Tag: Yurei Yanagi

Ringu (リング, Hideo Nakata, 1998)

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As the investigative duo at the centre of Hideo Nakata’s eerie supernatural horror Ringu (リング) begin to unlock the mystery of Sadako, we’re told that a strange woman who may have had some kind of psychic powers was loathed by those around her in part because of her habit of sitting and staring at the sea. Nakata opens the film with waves and often returns to them as if suggesting in this millennial horror that what we fear is a transmission we cannot see. In the end there may not be so much difference between the magic of an analogue TV broadcast and a message from another plane. 

In any case, perhaps the central message is that one should pay more attention to the words of those whose warnings are often dismissed on the grounds of their age and gender. Journalist Reiko (Nanako Matsushima), for example, doesn’t seem too invested in a video she’s making about a cursed video related by a trio of high school girls in a cafe who explain that they don’t personally know anyone who’s died after watching it but have been reliably informed by friends of friends who apparently do. As will later be discovered, the girls actually give Reiko crucial information but for whatever reason she does not remember it until coming to the same conclusion herself. In any case, it’s not until her own niece, Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi), dies in mysterious circumstances that Reiko starts to wonder if this is more than a spooky story elevating the chain letter to new technological heights.

According to the urban legend, if you watch the cursed tape you’ll immediately get a phone call telling you you’ll die in seven days. The supernatural entity now synonymous with the film, Sadako, is manipulating these still analogue waves for herself. Sending her messages via television and telephone she is a literal ghost of the airwaves and as Reiko’s ex-husband Ryuji later puts it radiating her sense of rage in her own mistreatment, insisting that her story be known and that those who refuse to acknowledge it should not be allowed to survive. Just as Reiko should have listened to the high school girls, someone should have listened to Sadako and because they didn’t others now have no choice. 

In a sense Sadako represents this nascent fear of technological advancement. When Reiko answers her flip phone, it’s a reminder that there’s no escape from unwanted communication even if you can in theory try to switch it off. The girl with Tomoko when she died was driven out of her mind and now won’t venture anywhere near a television, as if you could escape Sadako’s wrath by merely keeping your distance from the portal. The two teenagers who died around the same time as Tomoko were in a car in the middle of nowhere, but cars have radios which receive radio waves. Sadako travels through the air, invisible until she chooses not to be. She may only have a direct line, but it is in one sense a call for help she’s issuing only in the very inefficient manner of a vengeful ghost whose rage has become indiscriminate or at least directed towards the society that wronged her and everyone in it rather than a single guilty party. 

In a certain sense, you can cure the curse only by spreading it. If everyone everywhere suddenly understood, learned Sadako’s painful history, then the curse would wither and die with no new hosts to go to which is perhaps what Sadako wants. Yet it leaves Reiko with a dilemma, knowing that to save the lives of those closest to her she may have to ask someone else to risk their life or even expose them without their consent. Throughout the film she’s been depicted as an imperfect mother, divorced and often leaving her small son Yoichi to fend for himself at home while the boy at one point walks past his own father in the street and does not seem to recognise him so absent had he been in his life. Through their shared quest to undo the curse, the pair in a sense reclaim their parental roles and repair their familial ties in working together to save their son’s life in contrast to the parental figures surrounding Sadako who may have done the reverse. Sadako frightens us because of her transgressive qualities, quite literally transgressing the barriers between ourselves and the stories we tell by crawling out of them and finding us here, on the other side of the screen, where we thought we were safe to remind us not to look away and to listen to those whose voices are all too often ignored. 

Ringu screens at Japan Society New York on Oct. 7 as part of the Monthly Classics series.

20th anniversary trailer (English subtitles)

Boiling Point (３－４Ｘ１０月, Takeshi Kitano, 1990)

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The heroes of Takeshi Kitano’s films are often gentle men, capable of great tenderness but also filled with quietly mounting rage permanently on the brink of explosion. Everyone perhaps has their Boiling Point, the straw that breaks the camel’s back and sends it careering towards a self-destructive attempt at restitution. “Boiling Point”, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the original Japanese title (３－４Ｘ１０月) which references the score on the board at a baseball game and the originally scheduled month of the film’s release, October (it was later moved up to September making the whole thing even more meaningless). This perverse randomness was apparently another minor win for Kitano who had scored a critical hit with his debut feature Violent Cop but had struggled to convince the team around him to embrace his unconventional vision. Working with greater independence, Kitano minimises camera movement in favour long takes with static camera which perfectly compliment his deadpan sense of the absurd. 

