The World of Killers and Those Who Suffer

"Conscience is but a word that cowards use, devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe. Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law." - King Richard, Richard III

Do evil men exist? Does compassion truly exist and is it the opposite of evil? The answer to all three is yes, according to Kenji Mizoguchi's 1954 film Sansho the Bailiff (山椒大夫) which portrays an endlessly brutal and cruel world in which compassion is its own reward. Featuring gorgeous cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa, its beauty is presented, too, as a self-evident virtue. Featuring several excellent performances, the characters are nonetheless mostly simplistic, serving a severely moralistic story.

The film was apparently an influence on director Terrence Malick who wrote a stage play based on the film in 1990. It's not difficult to find philosophical similarities between Malick's Tree of Life and Sansho the Bailiff. Both films are deeply moralistic, both films cast women as pure, uncomplicated vessels of good.

Mizoguchi, along with Mikio Naruse, was at the forefront of a feminist movement in Japanese cinema, consistently making films where society's treatment of women is portrayed as unjust. Though what Mizoguchi's exact feelings were are unclear as he opposed the Director's Guild allowing Kinuyo Tanaka, who frequently acted in his films, to become a film director herself.

She never appeared in one of his movies again but that was after Sansho the Bailiff where she plays a noblewoman named Tamaki. As the film opens, she, her young son and daughter, and a servant are fleeing the province from whence her husband, the former governor, has been banished.

He's played by Masao Shimizu who manages to convey a sense of being deeply committed to principle and a terrible vulnerability. He's being exiled because of his belief in recognising more freedoms for the peasantry, essentially arguing for democracy. It's a value he passionately imparts to his children before he's taken away and this seems by Mizoguchi a conscious attempt to portray the democratic values imposed by the occupying U.S. forces as having precedent in Japanese culture. It's fascinating to compare this film with Mizoguchi's prewar 47 Ronin movie which seemingly argues for the honour of the complete sacrifice of self to one's lord.

Tamaki and her children are soon captured and sold into slavery. Tamaki is sent off to a remote island to be a prostitute and the children, Anju and Zushio, are sent to the slave village run by the cruel tyrant, Sansho (Eitaro Shindo).

After a few years of their lives of toil, the child actors are replaced by Kyoko Kagawa as Anju and Yoshiaki Hanayagi as Zushio. Where at first both were committed to one day escaping and finding their parents, Zushio has lost hope and has started to go along with the programme, helping Sansho torture and disfigure an elderly slave who attempted to escape.

It's Anju, his sister, who never wavers and through her persistence and sacrifice spurs a change in her brother when the two of them are sent to carry a sick slave to a place on a nearby hill where slaves broken beyond usefulness to Sansho are left to die.

Although one naturally cheers for Zushio in his efforts after escaping to free the other slaves, there's a further, self-evident injustice in Anju and Tamaki's inability to do anything but remain pure and sacrifice themselves. In this, perhaps they're not unlike the samurai of the 47 Ronin movie--their voluntary abdication of agency portrayed as something more sublime than democracy.

It's astonishing, the beautiful compositions in scene after scene of this film. Ultimately, Zushio makes sacrifices as well and there is a contrast set up between those like Sansho, who would serve themselves, and those like Anju, who would choose instead to place the welfare of others first. It's Nietzsche's master and slave dichotomy and Mizoguchi does not see a third alternative. One might find this third alternative, the ubermensch, in another film shot by Kazuo Miyagawa, Kurosawa's Yojimbo, though perhaps a better example is Kurosawa's film previous to it, The Bad Sleep Well, where one is reminded that the world often does not permit this third alternative.

The Long Legs of Summer

A rather large, beautiful daddy long legs has been staying in the ceiling corner above my television the past few days. His abdomen is about the size of a pea.

This morning I went out, headed for the library, wearing waistcoat and frock coat and soon had to remove both because it was 80 Fahrenheit. I guess winter week is over. Just yesterday it was under 60 when my friend Tim and I went to the South Korean supermarket in the afternoon for lunch. They have a nice food court and every restaurant gives you a big meal usually for around seven dollars or less--I suspect the fact that the grocery store is attached to the food court has something to do with it. It's like a huge slice of South Korea in this one shopping centre with a big restaurant and tea shop attached, as well as several Korean travel agencies, beauty parlours, arcades, and a Verizon store looking slightly out of place.

