Tag: Shun Oguri

Reincarnation (輪廻, Takashi Shimizu, 2005)

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Do our memories just vanish when we die? The murderous professor at the centre of Takashi Shimizu’s Reincarnation (輪廻, Rinne) was apparently obsessed with just this question, along with that of where we come from when we’re born and where we go when our corporeal lives have ended. But there’s a curious irony at the film’s centre in the ways in which we consciously or otherwise seek to recreate the past that suggests we are locked into a karmic cycle even while within the mortal realm.

The most obvious sign of that is the director Matsumoto’s (Kippei Shina) obsession with the grisly murder case that took place 35 years previously. He means to recreate it literally by building an exact replica of the hotel where it took place, only he intends to refocus the tale on the victims, leaving the killer a mysterious force in the shadows. It’s clear that this traumatic incident has left a mark on the wider world, not only in its lingering mystery but the darkness with which it is enveloped, while Matsumoto seeks to exploit it either for commercial gain or reasons of his art. We’re told that, perhaps like Shimizu himself, Matsumoto is known for a particular kind of filmmaking, in his case one involving copious levels of blood and gore. 

He’s drawn to aspiring actress Nagisa (Yuka) for unclear reasons, though her affinity for the material connects her intensely with this story as she too finds herself haunted by the figure of a little girl in a yellow dress carrying a huge and actually quite creepy doll. There is a sense that everyone is being drawn back here into the nexus of this trauma to play it out again, ostensibly for entertainment. Another actress at the audition, Yuka (Marika Matsumoto), seemingly kills her chances by bringing up that she has memories of being murdered in a past life and thinks that she might be able to put them to rest by acting them out. She too is connected to the hotel and possibly a reincarnation of a woman who was hanged during the incident, which is why she bears an eerie noose mark around her neck. 

Yuka is more literally scarred by a traumatic legacy, while those around her are merely curious or confused. Yayoi (Karina) has recurring dreams of the hotel which her parents can’t explain, leading to the suspicion that she too is a reincarnation of someone who died there, though all of the women were born long after the incident took place. Her professor at university (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) is cautious when it comes to the idea of the authenticity of memory. He teaches them about the concept of “cryptomnesia”, when a forgotten memory is recalled but not recognised as such, leading to accidental incidents of plagiarism in which the subject assumes their idea is original rather than a regurgitation of something they saw or heard long before but no longer “remember”. There is also, of course, the reality that many of our “memories” are effectively constructed from things others have told us of our childhoods that we don’t actually recall but are a result of our brain trying to fill in the blanks. Perhaps this might explain Yayoi’s dreams, that she came across the famous case at some point when she was too young to understand it and it’s implanted herself in her subconscious as an unanswered question.

Which is to say that perhaps it’s the memories that are being reincarnated in someone else’s head as much as it’s the disused hotel that’s become a place of trauma haunted by past violence and now inhabited by the pale-faced ghosts of those who died unjustly. The events themselves are constantly repeating just as the moments exist contemporaneously rather than in a linear cycle. Indeed, they are eventually preserved both through the film shot by the killer, witnessed as a document, and the film that Matsumoto was making, enjoyed as entertainment, but ultimately in Nagisa’s head where all concerned can indeed be “together forever” if now confined to eternal rest in the space of memory.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Bayside Shakedown the Final: The New Hope (踊る大捜査線: THE FINAL 新たなる希望, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2012)

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Is it really the end? Billed as the “final” instalment in the Bayside Shakedown series which began with a TV drama in 1997, Bayside Shakedown the Final: The New Hope (踊る大捜査線: THE FINAL 新たなる希望, Odoru Daisousasen the Final: Aratanaru Kibou) once again finds the gang contending with annoying red tape but also with a police force which is intrinsically corrupt and self-serving while questioning if they should remain in an occupation in which they are treated with such disdain. Continuing the familiar pattern from throughout the series, the gang find themselves coming up against a serial killer who may be a crazed vigilante only to discover that the whole thing may have been an extreme inside job designed with the intention of drawing attention to inadequacies in the justice system. 

