Tag: Satoru Matsuo

Ox-Head Village (牛首村, Takashi Shimizu, 2022)

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“A story about nothing” is how one middle-aged man jokingly dismisses a local legend about an ox-headed woman. Are urban legends just one big dad joke? Everybody who hears this story dies, so they say, which is obviously true whichever way you look at it though if it really were a curse it would have to move quickly or there’d be no-one to pass it on. As the heroine of Takashi Shimizu’s summer adventure horror movie Ox-Head Village (牛首村, Ushikubi Mura) discovers, however, there may be something to it after all in uncovering the dark history behind the local folklore. 

In her last year of high school, teenager Kanon (Koki) is beginning to experience strange events such as a series of mysterious scratches on her arm, odd bangs and noises at home, and her phone constantly playing a message about bad pennies and their tendency to keep turning up. Her friend Ren (Riku Hagiwara), who has a crush on her, shows her a viral video of some girls on paranormal live stream that goes wrong leading one, who looks exactly like her, to fall down a lift shaft and then mysteriously disappear. To find out what’s going on the pair head out into the country to the abandoned hotel where the shoot took place but end up battling supernatural malevolence born of the cruelty of previous eras. 

Like the previous two films in the “Village” trilogy, Ox-Head Village revolves around rural folkloric beliefs this time focussing on the suspicion cast against twins which in this village at least seems to have continued until the late 1960s. The root of the curse is the unnatural act of dividing something that should be one into two in attempting to separate pairs of twins leaving the one left behind, lonely, burdened with the residual stigma of being one of multiple births, and perhaps experiencing a little survivor’s guilt. In the film’s second sequence, bathed in yellow and shot with a 70s-style soft focus, two little girls kill a butterfly and bury it with its friends because it would just be lonely on its own. The resolution is that that which has been divided must be reunited in life or in death in order to end the curse, though as we later see that may not quite be the end of it. 

Meanwhile, though a supernatural horror film, Ox-Head Village is also part of a grand tradition of teen summer adventure movies. Kanon and Ren are about to embark on the last summer as high schoolers, the trip they take together as so many are is also about self-discovery as Kanon answers a few lingering questions about her past while searching for her doppelgänger. Her quest is also in its way about rescuing herself and laying to rest the sense of loneliness which has always plagued her. Along for the ride, Ren is perhaps more curious while obviously smitten hoping to cement his romance through a romantic road trip only to be blindsided by supernatural intrigue and country superstition. 

Nevertheless, there is something truly creepy about the innocent flowers the little girls draw along with the pre-modern superstition that informs life in the village. Though the sinister presence may in this case be firmly rooted in the past, they are able to mediate their curse through modern technology such as manipulating Kanon’s phone as a means of communication while using lift shafts to mimic the well which becomes the repository for the darkness of the village. As an old man puts it, a prejudice against twins might have been intellectually understandable in a time of famine, though morally indefensible and obviously absurd and out of place in the modern society. Even so, old beliefs have a way of persisting even if they are no longer clearly understood. 

Along with all the folk horror of ox-headed women, headless buddhist statues and “stories about nothing” there is the lingering dread of the lonely incompleteness visited on the little girls in yellow because of the outdated superstitions of an earlier era. Overcoming the curse requires both self-knowledge and self-sacrifice in order to heal the unnatural act of division which has been carried out but even this may not be enough to repair the damage of centuries of cruelty and prejudice. 

Ox-Head Village screens at Lincoln Center 19th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2022 OX-HEAD VILLAGE Production Committee

Jigoku-no-Hanazono: Office Royale (地獄の花園, Kazuaki Seki, 2021) [Fantasia 2021]

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The OL, or “office lady” occupies a peculiar place in Japanese pop culture if not the society itself. The evolution of the typing pool, the OL exists to one side of office life, treated as domestic staff in the corporate environment and in many ways expected to be invisible. As such, an OL performs stereotypically feminine tasks in the office such as keeping the place clean and their male bosses looked after in addition to handling often dull and pointless admin work. It goes without saying that in general being an OL is a young woman’s job with the expectation that most will either find a way to transition onto a more viable career track or simply leave the world of work behind to marry and become a regular housewife. 

It’s this image of the OL as the embodiment of bland geniality that is at the centre of Kazuaki Seki’s zany comedy Jigoku-no-Hanazono: Office Royale (地獄の花園, Jigoku no Hanazono), a repurposing of “yankee” high school delinquent manga for the world of the office lady scripted by comedian Bakarhythm. A devotee of yankee manga, 26-year-old OL Naoko (Mei Nagano) explains that even office ladies have their warring factions outlining the tripartite fault lines at play in even her small company where the head OLs from Sales, R&D, and Manufacturing constantly vie for hegemony through physical dominance. She however merely observes from the sidelines defiantly living her “ordinary” office lady life. That is until new hire Ran Hojo (Alice Hirose) arrives to upset the precarious workplace power balance. 

