Amon's Chopsticks
Hmmm, that's good Brucespoiltation.
Nothing is better than The Ninja Strikes Back. Unapologetic, crass, despotic, gratuitous, illogical, pointless, plagiarizing, exploitative, and above all, proud to be all of these things without any compromises. From beginning to end, the most entertaining and funny movie I've seen in decades. A film my brother labeled as Brucespoiltation, with the one of the most well known Bruce Lee imitators of all, Bruce Le (who looks nothing like Bruce by the way, even taking into consideration of the stereotype that “all Asians look alike to whites” – oh, most Asians I know also think the same about white people – but Le is not even close to Lee); you have to love other cast, notably Chick Norris – yes, that’s “CHICK” Norris, not to be confused, well, they want you to mistake it with Chuck, and with Bolo Yueng (from Enter the Dragon fame – the big Chinese guy that fought John Saxon), and Harold Sakata (007 Odd Jobs fame – they even play the Bond theme when he graces the screen). The opening credits music is a composite mix of Lalo Schifrin Enter the Dragon theme – about 5 second worth – I guess to keep from getting sued – mixed with stylistic and sheik 70 themes that is interchangeable from action film to funky jazz music for porn.
Ninja doesn't waste time on logical set up of plots or witty dialogs, rather just focuses of chaos and violating, not only the laws of physics but the laws of logic and the laws of its own universe and existence which is the 1970s. Forget Boogie Nights, Dazed and Confused, or all of these retrospective films that tries to capture and dissect the social stratosphere of the 70s, Ninja Strikes Back is the quintessential 1970 movie, and it achieves this without even trying. Ninja will always be my argument for the importance of bad movies, for the duality in all things, greatness cannot exist without colossal failures, but there is value and beauty in failure. This is not to say parody movies are great by definitions, these movies making fun of multiple movies, Meet the Spartans, Date Movie, Epic Movie, etc., with the exception Airplane or films by the Zucker brothers and Abrahams including Top Secret and to a lesser extend Hot Shots (I liked Part Duex a lot more for the jokes are less obvious and more broader than Hot Shot which seems to be obvious and limited to mainly parodying Top Gun), because Airplane set the rules for the genre, as well as broke conventions of film narrative; however, these “frat boy” parodies (seriously, the writers of these movie, starting with Spy Hard, were frat boys sitting around watching Hot Shots thinking they can do better and had a friend in “the Biz” with connections, thus the rest is history, lesson #1 in Comedy humility, what you think is funny might not be funny to others) that cost nothing to make and if 100000 frat boys out there go to see these films (which if you look at the weekend box office takes, they do, and will probably continue to do so), that’s $10 a ticket 10x100000 that’s at least one million, and, apparently, there are a lot of frat boys or frat boys at heart people out there that continue their support for the Friedberg and Seltzer team, god help us all. But on a cost effective scale and when compared to Ninja Strikes Back, these frat boy parodies fail micro economics 101 (I would think most frat boys who spend most of their time going and enjoying films like Meet the Spartans wouldn’t last more than half a semester in any course requiring some logical); where Frat Boys re-shoot and then inject their humor, Ninja just out right steal and exploit. In a way; there are little to no compromising with Ninja, logic is a needless distraction, why even bother? That’s where the frat boys fail as filmmakers, even on a moronic P.O.V. it cannibalizes its own genre and narrative for empty laughs, freshmen humor, and infantile logic that even an eight year old would not accept. Not that I’m trying to find emotional reciprocity with these films, but there is nothing there, no wit, no charm, no timing, these are all the right components that existed in Airplane, Kentucky Fried Movie, Naked Gun, Top Secret, Hot Shots Part Deux. Frat Boys tells a joke and hangs on that joke to make sure you get it, I guess they are always used to having to explain everything to other frat boys around them, so this carries over to other aspects. So the digressive lesson here is it’s ok to watch bad movies, as long as it’s a bad movie with heart, regardless of what was the intended purpose might be, sometimes it’s easier to laugh at a tragic failure than a parody of tragic failures.