The food is good, too, except it's hard to order something without unexpectedly receiving a hard boiled egg. As I already had three eggs that morning, I contented myself with the kimchi and the tofu soup that was still violently boiling for several minutes in the stone bowl it was served to me in.

I finally got around to starting the second season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. a few nights ago, largely compelled by the fact that Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen have so far only written the first episode. I've watched that episode and the second episode--written by Paul Zbyszewski--and unfortunately both have been pretty dumb, filled with the sort of smarmy quips that Joss Whedon sometimes manages not to make annoying but which consistently fall flat from the pen of his brother and his brother's wife. When speculating if the new villain Creole is lonely when a call comes through on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s monitoring line, Chloe Bennet's character Skye says, no, he's jacked and he can turn his body into anything. When now director Coulson exhibits signs of stress, Skye recommends yoga and Coulson says he's tried yoga but he's not flexible enough in that deadpan way that's supposed to make us go, "Aw, how cute, straight laced spy guy Coulson does/says normal people things," like 80% of his lines.

Still, the additions of Kyle MacLachlan and Patton Oswalt to the cast and upcoming episodes written by Drew Z. Greenberg, Brent Fletcher, and Jeffrey Bell make me want to stick with it a little longer at least.

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The Impression of the Impressed

What can you say about the life of a critic? According to the often quoted, somewhat passive aggressive speech written for Peter O'Toole's critic character in Ratatouille, critics are people whose range of influence will inevitably be much smaller than even the items they've given the worst reviews. It might be hard for anyone to really savour this speech after seeing 2014's Life Itself, a documentary on the life of the late Roger Ebert, perhaps the best known movie critic of all time, certainly one of my favourites. The film is an unflinching look at the effects of the cancer that robbed Ebert of the ability to speak and continue working on his famous television show but contains surprisingly few revelations about his life and even seems to gloss over and omit several things.

The most glaring omission is perhaps Richard Roeper--after the sudden death of Gene Siskel, Roeper became Ebert's co-host on At the Movies and sat beside him for over five years. Roeper wrote several guest reviews on Ebert's site shortly before his death and the two, when they mentioned each other in media, always seemed respectful of each other. Roeper's absence from the film is more than a little mysterious and causes one to wonder what else was omitted.

The first part of the film explores Ebert's youth working in the newspaper business and becoming one of the youngest credited movie critics at The Chicago Sun-Times. His alcoholism is mentioned, though it's a little vague as to why Ebert went cold turkey. Ebert says it was because he was tired of hangovers.

Among the more fascinating moments for me were the segments on Ebert's genuinely adversarial relationship with Gene Siskel, how these two very opinionated men found it difficult to deal with a partner who had trouble hearing his opinions on art countered. This created a lot of very real, fascinating conflict on the series and was a revelation on the ways in which people view art. Two reviews are contrasted rather fascinatingly--Ebert's famous thumbs down for Blue Velvet due to his indignation at the treatment of Isabella Rossellini (Siskel's thumbs up response that it's a movie and she's an actress and it's not real are not included) and Ebert's thumbs up review for David Cronenberg's Crash which Siskel gave thumbs down to out of an apparent sense of moral repulsion. It's fascinating to consider why these two movies evidently went too far for one critic and not the other, what emotional buttons had been pushed and how the mind interpreted those emotions.

My other favourite aspect of the documentary were the interviews with Werner Herzog and Martin Scorsese, both of whom feel Ebert's criticism enhanced their film careers. Scorsese describes a film festival in the early eighties thrown by Siskel and Ebert as the only thing that pulled him out of an unproductive phase where he was lost in cocaine addiction. Herzog describes a love for Ebert that makes the critic sound not unlike one of Herzog's mad protagonists whose passion for their object takes them beyond all considerations of physical and mental endurance. The awe Herzog feels at Ebert continuing to write about film with genuine passion every day, even after the cancer had taken his ability to speak, eat, drink, and walk, is sort of beautiful.

Let's See What's In the Audio Lobster Trap To-day

Those wishing to see a female Doctor Who can at least hear one in the 2003 audio play Exile, which features David Tennant in a supporting role before he was cast as the Tenth Doctor. Like the first time the Doctor was played by a woman--the 1999 special The Curse of Fatal Death where she was played by Joanna Lumley--Exile is a comedy special, though it takes its characters a little more seriously than Fatal Death, rather than being a complete tongue in cheek send up. Which is not to say it's very well written--it's written by Nicholas Briggs who never seems to turn in a decent script. Despite his participation--a regular writer for the Big Finish audio plays--Exile does not feature any of the real regular cast members of the series.