Naoko first catches sight of Ran after she challenges some of the OLs from her company as they harass a timid male employee in the street though they don’t become best friends until after Ran spots a salaryman trying to upskirt her at a bus stop and decides to teach him a lesson. Despite being a yankee, it seems that Ran is also trying to live a normal OL life, bonding with Naoko over their shared love of a TV drama, but is not exactly good at the job and regards fighting as her one and only skill. Perhaps speaking to an inner insecurity born of being a woman in a conformist and patriarchal society, each of the women struggle to see themselves as protagonists in their own lives rather than mere supporting players unwittingly both playing the role of the ditzy best friend to the competent hero. 

In one of her many meta quips commenting on the action and how it would play out if she were a character in a yankee manga, Naoko laments her status as the “comic book hero’s boring friend” which is extremely ironic seeing as she is certainly the heroine of this movie given that it’s her voiceover we’re hearing and her POV we generally adopt. Yet Seki sometimes undercuts her by shifting to a rival voiceover offered by Ran herself doubtful of her proper place in the narrative and eventually descending into an existential crisis after an unexpected setback shatters her sense of self. 

Nevertheless, even if as the de facto leader of her company’s OLs Ran advocates for equality insisting there are no bosses and no underlings only women standing together, Office Royale generally embraces rather than attacks societal sexism particularly in its somewhat unexpected conclusion which ends in ironic romance rather than female solidarity. Even so, it’s interesting that the OLs lose interest in delinquency once the hierarchy of fists has been fairly decided, acknowledging the superior skills of a better fighter and thereafter living peacefully rather than continuing the internecine determination to sit at the top of the pyramid which is the hallmark of the high school yankee manga. 

While the final arc strays into some potentially problematic territory with the uncomfortable humour of four male actors playing the top fighters of a rival gang of OLs from another company, Office Royale offers a series of surprisingly well choreographed fight scenes even if eventually descending into manga-esque cartoonish violence while much of the humour stems from Naoko’s adorably nerdy voiceover musing on what would happen next if this were a yankee manga. In the end, however, it’s less a tale of office lady infighting than of a pair of young women coming to a better understanding of themselves even if they do so through the potentially destructive medium of pugilism. 

Jigoku-no-Hanazono: Office Royale streamed as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

5 Million Dollar Life (五億円のじんせい, Moon Sung-ho, 2019)

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5 Million Dollar Life posterIs it possible to live a life without “debts” of one kind or another or are we all just living on loans? The hero of Moon Sung-ho’s 5 Million Dollar Life (五億円のじんせい, Gooku Yen no Jinsei) wants to find out, not least because he feels himself indebted to those who have helped him in the past and struggles with the pressure of living up to their expectation. An unexpected source provides some helpful advice in pointing out that “value” in one sense at least is not something you’re free to decide for yourself but is defined by others. Then again, not being certain of your own worth makes it impossible to claim your rightful place in society as someone as worthy of love and respect as any other.

When Mirai (Ayumu Mochizuki) was six, his family found out he had a congenital heart defect and would need to go abroad for a transplant. His community rallied around him and raised five million dollars so he could go to America for treatment. The heartwarming story also made him the star of an ongoing documentary in which he’s interviewed on television every year so those who contributed to saving his life can find out how he’s getting on. Becoming a local celebrity and an accidental TV star is obviously a lot of pressure for any young man, but Mirai feels acutely burdened by the responsibility of “repaying” the kindness that was offered to him. He doesn’t feel his life was worth five million dollars and knows he is unlikely to repay their “investment”. He is after all just “ordinary”. He won’t win a Nobel prize or cure cancer, all he can do is live his life in the normal way but that’s hard when it feels like everyone is secretly looking over his shoulder and waiting for him to make a mistake.

Meanwhile he’s also become a role model to the suicidal Chiharu (Hikari Kobayashi) who doesn’t “see the value in life”  and feels that “death is glorious” because people can hate you while you’re alive, but they’ll love you when you’re gone. Mirai gets where she’s coming from. He longs for an ending too, if only to reject the responsibility he feels towards those who saved his life. Attacked by a troll online, he takes up the challenge to make the five million dollars back and then kill himself to bring an end to the whole affair but quickly discovers that it’s a lot harder to make five million dollars than he thought.

Neatly taking place during the last summer of high school, Mirai’s odyssey sends him on an odd trek across working class Japan as he finds himself alone and without money or means to support himself. At only 17, he can’t even stay in a hotel on his own and so he winds up becoming homeless but is taken in by a nice old man who claims he decided to help him because he bought an umbrella with his last pennies rather than pinching someone else’s. Though he is often exploited and betrayed by those who take advantage of his goodness, that same quality finds an answer in others who, sometimes despite themselves, want to help him because he seems like the sort of person who needs help.

This idea finds encapsulation in the surprisingly astute words of wisdom Mirai receives from a petty gangster he meets after getting involved with sex work. The gangster, who starts off by telling him that he’s making a mistake selling himself short when it’s the customer who decides what his “value” is, later explains that it’s not so much that the world is divided into people who are nice and people who aren’t, but that some people are “worth” being nice to and Mirai, for one reason or another, is one such person who thrives on kindness.