The problem is that the body they’ve found appears to have been shot with a gun which was removed from the police evidence locker and is linked to a kidnapping case six years previously which just happens to have been handled by Mashita (Yusuke Santamaria) when he was a hostage negotiator. Mashita had ordered an end to the negotiations because of pressure from above to play by the rules with the consequence that the child later died while the prime suspect in the case was recently acquitted of the crime at trial (a staggeringly rare occurrence in Japan). When Mashita’s young son is kidnapped, all eyes are on a rogue policeman, Kuze (Shingo Katori), but it is obvious he is not acting alone. 

Toragai (Shun Oguri), the authoritarian detective from the previous film, has continued along a dark path which only intensifies when his paper on police reforms is rejected out of hand. He too thinks the police force needs structural reform but leans hard into the idea that too many people are getting away with crime rather than concentrating on removing the barriers which prevent police from doing their jobs as Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba) and Aoshima (Yuji Oda) would probably suggest. Muroi’s lasting dream is of building a police force which trusts policemen to do the right thing and he frequently tells his subordinates that they should feel free to exercise their own judgment. 

Meanwhile, the local cops continue to suffer under the command of the elitist officers from HQ who not only look down on them but assign menial tasks, as does Mashita in finding himself short staffed while most are busy providing security for a local energy summit. While Aoshima had experienced a health crisis that turned out to be a false alarm in the previous film, so this time Sumire (Eri Fukatsu) finds herself struggling with ongoing effects from her shooting in Bayside Shakedown 2 eventually deciding that it might be better to leave the police force entirely while lamenting her unfinished business with Aoshima which remains unresolved even in this “final” instalment while he somewhat unsympathetically can only ask her not to leave rather than express his true feelings. 

Ironically enough, by the time of the final showdown neither of them are actually in possession of a police badge, Aoshima scapegoated by Toragai who still holds a grudge against him while inconvenienced by interference in his scheme to frame a local petty thief for the killings, presenting him with an invitation to resign following serious misconduct accusing him of beating up suspects and planting evidence. One again, the police chiefs sit around a large circular table issuing orders from afar but are mainly concerned how to bury the “scandal” of having a police officer steal a gun from evidence and then use it to commit a murder. In a bizarre twist of fate, it later turns out that the whole thing may be an elaborate, not to mention entirely amoral, plan to expose police shortcomings with a side dose of revenge against Mashita for contributing to the child’s death by insisting on following protocol while receiving heat from above. 

As such the apparently “final” instalment skews a little darker than the series norm while as the subtitle implies offering a new ray of hope in the reversal of Muroi’s fortunes allowing him to embark on the police reforms which have been his and Aoshima’s goal throughout the series. Meanwhile, the film pays tribute to its previous instalments with frequent words of wisdom from the late Waku read from his notebook by his nephew and the ironic return of the previous chiefs reinstated as volunteer mentors as part of a reinforcement programme while familiar faces such as the Captain Kirk cosplayer also make their customary appearances. What’s clear is that there will never really be a “final” outing for Aoshima who reaffirms himself as the last line of defence protecting the local population as he once again runs toward sunset and the next case waiting just behind. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Bayside Shakedown 3: Set the Guys Loose (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 3 ヤツらを解放せよ！, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2010)

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It’s all change at Wangan police station in the third instalment in the Bayside Shakedown series, Let the Guys Loose (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 3 ヤツらを解放せよ！Doru Daisousasen the Movie 3: Yatsura wo Kaihou seyo!). Seven years on from the previous film, many things have changed. Aoshima (Yuji Oda) is now in charge of his team and the precinct is set to move to new purpose-built premises boasting the latest high-tech security systems which will aid them in combating potential terrorism and safeguarding local dignitaries. Even so, the gang will have to deal with some unfinished business from the past before they can fully move on as the circular tale takes us right back to the original film’s villain. 