The Doctor is played by comic actress Arabella Weir--who would go on to appear in a small role in the 2011 Christmas special "The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe". She does a decent enough job as the Doctor--this is basically a "What If" style story set after the events of the Second Doctor story The War Games. Instead of the Second Doctor being forcibly regenerated by the council of the Time Lords, the Doctor escapes and commits suicide which, we're told, always results in a Time Lord changing sex upon regenerating. I'm not sure what to make of that, if anything. She hides out on Earth and falls into a life of heavy drinking at a local pub with two co-workers from a job she takes at a local supermarket. David Tennant and Toby Longworth play two Time Lord councilmen sent to Earth to track the Doctor down and bring her back to stand trial.

Most of the jokes fall flat but Weir and Tennant manage to make a few work just from sheer skill as performers. My favourite bit is where the Toby Longworth Time Lord tries to lay a trap for the Doctor by interrupting a television transmission with footage of himself wearing a rubber mask pretending to be an alien threatening Earth--a reference to a television signal hijacking during an American Doctor Who broadcast in the 80s where an unidentified person dressed as Max Headroom interrupted a broadcast of Horror of Fang Rock. Tennant's reaction to Longworth explaining the plan is pretty funny as he notes what a long shot the plan is, how unlikely it is for the Doctor to happen to be tuning in at that particular time.

Tennant played minor roles in several Doctor Who audio plays before he became the Doctor himself--I first heard him playing a Nazi guard earlier this week in the 2001 Seventh Doctor story Colditz in which the Doctor and Ace visit Colditz Castle when it was being used as a Nazi prison for enemy combatants during World War II. Written by Steven Lyons, it's the first Seventh Doctor audio I've heard that really capitalises on the Seventh's established personality as a master game player. The story involves the effects of an alternate timeline manifesting in the current one in what turns out to be an almost Moffat-ianly complex way. It's a good listen--Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred turn in good performances as usual and the story advances Ace's personal storyline a little more, the one that was cut short by the series cancellation in 1989.

Blood and Toothpaste

If gangster is a respectable occupation, if it's okay to define your film career as neverending self-promotion, then why shouldn't a film crew be invited to film a gang war? Why should an ocean of blood mean anyone should have hard feelings? Like the films of Seijun Suzuki in the 60s, 2014's Why Don't You Play In Hell? (地獄でなぜ悪い "Why is Hell Bad"?) is a thorough send up of the machismo behind gangster films, using outright surrealism to emphasise the absurdity of the codes of conduct portrayed by the genre. It's a film that is simultaneously goofy and horrific and may be the weirdest and most anti-sentimental movie of 2014.

Did you remember to "gnash your teeth" this morning with tooth paste? It's "like a tingling bite"--just listen to little Mitsuko Muto (Nanoka Hara);

She takes that energy home with her, too--she rushes in the door before realising the whole kitchen and living room are ankle deep in blood from the gangsters her mother slaughtered with a kitchen knife.

It's for this reason Mitsuko's mother goes to prison for ten years during which time the little girl blossoms into a bit of a gangster herself (now played by Fumi Nikaido) who gives a guy the kiss off with a piece of broken glass, filling his mouth with glass first and of course telling him to "gnash your teeth!"

There are two big yakuza gangs in town--Mitsuko's father (Jun Kunimura--he played a gang boss in Kill Bill) heads one of them and the other is headed by Ikegami (Shin'ichi Tsutsumi), Mitsuko's number one fan.

Due to a confusing plot about Mitsuko being kidnapped by her own father, she's unable to star in the movie he's promised her mother will be ready by the time the woman's released from prison. So, with ten days to go, Muto enlists a dead eyed young man Mitsuko's been paying to pose as her boyfriend, Koji (Gen Hoshino).

He doesn't know anything about making movies so he enlists the aid of a group of amateur filmmakers who for some reason call themselves the "Fuck Bombers".

The ever manic Hirata (Hiroki Hasegawa) is their director and leader whose enthusiasm for being a great filmmaker has kept him from making movies all his life. Instead he spends most of his time making ecstatic proclamations with his crew at the local movie house and in bars. His gleeful awe over himself fits right in with the gangsters and he easily talks the star struck Ikegami into allowing him to film his showdown with Muto's gang.