Mirai’s desire to quantify his life by putting a price on it may be mistaken, as proved by the sad case of a family committing suicide because of monetary debt, but what he realises is that people help because they want to and they don’t necessarily expect anything in return other than kindness. If he wants to find a way to repay them, he’ll have to figure it out on his own terms first, but all they really wanted they wanted from him was that he live his life as happily as possible. 5 Million Dollar Life goes to some pretty dark places, but always maintains a healthy cheerfulness as Mirai goes on his strange odyssey looking for the “value” in being alive and discovering that it largely lies shared kindnesses and unselfish connection.

5 Million Dollar Life screens on 11th July as part of the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Scythian Lamb (羊の木, Daihachi Yoshida, 2017)

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Scythian Lamb posterSometimes life hands you two parallel crises and allows one to become the solution to the other. So it is for the bureaucrats at the centre of Daihachi Yoshida’s The Scythian Lamb (羊の木, Hitsuji no Ki). The prisons are overcrowded while rural Japan faces extinction thanks to depopulation. Ergo, why not parole some of those “low risk” prisoners whose problems have perhaps been caused by urban living and lack of community support on the condition that they move to the country for a period of at least ten years and contribute to a traditional way of life. The prisoners get a fresh start where no one knows them or what they might have done in the past, and the town gets an influx of new, dynamic energy eager to make a real go of things. Of course, there might be some resistance if people knew their town was effectively importing criminality, but that’s a prejudice everyone has an interest in resisting so the project will operate in total secrecy.

Not even civil servant Tsukisue (Ryo Nishikido), who has been tasked with rounding up the new recruits, was aware of their previous place of residence until he started to wonder why they were all so unusual and evasive. Tsukisue likes to think of himself as an open-minded, kind and supportive person, and so is disappointed in himself to feel some resistance to the idea of suddenly welcoming six convicts into his quiet little town, especially on learning that despite being rated “low risk” they are each convicted murderers. Thus when a “murder” suddenly happens in the middle of town, Tsukisue can’t help drawing the “obvious” conclusion even if he hates himself for it afterwards when it is revealed the murder wasn’t a murder at all but a stupid drunken accident.

The ex-cons themselves are an eccentric collection of wounded people, changed both by their crimes and their experiences inside. Many inmates released from prison find it difficult to reintegrate into society, especially as most firms will not hire people with criminal records which is one of the many reasons no one is to know where the new residents came from. Yet, there are kind and understanding people who are willing to look past the unfortunate circumstances that led to someone finding themselves convicted of a crime such as the barber (Yuji Nakamura) who reveals his own difficult past and happiness in being able to help someone else, or the woman from the dry cleaners (Tamae Ando) who is upset by other people’s reaction to her new recruit who, it has to be said, looks like something out of Battles without Honour. Tsukisue doesn’t know anything about these people save for the fact they’ve killed and has, unavoidably, made a judgement based on that fact without the full details, little knowing that one, for example, killed her abusive boyfriend after years of torture or that another’s crime was more accident than design.

Tsukisue later becomes friends with one of the convicts, Miyakoshi (Ryuhei Matsuda), whose distant yet penetrating stare makes him a rather strange presence. Miyakoshi is the happiest to find himself living in the small coastal town, enjoying the lack of stimulation rather than resenting the boredom as some of the other new residents do. Despite his obvious inability to “read the air”, Miyakoshi is quite touched by Tsukisue’s kindness and by the way he treated him as a “normal” person despite his violent criminal past, excited to have made a real “friend” at last. Trouble begins to brew when Miyakoshi joins Tsukisue’s garage band and takes a liking to another of its members – Aya (Fumino Kimura), another returnee from Tokyo with a mysterious past though this time without a prison background. Tsukisue has had a long standing crush on Aya since high school but has always been too shy to say anything. He thought now was his chance and is stunned and irritated to realise Miyakoshi might have beaten him to it and, even worse, given him another opportunity to disappoint himself though doing something unforgivable in a moment of pique.

The bureaucrat in charge of the scheme wanted it kept secret in part because he was afraid the criminals might find each other and start some sort of secret murderer’s club (betraying another kind of prejudice) which actually turns out not to be so far fetched, though the main moral of the story is that kindness, understanding, and emotional support go a long way towards keeping the peace. Meanwhile, another of the convicts has taken to “planting” dead animals inspired by a plate she finds on a refuse site featuring a decoration of a “Scythian Lamb” – a plant that grows sheep which die when severed from their roots, and the evil fish god Nororo sits atop the cliffs in reminder of the perils of the sea. The Scythian Lamb is a poignant exploration of the right to start again no matter what might have gone before or how old you are. It might not always be possible to escape the past, and for some it may be more difficult than others, but the plant withers off the vine and there’s nothing like good roots for ensuring its survival.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Chin-yu-ki: The Journey to the West with Farts (珍遊記, Yudai Yamaguchi, 2016)