Following the familiar formula, Motohiro opens with a gag sequence in which Aoshima prepares to give a briefing only it’s not about a case it’s about the logistics of moving offices of which he is in charge and characteristically vowing to do the best job possible. Hindering his progress, however, are two bizarre crimes, the first a bank robbery investigated by his colleague/long-term love interest Sumire (Eri Fukatsu) in which no money is stolen, and a bus hijacking he investigates himself in which the hijackers simply left the scene again without stealing anything. Ironically enough a theft does take place during the move involving three pistols which happen to belong to Aoshima, Sumire, and a new recruit from China, Wang (Kenichi Takito). Soon enough a body turns up on a boat along with Aoshima’s gun sending the gang on the chase for the mysterious thieves. 

The thing we’re constantly told about the new building is how secure it’s going to be, which makes the theft even more ironic, but the truth is that in true franchise style pretty much anyone and everyone is walking in and out carrying moving boxes so nothing is ever really “secure” even in the police station, harking back to the minor villain in the first film who was able to sneak in because he was wearing a fake cosplay police uniform and no one noticed him. Inevitably, this invisible vulnerability eventually comes back to haunt them when the criminals are simply able to steal the manual for the security system and replace it with one of their own to render it unusable to the police later trapped inside the building. Meanwhile approaches to public safety become a matter for debate when it arises that the criminals’ demand is that all of the villains we’ve seen Aoshima arrest so far including psychopathic serial killer Manami (Kyoko Koizumi) who still has a sizeable following online should be released. Counter-intuitively, the police bigwigs are in favour of acquiescing with only Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba), who has now been promoted to sit at the table himself, objecting on the grounds that it simply isn’t safe to release such dangerous criminals back into society. 

Rather than simply bureaucracy and funding concerns, Bayside Shakedown’s third instalment is more directly critical of the interplay between politics and justice as it becomes clear that the majority of police chiefs care more about public opinion than the law while also mindful of the upcoming general election. Meanwhile the same problem arises with the local police being sidelined by the elites from HQ, a smooth liaison officer Torikai (Shun Oguri) arriving to solve any disputes insisting that the locals be fully respected and allowed to turn their jobs only to turn dark and authoritarian after suffering a catastrophic injury on the job. Once again, Aoshima is forced to consider if his work has real value not only because of the way he’s treated by the cops from HQ but subjected to a healthcare crisis which leads him and many others to assume he’s not long to live. It’s later discovered that he’s been misdiagnosed during his annual checkup, but his boss unethically decides to keep that from him noticing he’s become depressed and lost his mojo, hoping that he’ll be easier to manager but quite the reverse turns out to be true. Again mimicking their previous heart-to-hearts throughout the series, Aoshima perks up after some encouraging words from Sumire in addition to some words of wisdom from the late Waku presented by his rookie nephew and decides to live as if there’s no tomorrow going flat out for justice while caring nothing for his safety. 

Even more than ten years on from the TV series and first big-screen outing, the romance between Aoshima and Sumire still hasn’t quite blossomed despite their respective brushes with death. Many things seem set to change for the Wangan police, the new building acting as a kind of reset while Muroi prepares to move into a more political role and a new, somewhat surprising, local police chief is selected to lead them into a new future just as dedicated to compassionate local policing defined by fairness and justice as they have ever been. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

No Longer Human (人間失格 太宰治と3人の女たち, Mika Ninagawa, 2019)

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Like a character from one of his novels, Osamu Dazai is remembered as a figure of intense romanticism, an image fuelled by his love suicide with a woman who was neither his wife nor the mistress with whom he had conceived a child. A proponent of the “I novel”, Dazai lived as he wrote, but crucially gives the hero of his final book, No Longer Human, a less destructive ending than he eventually gave himself in that he finally accepts his toxicity and chooses self-exile in the belief that he has fallen so far as to lose the right to regard himself as “human”. Mika Ninagawa’s biographical treatment of Dazai borrows the title from his most famous novel (人間失格 太宰治と3人の女たち, Ningen Shikkaku: Dazai Osamu to 3-nin no Onnatachi), but gives it a subtitle which pulls focus from the author himself towards the three women who each in their own way made him what he was. 

