The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: Memories (1995), directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Koji Morimoto and Tensai Okamura

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: 'Memories.' by Chromonicci

       Anime is big business these days, and a big part of that big success is in what experts call the ‘anime movie’. Call it cringey or kiddy if you want, but there’s no denying that some of the most successful films in recent times have been animated films from Japan. Didn’t that movie based on Demon Slayer make like a billion dollars at the box office? And those two Dragonball Z movies hit number 1 in the U.S., right? Wild.

       If you were to ask the average person on the street about the directors of these Japanese animated movies however, the only name you’re likely to hear is Hayao Miyazaki. Which is unfortunate, because even though Miyazaki’s reputation is well earned, reducing any segment of art down to a single creator does a disservice to art itself. So how about we use our anthology movie pick of the Marathon to put a spotlight on some new guys, and a guy that loyal blog readers have seen before.

       Released in 1995, Memories was directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Koji Morimoto and Tensai Okamura, written by Otomo and Satoshi Kon, and produced by Atsushi Sugita, Fumio Sameshima, Yoshimasa Mizuo, Hiroaki Inoue, Eiko Tanaka and Masao Maruyama through Studio 4°C and Madhouse, based on manga by Katsuhiro Otomo. In ‘Magnetic Rose’ (directed by Morimoto) a down-on-their-luck team of salvagers in 2092 respond to a distress signal on an enormous abandoned spacecraft once owned by a famous opera singer, although it seems to be home to something else now. In ‘Stink Bomb’ (directed by Okamura), bumbling scientist Nobuo Tanaka takes an experimental drug to cure his cold only to accidentally become a weapon of mass destruction in the process. Finally Otomo himself takes the lead in ‘Cannon Fodder’, a slice of life story centered around a family in a city so dedicated to warfare that the whole of society is centered around firing cannons, although who exactly they’re firing these cannons at is something of a mystery. Topics such as obsession, the persistence of memory, fascism and how other people at the comic convention feel when you refuse to shower or use deodorant will be addressed.

       When it comes to anthology films, especially those based on the works of one person, it can sometimes be difficult for each story to stand out. Animation helps to alleviate that problem; While all three stories feature a kind of violent morbidity that feel right inside the wheelhouse of the man behind Akira, the fact that each story features a radically different art style really helps to distinguish one from the other. Magnetic Rose uses a more realist style that modern anime fans would find reminiscent of films like Perfect Blue and Paprika, Stink Bomb is brings to mind the work of Naoki Urasawa (‘20th Century Boys’, ‘Billy Bat’), while Cannon Fodder brings to mind Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Monty Python. Of the three Cannon Fodder looks the most unlike what you’d expect from an anime film, with its heavily shaded, heavily stylized people stuck in a fascistic hell of steam and heavy industry, and it’s the one I like the most. Although at the end of the day all three look good, and they’re all animated with the degree of quality you’d expect from Madhouse, which has gone on to become Japan’s premier anime studio.

       Of course in all anthology films there’s always a centerpiece story, whether intentional or otherwise. For the Twilight Zone movie it was NIghtmare at 20,000 feet, and for Memories it’s certainly Magnetic Rose. It’s the longest of the three segments, and certainly the most ambitious in both what it’s trying to say and what it’s trying to show on a visual level. Those coming into this film from Akira will likely find the greatest level of familiarity with Rose as well, high-concept science fiction involving the nature of reality featuring highly fluid animation, and of the three it’s the only one that feels like it could have been expanded into its own feature-length film without much issue. I don’t know if I would have done that though personally, as I think the contrast between Rose and the more comedic, stranger stories really elevates the entire film.

       Diverse art styles pair well with diverse music. Anime fans will be pleased to see the name Yoko Kanno as the composer for Magnetic Rose, who would later go on to score the legendary Cowboy Bebop. Jun Miyake provides a little bit of ska for Stink Bomb, and Fumitoshi Ishino of techno group Denki Groove bookends the film with some hard dance beats. It’s a soundtrack made for vinyl, that’s the thing that comes to mind now.

