Tokyo Night Sky is Always the Densest Shade of Blue

Is there a name for this genre of film? Lovelorn, confused and underpaid people struggle through their twenties in carefully framed shots of big city life accompanied by a well-chosen indie rock soundtrack. There must be. I've seen so many. This one, however, is one of the best. Even after just twenty minutes, I sat there and thought to myself "This film is brilliant."

The film is from Yuya Ishii, the same director as Sawako Decides, and it shares some of the same qualities. A slow dreamlike story progression and a deadpan, almost undetectable, sense of humour. The two films also concern themselves with characters who are psychologically off-centre. Embarrassed that they even exist, their attempts at reaching out are often clumsy and self-defeating.

The cast is brilliant. From the two lead roles right down to sniggering staff at a cheap late night restaurant, there isn't a bad performance among them. The main female character is a great performance from Shizuka Ishibashi and the male lead, Sosuke Ikematsu, is excellent. Likable enough that his air of defeatism doesn't become insufferable and he keeps you on his side.

The photography is very fine. Understated but classy. Like a fine white wine (I'm writing this in a pub. Can you tell?). Tokyo has been photographed to death, but it still looks vibrant and new here.

Finally, and I only discovered this after watching, the dialogue has an unusual source: the poetry of Tahi Saihate. This explains the sometimes florid use of language in the voice overs, but it definitely gives the film a distinct character. The poet in question hasn't been translated into English yet, so hats off to the translator for dealing with it so well (although someone needs to tell them that "... Not." hasn't been used as a way of being sarcastic since about 2002).

I was delighted to find this film and I had that feeling afterwards as if you'd just done something good for yourself, like exercise or reading a newspaper.

A fragile and slightly awkward gem.

Death On The Mountain (1961)

This film is tells a story about how a trip in the mountains ends in tragedy and how suspicions grow after an article about it is published in a magazine.

It’s a fairly short film that focuses only on the main event - the tragic but apparently accidental death of a mountaineer. There are no sub-plots or character development beyond that which moves the story along. This means that, every step of the way, you feel you’re getting closer to a solution even if the film itself isn’t that fast paced.

Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement is the introduction, halfway through, of a new main character. With only a few broad strokes, the actor manages to establish himself as likable and interesting.

This is especially important since the final third of the film concerns him and the apparent killer retracing the steps of the doomed mountaineering party to pay their respects. As they do, the new guy keeps making observations about how the events of that fateful day don’t make sense and the tension between them slowly increases.

But do all these small clues add up? And if they do, will the killer kill again?

This is an enjoyable film, written in a tight, economic style and with some beautiful photography of mountain ranges.

100 Yen Love

This 2015 film is this year’s Japanese entry for the Oscar’s best foreign film. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know that each country could only nominate one film each. I was under the (perhaps naive) impression that they made some kind of effort to watch a decent amount and then make up their own minds.

Japan’s recent Oscar performance hasn’t been great, with only two nominations in the last thirty years (although one of those, Departures, actually won the Best Foreign Film Oscar) and I wonder if this is the film to break through the wall of indifference that the Oscar Academy usually shows.

The story is about a slacker, Ichiko Saita – played expertly by Ando Sakura – who is still NEET (No Education, Employment or Training) in her thirties. She finally gets a job in a convenience store, falls in love with a boxer and takes up the sport, desperate for a professional fight.

It’s a rights-of-passage film for a woman with zero self-esteem. Which is odd, when the people she meets and works with all seem far more dysfunctional than she is. Her wants and needs are positively mundane in comparison. Her desire for a normal relationship with the emotionally immobile boxer is almost heart-breaking in its futility.

It’s a comedy, but a very dark one and don’t be surprised if you find yourself wondering exactly when a scene went from humour to bleak realism. And, being a boxing film, there is the obligatory training montage.

In this film, boxing becomes a metaphor for the life that has pummelled Ichiko Saito into a nervous lump. Ichiko clearly wants to get beaten up, just so she can hug her opponent afterwards and it’s okay. An option that’s not available to her in real life.

