in that statement. Kazuto is trying to sell an image of familial bliss that his house design can bring, but when he knocks on Tadashi’s door the boy is rude and resents the intrusion. Typical teen behaviour, the clients might think, but still it’s a minor crack in the edifice of the image of a perfect family.

But for all that it’s Kazuto who most strongly resists the idea that Tadashi may really have killed his friend and clings fast to the hope that he may be a victim too even though, as mother Kiyomi (Yuriko Ishida) points out, that might mean that he’s already dead and was killed alongside him. For Kiyomi, she just wants Tadashi, whose name means “correctness”, to be alive even if that means he really did do it. If that were the case, the family would also face constant harassment for the rest of their lives, Tadashi would be in prison for the next 15 years, and they would likely have to compensate the other family financially for the boy’s lost future and 50+ years’ worth of lost earning potential. None of that matters to her so long as Tadashi is alive, but to Kazuto it seems more important that Tadashi not be guilty and he reclaim the image he had of his son as a good and honest young man rather than a delinquent killer and bully.

Investigations among the teens turn up contradictory reports, some saying that Tadashi was aloof and arrogant while a group of girls insist on his innocence and even contemplate going to the police to help clear his name. What’s clear is that everyone seems to have taken football far too seriously and a situation among hotheaded young men went way out of control. As a policeman later says, problems often occur at this age because children who are mature enough to think for themselves start wanting to solve their own problems without worrying the adults around them but don’t always know the best way to do it and end up making everything worse. The irony may be that in the end Tadashi may indeed restore a sense of hope for his family that they can turn things around and regain a more genuine sense of familial harmony no matter what the outcome may be.

Hope screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Let’s Go Karaoke! (カラオケ行こ！, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2023)

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Singing is serious business. In Nobuhiro Yamashita’s adaptation of the manga by Yama Wayama Let’s Go Karaoke! (カラオケ行こ！Karaoke Ikou!), it’s matter of life and death, metaphorically at least, for a young man confronting adolescence and a zany gangster who seems kind of lonely but is desperate to learn how not to embarrass himself at the boss’ big sing off so he won’t be subjected to a homemade tattoo of his most hated motif.

The irony is perhaps that this kind of yakuza at least doesn’t really exist anymore and “Crazy Kid” Kyoji (Go Ayano) is in many ways a ghost of bygone days inhabiting a Showa-era shopping arcade soon to be torn down and replaced by a luxury hotel. Meanwhile, high schooler Satomi (Jun Saito) is also facing a kind of apocalypse in that he’s a boy a soprano whose voice has begun to change. His encroaching puberty leads him to blame himself when the school choir only places third during the nationals not making it to finals. But it’s at this concert that Kyoji first hears his “angelic” voice and decides he’s the perfect person to teach him how sing, intimidating him into an impromptu karaoke session.

As Satomi later points out, adults don’t invite kids to karaoke and this arrangement would be odd even if Kyoji were not an old school yakuza with a severed finger in his glove compartment. Of course, Satomi’s frightened but cannot really say no offering a few words of advice by daring to tell Kyoji that his falsetto is  “sickening” and he should stop waving his hands around if he wants to master the art of singing. It is also doesn’t help that his choice of song, Kurenai by X Japan, a hair rock epic mostly written in broken English, is a song of manly melodrama which requires a good deal of screaming. Despite having enlisted Satomi, Kyoji talks about one of his fellow footsoldiers as if he’s died when he’s only decided to get some professional singing lessons in an effort not to come last and end up with a lame tattoo.

Yamashita frames both their challenges as the same, Satomi fearing a social death and the death of his youth if he takes to the stage at what he’s sure would be his final concert and his voice cracks while Kyoji, ironically enough, does not really fear a literal death but the pain and humiliation of being branded by the boss for being bad at karaoke. Despite their differences a genuine a sense of friendship does arise between them, if also a possibly inappropriate homoerotic tension, as they support each other towards their shared goals and learn to sing from the heart which was apparently the real problem with Satomi’s school choir seemingly more obsessed with technique and correctness than the simple joy of singing. 

Hovering on a precipice, Satomi exists in a liminal space in his own way as ghostly as Kyoji surrounded by the obsolete. In his school film club, of which he is an honorary member, they watch VHS tapes of classics such as White Heat, Casablanca, and Bicycle Thieves which can only be watched once because the player’s broken and you can’t rewind anymore. His world’s on the brink of eclipse, and his friendship with Kyoji is a harbinger of a darker, more adult world but also one that’s less frightening than it ought to be with its admittedly scary gangsters obsessed with karaoke and bad tattoos. He starts to wonder if Kyoji was even real or some kind of imaginary friend appearing to help him deal with his impending adolescence and what it means for his singing career, but is finally reassured by a piece of concrete evidence confirming at least that it did really happen if leaving him with a sense of loneliness once their quests have come to an end. Surreal in its cheerful darkness, Yamashita’s heartfelt drama is an advocation for the for the healing powers of karaoke and the importance of singing from from the heart no matter how it might sound to those you who may themselves shed a few manly tears over a song about lost love and absent friends.