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Chin-yu-ki posterWhen a film tells you what it is, you should believe it the first time. Many fine films are undone by unwise titles, but if you were expecting anything more than what is promised by the title of Chin-yu-ki: Journey to the West with Farts (珍遊記), you have only yourself to blame. Director Yudai Yamaguchi is known for his distinctly lowbrow, zany humour and it seems he’s met his match in adapting the much loved Journey to the West parody manga, Chin-yu-ki – Taro to Yukaina Nakamatachi. Set in Japan in an indistinct period possibly somewhere around the Meiji restoration, Chin-yu-ki is a bawdy story of penis power, fantastic farts, romantic disappointments, and the ongoing path to enlightenment of its slightly more than cheeky hero.

Beginning as it means to go on, the film opens with a Buddhist nun, Genzo (Kana Kurashina – renamed “Shenzang” in the subtitles on this HK blu-ray to match the original Journey to the West), talking to an older couple referred to as “Old Fart” (Ryosei Tayama) and “Old Bag” (Takashi Sasano). The couple were never blessed with children of their own and so when they notice a great flash and something falling to Earth, they are delighted to find a lovely baby boy lying in the crater. Unfortunately, Taro Yamada (Kenichi Matsuyama), as the baby is called, is a wrong ‘un. Now 16 years old, Taro is a fiery demon who has robbed the entire area to build himself a giant mansion where he lives on his own and has provided his adoptive parents with a small hovel on the outskirts of town. Old Fart and Old Bag try to warn Genzo that Taro is not your average sinner – he controls people with his giant penis and stinky farts.

Genzo is undeterred and demonstrates her various skills which, strangely, centre around the ability to unping a bra at 20 paces (yes, apparently in this version of the Meiji era, people wear bras). Her other trick is magically hurling buns into people’s mouths which does at least shut them up for a bit. Against the odds she manages to tame Taro, reducing him to his basic, naked state in which she manages to shove a magic crown on his head which allows her to control him and stop him doing naughty things. Genzo determines to take Taro to Tianzhu to purify his soul and so the pair walk off together towards their joint destiny.

The road trip format provides plenty of scope for set piece gags as Genzo and Taro encounter various strange characters along the way who often make surprising returns. This is no character drama, but Taro does indeed learn a few things even as he remains as wilfully naughty as in his unreformed state. As it turns out, the major narrative event revolves around a grudge held by a man who previously encountered Taro at his most cruel. Ryusho (Junpei Mizobata), now a famous pretty boy actor, is still nursing a broken heart after Taro ruined his true love dream which had proved so difficult for him to win as a shy young schoolboy. Now backed by a series of strange companions including a dominatrix-type assistant who dresses in shiny leather and carries a whip, a woman in Cheongsam, and a man in anachronistic Chinese PLA uniform, Ryusho is still a hopeless romantic and develops an unlikely crush on Genzo, which she returns but is unable to act on because of her vows and her mission to reform Taro.

Misunderstandings abound and it has to be said, the crosstalk between Ryusho who has been abandoned by his buddies and has hired a series of Vietnam-era American mercenaries, Genzo, and Taro as they argue about an unclear subject is genuinely quite funny as is the reaction when Taro unmasks himself in a local bar full of bounty hunters who don’t believe he is who he says he is because he’s wearing a shirt with the name of a guy he just robbed on it. The rest of the humour is, however, of a lower order even if the penis and fart jokes fade out in the middle section of the film which does have a few amusing jokes of its own. Matsuyama delivers a surprisingly energetic performance which is in strong contrast with the distant, inscrutable characters he often plays but as cheerful as his Monkey King stand in is, he can’t compensate for the film’s otherwise disposable quality which seems primed to appeal to those seeking zany, lowbrow humour but offers very little else.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Apology King (謝罪の王様, Nobuo Mizuta, 2013)

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The Apology King.jpgThere are few things in life which cannot at least be improved by a full and frank apology. Sometimes that apology will need to go beyond a simple, if heart felt, “I’m Sorry” to truly make amends but as long as there’s a genuine desire to make things right, it can be done. Some people do, however, need help in navigating this complex series of culturally defined rituals which is where the enterprising hero of Nobuo Mizuta’s The Apology King (謝罪の王様, Shazai no Ousama), Ryoro Kurojima (Sadao Abe), comes in. As head of the Tokyo Apology Centre, Kurojima is on hand to save the needy who find themselves requiring extrication from all kinds of sticky situations such as accidentally getting sold into prostitution by the yakuza or causing small diplomatic incidents with a tiny yet very angry foreign country.

