Go get it. Pretty damn good–great for an hour, then it kind of veers too much into the quirky conventional road-movie romance fantasy it so adroitly avoids and disrupts before that, but… I was sold by then. It’s anchored by a(nother) great performance by Lou Taylor Pucci, as a kid taken by an urge to get unstuck, so he steals a car… everything else about the plot emerges en route, so I won’t spoil up front. But there’s some dialogue and supporting performances that are sly, strange, occasionally idiosyncratically wonderful–particularly Bill Duke, as a traveling liquor salesman. And besides Pucci the film boasts a great M. Ward soundtrack.
Month: December 2008
Sukiyaki Western Django
We (or maybe mostly I) have talked about Takashi Miike before (here, among other places), and let it be said: even at his goriest, and by god he can be gory, he’s among the most astonishing–and astonishingly sloppy–stylists working. His Western goes in the greater pile. It begins on a soundstage so resolutely, beautifully drawn and shot in such high-contrast saturated colors that when you see Quentin Tarantino putting on a lousy Southern drawl, then a Japanese actor accosting him in an almost-phonetically-pronounced English, and then later have Tarantino intone phrases from an alleged story of a Japanese temple in an English mimicking that strange Japanese-inflected pronunciation… well, let’s say the artifice is not mere surface ploy but is emphatically and for this viewer wonderfully central.
The story is a neat mash-up template of various generic influences both Western and Japanese (one of the characters even jokes that the protagonist shouldn’t try getting all Yojimbo), and there are some great lovely gun battles, and a few tricky technical games (one lovely bit when a man jumps out of his second-story window onto his horse) — all in all, not a movie to watch to sink into the plot but a movie which delights in–and produces the delight of–genre and aesthetic form. I REALLY enjoyed this.
Marsupial angst
Easily the best film I’ve ever seen about a marsupial, Executive Koala is a film noir about a driven Japanese junior exec (in a pickle factory), whose wife disappeared three years ago and whose recent lover has turned up dead — and he’s the suspect. And he seems to have things buried in his memory. And he’s a human-sized koala bear. Most of his colleagues are humans, except for the rabbit, and one frog who works at the local convenience store. There are secret Korean martial arts in this film, and a short interlude in musical theater (about Exec Koala’s childhood town and upbringing). There are also shady psychotherapists and discussions of kimchi and this was way too straight to be camp but way too strange to be straight.
God damn I love Japanese pop culture.