It’s smart, affecting and emotional. I do wonder if it’s Academy material, though. However, with this film and 0.5mm, I would hope for a Best Actress nod for Ando Sakura. Or is that too naive, even by my standards?

0.5mm

In this film from 2014, director Ando Momoko directs her sister Ando Sakura in a long, rambling story about a home-carer who, out of kindness, helps one of the families she cares for out of office hours. This is against official practise, so when the evening ends in tragedy, she is also given the sack.

This begins a long road trip type movie in which Sakura’s character, Yamagishi Sawa, drifts from one adventure to another. Although “adventure” is probably the wrong word. They are understated episodes in which Sawa gets involved with a lonely old man and changes his life for the better before moving on.

The film lasts over three hours and, since it involves several short stories, you could be forgiven for watching it in several chunks, like I did. However, that’s not to say the film is bad. Far from it. But it can be a test of endurance.

Luckily the film is centred around an astonishingly good performance by Ando Sakura. She’s in pretty much every scene and it’s her portrayal of an everyday woman thrown into extraordinary circumstances that makes the film work.

She’s just an amazing actress and if I was the type to write fan mail, I’d have written her a book by now. But it’s so hard to pin down why she is as good as she is. It’s almost as if she isn’t acting. But at the same time, you can’t help but be transfixed by her.

So, at the very least, if you want three hours of some of the best acting you’re likely to see, then this is for you. The addition of intriguing stories and clean, crisp directing is a bonus.

C'est Si Bon

I heard about this Korean film back in July and, since then, I have been repeatedly visiting its page on Asiatorrents, hoping that the English subs would be there. In the meantime, I’d have the first twenty minutes on in the background, just to enjoy the songs.

When, after four months of trying, the subtitles finally arrived, it almost didn’t register and I was about to click away, thinking “Maybe next time” before I realized that I was looking at it.

Was it worth the wait? Well, it is certainly a sweet film. The music and the period details give it a charm that’s hard to ignore.

It tells a fictional version of the start of a famous folk duo Twin Folio.

They were formed of two singers who were popular at a local live music club C’est Si Bon. The film invents a third member who left the band before they became famous, and he becomes the main character as he falls in love with another performer at the club.

Since the film starts in the present day before returning to the late 1960s, the viewer is given a good idea that all the hopes and dreams of youth do not run smoothly. In fact, halfway through the film, I wanted to stop watching just so it had a happy ending.

But it didn’t. It was a lovely, touching film full of great performances. It gets a bit soap-opera-ish towards the end, complete with a tear-jerking scene in an airport, but by that time I was fully invested in the characters and was willing to let this cliche slide.

Perhaps it works best as an introduction to the kind of music that was popular in the sixties and seventies, long before K-pop was even thought possible. Certainly, for someone like me whose knowledge of Korean culture only goes back eight years (not counting the occasional film) this has been as much an education as entertainment.

Just watched: Attack on Titan

Giants attacking people. If you think about it, it's difficult to come up with an older storyline. Ever since people gathered round to tell tales, it seems that the idea of a giant who eats people has been a recurring theme, with Jack and the Beanstalk being perhaps the most famous.

And so to Attack on Titan (I’ve no idea why it isn’t “Titans” since there’s more than one) a film in which humanity is under attack from hordes of giants in a dystopian future. No one knows where they’re from, and there’s only one way to kill them: attack the back of the neck.

It looks good, and has a nice atmosphere and at 1 hour 38 minutes, it doesn’t feel too long. Mind you, there is a sequel coming out in a month or so. Unfortunately, after that, the compliments quickly dry up.

The characters are awful, with dialogue apparently taken from an old 8-bit role playing game. The hero is a tortured loner, who loses a loved one early on, is not taken seriously by his peers, but becomes their saviour. Any storyline that doesn’t involve the hero, and might actually include some relationships is quickly finished off by having somebody die. This way the writer neatly avoids having to write any proper dialogue that real people might actually say.