Labels: Digression: The Sunshine in the Cloudy Narrative
From Fantasy to Funerals
The winner for best foreign film this year is Yojiro Takita's Departures. I saw this film while visiting Taiwan for this past Chinese new year. Departures was quite popular in Taiwan as well as most of Asia thanks to it's Buddhist theme of life and death, positive and negative actions, a gateway to another existence, what-have-you've-done-with-your-life-when-death-comes-knocking Ikiru-esque meditations. You would think the Japanese are tired of asking these questions in their films (See Paul's review of the criminally underrated The Funeral), but apparently the answers talented writers and directors have been giving are unsatisfactory. It was by chance that I decided to watch Departures. Up until my plane ride back, Yojiro Takita was under my radar; however, the first film that I saw of Takita holds the prestigious title of being the first date movie with the Wife, the black magic feudal Japan fantasy meets Sherlock Holmes shaman Onmyoji. Though Onmyoji hit theaters in Japan in 2001, it did not make it to the U.S. until 2003 when I saw it with the Wife on our 1st date at Piper's Alley in Chicago, I believe I still have the stub somewhere to get the exact date. After watching this film, I did more research and found out that Takita has been in the business for over 20 years, now approaching 30 years. I didn't think much of the style of Onmyoji, just your standard mixed genre where the occult meets religion mixed with action, a dash of politics, and of course romance (even some homoerotic sensibilities between the two male leads), of course romance, after all it's the Japanese. At the time, I can't say I really liked the attempt to mix genre's so wildly from different facets of the scale; but having revisit the film on video, I can see what Takita was shooting for, and to some extend, beautifully crafted with a few minor and unmentionable holes in the plot, but over all, not a bad personal introduction to Takita. Onmyoji was so successful in Japan that a sequel, creatively titled Onmyoji 2, wouldn't be too far behind. The hunky Mansai Nomura return as Abe no Seimei. Wife, having been and still is a Japanese drama (soap opera) expert, has a detail knowledge of stars, actors, actress and told me at that time that Mansai is considered to be quite the sought after actor and is known in the female circle as the "muscular guy." What is intriguing was not Takita's Onmuoji 1 and 2 but the film in between that should have caught the attention of the U.S. art film scene but was overshadowed by the success of Twilight Samurai which hit theaters 2 months before Takita's When the Last Sword is Drawn made it to Japanese theaters. So the success of one killed the possible success of the other. Having seen Yoji Yamada's follow up to Twilight, I might have to say that luck, not craftsmanship was the contributor to the success of Twilight, obviously Shuhei Fujisawa's beautiful novel and story helped a great deal. In retrospect and after Departures, my money is on Takita which seem to be better endowed with artistry and composition more than Yamada, if you have seen Twilight Samurai and was hoping Hidden Blade to be a better follow-up but was disappointed like me, pick up When the Last Sword is Drawn and your faith in reflective-existential-humanist samurai films will surely be reinvigorated. So the road leads to Departures.
So Masahiro Motoki play Daigo Kobayashi, a cellist in an orchestra that has just seen it's last day and like many people in the world, he finds himself jobless. Daigo then decides to move back to his hometown with his wife to look for work. He mistakes a job listed in the classified ads entitled "Departures" thinking it is an advertisement for a travel agency, of course it's not. It's actually for a "Nokanshi" or "encoffineer," a "funeral professional" for a funeral home. While his wife and others despise the job due to the social stigma that comes with the title, Daigo takes a certain pride in his work and begins to perfect the art of "Nokanshi," acting as a gentle gatekeeper between life and death, between the departed and the family of the departed. The film follows his profound and sometimes comical journey with death as he uncovers the wonder, joy and meaning of life and living...and of course we have all been bitten by these melodramatic Japanese humanist flares many times before, so if Departures got the Oscar, why not Hula Girls? What about Swing Girls? The Star Maker? Christmas on July 24th Avenue? Always? No? Nothing? Well, reason number one is that Takita had nothing to do with these other films; and that is the main reason as well. Takita has a fantastic sense of timing mixing irony with melancholy to bring sincere joy, not sentimentality, to a dreadful situation, which is the downfall of similar themed Japanese films. While other are too busy trying to milk tears artificially from your eyes, Takita doesn't let the story beat the tears out of you; rather, with a poker-faced direction and juxtaposition, accepts what responses naturally flows out of the viewer. He is not an emotional pornographer like most recent Japanese drama film directors; he has a very naturalistic style that pours out passionately to shows life and energy in mundane ritualized gestures of preparing lifeless bodies for the afterlife. There is passion and beauty in this irony, and Takita's genius is never to sells you his genius, but to let the characters and their actions do all the work naturally. A style without style, formless and transcendent, the likes of which have not been seen, at least by me, since Teshigahara's Woman of the Dunes.
Labels: Digression: The Sunshine in the Cloudy Narrative
The Bitterness is Strong with this One
Yes, "originally intended 2.00:1." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univisium, right. But how come you only go back to mutilate the great films in 2.35:1 scope, why doesn't the 1.85:1 get any love? Why not Dick Tracey? The Conformist, (there's a double pun in that title and your actions), how about Last Tango (will put a whole new spin on the butter scene, or not). Ladyhawk...Ishtar...Bulworth...Little Buddha? Oh I get it, because these were crap, so there's no use of defecating on these films, only the ones everybody likes, Reds, Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor, the ones you won lots of awards for. The others, nah...Unifascism more like it. And that's all I'm going to say about this subject and forever destroy all of my respect and admiration for Mr. Storaro and Bertolucci (mainly for letting Storaro con you into destroying The Last Emperor for personal gain), as a director, well, Stealing Beauty, The Dreamers, is it me or you have become a perv that likes to direct underage girls (and boys) to take off their clothes?
Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio?
