kkkultur

FOR ANYONE WHO HAS AN INTEREST IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMA

Watch this

That Paranormal Activity has noting on L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat for a wholly terrified audience reaction.  

NEW SPIKE JONZE SHORT - I’M HERE

A couple of months ago, Spike Jonze’s robot-romance short film premiered at Sundance film festival, and as far as I know it is bittersweet ‘mazin. It is being screened here in a strange cyber-cinema (maybe the future of film viewing? i doubt it). Viewings are limited to 700 a day so if you can’t get in today, give it a few days then try. 

I still haven’t seen it yet so can’t pass comment but fairly sure it’s ‘classic Jonze’. 

MAYBE THE LICENCE FEE ISN’T SUCH A GOOD THING

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00r0qns/Wild_Hogs/

Maybe give this one a miss…

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD & SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD

As promised, here are my reviews of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Survival of the Dead (the latter is released in May, the former was released 42 years ago). I’m going to use comparative bullet points to ‘jazz things up’ a bit:

Night of the Living Dead

• Based around characters in a house trying to protect themselves from a zombie attack.
• For its time, this was completely original and pretty much invented the zombie-apocalypse sub genre. They still hadn’t thought of the word ‘zombie’ instead saying things such as ‘ghouls’ or ‘flesh eating monsters’.
• It was obviously very subversive upon its release, criticising much of late 60s American society.
• If you’ve seen Shaun of the Dead then you’ll vaguely feel as if you’ve seen NotLD before.
• Hilarious misogyny throughout - every women is either screaming, crying or in a state of shuddering melancholy..
• The zombies are essentially people with white(r) faces, which makes things wonderfully ‘camp’.
• A classic.

Survival of the Dead

• Based around characters trying to escape a zombie invasion by sailing to an island off the coast of Delaware.
• For a modern day horror film, it’s pretty unoriginal compared to something like 28 Days Later, Romero seems to be desperately trying to find ways in which he can still release zombie films without plagiarising himself (but to no avail).
• If you’ve seen any other George A. Romero film, this will be pretty uninspiring.
• Plenty of stereotypical characters - ‘rural, swearing irish’ type, ‘annoying lesbian tom-boy’ type, ‘religious, quiet mexican’ type. Looks like Georgie boy’s dropped the misogyny and is instead spreading his vague tongue-in-cheek prejudices globally.
• Contains a strange subplot where some o’ the irish try and coerce the zombies to gouge on animals rather than humans.
• Lots of the gore effects looks as if they were done on MS Paint.
• An annoying teenager-type marches around the film criticising all the old fashioned technology (at one point he says ‘Lo-tech, more like No-tech’ - which elicited an ironic groan from the audience). At one particularly ‘modern’ moment he criticises a laptop for its bulkiness, and instead suggests an iPhone.
• Forgettable.

GOD BLESS THE LICENCE FEE part 3.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rfgyc/Hollywoodland/

Don’t blame me if it’s bad - I still haven’t seen it yet.

GOD BLESS THE LICENCE FEE part 2.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rf174/In_the_Loop/

Sozza if you don’t live in the UK, but if you do, have a gander at maybe the (second) best British film of last year.

The best was Fish Tank.

A WOMAN CONQUERING HOLLYWOOD?!

Whatever bad things you say about the ‘arms trade’, you have to give them some slack when technically it’s thanks to them that the bomb-disposal war drama The Hurt Locker was made, therefore beating Avatar at the Oscars/BAFTAs.

I’m going to blog some more from now on.

A brief and belated ‘A HEADLESS WOMAN’ review

Having missed the first 15 minutes - as for some reason they didn’t show adverts or trailers?? - I spent the whole film trying to work out who everyone was and what was going on; turns out that these feelings of confusion and alienation were intended. It really wasn’t that exhilarating to watch but had some nice shots and the ‘mise-en-scene’ (haven’t used that word for a while) seemed to be the only way in which we as the audience were offered pieces of the cryptic puzzle to try and decipher what the hell was going on (quite like Hidden). I (sort of) enjoyed it but am sure through repeated viewings one could understand why its ‘Peter Bradshaw 5-Star’ worthy.

Takashi Miike

Takashi Miike (pronounced Meekay) or as us homeboys who like to pretend to speak Japanese call him: ’三池 崇史’ is one of the strangest, sickest and most prolific directors working in the world today.

He has directed 81(!) films since the beginning of 1991, and nearly every one of his deranged creations will contain the following things:

• Extreme violence - you can guarantee that the goriest thing you can think of has been topped by a scene in a Miike film.
• Sexual peversion - after watching a few of his films, you tend to become completely desensitised to intense sessions of S&M/wife-beating/fetishes of any kind, meaning you can no longer function in respectable society without imagining what the nearest person to you would look like if they were tied up and whipped.
• Surrealism - A woman giving birth to an adult? Check. An adolescent son swimming in gallons of his mother’s breast milk? Check. A soup-dwelling curly-headed pixie who becomes enamoured by a lady’s uvula and steals it? Check.
• Dark humour - Miike’s comic sensibilities are so black they make James Brown seem like an albino (is it OK to make a joke like that?!).