In fact, during a lengthy battle scene, the hero meets another character that he’s argued with in the past and my heart sank. The words “Oh God, they’re not going to start talking, are they?” actually crossed my mind.

An early glimpse of what I suppose is the final boss

The film's not quite bad enough for me to say you should avoid it. The directing is lively and dull bits don’t last too long. And, if I'm being honest, I'll probably watch the sequel. I wouldn’t suggest that you ask your friends round to watch this film as part of a fun evening, though. Unless you don’t really like them.

Just watched: Kumiko the Treasure Hunter

My initial reaction to seeing this film was that it was exactly the kind of film that goes down well at festivals. It was nicely shot, with plenty of silent thoughtful bits where the audience can project their own ideas about the action onto what they’re seeing. Is Kumiko a fantasist? Having a mental breakdown? Or just plain stupid?

At the start of the film, Kumiko is working in a dead-end job at an office where no one appreciates her. So far, it’s not much different from a typical jdrama. Then she finds a VHS copy of the film Fargo (apparently in a cave, but this is never explained) and is convinced that, since the film is based on a true story, that the bag full of money hidden in the film by Steve Buscemi must also be true.

It’s based on an urban legend which grew up after a Japanese woman was found dead in a field near Fargo. And as you might expect from a film based on an urban legend, there’s not a great deal of characterisation. Kumiko’s English is poor, never getting much further than “I want to go... Fargo”

On the plus side, the film is as faithful to real events as it can be, and Kikuchi Rinko is sympathetic in the lead role, and watching her inevitable descent is pretty uncomfortable. I wanted her to ditch her job and look for treasure, but at the same time I wished she hadn’t.

It’s a blank canvas of a film. And not just because of the sparse dialogue and the snow white landscapes. It allows the viewer plenty of opportunity to read into the film whatever story they want. A story of doomed bravery? Or the dangers of cultural ignorance? On a board outside the screening room where I saw the film, the cinema had left a board for people to write up their impressions of the film. Among these messages was “I don’t see what’s funny about a woman having a nervous breakdown and dying of exposure!” which wasn’t what I got from the film at all.

So there you go. A film that depends a lot on the viewer to fill in its gaps. Which is no bad thing.

Just watched: Kuroi Tobakushi

I would recommend this 1965 film only as a period piece rather than an example of exciting story-telling. Coming from an age where men were real men and women were real women, etc, part of the joy of this film is watching stuff that simply wouldn’t be allowed these days. Women are there to be slapped, kissed or saved. Men scowl menacingly or laugh loudly for no readily apparent reason. And everyone smokes, especially in bed.

The film is about a famous gambler (the film's English title is The Black Gambler), and how he finds himself caught up in games with increasingly high stakes as he tries to get a friend out of debt. He’s a cheat but so are his opponents. This, at least, solves one big problem with gambling dramas: you need to end on a big hand. Something like four aces against a full house. Except that almost never happens in real life. But if everyone’s a card shark, then it can happen whenever you want and it doesn’t seem absurd.

It starts very well as it moves quickly from one method of gambling to another (poker, horse-racing, bridge) and most scenes are fairly tense. The film has an international feel, too. French and English dialogue mingles with Japanese. But towards the end, the film relies more and more on flight scenes and it ends not with the turn of a card but with our heroes trapped on a roof surrounded by armed gangsters. It would’ve been nice if they’d stuck to the gambling, like a proto-version of Liar Game.

Also, there’s an interesting glimpse into the Japanese psyche of the time. Japan was just coming out of recession and starting to return to the world stage, where it felt it should belong. There’s a scene where the room shakes. All the westerners panic, but they are calmed down when it is explained to them that it is just construction work on a subway and he adds “It’s to make Japan a first class nation.” A neat example of the low-self esteem that seemed to run through Japanese society back in those times.

Recommended: Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons

A long time ago, before torrenting, the internet was mostly useful for buying cheap VCDs from the Triple D House website from Hong Kong. Back in those days, Stephen Chow was a favourite in our flat, with titles like Royal Tramp, God of Cookery, Shaolin Soccer and, eventually, Kung Fu Hustle. This film from 2013 is his most recent directing work, and marks a return to a more familiar martial arts/comedy genre after the family-friendly CJ7.