He also relegates himself to a supporting role unseen on screen for over half of the running time. Our hero is small town loser Masaki (Yurei Yanagi) who we first meet hiding in a toilet during an amateur baseball game in which he is desperate to play but strikes out when given the opportunity in the first of many petty humiliations. He has been taken under the wing of the team’s coach, Iguchi (Taka Guadalcanal), a former yakuza attempting to go straight by running a dive bar, and has a part-time job at a petrol station. Masaki perhaps images himself as something greater, as evidenced by his extremely cool motorcycle jacket and bike, but is a dreamer at heart, nervous and tongue-tied, unable to unlock his hidden potential. Even he has a boiling point, however, which is later hit when he gets into an altercation with a teddy boy yakuza at the garage who starts a pointless argument about being kept waiting, pulling the old trick of goading Masaki into fighting back to get leverage over their shop and begin extorting it. Masaki has just got his boss into trouble through losing his cool, but is ironically offered a job by a visiting thug jokingly admiring his fighting prowess. 

Iguchi meanwhile is a man divided, permanently on the brink of boiling over. When some irritating sophisticates “ironically” visit his bar clutching their designer handbags and holding their noses, he’s obliged to be nice to them but he simply can’t. Unable to bear their snotty arrogance, he glasses one of the women on the way back from the bathroom and throws the whole gang out. The yakuza has it seems been reawakened, and though he was reluctant before, he to decides approach his old boss, Otomo (Hisashi Igawa), on Masaki’s behalf. The reception he receives is not as he expected. Iguchi is reminded that he chose the civilian life and being a yakuza isn’t a part-time job, you can’t just pick it back up again when it suits you. Not being able to help Masaki is another small humiliation, one he perhaps intends to overcome through turning violence on an old underling who disrespected him in refusing the customary deference. Predictably, it backfires, you can’t be half a yakuza after all. Iguchi is completely finished, boiling with rage but too humiliated to do much about it other than vow revenge by going to Okinawa to buy a gun in order to put an end to the lot of them. To protect his mentor, an oddly yakuza-esque gesture, Masaki volunteers to go in his stead, dragging his catcher friend Kazuo (Duncan) along for the ride. 

A complicated liminal space, Okinawa is both an enticing holiday destination and source of political contention thanks to the controversial presence of the US military bases. It’s indeed corrupt foreign influences who can provide our guys with guns, but Okinawa is also a place slightly out of time, trapped in the Showa-era past while the rest of Japan has already transitioned to an economically prosperous mid-Bubble Heisei. Consequently, these are Showa-era yakuza with fancy outfits and sunshades hanging out in neon-lit bars with butterflies on the walls. Uehara (Takeshi Kitano) is in the process of being humiliated in front of his gang for supposed embezzlement of collective funds. He too wants a gun to enact his revenge, something which he fantasises about in an eerie and fatalistic flash forward. Before that, however, he’s befriended our guys and taken quite a liking to Kazuo, hinting a latent homosexuality in another example of the unwelcome association of queerness and savagery often seen in yakuza movies. Uehara has a girlfriend but treats her with utter contempt, insisting that she sleep with his underling only to punish her for it afterwards and take over halfway through to rape him. In fact all of his subsequent sexual actions are rapes, his assaults on women cold and mechanical as if purely performative, implying that it is his repressed homosexuality which underpins the sense of humiliation that fuels his violence and his cruelty. 

Unlike Uehara and Iguchi, our guys have not even one foot in the yakuza world and despite their ingenious plan to get the guns on the plane have no idea what they’re going to do with them, marching all the way over to Otomo’s before realising they don’t know anything about the use of firearms with the consequence that they become useless lumps of metal in their hands. They are boys playing gangster out of a misguided ideal of heroic nobility in their desire to avenge Iguchi who by all accounts is still sulking alone at home. This is their greatest and final humiliation, failing as men in front of men. Yet, their friendship perhaps survives, patched up in silence over shared ice lollies. Even so, Masaki is about to boil over, travelling towards a split second moment of fiery self-destruction and misdirected rage. But then Kitano pulls the rug out from under us again. Was this all a dream after all, grim wish-fulfilment from a repressed young man longing to burn out bright, or perhaps a lengthy vision of the kind visited on Uehara which would at least explain Kitano’s many non-sequitur cuts and ellipses? Who can say, but the humiliating sense of impossibility is all too real for those unable to take a swing at life’s many opportunities.