Most people will be aware of Miike’s work because of the thoroughly disturbing Romantic-Horror film Audition, which has gained a significant cult following among horror nerds and fans of all things absurd. It follows Shigeharu a middle-aged widower as he ‘auditions’ girls for a fake film with the intent to seduce and marry one of them. He settles on a quiet, good-natured ex-ballerina Asami and despite warnings from his friend, who claims that mysteriously none of her references can be contacted, Shigeharu follows his heart and pursues his love interest. Their relationship progresses, and we see Asami opening up to Shigeharu; they spend a night in a hotel together but in the morning, Asami is no where to be seen. Having heard nothing from her, he decides to track her down by following up all the references on her CV. What ensues is a number of surreal and often horrific sequences where Asami’s past is uncovered (or maybe made more cryptic, depending on how you interpret it). To fully describe what happens in the last scenes would be to completely ruin the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it. But trust me - track it down, watch it and you won’t be able to get it’s unsettling atmosphere out from under your skin.  It is the sadistic and melancholic mood that pulses throughout Audition that helps set it apart from typical Hollywood ‘stalker chick’ movies. If you can’t be bothered to watch it and instead want a vague idea of the film’s plot whilst enjoying a song by emo ‘legends’ My Chemical Romance then simply click here. There are many interpretations concerning the film’s ambiguous ending ranging from people who view it as an empowering feminist manifesto to those who just see it as needless torture porn.

I could go on to describe the plot of every film Miike has made during his prolific career but shall instead offer you some highlights from his unique oeuvre:

Ichi the Killer (2002)

My favourite Miike film, which is based on the controversial Manga comic of the same name. It follows Kakihara a sadomasochist yakuza leader who is pursuing the elusive schizophrenic psychotic loner Ichi after his boss is murdered. This surreal action film is nightmarishly visceral and gore & torture are thrown in by the bucketload (there’s an infamous tongue cutting scene which puts Oldboy to shame). There are copius scenes of torture using thin accupuncture-styled metal spikes (Miike loves these) and one scene involving a man who is hung up by hooks and has boiling fat poured onto his back. But wait, I know what you’re all saying: ‘OK we get it, there’s lots of violence but where is the sex?’, well luckily there is also an equal amount of extreme sex to boot; Kakihara’s S&M conquests are revealed in full detail and there is a darkly comic scene where Ichi masturbates over a women being beaten by her husband. Well I concur, this all seems a bit gratuitous, but it’s the way that Miike weaves all of these demented themes into some sort of alternative narrative which gives the film credibility (well for me anyway). He presents us with a parallel universe in which Tokyo is inhabited by characters who see pain as an empowering end in itself (like Fight Club) and whose psychosexual hang-ups dictate their questionable actions. A gore-fest that offers you no clues as to what is actually going on - just the way films should be.

Visitor Q (2001)

This low-budget straight-to-video psuedo-documentary is aesthetically the antithesis of Ichi the Killer but what it lacks in glistening cinematography, it makes up for in bizarre nonsense. The eerie realism thanks to the use of handheld video cameras is ‘juxtaposed’ with the insanity of the characters actions and the darkly comic way in which the story unfolds. I sat through the first half of this feeling slightly disappointed but as always with Miike, the ludicrous ending meant it’s easily one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen. Necrophilia, incest, lactations by the (literal) bucketload - need I say more?

Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

This film is truly undefinable. A family of failures decide to buy a guesthouse in the country but accidentally manage to kill all the guests in different ways; they then decide to bury the bodies and conceal the deaths, but soon get sucked into a nightmare of lies and deceit. Now this all sounds like pretty dark territory, but the film is at it’s core a family comedy. We are sucked into a film of genre-defying madness, seamlessly leaping from claymation animation to musical song and dance numbers to dream sequences to Hitchcockian melodrama to karaoke sing-a-longs to zombie invasions. In HotK it is impossible to predict what will come next, and that’s why it’s so brilliant.

Gozu (2003)

Gozu is essentially a stream of consciousness, where the spontaneous decisions made by Miike during filming (lots of it was improvised on set) are forced into a typical Yakuza-movie shaped template. The result is something that manages to defy expectation and interpretation throwing in all sorts of themes such as conceptions of split-personality, femininity and reincarnation whilst providing Miike fans with the always-insane imagery that they come to expect, such as a man who keeps ‘skin suits’ in his wardrobe and a yakuza boss who anally stimulates himself using a soup ladle.

Imprint (2006)

Originally created as an episode for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, Imprint was deemed too extreme to show to US audiences so has never been exhibited in America. It follows Christopher an American journalist as he tries to track down his girlfriend Komomo who he believes is working in a brothel on an unnamed island. He soon finds out from one of the girls that she is dead and the episode follows Christopher as he tries to unravel the truth as to why she died. Although this isn’t a Miike ‘film’, it exhibits all of his trademarks and is up there with his scariest work. It is filmed entirely in English, which makes the dialogue feel slightly rusty (as everyone has Japanese accents) but that is soon forgotten as the supernatural mysteries of the island and it’s inhabitants force you into terrified submission. Despite being unaired, it is available on youtube, so check it out.

As you can tell, this Miike is pretty messed up, but it’s the extent to which he takes things to extremes that really defines him as an idiosyncratic ‘autuer’. Miike’s complete disregard for any concept of censorship boundaries means that most of the time it feels as if he is literally pushing things as far as they can go; to borrow a phrase from the blurb of one of his DVDs ‘the transgressive experience will leave you shocked and stunned as he railroads taboos like there’s no tomorrow’. And isn’t this why art exists? To break down moral boundaries and experiment with new ideas? Judging by Takashi Miike’s work, it seems so.