It is a prequel to the famous folk story, Journey to the West. In the story we follow a demon hunter who would rather try to rehabilitate the demons he captures rather than actually kill them. He meets another demon-hunter, a woman, who falls in love with him and together they go off on adventures.

Stephen Chow himself isn’t in this film, but the main character is one who would have certainly been played by a younger Chow. The demon-hunter, scruffy but well-meaning, is played well by Wen Zhang mixing a determination to do the right thing with a confusion over what exactly that should be. He is paired with Shu Qi, who plays the other demon-hunter who falls for him.

Just like Kung Fu Hustle, this game mixes CGI enemies and situations with physical comedy and impressive fight scenes. It's beautifully filmed and the costumes, locations and demons are always great to look at. It’s constantly inventive and funny, never letting up from the opening Jaws-referencing scene to the final epic fight.

The very last scene points towards a sequel, but I seem to recall rumours of a sequel to Shaolin Soccer, and also a sequel for Kung Fu Hustle, but nothing came of either of them. I’m not holding my breath now, either, but another film in this series would be very welcome.

Looking forward: Kumiko The Treasure Hunter

Just a quick note, because I need to share.

This film, just shown at the Sundance Festival, is about a Japanese woman who convinces herself that the film Fargo hides clues to a hidden treasure, and so heads to the States to look for it.

The story appeals to me, plus it’s going to be great to see Kikuchi Rinko actually acting again, instead of standing in front of a green screen while a giant robot explodes in the background.

Am excited.

Just watched: Tug of War

I watched this film solely because it had Inoue Mao in it. I haven’t seen any good reviews for it. In fact, I’ve not seen any reviews at all. This film had just sort of drifted past without notice on its release in 2012.

And I can totally see why. It’s a feel-good film, made in the style of Hula Girls. The storylines are the same: a small town council decides on a unique scheme to raise the town’s profile. In Hula Girls, it was Hawaiian dancing. In Tug of War it’s – you guessed it – tug of war. In this case, a female tug of war team.

And just like Hula Girls, each of the band of brave amateurs seems to have a domestic problem to overcome, such as an elderly father with dementia, or a rebellious teenage son.

It’s all so predictable, right down to the life-affirming montage where the team starts practising properly. Too obvious to be funny or interesting and too lightweight to be emotionally engaging.

The Fifth Annual November 8th Awards

Given that this past twelve months has seen my amount of TV viewing fall off a cliff, this is probably the least representative November 8th awards that I’ve done. Nevertheless, I have seen some very good things and I’d like to celebrate them. And so, with a conspicuous lack of nominations, here are the winners...


Best drama

Petero no Souretsu

Actually, this was going to be Border right up until last week, when I finished Petero no Souretsu. Plenty of dramas this year were quite nice, but most were abandoned halfway through. These two, however, kept me gripped until the end. Border expertly took a silly idea and played it straight, turning it into something quite unique: a sensible supernatural cop show. But Petero no Souretsu was a fine piece of drama, expertly played and I think it just deserves the win.


Best comedy

River’s Edge Okawabata Tanteisha

I did enjoy No Con Kid (didn’t write about it, though) and Kagi no Kakatta Heya but to be honest, River’s Edge had no real competition. Made with such care and acted so perfectly, there was almost nothing to dislike about this series. The idea of a detective series that takes weird cases is hardly original (after all, last year’s winner Mahoro Ekimae Bangaichi had almost exactly the same plot) but I fall for it every time. Gorgeous.


Best Film

Ah, now this is a category that I have kept up with. Mostly.