       Memories gets the recommendation. It’s not a film on the level of Akira, but then most movies aren’t, but it is a showcase of incredible talent and a love letter to the art of animation. Probably not something you’ll want to watch with the kids, a bit too dark for that, but grab a friend or two this Halloween and you’ll have a good time. Although if you’re trying to watch anime on Halloween having any friends at all might be too much to ask.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989), directed by Kazuki Omori

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune - "Bio Wars" by Koichi Sugiyama

       Now this is truly a blast from the past. We haven’t seen hide nor hair from the King of the Monsters since Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, the sixth ever writeup on this blog. Despite making it a priority to cover foreign films, despite the direction of this blog being geared towards genre films (especially horror and science-fiction), despite the fact that I’ve been a fan of the thing since I was a child, the last time the big green lizard’s name appeared on this section of the internet was almost a decade ago. It’s not like we had a good excuse either, I mean if Monkeybone or Cool World of all movies could get an entry then Big G definitely should have been four or five films deep at this point. Yet every year when the list was compiled Godzilla was, like so many others, a bridesmaid but never the bride.

       Well this year I’ve decided to use the Global Top Ten to take care of some films that have been on my watch queue. We’ve already seen one, Once Upon a Time in the West, and now it’s time to return to Japan and see how they filter important social and political issues through the lens of people in rubber suits smashing miniature models of Tokyo. The only proper way to do it, really.

       Released in 1989, Godzilla vs. Biollante was written and directed by Kazuki Omori, story by Shinichiro Kobayashi, and produced by Shogo Tomiyama and Tomoyuki Tanaka through Toho, the grand central station of kaiju pictures. After falling into a volcano in the ending of the previous film, Japan has been freed from the menace known as Godilla, the atomic lizard has left behind something other than destroyed homes and families: his DNA in the form of sin cells. So useful are these cells that other nations are trying to get their hands on them, including the country of Saradia, an oil-producing country in the middle east that is totally not a stand-in for any other country. That’s bad news for botanist and geneticist Professor Shiragami, as it’s not five minutes after Saradia acquires those G-cells that someone bombs the research lab they were in, killing his daughter in the process. 

        Five years later and it looks like Godzilla is getting ready to leave his lava bath, so Japan has cooked up a way to kill him off for good: Anti Nuclear Energy Bacteria, a biological weapon designed to to consume radiation, derived from those G-cells. Of course the existence of such a weapon is an even bigger gamechanger than the G-cells, and so you have espionage agents and spies gunning for that secret formula. Also Shiragami, who was put on the ANEB project, decided to take the G-cells and combine them with plant cells for whatever reason, he’s a fucking moron I guess, and obviously that ends up creating a giant monster named Biollante. Now normally when two giant monsters are in the same general area they just leave each other alone and don’t interact, but I think this just might be the exception.

       Let’s start with the good: the special effects. Not much has changed from the Showa to the Heisei era films on a technical level, it’s still people in suits walking around miniature cities with little smoke bombs going off every now and then, but what has changed is the presentation. Godzilla is no longer the goofy joke he was in the 70s but a brutish engine of destruction, and Biollante wouldn’t look out of place in a John Carpenter film, in fact I’d say it looks better than the creatures in In the Mouth of Madness. The miniature cities have similarly increased in size and complexity, Godzilla appearing almost dwarfed by these giant skyscrapers, which explode and crumble with exquisite precision. There’s a surreality to it for sure, the lighting on those skyscrapers almost emphasize how much they’re not actual buildings, but to me films like Godzilla vs. Biollante and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was when kaiju movies finally looked like kaiju movies rather than Rifftrax fodder. A bit like how some people say that superhero films weren’t good until the MCU started, if I cared about Marvel.

       Unfortunately just about everything else in Godzilla vs. Biollante isn’t as good. There’s a good premise of governments and corporations trying to exploit Godzilla for their own ends, some ‘you thought of whether you could rather than if you should’ before Ian Malcolm put it out there for taste, but that premise is reduced to a simple ‘find the McGuffin’ thread with people trying to steal/recover the bacteria, and the whole anti-genetic engineering message kinda goes out the window when both things created through meddling with nature ultimately saved the day in the end. Then there’s this angle involving psychics, because psychics exist I guess, and one teenage girl apparently can project the same level of power as Godzilla, which begs the question of why we need bioweapons when a bunch of 9th graders could take care of it in five minutes. Also ghosts exist and inhabit plants? Apparently the Godzilla filmography takes place in the Undertale universe. It’s an aggressively muddled movie.