Boiling Point is the second of three films included in the BFI’s Takeshi Kitano Collection blu-ray box set and is accompanied by a new audio commentary by Little White Lies’ David Jenkins, plus a featurette recorded in 2016. The first pressing includes a 44-page booklet featuring a piece on Boiling Point from Mark Schilling, an essay on Violent Cop by Tom Mes, an introduction to Kitano’s career & writing on Sonatine by Jasper Sharp, an archival review by Geoff Andrew, and an appreciation of Beat Takeshi by James-Masaki Ryan.

The Takeshi Kitano Collection is released 29th June while Violent Cop, Boiling Point, and Sonatine will also be available to stream via BFI Player from 27th July as part of BFI Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

We Are Little Zombies (ウィーアーリトルゾンビーズ, Makoto Nagahisa, 2019)

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Little Zombies poster“Reality’s too stupid to cry over” affirms the deadpan narrator of Makoto Nagahisa’s We Are Little Zombies (ウィーアーリトルゾンビーズ), so why does he feel so strange about feeling nothing much at all? Taking its cues from the French New Wave by way of ‘60s Japanese avant-garde, the first feature from the award winning And So We Put Goldfish in the Pool director is a riotous affair of retro video game nostalgia and deepening ennui, but it’s also a gentle meditation on finding the strength to keep moving forward despite all the pain, emptiness, and disappointment of being alive.

The “Little Zombies”, as we will later discover, are the latest tween viral pop sensation led by bespectacled 13-year-old Hikari (Keita Ninomiya). Recounting his own sorry tale of how his emotionally distant parents died in a freak bus accident, Hikari then teams up with three other similarly bereaved teens after meeting at the local crematorium where each of their parents is also making their final journey. Inspired by a retro RPG with the same title, the gang set off on an adventure to claim their independence by revisiting the sites of all their grief before making themselves intentionally homeless and forming an emo (no one says that anymore, apparently) grunge band to sing about their emotional numbness and general inability to feel.

Very much of the moment, but rooted in nostalgia for ages past, Little Zombies is another in a long line of Japanese movies asking serious questions about the traditional family. The reason Hikari can’t cry is, he says, because crying would be pointless. Babies cry for help, but no one is going to help him. Emotionally neglected by his parents who, when not working, were too wrapped up in their own drama to pay much attention to him, Hikari’s only connection to familial love is buried in the collection of video games they gave him in lieu of physical connection, his spectacles a kind of badge of that love earned through constant eyestrain.

The other kids, meanwhile, have similarly detached backgrounds – Takemura (Mondo Okumura) hated his useless and violent father but can’t forgive his parents for abandoning him in double suicide, Ishii (Satoshi) Mizuno) resented his careless dad but misses the stir-fries his mum cooked for him every day, and Ikuko (Sena Nakaijma) may have actually encouraged the murder of her parents by a creepy stalker while secretly pained over their rejection of her in embarrassment over her tendency to attract unwanted male attention even as child. The kids aren’t upset in the “normal” way because none of their relationships were “normal” and so their homes were never quite the points of comfort and safety one might have assumed them to be.

Orphaned and adrift, they fare little better. The adult world is as untrustworthy as ever and it’s not long before they begin to feel exploited by the powers intent on making them “stars”. Nevertheless, they continue with their deadpan routines as the “soulless” Little Zombies until their emotions, such as they are, begin inconveniently breaking through. “Despair is uncool”, but passion is impossible in a world where nothing really matters and all relationships are built on mutual transaction.

Mimicking Hikari’s retro video game, the Zombies pursue their quest towards the end level boss, passing through several stages and levelling up as they go, but face the continuing question of whether to continue with the game or not. Save and quit seems like a tempting option when there is no hope in sight, but giving in to despair would to be to let the world win. The only prize on offer is life going on “undramatically”, but in many ways that is the best reward one can hope for and who’s to say zombies don’t have feelings too? Dead but alive, the teens continue their adventure with heavy hearts but resolved in the knowledge that it’s probably OK to be numb to the world but also OK not to be. “Life is like a shit game”, but you keep playing anyway because sometimes it’s kind of fun. A visual tour de force and riot of ironic avant-garde post-modernism, We Are Little Zombies is a charmingly nostalgic throwback to the anything goes spirit of the bubble era and a strangely joyous celebration of finding small signs of hope amid the soulless chaos of modern life.