Yet what he was, in Ninagawa’s characterisation at least, was hollow. Late into the film, she includes a famous literary anecdote in which a young Yukio Mishima (Kengo Kora) turns up to a party where Dazai (Shun Oguri) is holding court following the publication of The Setting Sun and accuses him of being a poseur, a coward who writes endlessly about death but has no real intention of following through. That’s something of which he was often accused, having already failed to die as we see in the film’s opening in a love suicide in which the woman died calling out another man’s name. Intensely insecure, he carps on about being disrespected by the literary establishment, in fact using his final days and one of his last chances to pen an embittered screed against the famous authors who read but apparently did not care for his work. His editor despairs of him, resenting him not only for the debauched lifestyle which interferes with his writing but his essential caddishness that sees him both mistreat his loyal wife and use countless women as fuel for his art never quite caring about what happens to them afterwards. 

Dazai claims that Michiko (Rie Miyazawa), his legal wife and mother of his children, is OK with his affairs because it is “love in the service of art”. There is some truth in that, though as Michiko points out, Dazai himself would have no interest in a woman so passively self-sacrificing as that of Villon’s Wife. When the children catch sight of their father embracing another woman at a festival, she calmly tells them that he is “working” before pulling them on in embarrassment, putting up with it perhaps more because she has no other option than in respect for Dazai the great artist. 

Yet as his new lover Shizuko (Erika Sawajiri) claims, beautiful art comes from broken people, an idea which perhaps enables Dazai’s grandiose vision of himself as an unjustly dismissed literary genius. Just as Villon’s Wife was “inspired” by his relationship with Michiko, The Setting Sun is about Shizuko, only this time Shizuko is more collaborator than muse. He plunders her diaries and the most famous line from his novel, “Men are made for love and revolution” was in fact not written by him but stolen from her (she eventually asks for a co-writing credit but evidently did not get one, penning her own book instead). What she asks him for in return is a child, a strangely common request also made of him by Tomie (Fumi Nikaido), the woman with whom he eventually dies largely, the film suggests, because despite the longing for life that birth represents she pulled him towards death and he was too indifferent to resist. Dazai’s resistance, if you can call it that, is listlessness in which he has no desire to live but equally perhaps no real desire to die. 

Despite the foregrounding of the title, the three women are perhaps three paths he could take – the conventional as a husband and father, the radical as man standing equal with a woman who is not a wife with whom he births “a new art”, and finally the nihilistic “death” which is the route he eventually takes. With or perhaps for Tomie he writes the work he knows will destroy him in which he excoriates himself rather than her but, unlike in life, receives the gift of self-awareness and then lets himself (partially) off the hook. In Ninagawa’s visual complexity he is perhaps to an extent already dead, collapsing in the snow after haemorrhaging blood in the later stages of TB next to a red circle looking oddly like the flag of Japan only for white petals to begin raining down on him as if he were already in his coffin. We see repeated shots of shimmering water reminding us of his death by drowning, and for all of Ninagawa’s characteristically colourful compositions it’s the women who are surrounded by the vibrancy of flowers in full bloom never Dazai himself. On her husband’s death, Michiko can exclaim only (and ironically) that the sun has finally come out as she gets on with her life putting out the washing. Shizuko affirms that Dazai was the love of her life while asserting her own artistic identity in pushing her book which is an inversion of his. Meanwhile, Dazai has consumed himself, a cad to the last, overdosing on romanticism as an artist who fears he has nothing else to say.

Hong Kong trailer (English/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Weathering with You (天気の子, Makoto Shinkai, 2019)

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weathering with you poster 2Some might say much of life is learning to weather the storm, but when the storm is literal as well as metaphorical it’s easier said than done. Following his 2016 mega hit Your Name, Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You (天気の子, Tenki no Ko) opts for much of the same but grafts an additional layer of anxiety onto the lives of his precarious teen heroes who are left largely adrift, betrayed by corrupt adult society and plagued by doubt and despair in a world which, it seems, is trying to drown them in existential hopelessness.