Kurojima promises to know an even more powerful form of apology than the classic Japanese “dogeza” (falling to your knees and placing your head on the ground with hands either side, or OTL in internet lingo), but if you do everything he tells you to, you shouldn’t need it. His first case brings him into contact with Noriko (Mao Inoue) whose awful driving has brought her into contact with the yakuza. Not really paying attention, Noriko has signed an arcane contract in which she’s pledged herself to pay off the extreme debts they’ve placed on her by entering their “employment” at a facility in Osaka. Luckily, she’s turned to Kurojima to help her sort out this mess, which he does by an elaborate process of sucking up to the top brass guys until they forget all about Noriko and the money she owes them in damages. Impressed, Noriko ends up becoming Kurojima’s assistant in all of his subsequent cases, helping people like her settle their disputes amicably rather allowing the situation to spiral out of control.

Mizuta begins with a neat meta segment in which Kurojima appears in a cinema ad outlining various situations in which you might need to apologise including allowing your phone to go off during the movie, or attempting to illegally film inside the auditorium etc ending with a catchy jingle and dance routine pointing towards the contact details for his apology school. Kurojima’s instructions are also offered throughout the film in a series of video essays in which he outlines the basic procedures for de-escalating a conflict and eventually getting the outcome you’re looking for.

Of course, all of this might sound a little manipulative, which it is to a degree, but the important thing to Kurojima lies in mutual understanding more than “winning” or “losing” the argument. The second case which comes to him concerns a young man who has some very outdated ideas and has, therefore, been accused of sexual harassment. Unfortunately, Numata (Masaki Okada) is a classic sexist who only makes the situation worse for himself and completely fails to understand why he was at fault in the first place. Even following Kurojima’s expertly crafted instructions, Numata further insults his female boss whilst attempting to apologise meaning Kurojima has to come up with an even more elaborate plan to smooth the situation which involves pretending to be the ghost of a man who threw himself under a train after being accused of harassing a young woman at work who did not return his affections. This seems to do the trick and the relationship between Numata and his boss appears to have improved even if Numata still has a long way to go in the person stakes, though it does perhaps make light of a serious workplace problem.

Numata follows all of Kurojima’s instructions but still gets everything wrong because he refuses to understand all of the various social rules he’s broken and therefore why and how the apology process is intended to make amends for them. Understanding and sincerity are the keys to Kurojima’s ideology but Numata, after a quick fix, fails to appreciate either of these central tenets and so is unable to work things out for himself. Similarly, in another case the parents of an actor are required to make a public apology when their son is captured on CCTV getting into a street fight. Only, being actors, they find genuine sincerity hard to pull off on the public stage either resorting to chewing the scenery or overdoing the dignified act, not to mention plugging their latest appearances at the end of the speech. The public apology is an important part of the Japanese entertainment industry though it might seem odd that the famous parents of a “disgraced” celebrity would be expected to apologise to the nation as a whole, but as it turns out all that was needed to settle the matter was a quick chat between the people involved, fully explaining the situation and reaching a degree of mutual understanding.

The innovative structure of Apology King neatly weaves each of the cases together as they occur in slightly overlapping timeframes but each contribute to the final set piece in which Kurojima becomes an advisor during a diplomatic incident caused when a film director unwittingly offends the small nation of Mutan by accidentally turning their crown prince into an extra in his film. Mutan is a nation with many arcane rules including a prohibition on filming royalty as well as on drinking and eating skewered meat, all of which the crown prince is seen doing in the movie. Matters only get worse when the film crew travel to Mutan to apologise but make even more faux pas, especially when it turns out that Japanese dogeza is actually incredibly rude in Mutanese culture. Revisiting elements from each of the previous cases, Kurojima is only able to engineer a peaceful solution by convincing the Japanese authorities to utter a set phrase in Mutanese which means something quite different and very embarrassing in their own language. Apologies are, of course, always a little humiliating, but then that is a part of the process in itself – placing oneself on a lower level to those who’ve been wronged, as symbolised in the dogeza.

Full of zany, madcap humour and culminating in a gloriously unexpected pop video complete with dancing idols of both genders exhorting the benefits of a perfectly constructed (and sincere) apology, The Apology King is a warm and innocent tribute to the importance of mutual understanding and its power to ease even the deepest of wounds and most difficult of situations. Hilarious but also heartfelt, The Apology King is a timely reminder that unresolved conflicts only snowball when left to their own devices, the only path to forgiveness lies in recognising your own faults and learning to see things from another perspective. Kurojima’s powers could be misused by the unscrupulous, but the most important ingredient is sincerity – empty words win no respect.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Attack on Titan: The Movie – Part 2: End of the World (進撃の巨人 ATTACK ON TITAN エンド オブ ザ ワールド, Shinji Higuchi, 2015)

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166831_02Review of the second Attack on Titan live action movie first published by UK Anime Network.

Attack on Titan: The Movie – Part 1 ended on a humdinger of a cliff hanger, so this concluding half of the two part movie is one  which carries a fair amount of expectation regardless of reactions to the first instalment. Picking up more or less straight after the end of Part 1, the situation continues to be desperate as the mission to acquire explosives to blow the wall closed is an abject failure. Thanks to Eren’s (Haruma Miura) efforts, the Titan onslaught has eased off but he now finds himself in the direct firing line of sinister dictator Kubal (Jun Kunimura). Coming up with an alternative plan to recover the dud bomb we saw in the beginning of the first film, our intrepid band of comrades decide to return to their former home paving the way for the massive Titan on Titan frenzy finale.