       That’s not a foreign concept when it comes to Godzilla movies, so you then have to look at the action layout. It’s a cold hard truth of the kaiju subgenre that despite it being predicated on giant monsters destroying stuff or fighting each other, most of the film will be dedicated to things that are not kaiju related, so keeping the audience engaged with the human aspect of the film is key. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah managed to do that decently well with it’s faux Aliens, but Godilla vs. Biollante is the polar opposite. I could not bring myself to care about any of these characters, besides the idiot who says a witty one-liner to Godzilla after shooting him with a rocket and is immediately crushed to death,  and because most of the film is built around waiting for Godzilla to do something and then sending other people to do it, the film can’t figure out a way to make them interesting either. I can’t even remember any of their names besides Shiragami, Kuroshima the Ian Malcolm wannabe and Asuka the forgettable female lead. Even Shiragami barely exists in this film, the character who should be the most emotionally nuanced in the film given his backstory and him literally being responsible for creating a giant monster, and it doesn’t help that the actor is more wooden than Pinnocchio’s taint. It’s hard to believe that a movie with giant monsters, super science and psychics could be so damn dull, but Godzilla vs. Biollante will make you a believer.

       Even calling it Godzilla vs. Biollante seems like a touch of false advertising. Yes the two monsters do meet each other, but the total amount of time that the two kaiju are on screen together is probably less time than it would take to eat a Happy Meal, and their fight is less active than your average episode of Power Rangers. In fact Godzilla spends the majority of the movie, when he actually shows up, fighting with the JSDF and their state of the art ship that looks like a bloated horseshoe crab, and those fights are actually way more dynamic than the one with the giant monster plant. Biollante, despite being second-billed, doesn't really do all that much, and honestly could have been completely written out of the story and barely anything would change. 

       I also can’t let this write-up go without giving a big middle finger to the score. While you do get the iconic theme whenever Godzilla is on screen, most of the time you get this Sousa-like booming orchestral stuff which sort of makes sense in the scenes with the horseshoe crab ship but is totally dissonant with the other scenes. A giant nuclear monster just ran through a major metropolitan area, tearing it to the ground and killing hundreds if not thousands of people, it probably shouldn’t sound like the ending of Star Wars.

       Ultimately I just don’t see myself giving Godzilla vs. Biollante. I’m as big a fan of the atomic lizard as anyone, and it’s nice to see him again after all this time, but the film surrounding him is a mess, and not in a funny way like the Showa movies. If you want to see some badass Gojira action, the best bet in this blog’s opinion is still Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. There’s still plenty of Godzilla movies to choose from though, and hopefully it won’t take almost a decade for us to see another one.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Boiling Point (1990), directed by Takeshi Kitano

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Ichiro Goes to the Moon", by The Baseball Project

       Quite an interesting fellow, this Takeshi Kitano. I first knew him as the creator of the bizarre Japanese game show ‘Takeshi’s Castle’, which was redubbed as ‘MXC: Most Extreme Elimination Challenge’ on Spike TV in the early 2000s. Later on I became aware of him as the brains behind Takeshi No Chousenjou, or Takeshi’s Challenge, an infamously shitty game for the Nintendo Famicom which was made with the intent of confusing and frustrating its players, like forcing players to wait five actual minutes for a code to appear or sing a several minute long perfectly (the Famicom controller featured a built in microphone). That this guy was a filmmaker, a relatively successful one at that was this nebulous thing in the back of my mind, like I knew it was true but I had no idea what to make of that information. So I avoided it for years, until the winds of fate shifted me in his direction and I said ‘fuck it’. I feel like he’d want it that way.

‘Beat’ Takeshi’s second feature-length film, released only a year after his debut Violent Cop, Boiling Point centers mostly around Masaki, a young man with a personality not unlike a boiled cabbage. Masaki lives a simple life, drifting between his job at a gas station and pinch-hitting for a shitty neighborhood baseball team known as the Eagles, until his lackadaisical attitude ends up getting him in trouble with the Otomo Group, a local branch of the Yakuza. Masaki’s friend and coach Iguchi, himself a former gangster, attempts to resolve the conflict only to receive a beating for his trouble, and subsequently disappears, supposedly traveling to Okinawa in order to buy a gun so he can kill the bastards. Masaki then decides that he too will travel to Okinawa and buy some killing machines, and the whole sordid tale unfolds from there. I don’t know where the boiling part comes in though.