We Are Little Zombies was screened as part of the 2019 Nippon Connection Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Makoto Nagahisa’s short And So We Put Goldfish in the Pool

Music videos for We Are Little Zombies and Zombies But Alive

Dangan Runner (弾丸ランナー, SABU, 1996)

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Dangan Runner posterIt’s not difficult to see what might send three young men running like stray bullets from a random gun in the Japan of the mid-90s, but each of the various protagonists of SABU’s debut feature Dangan Runner (弾丸ランナー, AKA Non-Stop) is reaching for a different target. Like much of the director’s later work, Dangan Runner pivots on random circumstance which somehow conspires to bring our three runners together as if bound by cosmic thread while they too are chased by an oncoming storm in the form of vengeful yakuza and the bumbling cops hot on their trail.

Kickstarting the whole affair, lowly restaurant worker Yasuda (Tomorowo Taguchi), fed up with the petty humiliations of his life, decides to rob a bank. He has everything planned, even rehearsed and choreographed down to the second, but when the time comes he makes a mistake. Having left his mask at home, he decides to buy one from a local combini but panics and accidentally shoplifts instead, attracting the attentions of bullet two – Aizawa (Diamond Yukai), who is wounded in the arm by Yasuda’s nervous shot when his gun accidentally goes off. A drug addict and former rockstar, Aizawa, intent on revenge for the disrespect he’s just been paid, retrieves the gun dropped by Yasuda and chases him through the streets of Tokyo. Aizawa in turn continues the chain reaction when he bumps into a yakuza, Takeda (Shinichi Tsutsumi), who is “triggered” by a deep seated trauma into chasing off after Aizawa, knife in hand. Meanwhile, a rival yakuza clan is also after Takeda because of gangland politics while they too are being monitored by the police who have gotten wind of a gang war in the offing.

Though SABU’s film is not in the least political, it is like much of his work a mild satire even if its sympathy lies firmly with its three central heroes each desperately trying and failing to outrun themselves. Yasuda, a small man with a slight frame, is the lowest of the low. He has a terrible job as a kitchen assistant in a small restaurant where he is constantly bullied by the head chef and belittled by the other kitchen staff who are all much taller and stronger than he is. It’s not difficult to see why he might bristle so much when one calls him “good for nothing”, yet he’s not the type to offer more than an angry stare in return. To make matters worse, he runs into an old girlfriend who appears to have moved on and up. Walking arm in arm with a wealthy salaryman, she has apparently jettisoned the “common” name of “Midori” for the relatively more sophisticated one of “Yasuko”, presumably hoping to hook someone who is indeed the polar opposite of a “loser” like Yasuda.

Aizawa also has his share of woman troubles though his are of an opposing dimension. A failed musician with a drug problem, Aizawa alienated his loving girlfriend while hoping his addiction would save him from his unattainable dreams. Of course, it’s an entirely different “shot in the arm” that starts him running, but like Yasuda in the end all he can think of is the girl and how he did everything wrong. Takeda, by contrast, is a yakuza through and through. His regrets are bound up with homosocial bonding and male loyalty, mourning the death of the trusted superior he failed to save in dodging the blows of a random assassin. Yet as his superior tells him, all living beings run towards the same thing. A yakuza cannot control his death but he can control his life and the effect he has on others. He urges Takeda to run and find life in the process, but perhaps Takeda’s destination is the run itself rather than where it will eventually take him.

Indeed, Yasuda, accidentally landing up in the middle of the yakuza gang war, affirms that he never felt so alive as when he was running for his life. All three men, running fast from failure, finally achieve the freedom they’d dreamed of through the intense exertion of their flight which later literally becomes orgasmic as all three fantasise about a pretty woman seen on the side of the road. Like bullets fired from a gun powered by social impossibility, each is destined to explode on reaching its chosen target. Like many of SABU’s later protagonists, these are men brought low by life and circumstance, driven slowly mad by a conspiracy of cosmic coincidence, mere playthings of fate without power or agency. Angry young men are a powder keg waiting to ignite, but in SABU’s whimsically surreal universe they usually sort things out amongst themselves. For the Dangan Runners, they only need to look in the mirror to figure out where it is they need to go.