Let’s Go Karaoke! screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

You’ll Fall For Me (君は僕をスキになる, Takayoshi Watanabe, 1989)

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Two mismatched friends find themselves caught up in an ironic love square in Takayoshi Watanabe’s infinitely charming Christmas rom-com, You’ll Fall for Me (君は僕をスキになる, Kimi wa Boku wo Suki ni Naru). A bubble-era nonsense comedy filled with surreal humour and zany gags along with genuine heart, the film pits friendship against love but not only of the romantic kind as the two women each consider acts of selflessness in knowing that pursuing, or preventing the other from pursuing, their romantic destiny will necessarily cause each of them pain. 

Beginning in the summer the film opens with a bizarre incident in which mousy pudding-obsessed librarian Tomoko (Yuki Saito) thinks she sees her neighbour across the way, Chika (Kuniko Yamada), jump off the roof of a nearby building only it turns out to be a strange practical joke. Chika certainly has a flair for the dramatic along with an unusual personality that has made her something of an outcast at her office job while even her friendship with Tomoko seems somewhat one-sided with her constant refrains of “you’re my best friend!” which are generally met by a blunt reply from Tomoko of “we’re not friends”. In any case, Chika’s current dilemma is that she doesn’t have a date lined up for Christmas Eve and thinks she’s jinxed because she always seems to get dumped right before the big day, while Tomoko is rather shy and it seems had no expectations of getting a boyfriend anyway. 

Their prospective suitors are a couple of salarymen, the feckless son of a CEO, Kyosuke (Masaya Kato), and his nerdy best friend Junpei (Senri Oe) who like Tomoko is a spectacles wearer. The pair have a typical meet cute when they bump into each other at a crossing and knock each other’s glasses off, each ending up with the wrong pair and not realising until it’s too late. Meanwhile, at the office, Kyosuke is being pressured by his father (Jo Shishido) to embrace adult responsibility and meet a prospective candidate for an arranged marriage who looks suspiciously like Chika though Kyosuke never looks at the photo. To get him off his back, he says he’s dating a woman from the company. Because he’s just that popular, a stage event is organised at which Kyosuke is supposed to announce who it is he has his eye on but he scandalises just about everyone by naming Chika who wasn’t really in the running. 

In the opening scenes, however, the guys had been indulging in a bit of 80s excess dribbling champagne from a helicopter some of which had rained down on Tomoko as if anointing her from above. She ends up having a second meet cute, this time with Kyosuke, who accidentally hypnotises her to think she’s a dog leading her to then attack him. A similar thing happens to Chika who is looked after by Junpei after having too much to drink on a date with Kyosuke at a nightclub where Tomoko had also agreed to go on an awkward date with Junpei. Inconveniently, the entirely mismatched Kyosuke ends up falling for the mousy charms of Tomoko who at this point doesn’t know that he’s “dating” Chika.

While the film presents an interesting picture of women in the workplace at the height of the bubble era, it also subtly undermines the prevailing consumerist culture of the age while preserving the romanticisation of Christmas. They two women each want to find a boyfriend to spend Christmas Eve with partly for reasons of social status and partly because they are simply quite lonely, Chika in particular very invested in her friendship with Tomoko while she, much more introverted, seems continually exasperated but despite herself allows Chika to dominate her existence. After becoming aware of their romantic conflict, the two women end up spending Christmas Eve together at a nice restaurant prioritising friendship over romance until one of them realises the other is unhappy and after discovering a note from their suitor asking them to meet in a local park chooses to spend the rest of the evening alone so her friend can go get her man. 

Then again, there’s a clear idea that Tomoko in particular is undergoing a kind of transformation signalling her shift away from Junpei by deciding to get contacts, putting on lipstick, and dressing in a slightly less mousy fashion while Chika’s attempt to become the sort of woman that Kyosuke would date by dressing and acting more like the other women in the office largely backfires. Meanwhile Kyosuke and Junpei are also changing, Kyosuke giving up his womanising ways and becoming more serious in his pursuit of Tomoko while Junpei comes to appreciate the vulnerable force of nature that is Chika. The film takes its title from Kyosuke’s attempt at hypnotising Tomoko into falling in love with him only to find that he’s the one who’s fallen under her spell as they move towards the anticipated Christmas Eve climax accompanied by the now classic song by Tatsuro Yamashita. Faced with the choice, the women do indeed choose friendship over love but discover that it isn’t really a choice at all because they both just want their friend to be happy even if it means a lonely Christmas for themselves as the ironic role reversal of the closing coda makes clear.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Tatsuro Yamashita – Christmas Eve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7d_oggBdX4