Taken on its own, something like Takeshi’s Challenge might have seemed like a conceited vanity project, but after watching Boiling Point you realize that this is just the way Beat Takeshi rolls. The whole movie is like trying to have a drunken conversation with your girlfriend’s disapproving parents; The long pauses, the sudden shifts to other subjects, the awkward conversations, and of course the explosive bursts of violence. It’s all natural though, there’s never a sense that he’s riding someone’s coattails or trying to follow. Where other directors have their visions sullied by outside interference, Beat Takeshi has made the exact movie he wanted to make, i.e. full of Yakuza and designed to weird people out. You might not respect it, but you have to recognize it.

       Combining bleak, nihilistic or absurdist humor with the ‘crime’ genre is a pretty popular combo, especially in the late 80’s-early 90’s when Kitano stood side by side with filmmakers like the Coens and Quentin Tarantino, but I think Boiling Point might be a case where things got a little too absurdist for its own good. Progressing the plot feels like it takes at least half the film, and even when we do progress we are subjected to endless amount of faffing about in the process. Which can have a certain appeal when you’ve got the cast to support it, which is not the case with Boiling Point. Aside from the character Takeshi plays himself there’s nobody in this movie that’s all that compelling, especially Masaki, who as I mentioned loses out to a block of wood in a charisma contest. Which means that those 90+ minutes very crawl along at a snail’s pace, as we are subjected to Kitano’s pretentious attempts at being edgy and lolrandom. 

       This is his second movie though, at least in terms of directing, so I guess we can give him a little leeway in that regard. For fans of gallows humor by way of gangster movies Boiling Point might be the thing to cure what ails you, to others it’s just a sign that the water for their instant ramen is ready. Either way it’s not a must-watch movie, and I don’t feel an urge to recommend it. The choice, however, is always yours.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), directed by Shinya Tsukamoto

     

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Megatron", by Chu Ishikawa

     We’ve seen movies from several countries so far over the course of this list. The U.S. of course, Italy and Sweden, but so far the Asian side of horror (specifically films from Korea, Japan or China) has been conspicuously absent. I’m not intentionally avoiding those types of movies, but Asian horror (and we’ll be focusing on Japanese horror here) is a strange beast. Most modern movie audiences will remember Ringu or Ju-On: The Grudge (at least their anglicized adaptations) and their freaky-ass ghost children, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who's seen House or the underworld scenes in Jigoku can attest that Japanese horror, like the rest of Japanese pop culture, is made of pure-grade insanity, and I wasn’t sure that said insanity would necessarily translate into an enjoyable movie. But I rolled the dice, and what I ended up with is Tetsuo: The Iron Man

      I’m not sure whether it’s actually worth trying to describe the plot, because the plot doesn’t make any fucking sense, but I’ll give the bare minimum. One day, after inserting steel rod into his leg, a metal fetishist (director Shinya Tsukamoto) is struck and killed by a car. We then cut to a salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi), who lives with his cat in a cramped apartment and occasionally has hot sex with his girlfriend. One other day, when the salaryman is waiting for the train, he is attacked by a strange woman who seems to have been mutated into some kind of metal zombie. Though he eventually escapes, the salaryman eventually discovers that he has become infected by this metallic sickness as well, slowly becoming more and more metallized as time goes on. A punishment from some angry god, or perhaps something much more sinister? Watch and find out…

      So what is this industrial art house movie about? I couldn’t really say, something about sex and art or some other crap. It does feature some of the freakiest body horror this side of Cronenberg though, perhaps even freakier, and Tsukamoto’s visual design is physically disturbing and in stark contrast to what we know of as human. Like Häxan, this is a film that feels more like you’re experiencing a nightmare, something that is fearful precisely because it refuses logic and order. It’s also something you probably shouldn’t watch while high, much like Häxan. If you’re planning to have a sober Halloween for some reason, and you’ve been looking for some crazy cyberpunk bullshit, then come no further than Tetsuo: The Iron Man. And if that’s not enough, there’s two more Tetsuo films, so you can get freaky all night long.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016: Akira (1988), directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Kaneda", by Geinoh Yamashirogumi