Dangan Runner is available on dual format DVD & blu-ray from Third Window Films. On disc extras include a video essay on the history of V Cinema from film scholar Tom Mes, and an expansive audio commentary by Jasper Sharp providing detailed background on SABU’s career and the Japanese cinema landscape of the mid-90s.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Japanese Girls Never Die (アズミ・ハルコは行方不明, Daigo Matsui, 2016)

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Japanese Girls Never DieJapanese Girls Never Die (アズミ・ハルコは行方不明, Azumi Haruko wa Yukuefumei) but, like old soldiers, only fade away in Daigo Matsui’s impassioned adaptation of the Mariko Yamauchi novel. Crushed by a misogynistic society, these are women who may well want to disappear if only as an alternative to finally being forced into submission to the predefined paths of womanhood – i.e. marriage and motherhood (and nothing else) that have been carved out for them. The young are, however, fighting back if in less than admirable ways. The best revenge on an oppressive society may be living well in one’s own way, but when that same society is at great pains to frustrate your goal the options are few.

As per the title, 28-year-old admin assistant Haruko Azuma (Yu Aoi) has gone missing. Her face, stolen from her missing poster, has been co-opted by a pair of petty punk idiots trying to come-up with a viral graffiti tag to rival Obey, but there’s no art or intention behind their minor act of social transgression so much as bravado and pithy rebellion. Nevertheless, Haruko’s image, plastered throughout the city, has become a hot topic on Japan’s social networking sites where a hundred trolls wade in with their prognostications and salacious fantasies of her violent death at the hands of a sex maniac.

Meanwhile, in an ironic subversion of the normalities of city life, young men have been urged to avoid walking alone at night following a spate of attacks by a gang of rabid school girls taking revenge on the male sex. No exact motive is given for their crusade save the missing poster that precedes Haruko’s and asks for information on a disappeared school girl, but goodness knows they have enough obvious reasons to have decided on a course of vigilante justice.

Haruko’s world is one defined by entrenched sexism. At 28 she finds herself embarrassed to be a still single woman at a wedding while a chance encounter with a school friend (Huwie Ishizaki) at a supermarket leads to more awkwardness when he pointedly remarks he assumed she’d be a housewife by now, and that she looks “old”. At work, Haruko’s colleague Yoshizawa (Maho Yamada), 37 and still unwed, is the butt of hundred jokes for the two middle-aged men who, for some reason, are their bosses though they hardly seem to do any work and automatically earn seven times Yoshizawa’s salary. The bosses urge Haruko to dress in more feminine fashions, asking invasive questions about her personal life while disparaging single women like Yoshizawa who they blame for Japan’s declining birthrate and a related raise in their taxes, avowing that women over 35 are essentially pointless seeing as their eggs are already “rotten”. Yoshizawa has developed a thick skin for their constant needling, realising that it amounts to an odd combination of sexual harassment and constructive dismissal campaign. Unwilling to pay a “higher” salary to an “older” woman, they are waiting for her to quit so they can hire a young and pretty new girl who will be naive enough to accept the pittance they intend to pay her.

It might be thought that the attitudes of Haruko’s bosses are a reflection of their generation, but the two young punks, Yukio (Taiga) and Manabu (Shono Hayama), are no different. 20-year-old Aina (Mitsuki Takahata), a bar girl with ambitions to enter the beauty business, gets swept into their unpleasant orbit after getting into a “relationship” with Yukio, but Yukio thinks of her only as a plaything, even going so far as to encourage the shy Manabu to try his luck because (he claims contemptuously) Aina is the kind of girl who’ll go with anyone. Later she becomes a key part of their mini graffiti movement, but once the pair start to get a little recognition they essentially erase Aina from the story taking all the credit for themselves. Aina, poignantly looking up at the poster advertising the boys’ big moment in the same way she had gazed at Haruko’s missing poster on the police station notice board, realises she’s finally had enough of all their lies and of being made to feel invisible in a society which refuses to recognise her as anything more than an object for exploitation.