Kingdom (キングダム, Shinsuke Sato, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

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Kingdom poster 1The class war arrives in feudal China via modern Japan in Shinsuke Sato’s big budget adaptation of the wuxia-inspired manga by Yasuhisa Hara, Kingdom (キングダム). Set in China’s Warring States period, Kingdom offers a surprisingly progressive message, if mildly tempered by a failure to tackle the system in its entirety, in which the oppressed (which in this case includes the king) rise up against sneering aristocracy fuelled mostly by righteousness and fierce defence of the right to dream.

The tale begins with a fateful meeting between enslaved war orphans Piao (Ryo Yoshizawa) and Xin (Kento Yamazaki) on a small farm somewhere in rural China. The boys, realising there is no way out of their enslavement save the sword, commit themselves to perfecting their martial arts with the ultimate goal of becoming the world’s greatest generals. Their intense bond is broken when a mysterious man, Lord Chang . Wen Jun (Masahiro Takashima), appears and offers Piao a job at the palace. Though he agonises over leaving his brother behind, Piao seizes his destiny little knowing he has been hired not quite so much for his sword skills as for his resemblance to weakened king Ying Zheng (also played by Ryo Yoshizawa). Sometime later, Piao returns close to death, entrusting Xin with an important mission – go to Ying Zheng and seek his own destiny by restoring rightful rule.

The two boys are about as oppressed as it’s possible to be – orphaned slaves with no prospect of improving their condition save the one they’ve already decided on, fighting in a war. This doesn’t quite explain how they can release themselves from the farm, but Xin’s eventual flight, in which his master does not attempt to stop him, might suggest the first hurdle is not as big as it seems. In any case, Xin finds an unlikely ally in Ying Zheng who has been deposed from the throne by his younger brother for not being royal enough because his birth was illegitimate and his mother was a dancer.

Of course, Ying Zheng’s intention to regain his “rightful” throne is in defence of a necessarily unequal social order, but it’s also a blow against the kind of elitism which mark’s his brother Cheng Jiao’s (Kanata Hongo) philosophy. Cheng Jiao believes that he is the most rightful king because his blood is the most royal. He looks down on Ying Zheng as low born, and has no respect for his subjects or the lower orders. “A peasant in fine clothes is still a peasant” one of his minions intones to intimidate an opponent, but someone with a sword is still someone with a sword no matter their circumstances of birth and provided you have access to acquire one, perhaps swordsmanship is a truly egalitarian art given that it largely depends on how well you wield a blade. Eventually, Ying Zheng makes an ally of another oppressed people – the mountain dwellers subjugated, and previously betrayed, by the powers that be who lend their strength to toppling a corrupt power structure in order to restore something like peace and balance to the land.

Indeed, asked to give a brief manifesto speech, Ying Zheng cooly declares that he aims to create a unified China by eliminating borders and therefore the need for war. Insisting that when a king picks up a sword it ought to be in service of his people, he makes the case for a borderless world, little caring that, as his general points out, history may brand him a tyrant. Nevertheless, he remains a “puppet king” whose status is dependent on the loyalty of key general Wang Yi (Takao Ohsawa) with whom true power lies. Wang Yi, as we later find out seems to be a “good” person who used his troops to protect the innocent and ensure no civilians were harmed during the chaos of the insurrection but he does indeed wield dangerously vast power for just one man. Meanwhile, Ying Zheng may reject the primacy of blood, but does dare to claim his birthright as an oldest son and is of course acting in service of an inherently oppressive system even if he means to make minor improvements towards the kind of meritocracy that allows men like Xin to embrace the power of their dreams.

The power of dreams is indeed the key. Though Cheng Jiao’s hardline mercenary may sneer that “dreams are bullshit” and deny a slave like Xin’s right to have one at all, to men like Xin dreams are all they have. As he says, they get you back on your feet when everything else seems hopeless. Learning that Piao achieved his dream even if it was only for a few moments gives him the strength to pursue his own in service not just of himself but his brother, friends, and kingdom.

Appropriating the aesthetics of wuxia may prove problematic for some, but like many Japanese manga with international settings, Kingdom’s mechanics are essentially home grown which is perhaps why Sato heavily leans on Kurosawa’s legacy, possibly overusing the distinctive side wipe and giving his heroine a look echoing that from Hidden Fortress while other influences seem to feed back from Star Wars in the strangely cute masked mountain elders and gleaming golden armour of bad ass warrior queen Yang Duan He (Masami Nagasawa). A surprisingly positive, perhaps ironically bold plea for a borderless world and if not actual equality at least a friendly kind of egalitarian nobility, Kingdom hands victory to those who fight hardest for their right to dream while subtly advocating for their right to rebel against an inherently unjust social order in order to claim it. 