     As much as Japan has been connected to animation over the years, and despite the vastly differing amounts of diversity and content that medium is given when compared to the West, that’s not to say that Japan has a peerless record on the subject. Indeed, the Land of the Rising Sun can be just as bull-headed and destructive to the creative process as any other country in the industry. Whether it’s putting the animators on a shoestring budget, thus reducing the animation quality (you’ve probably seen enough slideshow animes to know what I mean), or just outright refusing to give people credit for their work, the fact is that artistic integrity doesn’t matter half as much as getting the product on the shelves. It makes a certain degree of sense, when you’ve got a dedicated demographic that doesn’t mind shelling out 50 bucks a pop for a blu-ray, then you probably want to put out as many blu-rays as you can. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t good shows and movies being putting out, but it does mean dealing with a mountain of shovelware, and that this dedication to immediacy can hurt even a good show.

     Still, establishing a legacy through animation is entirely possible. Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli is probably the most famous example, at least when it comes to Western audiences. Shinichiro Watanabe, creator of Cowboy Bebop (the one anime everyone can agree is good), Samurai Champloo and Space Dandy. And, as you might expect from this article, mangaka and filmmaker Katsuhiro Otomo. Although his work in the field seems limited (around half of his work in film seems to be focused on screenwriting), that observation doesn’t seem to matter much when his feature-length directorial debut was 1988’s Akira, based on his 1984 manga of the same name. Akira, a movie that, like Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”, inspired legions of imitators and very few peers.. Akira, a film that managed to carve itself out a spot in Western pop culture in an era when people still called it japanimation and Dragonball Z was still a dot on the horizon. Akira, the film that took the bar set by Cronenberg and Carpenter and raised it as far as it could reach.

     Akira, it’s a movie.

     The year is 2019. 31 years ago, Tokyo was almost completely obliterated in a massive explosion. Upon its ashes Neo-Tokyo was built, yet this new city failed to live up to the reputation of the original. Rampant crime and drug abuse, crippling poverty and severe economic depression, daily protests that threaten to erupt into terrorist attacks or military oppression. Could this be it? Is this how the world ends, with civilization slowly rotting and decaying until it finally collapses in upon itself? At the very least, Japan seems destined to end with a whimper rather than a bang.

     For teenagers Kaneda and Tetsuo, worrying about how shitty the future is going to be doesn’t matter as much as living in the now. They and the other members of their gang spend their days popping pills, trying to get laid, riding around on their motorcycles and beating the hell out of other gangs. School? Finding a job? Fuck that mess man, why bother contributing to a broken system? Biker punks for life bro!

     Or so it would seem, until one night a mysterious boy who looks like an elderly man appears and somehow causes Tetsuo to crash his bike. Before Kaneda and his friends can get help, the military arrives and takes not only the boy, but Tetsuo as well. Who is this mysterious boy? Who is the mysterious girl that seems to be connected to the boy? Why does the military need this boy and Tetsuo? Kaneda is going to find out, but the answer might not be something anyone wants to hear. Because Akira, the ultimate energy, is getting ready to awaken once again. And when he does, no one is going to be safe.

     Leave it to the man with years of experience in sequential art to know how to put a movie together. Akira in motion is a beautiful thing, & Otomo has a gift for crafting scenes manage to stick themselves into your mind. The infamous ‘bike braking’ moment that’s been referenced so many times since, the battle with the military, the climax...hell, every time someone shoots a gun it ends up looking amazing. I dunno, it’s the fluidity of those action that’s most appealing I guess. The smoothness of it. It feels more natural, as if you’re seeing something real rather than animated. One of those you have to experience to understand.

     It’s also not a film that shies away from uncomfortable scenes. Lots of blood, lots of scenes where people get blown away with bullets (and a couple that are pretty much pulped) and of course the end of the film where things upgrade to full-on body horror. Of course this isn’t quite like The Fly or Tetsuo the Iron Man, where we as the audience are forced to watch a man decay in front of our eyes. It’s more like standing up after a long period of drinking or substance use and feeling the world drop out from under you. Suddenly the rules don’t exist anymore, and reality itself descends into utter chaos. Rather similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey in that respect, although I’d say Akira might take the points in the pure bizarre. Which is probably what keeps it from being a truly scary movie, unless you have a low tolerance for things like this. You spend less time being scared and more time watching to see what weird crap they come up with next.