Haruko’s face is literally plastered all over town, but she remains essentially faceless, her image stolen and stripped of its identity to be repackaged as a soulless symbol for two idiotic boys who not only do not care who she is or might have been but only seek to profit from claiming to be allies in a struggle while simultaneously propping up the opposing side. The image does, however, gain its own independent power, speaking for all the oppressed and belittled women who find themselves essentially disappeared in being forced to abandon their hopes and dreams in the face of extreme social pressure. The school girls are fighting back – the next generation will (perhaps) not be so keen to remain complicit in the social codes which restrict their prospects. Then again, as the image of Haruko tells one of her lost disciples, the best revenge is living well. Choosing to absent oneself from a system of social control, going missing in a more positive sense, may be the best option of all.

Screened as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2018.

Screening again:

  • Dundee Contemporary Arts – 26 February 2018
  • HOME – 27 February 2018
  • Phoenix Leicester – 1 March 2018
  • Filmhouse – 3 March 2018
  • Showroom Cinema – 6 March 2018
  • Firstsite – 9 March 2018
  • Exeter Phoenix – 13 March 2018
  • Queen’s Film Theatre – 18 March 2018

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Getting Any? (みんな～やってるか！, Takeshi Kitano, 1995)

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getting any? posterDespite his reputation for violent gangster dramas and melancholy arthouse pieces, Takeshi Kitano is one of Japan’s most successful comedians and began his career as half of an irreverent and anarchic “manzai” comedy double act. 1995’s Getting Any? (みんな～やってるか！Minna – yatteruka!) is his first big screen comedy and loosely takes the form of a series of variety-style skits in which a lonely, hapless middle-aged man tries on various different personas in the pursuit of his goal but remains an isolated bystander in the surreal events which eventually engulf him. Part bawdy, sleazy sex comedy and satire on the death of materialism in the post-bubble world, Getting Any? is a cineliterate journey through Showa era pop culture peppered with gratuitous nudity and absurd running jokes.

After watching a very 1980s “aspirational” movie in which a good looking, wealthy young salaryman type gives a young lady a lift in his flashy convertible in which they later end up having sex, Asao (Dankan), watching at home in his pants with his grandpa sitting behind him, decides the reason he hasn’t got any luck with women is that he doesn’t have a car. So, he goes and gets one from a very strange salesman but as he doesn’t have much money the car he gets is, well, it’s unlikely to get stolen, and he still isn’t getting anywhere. He tries a convertible too but that’s no good. Then he starts fantasising about air hostesses, decides to become an actor, gets mistaken for a top yakuza hitman, and comes into contact with a pair of mad scientists who want to turn him invisible.

Asao has only one goal – to have sex with a lady (preferably in a car), but he never stops to think of his potential partners as anything more than a receptacle for his desires. Consequently, he refuses to look at himself or consider the ways he might be getting in the way of his own needs, but constantly chases a quick fix thinking that the reason women don’t want him is because of something material that he lacks. He thinks the path to sexual success lies in cars, money, status, and finally technology, but none of these things really matter while Asao remains Asao.

As part of his journey, passive as it is, Asao does not always remain Asao, or at least the Asao he was for very long. Having failed to be the sort of man who can woo with car, he tries acting – literally playing a part, at which he seems quite good except for going “overboard”. An incident on an aeroplane sees him mistaken for a top yakuza which he is less good at but every mistake only ever works out in his favour. Thanks to his involvement with the mad scientists whom he allows to experiment on him so that he can go peeping in the women’s baths, Asao will finally become another kind of creature entirely, literally reduced to feeding off the excrement his nation has recently produced.

Kitano works in just about every element of almost “retro” pop-culture he can think of from the amusing soundtrack of Showa era hits and references to famous unsolved crimes to a hitman named “Joe Shishido” (star of Branded to Kill), the Zatoichi series, a Lone Wolf and Cub ventriloquist dummy duo, the Invisible Man, Ghostbusters, The Fly, and finally Toho’s tokusatsu classics culminating a lengthy skit inspired by Mothra including the iconic Mothra song given new lyrics and the same old dance performed by two full-sized ladies. Though most viewers will be able to spot the joke even without quite understanding it, some knowledge of Japanese pop-culture from the ‘70s and ‘80s will undoubtedly help.