Whereas Attack on Titan: The Movie – Part 1 attempted to reframe itself as a monster movie, The End of the World places itself firmly within the comic book genre. Rather than a frightened populace desperately trying to protect itself from the sudden arrival of man eating giants, The End of the World introduces a series of human lead super Titans who will eventually be duking it out during the film’s finale.

Largely, The End of the World eschews the thematic concerns of the first film in favour of large scale action scenes but it does come up with a few new ideas of its own. Towards the beginning, it seems as if The End of the World is about to undercut all the unpleasant fascistic connotations of the previous film by bringing Eren into contact with the Survey Corps who are now the rebel resistance but this turns out to be a hollow offering as the squad is then painted as a renegade militia commanded by a madman.

After his original imprisonment, Eren wakes up in a minimalist, low ceilinged white room which contains a ‘50s style jukebox with a cover version of the old time hit The End of the World already playing. Despite the ban on machines “the government” has apparently stockpiled some of these “artifacts” for their own use which also includes a rather prominent remote control for an Apple TV. At this point we’re shown some archive footage which explains the birth of the Titans and the creation of the “modern” society, the implication being that the Titans are part of an elaborate governmental propaganda scheme designed to keep the unruly populace firmly in line. The Titans reappeared at a political crisis point as the government felt the loyalty of its people waning and also feared that the plan to explore outside of the walls would weaken their authority. Having already instituted authoritarian policies such as limiting access to childbirth, the government used the Titan threat to galvanise support through fear.

This sequence begins to offer an entirely different reading of the film – one which is more fully hinted at in the final post-credit sequence, but is then largely forgotten. Aside from a nasty slice of possible domestic violence and some PTSD End of the World stays away from further character driven drama, leaving Shikishima to ham things up with an increasingly camp performance whilst behaving in a very ambiguous way towards Eren which proves awkward when considering further information provided regarding Eren’s childhood. As a whole, the Attack on Titan movies have a major problem with internal consistency, piling plot holes upon plot holes yet still failing to make any of its central conceits remotely compelling.

However, The End of the World does improve on some aspects of the previous film – notably in its tighter running time and action set piece finale (lengthy exposition sequence and extremely long recap aside). Production values appear a little better, there is far less of the bad CGI which marred the first film, and there’s even some more interesting production design to be found too. The Hollywood style heroic ending with the sun shining and the score soaring might appear less clichéd when considered alongside the alternate reading offered by the post-credits sequence, but then again this may be another red herring just like the resistance group which originally appeared to offer hope but was then summarily discredited.

The two live action Attack on Titan movies come at the original franchise from vastly different angles and are often at odds with each other. Some of these inconsistencies may be explained by the post-credits sequence which is, perhaps, a hook for a putative third film but only adds an additional layer of confusion to what is already an overloaded premise. All of that aside, The End of the World does offer slightly more straightforward, comic book style trial by combat action heading into its finale even if it does lay on the exposition a little thickly. Whilst offering some mild improvements over the first film, End of the World fails to rescue the project as a whole but is likely to provide satisfaction to those left hanging after the curtain fell on part one.

English subtitled trailer:

Attack on Titan: The Movie – Part 1 (進撃の巨人 ATTACK ON TITAN, Shinji Higuchi, 2015)

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Attack on Titan p1Review of the first of the two part live action Attack on Titan (進撃の巨人 ATTACK ON TITAN, Shingeki no Kyojin) extravaganza first published by UK Anime Network.

It is a law universally acknowledged that a successful manga must be in want of an anime adaptation. Once this simple aim has been achieved, that same franchise sets its sights on the even loftier goals of the live action movie. This phenomenon is not a new one and has frequently had extremely varied results but fans of the current cross over phenomenon that is Attack on Titan may find themselves wondering if perhaps more time should have been allowed before this much loved series tried its luck in the non animated world.

Throwing in a few changes from the source material, the film begins with the peaceful and prosperous walled city where childhood friends Eren, Armin, and Mikasa are young adults just about to start out on the next phase of their lives. Eren, however, is something of a rebellious lost soul who finds himself gazing at the land beyond the walls rather than on a successful future in the mini city state. However, little does he know that the Titans – a race of man eating giants responsible for the destruction which saw humanity retreat behind the walls in the first place, are about to resurface and wreak havoc again. His dreams of a more exciting life may have been granted but humanity pays a heavy price.