     If you’re a gorehound, an animation fan or if you’re interested in getting into the anime scene, this is just one of those movies you need under your belt. English dub, original Japanese, Neutral Spanish dub, whatever you want to use, it’s (probably) all good. The West may not respect the field of animation as much of animation as much as we could, but we should at least love the gems that we got.

     One more left.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2015: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), directed by Hayao Miyazaki

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Lupin III", by Yuji Ohno

     When it comes to animation, few names entail a level of respect and admiration like Hayao Miyazaki. In a market dominated by Disney and Dreamwork’s forever war, the work of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have been the outlier, one of the few to chip away at the saccharine stigma the U.S. has when it comes to animation, like his peers Don Bluth and Ralph Bakshi. Even more noteworthy, he is the only director of anime (or anime movies, to stop any naysayers) to hold any sort of regard in America. People who have never watched anime, maybe even shit talk it when asked, will often give a pass to Miyazaki’s films. That’s power my friends, more than any one of your Dragon Balls or Narutos.

     While he is generally known for his original works, like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki’s first major work was actually an adaptation of the popular Japanese comic Lupin III, which in anime terms generally means using the characters in original stories rather than taking something from the comics. Created by mangaka Monkey Punch in 1967 for the magazine Weekly Manga Action, Lupin III detailed the adventures of the titular character, Arsene Lupin III, the cocky, perverted descendant of the master thief Arsene Lupin (the French equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, sort of a proto-pulp hero). Alongside his team of reprobates: eagle eyed marksman Jigen, master swordsman Goemon and femme fatale Fujiko Mine, Lupin frequently engages in acts of high risk, high reward and high profile theft and espionage, always one step ahead of his arch-nemesis, Interpol Officer Zenigata. Manga gave way to a popular anime series, which eventually transitioned into a full-blown franchise with several films and OVAs to its credit. What Lupin eventually became may not exactly resemble Monkey Punch’s original series, but he’s still pretty awesome, and he’s carved himself a nice place in pop culture to boot. Japan’s very own crazy James Bond.

     The Castle of Cagliostro, though not an ‘original’ story, still carries that distinctive Miyazaki flair that we would come to know and love from his later films. While on a visit to the Duchy of Cagliostro, a tiny nation known in criminal circles as the counterfeiting capital of the world, Lupin and Jigen come to the aid of a runaway bride, on the run from shadowy goons. The bride, as it turns out, is Lady Clarice, the last surviving member of the royal family, and the goons are employed by the Count of Cagliostro, the current regent and huge asshole. Seems that there is a secret treasure connected to the royal rings, and by marrying Lady Clarice the Count gets to solidify his rule and get access to the treasure. It’s a job with little to gain and much to lose, considering the death traps, security systems and ninja guards, but the master thief just can’t sit idly by while there is a lady in need, can he? Add to that a chance to depose the ruler of a sovereign nation and create an international incident, and it’s like icing on the cake. Go big or go home, it’s the Lupin way.

     I don’t know what it is with Miyazaki’s films, but they always fill me with a sense of nostalgia. It’s the same with Cagliostro. It’s not about the bittersweet process of growing up like Kiki’s Delivery Service or Totoro, and yet in a way it kind of is. By 1979 Lupin the Third, Jigen and the others had already existed for over 10 years, characters which to a lot of people embodied the fun and seemingly endless days of their childhood. By taking those characters and placing them in a classic archetypal framework, the hero rescuing a princess from an evil ruler, Miyazaki is telling the audience a modern day fable, substituting characters like Robin Hood or Lancelot with Lupin and Jigen. It gives the film a timeless quality, and it imbues the characters with this sense of magic, this wonder that so often seems to leave us as we grow older. Yet that magic, the unshakeable belief that Lupin will always get away, that Zenigata will always chase him, it’s...comforting, I guess is the way to describe it. Comforting to think that, like with Indiana Jones or the original Star Wars, the world was this amazing exciting place, and that heroes really did exist and adventure was always around the corner. That’s the world I want to live in, and that’s the world that has been taken from me over the years, to be replaced with this ugly cancerous cynicism about politics and the environment and life. I hate it, I honestly fucking hate it. But when I watch this movie, when I watch any Miyazaki movie, I get to remember what it was like, and live in that moment for a while.