The central joke revolves around Asao’s fecklessness as he repeatedly fails at each of his schemes, only occasionally succeeding and then by accident, and not for very long. A charmless literalist who lacks the imagination to achieve his goals in a more natural way, Asao fails to learn anything at all, engulfed by one surreal situation after another. It does however give Kitano the excuse to indulge Asao’s flights of fancy as his sexual frustration sends him off into a series of bizarre reveries involving topless women desperate to make love to the suave male stand-in Asao has imagined. Filled with silly slapstick humour and frequent nudity, Kitano’s subtle satire may get lost but even if the joke begins to wear thin just as “flyman” finally lands on his object of desire, there is plenty of amusement on offer for fans of lowbrow humour.

Getting Any? is released on blu-ray by Third Window Films on 16th October, 2017.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Hana-bi (はなび, AKA Fireworks, Takeshi Kitano, 1997)

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Original quad poster from UK theatrical release (some of these cinemas no longer exist. Also, sponsored by Yo! Sushi.)

Review of Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-bi (はなび) first published by UK Anime Network.

Takeshi Kitano might still be best known for his ultra violent gangster pics, but after making it into the international arthouse repertoire with Sonatine back in the early ‘90s it was Hana-bi which put him on the map as one of Japan’s most prominent exports. Kitano plays the lead in the film once more adopting his cooler than cool persona with occasional flashes of violence only this time on the side of the law (to begin with, anyway).

Told in an initially confusing, flashback structure, Hana-bi follows middle aged policeman Nishi who experiences several life changing events in a short space of time. At the beginning of the film he’s let off a stakeout and told to go visit his wife who’s ill in hospital. Unfortunately, as we later find out, this will prove to be a poor decision as pretty much everything goes wrong – Nishi’s partner, Horibe, is shot and ends up paralysed, one of his other men is wounded and tragically another killed right in front of Nishi’s eyes. After being told that nothing more can be done for his wife and it’s better that she just come home from the hospital, Nishi quits the police force, gets involved with the yakuza and robs a bank before taking off with his wife for one last holiday.

Actually, the film skips over its climactic event until quite a way into its running time. Kitano unsettles us right away by giving us very little explanation for what we’re seeing. He shows us Nishi meeting with the widow of a man we didn’t even know was dead yet (not that he really told us who she was anyway). We’re left to piece events together like a detective listening to a confused witness testimony only our information is primarily visual – there isn’t even a lot of dialogue to guide us on our way. This refreshing technique is one the generally laconic Kitano seems to favour and greatly adds to Hana-bi’s low-key style.

Kitano never says too much in his movies anyway, but this time his is wife also near silent uttering the grand total of two words in the entire film and both of those come in the final scene. We know that she has a terminal illness (though it isn’t clear that she knows this, or how much she understands). Nishi and his wife also apparently lost their young daughter not long ago and it’s implied that perhaps she just hasn’t been fully present ever since. Her lack of speech, shyness and constant game playing coupled with her outwardly cheerful (if sometimes vacant) demeanour give her a childlike quality but the two words she does offer at the film’s conclusion imply (at least in that moment) that she knows what’s going on and understands what is about to happen.

Nishi and his wife have an extremely close relationship, they rarely need to speak to each other. However, Nishi’s partner, Horibe, discovers that his marriage was not as secure as he assumed as his wife and daughter walk out on him after his accident. In an effort to give him something to strive for, Nishi sends him some painting supplies and henceforth Horibe’s artwork (actually designed by Kitano himself) becomes a prominent motif in the film. The first series takes animals and then people and paints them with the heads of flowers but this then gives way to more complicated pointillist scenes. Many of Horibe’s works feature a repeated motif of a man, woman and child (neatly echoed in the films closing scenes) seemingly enjoying a happy family occasion. Perhaps this is an odd sort of masochism on Horibe’s part, lamenting everything he’s lost since his accident but the two figures could also represent the Nishis reunited with their lost daughter.

Shot in Kitano’s trademark blues, Hana-bi is a melancholy tale. Flowers and fire, Kitano shows us both extreme tenderness and fits of violence as he’s both the loving husband, grieving father, nurturing best friend and hardline cop who bears personal responsibility for the loss of his own. This path only leads in one direction and we’ve figured out where we’re headed long before nearing the end of our journey. Nevertheless, Hana-bi is a rich, poetic experience which continues to prove deeply moving and endlessly fascinating.

Hana-bi is re-released in the UK today on blu-ray courtesy of Third Window Films who will also be releasing Dolls and Kikujiro in the near future.