Fans of the manga and anime may well be alarmed by certain elements of the above paragraph. Yes, the film makes slight but significant changes to its source material which may leave fans feeling confused and annoyed as the film continues to grow away from the franchise they know and love so well. For a newcomer, things aren’t much better as characterisation often relies of stereotypes and blunt exposition to get its point across. Attack on Titan actually has a comparatively starry cast with actors who’ve each impressed in other high profile projects including Haruma Miura (Eternal Zero), and Kiko Mizuhara (Norwegian Wood, Helter Skelter) as well as Kanata Hongo (Gantz) but even they can’t bring life to the stilted, melodramatic script. Things take a turn for the worse when Satomi Ishihara turns up having presumably been given the instruction to play Hans as comic relief only with a TV style, huge and bumbling performance.

That said, there are some more interesting ideas raised – notably that even a paradise becomes a prison as soon as you put a wall around it. Indeed, everything seems to have been going pretty well inside the walls until Eren suddenly decides he finds them constraining. Once the Titans break through, the very mechanism which was put in place for humanity’s protection, the walls themselves, become the thing which damns them as they’re trapped like rats unable to escape the Titan onslaught.

Machines are now outlawed following past apocalyptic events – humanity apparently can’t be trusted not to destroy itself and this cheerful, feudal way of life is contrasted with the chaos and pollution which accompanied the technologically advanced era. Unfortunately, a reversion to distinctly old fashioned values also seems to have occurred as we’re told you need permission to get married (as sensible as this may be from a practical standpoint in a military society) and the single mother gets munched just as she’s making the moves on a potential new father for her child. The Titans themselves have also been read as a metaphor for xenophobia which isn’t helped by the almost fascist connotations of the post attack society.

Much of this is really overthinking what appears to be an intentionally silly B-movie about man eating giants running amok in a steampunk influenced post-apocalyptic society but then it does leave you with altogether too much time to do your thinking while you’re waiting for things to happen. The original advent of the Titans is a little overplayed with the deliberately gory chomping continuing far too long. Action scenes fare a little better but suffer from the poor CGI which plagues the rest of the film. This isn’t the Attack on Titan movie you were expecting. This is a monster movie which carries some extremely troubling messages, if you stop to think about them. The best advice would be to refuse to think at all and simply settle back for some kaiju style action but fans of either campy monster movies or any other Attack on Titan incarnation are likely to come away equally disappointed. It only remains to see if Part 2 of this bifurcated tale can finally heal some of the many holes in this particularly weak wall.

US release trailer:

The Suicide Song (伝染歌, Masato Harada, 2007)

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Suicide Song US Tokyo Shock DVD Cover
US Tokyo Shock DVD cover

There comes a time in every director’s life when fate leads them down the strangely tempting path of the idol movie. In recent years, sweet and innocent is no longer quite enough to cut it and when your film stars a bunch of kids from AKB48, you’re going to need 48x the kawaii factor so even though the DVD cover is suitably macabre and The Suicide Song (伝染歌, Densen Uta) is marketed as a J-Horror movie, there’s quite a lot more singing and dancing than might be reasonably expected.

In true idol star horror movie fashion, the film begins with some cutesy high school scenes before one student, Kana (Atsuko Maeda), starts in on her teacher who basically wants to skip a whole bit of the text book because it’s not on the exam. The potentially irrelevant teaching matter concerns famous Japanese playwright Chikamatsu whose big thing was, you guessed it, double suicides. Shortly after this, Kana is heard singing a weird song and then cuts her own throat with a kitchen knife right in front of her friend and classmate, Anzu (Yuko Oshima). It seems there has been a spate of these spontaneous suicides of teenage girls which occur after singing this particular song so skeevy newspaper guys Macasa, led by occult obsessed Riku (Ryuhei Matsuda ) and his ex-military buddy Taichi (Yusuke Iseya), decide to do some “investigative journalism”. Anzu and some of the other kids wind up helping out too, eventually coming under threat of that very same curse….

The idea of a “suicide song” isn’t a new one. Gloomy Sunday – a 1930s Hungarian folk song which achieved widespread acclaim thanks to an English language cover version recorded by Billie Holiday in 1941 became an urban legend after numerous suicides were linked to the doleful track and its extremely bleak lyrics. This time around, it’s AKB48’s inoffensive Boku no Hana which apparently drives anyone who tries to sing it to their deaths. Like Gloomy Sunday, the song features extremely nihilistic lyrics which echo the existential confusion and romantic disillusionment that many of its young listeners are undoubtedly experiencing. A perfectly rational explanation for why so many young women might be taking their lives with this particular song on their lips, yet Suicide Song is not particularly interested in exploring the various real world pressures which might push high school students towards death when their lives ought to be just beginning.

It’s not long before the curse makes the leap to supposedly solid adult males. Later, one character tries to weaken the importance of the song by suggesting that it just opened a door for the suppressed feelings that were already there. That each of the victims already wanted to die and and simply allowed themselves to make use of this real world meme to give themselves permission to end it all. This is an interesting idea in some ways, though comes close to victim blaming and conveniently lets the central characters off the hook for failing to save their friends who have already fallen for what is either a curse or mass hysteria. In any case, like most Japanese horror movies and mysteries, the real villain is a circle of buried secrets. The traumatic past must be faced, brought out into the light and then given a proper burial to end the ongoing chaos.