The Great Passage
Petal Dance
The Last Chance:Diary of Comedians
Snow White Murder Case

A tough one. The Great Passage is a film about dictionaries, and I love words and language, so it obviously struck a chord with me. The Last Chance made me cry with its tale of a failing stand-up comedy act. The Snow White Murder Case was a great story that kept me thinking long after it ended but, despite all that, I cannot explain the hold that Petal Dance has had over me since I first saw it. It’s gentle semi-improvised pace means it is more of a mood piece than a story to be followed. And that’s how I’ve enjoyed it each of the six or seven times I’ve seen it. Almost like ambient cinema. Delightful.


Best Actor

Oguri Shun (Border)

A winner by a country mile. His performance in Border held the storyline together, and was full of nice touches as he slowly lost his ability to trust his colleagues while he relied more and more on his supernatural power of seeing the dead. Perfect.


Best actress

Inoue Mao (The Snow White Murder Case)

Tricky one, this. I almost gave it to Toda Erika for Kagi no Kakatta Heya, simply because for the first few minutes of her performance I didn’t realise it was her. Quite a convincing change in appearance and mannerisms.

But Inoue Mao takes it with a great performance as the suspect in a murder investigation who has already been tried and charged by the media. The best role in her career so far.


Best Game Show

The Genius
Crime Scene
Game Centre CX
Running Man

After three years of being first, Running Man slips back a few places, displaced by two new game shows from Korea: Crime Scene (basically Cluedo for TV) and The Genius. I decided to give the award to The Genius since it's a stunning piece of work: tense, exciting and funny. It is everything you want from a game show. Crime Scene was an excellent example of how murders can be fun. Meanwhile, Running Man is still funny enough that I can barely wait for the subs each week and Game Centre CX remains a fixture on my list of essential viewing.


Best album

Bump Of Chicken “Ray”

I knew half the CD before I even got it, since so many singles had been released from this album. Luckily, the half I didn’t know was well worth the cost. A great piece of work. The three opening tracks by themselves are almost worth the win.


Safe Pair of Hands Award

Odagiri Joe (The Great Passage, Gokuaku Ganbo, River’s Edge, Real)

This award could have gone to Hong Jin Ho, the ex-Pro Gamer from Korea who appeared in The Genius, Crime Scene and a nice bit of Korean fluff I saw called “Sweet 17” where he gave advice on romance, of all things.

But Odagiri Joe was in so many films and dramas I saw in the past twelve months that I lost count. And, amazingly, I liked all of them. Well, Alice no Toge wasn’t so great, but everything else was good. Certainly, twice he was involved in stuff that’ll I want to watch over and over, and everywhere else he was able to lift his scenes into something above the norm. Effortlessly talented.

And that's my opinion (albeit very uninformed) on the previous twelve months.

Recommended: The Snow White Murder Case

This film has been on my radar for a while, since it stars Inoue Mao, but I was unaware of any subs or a decent rip online until I saw it mentioned on Hamsapsubeke.

It’s a murder mystery which is described through the eyes of a tabloid TV journalist, who’s keen for a big exclusive story. As such, all of the clues and eye-witness accounts point to one suspect: one who just so happens to have disappeared on the same evening as the murder.

The film reminded me a lot of Rashomon, with its multiple telling of the same story, and it was fascinating to see the events shift from one perspective to the next. Inoue Mao was superb in her role, probably the best I’ve seen her in any film. There’s a real difference in her performance when she’s in a flashback (as described by someone else) and when she’s being the actual character herself. I loved that kind of subtlety to her role. Ayano Gou, too, was great as the manipulative reporter.

By telling the story through news reports and twitter feeds, it really shows how a story can grow and how the opinions of people who have nothing to do with the case are able to be spread and repeated.

It also reminded me of the Joanna Yates murder case in 2010, where the media latched onto the idea that the landlord was the murderer and strongly put forward their theories until the real killer (a neighbour) was arrested.

A lot to think about, and a clever story in its own right. With half an hour to go, I still wasn’t sure how the film was going to end. The overlap of social media and the need for news reporters to get the facts first (whether the facts are true or not) is a timely subject, given the recent hoax of the “countdown” to release photos of Emily Watson.

A great film, in a surprising number of interesting ways.