     Halloween is a holiday all about remembering that feeling, I think. Like the rest of these movies though, it’s just an excuse to watch something I haven’t seen, so decide for yourself whether it fits your criteria. Either way, it’s recommended.

Branded to Kill/Koroshi No Rakuin (1967), directed by Seijun Suzuki

This entry was inspired by me playing the game Killer7, a game made by Suda51 for the Nintendo Gamecube. Check it out if you feel like it.

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Fashion Killa", by A$AP ROCKY

     At Haneda Airport, Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido) and his wife Mami are picked up in a cab. The driver of the cab is Kasuga, formerly one of the top 10 killers in Japan, now a disgrace and a drunk. Kasuga implores Hanada (the No. 3 killer) to help him on a particularly important job in order to restore his shattered reputation: for five million yen, ensure the safe transportation of a prominent member of the yakuza from Nagano to Sagami Beach. Out of money at the time, Hanada accepts. A simple job, and one that should be easy for one of the best assassins in the game.

     As simple as things begin, they quickly take a turn for the bizarre when Hanada meets the strange yet alluring Misako (Annu Mari). A killer must not indulge in alcohol or women, he must have no weaknesses, know neither love nor loneliness...But what happens if he does fall in love? What will it drive him to do? What happens when the No. 3 killer in Japan has to go up against No. 1, the assassin so good that no one even knows what he looks like? Nothing good for Hanada, but certainly interesting for an audience. Japanese or otherwise.

     What does it take to be a pro killer? Often we hear stories about people who return from combat who are unable to cope with the trauma, how they end up in therapy, or the streets, or dead by their own hand. What about those who didn’t? What does a person do to themselves in order to kill another person? At that moment, do they cease to think of themselves as human? We humans kill animals and plants with ease because we consider them not on our level, perhaps that we are superior. In that fashion, does a killer disconnect from his humanity in order to kill, or does he in fact place himself above humans as we do deer and cows? If certain people have the ability to kill, what is about the No.1 killer that makes him No. 1? This struggle between humanity and inhumanity, particularly in the case of Goro Hanada, seems to be one of the central themes of the film. Perhaps even the main theme.

     Wikipedia states that this is considered by some to be an ‘absurdist masterpiece’, and that it influenced John Woo and Jim Jarmusch. Absurd in this case doesn’t mean silly, but is rather a philosophy similar to that of Friedrich Nietzsche's nihilism. Unlike nihilism, which emphasizes the lack of any inherent meaning in life (nihilists don’t believe in anything, as Walter Sobchak so eloquently stated in The Big Lebowski), absurdism emphasizes the inability of man to find said meaning whether it actually exists or not, so there’s no point in trying to do so. The works of Albert Camus are considered absurdist fiction, for example.

     So is Branded to Kill absurdist? I believe so. That’s not to say that the film is illogical, that characters do things for no reason, because you can see the basic cause-and-effect. But in a way, all we really see is the cause and effect. Why people behave the way they do, for what reason do killers kill, what those victims did that warranted killing, is never touched upon. It’s frustrating perhaps, because as an audience we naturally place ourselves within Hanada’s shoes, but Hanada quickly becomes as lost and confused as we ourselves feel. Beyond his basic carnal desire however, I don’t believe we understand Hanada either. Was Seijun’s intent in this film to make this world of yakuza and hitmen familiar yet ultimately foreign to our own, assumedly normal, perceptions? Quite possibly. It was criticized by Japanese film studios that it ‘made no money and made no sense’ after all, so that doesn’t seem to far off the mark.

     Knowing that this film inspired Jim Jarmusch makes me understand him a bit better, but I still don’t care for Coffee & Cigarettes. Not enough gunfights, I guess. Check out Branded to Kill though: it’s part drama, part action, part thriller, with a soundtrack that sounds like it comes from Thelonious Monk scoring a silent movie and a place in Japanese cinema history. Plus it’s a movie that really puts you in a thinking sort of mood, if my reaction is anything to go by. And thinking about how things are and how you feel about it is good, isn’t it?

     Don’t answer that, O’Brien.

Result: Recommended