Kingdom was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival. It will also be screened in US cinemas from Aug. 16 courtesy of Funimation.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Terra Formars (テラフォーマーズ, Takashi Miike, 2016)

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terra-formarsTerra Formars – Terror for Mars? It’s all about terror in the quest for terra and reform in Takashi Miike’s bug hunt extravaganza adaptation of Yu Sasuga and Kenichi Tachibana’s manga. In fact, much of the plot is more or less the same as Aliens, but our motley crew is not a crack team of space marines headed by a recently awoken from stasis super survivor who proves unexpectedly dextrous in a robotic forklift exoskeleton, but a collection of human “bugs”, parasitical criminals who’ve each been made an offer they can’t refuse. High budget and boasting a starry cast, Terra Formars (テラフォーマーズ) definitely falls into the throwaway Miike category and proves curiously dull despite its ridiculous set up, but then if you happen to be into bugs there’s really a lot to like here.

Running through the Tokyo of 2597 which seems to be some kind of Blade Runner theme park, Shokichi (Hideaki Ito) and Nanao (Emi Takei) are trying to escape the oddly bug-like police only to be captured and taken to the lair of mad scientist and all round fabulous guy, Honda (Shun Oguri). He has a proposal – join his mission to Mars and get a large amount of money instead of getting a death sentence for the murder they were on the run for. Reluctantly, they agree but there are several things Honda forgot to tell them – they’ve been given alien bug DNA which gives them super powers, and the “cockroaches” they’re supposed to be exterminating have mutated into giant humanoid creatures capable of planning and tool use. Oh, and everyone on the first mission died horribly.

By 2597, the world has become massively overpopulated but luckily enterprising scientists had come up with a plan for terraforming Mars through the use of various kinds of moss distributed by millions of cockroaches. The terraforming process is now complete and it’s time for colonisation to begin but no one really thought about what to do with all their insectile helpers. No longer “mere” bugs, the highly evolved Roaches are now the (not quite) indigenous peoples of Mars. Miike does not push the colonisation narrative (and nobly attempts to mitigate the elements which have seen the original source material decried as racist) but you can’t get away from the fact that the Roaches have every right to fight back and defend their homeland from an invading force wielding superior technology and hellbent on mass extermination.

Honda’s big idea (well, one of his big ideas as it turns out) was to send a bug to catch a bug. In some senses, all of the assembled bait could be regarded as human pests – petty criminals and reprobates offering nothing of value to society. Given the pace of the film and the subsequent carnage, none of them is given much time to shine so we mostly remember them by their epithets – creepy serial killer, hikkokomori hacker, teenage prostitution ringleader, illegal immigrant, former yakuza and dodgy ex-police officer – in other words, people with no options that no one will miss. They’ve each been more or less forced into this position by their peculiar circumstances as exploited by Honda and his team who have given them a “risky” operation involving alien DNA which has given them bug-like powers from super sharp pincers to venomous stings.

Bug hunt is an apt way to describe the subsequent action as the crew activate their inner insects and prepare to squash some Roaches only to die in various painful looking ways, usually by losing their heads. There’s a distinctly Aliens undertone to the entire enterprise, even borrowing a key plot revelation from the film’s ‘80s anti-corporate message but it’s all so unimportant next to the bug killing that it most likely gets missed. Repetitious in the extreme, the two hour runtime is stretched to breaking point with battle after battle of mostly losses as the Roaches effortlessly swat our puny human heroes.

Production design is the most impressive element but even this borrows heavily from such similarly themed genre landmarks as Blade Runner, Aliens, Total Recall, and to a lesser extent Starship Troopers. Ultra camp from Honda’s obsession with his fashionable outfits to the Ultraman style practical effects of the bug suits, Terra Formars later fails to capitalise on its surreal and ridiculous premise, remaining disappointingly straightforward in terms of tone for much of the running time. Keen entomologists will perhaps enjoy the animated info sequences introducing the various beetles, flies, and other assorted creatures as well as those same traits being acted out by our heroes but for everyone else Terra Formars may prove a rather dull expedition to the previously red planet, now a green and pleasant land but very definitely inhabited and defended. Plenty of bug splatting action with only minimally disquieting overtones but a sorry lack of excitement, Terra Formars is a disappointingly by the numbers sci-fi effort from the usually exuberant Miike but does at least look good.

Original trailer (No subtitles – massive spoilers)