16-year-old Hodaka (Kotaro Daigo) has run away from his parochial island home for the bright lights of Tokyo. Beyond disconnection from his parents and small-town ennui, he never gives much of a reason why he’s so determined not to go back, but tries to make a go of it in the city with all the prideful naivety of an adolescent young man. What he discovers is that, because of laws in place to protect him, he can’t support himself honestly as an independent teen, ironically placing him firmly at risk in shady Kabukicho but it turns out that you can’t even get a job as a host in a sleazy bar without proper ID. Just when he’s hit rock bottom, Hodaka is given new hope when a friendly employee at McDonalds decides to gift him a burger just because she can see that he’s hungry.

Hodaka describes the BigMac as the best meal he’s ever tasted, because he’s tasting kindness in an environment which has turned out to be far more hostile than he’d anticipated. He tries to repay that kindness when he spots the girl out in Kabukicho being manhandled by a gangster trying to coax her into a love hotel, threatening him with a gun he picked up from the rubbish bin outside a club. The girl, Hina (Nana Mori), ends up saving him again, but the rescue originally backfires because of Hodaka’s problematic adoption of the gun. He regains Hina’s sympathy by throwing it away, allowing a genuine connection to arise between them, especially when he discovers that Hina has an unusual power – she can stop the rain with the power of prayer.

It’s the height of summer, but it hasn’t stopped raining since Hodaka arrived in Tokyo. In fact, it’s just about time for Obon when the departed souls of long gone relatives are able to return. Hina apparently became linked with the sky after praying at a shrine during her mother’s illness, but if the gloominess of the heavy skies and constant rain is a reflection of her unhappiness, it’s one belied by superficial cheerfulness even though her life is just as hard as Hodaka’s. In addition to trying to support herself on the kind of money you can make as a teenage part-timer, she’s also responsible for her younger brother Nagi (Sakura Kiryu) which is why, perhaps, she was tempted by that gangster’s offer of big bucks to be made in Kabukicho.

Hodaka too looks for familial connections, moving in with a middle-aged man who saved his life during the storm that brought him to Tokyo. Like Hina, Keisuke (Shun Oguri) is also drowning in grief, in his case for a beloved wife killed in an accident, while dealing with separation from his daughter who has been taken in by her grandmother in disapproval of Keisuke’s scrappy lifestyle. It’s working for Keisuke’s occult-themed magazine that leads Hodaka to recognise Hina as a “Sunshine Girl”, but also to learn that such “weather maidens” were once common in ancient Shinto Japan and mostly met a bad end. A fortune teller makes it clear that exercising the kind of power that Hina has is likely to deplete her capacity for life, a mild irony in that it’s the inability to feel alive that these rains seem to symbolise.

Ironically enough, both teens met their destiny because they were chasing the light – Hina drawn to a rooftop shine illuminated by an improbable ray of sunshine in the rain, and Hodaka longing to find his place in the sun and resolving to live inside the light that Hina casts. Eventually, Hodaka is forced to make a decision and comes to the conclusion that he can accept Hina for all that she is, that she doesn’t need to be the “Sunshine Girl”, she can feel what she feels and the world will cope. He will weather the storm along with her.

Meanwhile, the spectre of real world climate change looms in the background. Hodaka’s decision necessarily means he has chosen to drown the world to save his love. Faced with the gradual submergence of the city of Tokyo, an old woman waxes philosophical, remembering that back in Edo most of this land was underwater so perhaps it’s just going back to the way it’s supposed to be. Hodaka is swayed but unconvinced. Still young, he is very invested in the idea that he has changed the world, for good or ill, seizing his agency as path out of his despair. But Shinkai’s messages are mixed. Hina continues to pray, but Hodaka comes to the conclusion that the world has always been messed up so perhaps all you need to do is learn to live in it and the rest will figure itself out. As much as it’s true that the problems of climate change should not rest on the young, who are blameless, it is perhaps irresponsible to advocate cautious indifference. Hodaka remains wedded to the idea that he’s made a choice and his choice has changed the world, while beginning to realise that changing the world is not his responsibility, or at least not his alone and not in that way. He has, however, found a way at least to live with all his choices, undefeated by the rain.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Let Me Eat Your Pancreas (君の膵臓をたべたい, Sho Tsukikawa, 2017)