Recommended: The Chaser

Ah, once upon a time I was cutting edge! I followed J-dramas with more attention than a cat following a wounded bird! I saw all the dramas and plenty of films, and I even wrote about future seasons and what I was looking forward to. Now, lack of time has put an end to all that, and I’m just as reliant on review sites as anyone else. So tonight I’m going to dash off two reviews of films that I found out from other sites.

I found this film on a Top 25 of Korean Movies, and for some reason the description appealed to me, so I hunted it down and had a look.

The Chaser is a thriller, but is best described as a Tragedy of Errors. Most thrillers and mysteries rely on the characters misunderstanding something vital that increases the danger and heightens the tension, but this has people making mistakes all the time. And not just one big mistake, like asking for help at an old abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. Little things. Like a missed call, a wrong turning or a set of dropped keys.

The storyline revolves around an ex-cop who is now a pimp who is convinced that his best prostitutes are being kidnapped and sold on. When a familiar phone number asks for a particular woman, he suspects this is him, and he puts in place a plan to catch him.

Except nothing goes right, not for the pimp, nor the killer (since the women aren’t being kidnapped at all) nor the police who don’t know how to deal with an ex-cop-turned-pimp yelling about abductions, while another man is calmly telling them he’s murdered nine people.

If I’ve made it sound funny, then it’s not. Not really. In fact, it’s more painful to watch everyone come to reasonable but agonisingly wrong conclusions. But at the same time, I can’t fault how nicely everything fits together. It’s a tense time-bomb of a film, and definitely worth anyone’s time.

Just watched: Real

Real is a film released in 2013 starring Ayase Haruka and Satou Takeru as two lovers: Atsumi and Koichi. Atsumi is in a coma after a failed suicide attempt, and Koichi is using a new method to send himself into her thoughts in order to talk to her, and try to discover why she tried to kill herself.

It all looks great. The fictional world of the comatose Atsumi is nicely realised. Sometimes solid, sometimes indistinct, and the other people who “live” in her world are convincingly false and somewhat unnerving.

Supporting actors include Nakatani Miki and Odagiri Joe. Mind you, almost everything I see these days seems to have Odagiri Joe in it. It’s not a deliberate choice, honest.

The story, though, is a bit of a strain. The twist halfway through is easy enough to predict, and the film even puts in a few things to prompt you in case you can’t see it coming. But even so, once the story has changed, the viewer is expected to forget what happened before.

And the ending, too, isn’t terribly well thought out. Having spent all that time creating such a convincingly weird world, the final scenes are a bit of a change in style. So this film, while being great for the eyes, is not so great for the brain. Worth a look, though.

Just watched: Cold Eyes

A recent bout of flu left me stuck on a sofa for two days and, as usual, when I’m ill I like to watch Korean variety shows. I rewatched a bunch of old Running Man episodes, and my eye was caught by episodes 151 and 152. The guests included Jung Woo Sung and Han Hyo Joo, and they were both so funny that I wanted to see the film they were promoting. This was perhaps the first time that an appearance on a game show has made me want to watch something!

This 2013 film is about a high-tech surveillance police department on the trail of a deadly gang of criminals. Han Hyo Joo is the newcomer to the team but, unlike too many cop shows, she is not there for comic relief or to annoy her old-fashioned bosses with her clever techniques. Instead, she’s good at her job and she fits into the team just fine.

Jung Woo Sung, meanwhile, is the criminal mastermind who is behind these meticulously planned and violent crimes. The acting is great. Han Hyo Joo is totally believable as the cop with a photographic memory and Jung Woo Sung impresses as the impassive killer that they have to track down.

The film throws everything into the mix, car chases, martial arts, gun fights, forensic science and even some comedy, too. It’s amazing that it all flows together and nothing seems forced. It's a lot of fun from start to finish. I shall definitely have to track down the original version: Eye In The Sky, a Hong Kong film made in 2007.

Meanwhile, if you can find episode 151 of Running Man, take a look. Jung Woo Sung is just as intense in a variety show as he is in a big-budget movie.