Harada is playing a very strange game. He adds in generic J-horrorisms such as odd jump cuts, stuttering, power outages and possessed video footage as well as a good deal of shadiness in the form of the low rent newspaper guys and the investigation turning up something as dark as a teenage gang competing to see how many kids they can get to kill themselves using the song as a marker. Yet, he generally keeps things cute and light just like your average teen idol romance movie. We’re even treated to a very special AKB48 performance at their club in Akihabara (“Japan’s Most Sophisticated Show” !) where they sing Aitakatta for a room full of devoted middle aged guys who are their biggest fans. There are also frequent cinematic quotations from such Hollywood classics as Vertigo and The Lady From Shanghai (not to mention a completely shoehorned in paintball sequence using Ride of the Valkyries a la Apocalypse Now) which seem to hint at some kind of greater plan, but whatever it is never quite materialises.

Whatever Harada’s intentions may have been, Suicide Song is a strange beast which veers widely in tone from wacky comedy to supposed horror film. In actuality there are very few real scares despite the J-horror aesthetic and the comedy never amps itself up to the level of parody. If the intention was to create some kind of weird, subversive genre hybrid, the punches have been well and truly pulled. Watched as a horror movie Suicide Song is prone to disappoint, though its moments of absurd comedy and cute schoolgirl drama prove enjoyable enough for those able to adjust their expectations on the turn of a dime.

The Suicide Song is available with English subtitles on R1 US DVD from Tokyo Shock.

English subtitled trailer (aspect ratio is slightly stretched):

Noriben – The Recipe for Fortune (のんちゃんのり弁, Akira Ogata, 2009)

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noribenIt used to be that movies about marital discord typically ended in a tearful reconciliation and the promise of greater love and understanding between two people who’ve taken a vow to spend their lives together. These endings reinforce the importance of the traditional family which is, after all, what a lot of Japanese cinema is based on. However, times have changed and now there’s more room for different narratives – stories of women who’ve had enough with their useless, deadbeat man children and decide to make a go of things on their own.

So it is for the heroine of Noriben: The Recipe for Fortune (のんちゃんのり弁, Nonchan Noriben). Inspired by Kiwa Irie’s popular manga, Noriben follows the adventures of Komaki – a woman in her early 30s who gets her daughter dressed for school one morning but secretly takes her to the train station instead where they board a train headed for Komaki’s hometown. Having left her husband who has literary aspirations and consequently no job (the couple were living off, and with, his parents), Komaki has no firm plans other than moving back in with mother. Used to living off scraps and leftovers, she knows how to make her food go further and is also an excellent cook so the unusual layered bento boxes she makes for her little girl, Noriko, prove a big hit with the kids, and later the staff, at the local school.

Hooking back up with a former crush and now local photographer, Komaki ends up tasting the best meal of her life at a tiny eatery and suddenly hatches on the idea of opening a mini bento shop of her own. Of course, it’s a steep learning curve especially for a woman in her thirties with almost no work experience and no real knowledge of how to set up and run a business which is completely leaving aside the need to hone her cookery skills. If there’s one thing you can say about Komaki, it’s that once she’s set her mind on something she will make it happen and so her new life in her old town is just beginning.

Noriben addresses a lot of themes which are becoming fairly common at the moment including the “boomerang daughter” who suddenly arrives home following the breakdown of a marriage. Komaki’s soon to be ex-husband is not an enticing proposition and it seems that most, if not all, of what she says about him is true. He’s a layabout whose dreams of becoming an author are very unlikely to come true and, as his parents seem content to go on supporting him, his promises of getting a real job are most likely hollow too. There’s no real idea of the couple reconciling and when the husband suddenly turns up and starts behaving in an irresponsible way the situation ends in a bizarre marital street fight which does at least seem to clarify for the pair that their marriage really is well and truly over.

Komaki begins a tentative romance with her high school crush Takeo who took over his family’s photography studio though with the advent of digital technology and home printing the shop’s days are numbered. However, Komaki’s uncertain marriage status and Takeo’s diffidence both prove stumbling blocks to the path of romantic bliss and the film seems to imply that Komaki’s own headstrong character is also a problem when it comes to building relationships. Here, the film doesn’t quite know what it wants to say. Perhaps wanting to emphasise Komaki’s strides towards becoming a truly independent woman, it has her side step romantic entanglements but it also seems to declare the need for choice where there isn’t one.

In essence Noriben is a perfectly pleasant, if slightly bland, film that meanders its ways towards a bittersweet ending. Presumably intended to be a celebration of female empowerment as this ordinary woman makes a break from an unrewarding relationship to prove that she can do better on her own, the film only partly fulfils this message as it also comes with an air of sadness and sacrifice where Komaki also has to give up on various other parts of life in order to pursue her dream. That said, Noriben does offer a degree of playful comedy and down home style wisdom that make it a fairly enjoyable, if forgettable, experience.

Reviewed as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2016.