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Let me eat your pancreas posterBack around the turn of the century, a new kind of melodrama was taking the Japanese box office by storm. “junai” or “pure love” was not exactly new in terms of genre but began to grow in popularity in the early 2000s thanks to growing interest in Korean television drama, finally hitting its zenith in 2004 with Crying Out Love in the Centre of the World. The junai boom lasted only a couple of years, but Japanese cinema has never been able to get enough of tragic stories of first love destroyed by cruel fate and, ironically enough, returns with the improbably titled Let Me Eat Your Pancreas (君の膵臓をたべたい, Kimi no Suizo wo Tabetai) which sets its fictional past in 2003 – exactly the same time as the contemporary presents of the junai classics.

In 2012, Haruki Shiga (Shun Oguri) is a melancholy high school teacher who can’t decide if teaching is really his vocation and has a resignation letter sitting in his desk. Meanwhile, he is handed a slightly upsetting task by his boss – the school library has become too rundown to consider renovating and so it’s going to have to close. When Shiga was a high school student at this very school, he also ran the library club (he now has a qualification in librarianship) and so he seems to be the perfect person to ensure everything gets packed up and dealt with in the proper fashion. The library, however, holds some painful memories for him – of a girl he grew close to for only a few months while she battled a terminal illness and changed his life forever.

12 years previously, Sakura (Minami Hamabe), a popular young woman, drops her sickness diary on leaving the hospital, whereupon Shiga picks it up and unwittingly becomes the only person outside of Sakura’s family to know that she is suffering from a degenerative pancreatic illness and has only a couple of years at most to live. She knows her case her is hopeless and the treatment she receives will only prolong her life temporarily while easing her symptoms, but is determined to live out the rest of her days to the fullest.

Unlike Sakura, Shiga (Takumi Kitamura) describes himself as a loner who isn’t good with people. He spends his days with a book in his hand and is thought of by most of his classmates (if they think of him at all) as the creepy silent boy. Thus his unexpected friendship with Sakura raises more than a few eyebrows with the other kids, especially Sakura’s best friend Kyoko (Karen Otomo) who is both jealous and confused as to why her friend has suddenly started hanging out with the loser boy. Then again it’s precisely because of this aloofness that Sakura first believes she can entrust her final days to Shiga – as virtual strangers it’s much easier to process the idea of an ending, if Sakura had tried to confide in Kyoko about her illness it would only have marred the end of their friendship. Shiga is detached, he doesn’t get emotionally involved, but despite himself still cares which makes him the ideal point of support for a girl longing to escape a carefully ordered life to get a taste of everything she knows she will miss.

Let Me Eat Your Pancreas may situate itself in the junai era of the early 2000s, but owes an undeniable debt to Shunji Iwai’s seminal 1995 romantic melodrama Love Letter and even borrows its central library conceit with a hidden message which eventually reaches its destination much later than intended. Like Love Letter, in which one of the heroines is perpetually worried about the possible repercussions of minor illnesses, Pancreas is keen to remind us that the truth is we are all dying and illness or not today might be our last day – it’s best to make the most of it without sitting around worrying about what the future might hold.

Sakura, dying yet so full of life and energy, is keen to impart her life philosophy to the introverted Shiga. For Sakura life is about connection, sharing experiences with others be they joy or pain. Shiga, though loathed to admit it, is in his own way desperately lonely but has resolved himself to surviving alone, believing that he lacks the ability connect meaningfully with other people. His nascent connection with Sakura is destined to end in tragedy but does at least begin to release something in him which had long been suppressed. Even so, as an adult he’s just as withdrawn and isolated as he’d been as a teen and it’s not until he’s forced to revisit this traumatic incident in his early life that he learns the full value of its lessons. Let Me Eat Your Pancreas, though wilfully embracing some of the genre’s more problematic elements, is a beautifully affecting return to the world of junai which manages to turn a story of death and tragedy into a celebration of life and love as its isolationist hero begins to find the strength to embrace the art of being alive no matter how painful it may turn out to be.

Original trailer (no 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)

Snakes and Earrings (蛇にピアス, Yukio Ninagawa, 2008)

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91+iM1s07LL._SL1500_When 21 year old Hitomi Kanehara’s Snakes and Earrings (蛇にピアス, Hebi ni Piasu) was published back in 2003 it took the coveted Akutagawa prize for literature and the country by storm. Its scandalous depictions of the dark and nihilistic sex life of its outsider youngsters outraged and fascinated enough people to get it onto the best seller lists and earn a cinematic adaptation from Japan’s top theatre director Yukio Ninagawa in only his second foray into the world of moving pictures. However, Snakes and Earrings is perhaps that rare instance of an adaptation which clings to closely to its source material as its detached, emotionless and straightforward approach end in something of a miss fire.

Lui (Yuriko Yoshitaka) is a typical “gyaru” – for those of you reading from the future, this is an “ultra feminine” fashion trend which encourages young women to barbie doll it up to the max. It’s a little strange then when she catches sight of young punk Ama (Kengo Kora) in a nightclub and becomes fascinated with his forked tongue. In actuality, it’s the tongue she falls for, not the guy, but the two become a couple and she moves into his apartment. Before long she too gets a tongue ring and becomes determined on splitting her own tongue as well as getting herself a large tattoo. That’s how she meets Ama’s tattooist friend Shiba (Arata Iura) who becomes equally fascinated with Lui. Lui trades sex with Shiba in return for designing her body art and the two begin an illicit, sado-masochistic affair behind Ama’s back but even after Lui’s tattoo is completed it only sends her further into a spiral of nihilistic self annihilation.

Snakes and Earrings opens with a beautifully shot near silent sequence which pans across the skyline of modern Tokyo picking out the neon lights and advertising boards that proclaim it as a city which belongs to the young. Even when we’re with Lui inside the nightclub, the sound remains muted as young men and women dance to music that we cannot hear – even when Lui spots Ama it’s only the visuals that hang until he comes over and talks to her and we realise she’s had her headphones in the entire time. This sequence is neatly echoed at the film’s conclusion but is, however, something of an anomaly when it comes to the prevailing style of the film which is relentlessly detached and straightforward in approach.

Lui – short for “Louis Vuitton” remains something of a cypher. She’s torn between her two lovers – the punkish dope Ama who would kill for her and the cold, sadistic Shiba who would kill her given half the chance. She doesn’t seem to know what she wants or who she is and quickly loses herself in alcoholism and self disgust. It feels as if there should be more to this – a critique of the emptiness of modern life or the dehumanising effects of the city but all there is is a great nothingness. Perhaps that’s the point, there is nothing to Lui – not even a real name. She possesses no clearly defined identity and therefore does not exist. This is a fine idea, on paper, but does leave a great gaping hole where the protagonist ought to be.

Lui’s two love interests, the oddly vibrant Ama and the restrained Shiba represent two sides of the same thing as Lui is torn between pleasure in pain and pain in love. Kengo Kora does what he can with a thinly defined role which often feels more like a plot device than anything else. Arata Iura fares a little better with the meatier role of Shiba who is accorded more screen time but the film remains resolutely cold and distant. In a minor instance of distraction, Shun Oguri and more prominently Tatsuya Fujiwara turn up as bit players in the roles of two street punks who get into a fight with Ama which is, frankly, baffling.

Though opting for simplistic, straightforward compositions much of Snakes and Earrings is beautifully captured even if deliberately alienating. As in the book, even the frequent, semi-explicit sex scenes are shot in such a matter of fact way as to render them totally neutered, devoid of any kind of sensation. Ultimately, Snakes and Earrings finishes as a noble failure, neatly echoing its heroine’s nihilistic mindset whilst simultaneously failing to engage.

The Hong Kong DVD/blu-ray release (as well as the Japanese blu-ray) of Snakes and Earrings includes English Subtitles.