There's so much blood in this movie, it's the Dead Alive of gangster films. All the blood and mania and broad comedy are dizzying and the film undercuts itself time and again until a climax that's both completely over the top and completely meaningless. It see-saws between cold blooded beatings and bizarre sentimentality, from severed limbs to the Fuck Bombers yet again waxing nostalgic about their years running around with cameras, filming everything but creating nothing. Koji marvels at meeting and falling for the little girl he had a crush on when he was a kid. This means more to him than whether or not anyone dies. But then, death would be committing a massive faux pas to stand in anyone's way here.

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Dreams Desperately Projected On the Void

Happy New Year and it's time for my annual ranking of the year's movies. It's been a year of contrasts: faith and realism, dreams and cold waking, love and alienation. And it's been a good year for vampires--though I still haven't seen A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Maybe it'll be on next year's list. On that note, you may see a few movies on this list you'd consider to be 2013 or even 2012 films. My criterion is availability--if a movie wasn't reasonably available to English speaking audiences until 2014, I included it on this list. That's why The Wind Rises is on this list, nevermind motherfuckers who managed to see it at a New York festival in 2013. Anyway, everyone's including The Tale of Princess Kaguya on their 2014 lists and that was released in 2013 in Japan, too.

Without further ado--the list, as always, goes from worst to best:

35. Transformers: The Age of Extinction (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

It was a tough call between The Age of Extinction or Gun Woman but, while Gun Woman was misogynistic and sloppily made, at least it felt like the filmmakers actually cared about what they were making. Transformers: The Age of Extinction is noise borne of pure, mindless cynicism.

34. Gun Woman (女イ本銃) (my review, the imdb entry)

A depressing wallow in anger and lust, naked women wordlessly fight or are physically abused by whining, strutting, shitkicking guys. And this makes the women love them.

33. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

The plot is dumb but more solid than Transformers, it's misogynist but not as angry about it as Gun Woman.

32. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Dull human leads detract from some impressive ape performances and everyone is brought down by a textbook plot and silly motivations.

31.Wild (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Good performances by Laura Dern and Reese Witherspoon and some nice scenery couldn't save this movie from its own smugness.

30. Oculus (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Good performances by Katee Sackhoff and Karen Gillen couldn't save this movie from being completely disassociated from its characters.

29. The Edge of To-morrow (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

There's something academic about this movie's mashing of Groundhog Day and War of the Worlds but as a completely by the book spectacle it doesn't actually do anything wrong, its only crime is that it's not in any way exceptional. It deserves a smile at least.

28. The Eternal Zero (永遠の0) (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Fascinating for its peek into the political climate of Japan, this glorifying of Japan's effort in World War II is maybe the first time the nation has so publicly felt pride in its participation in that war. Massively popular in Japan and endorsed by the Prime Minister, it's not likely to see U.S. theatrical release any time soon since it portrays the attack on Pearl Harbour in a positive light. But it's worth noting that the Obama administration didn't order a massive cyberattack on the studio that released it like a certain mutual adversary of Japan and the U.S. might have done.

27. Maleficent (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

This supposedly feminist reinterpretation of Disney's Sleeping Beauty actually manages to be no more feminist than its 1958 predecessor and doesn't make as much sense. But Angelina Jolie looks really good and she clearly had fun in the few moments she gets to portray the classic Maleficent.

26. The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

The weakest of Peter Jackson's weaker Middle Earth trilogy, it lacks the visual beauty of the previous instalment and is a lot heavier on the padding. But it has some fun action spectacle.

25. Thorn (가시) (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

It's a little sexist but has two generally interesting characters and one fascinatingly cruel turn of plot.

24. Gone Girl (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

This movie was dumb but slick. It went down easy--it wasn't quite as passionate as the not especially passionate The Edge of To-morrow but even on auto-pilot David Fincher can make a basically entertaining and pretty film.

23. Veronica Mars (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

I'm not sure how well anyone who's not a fan of the show would enjoy this but Kristen Bell's smart, funny, and very human detective always pleases me.

22. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

The first wave of Scarlett Johansson's all out assault on the year, this was an entertaining action film with a dash of espionage intrigue far superior to its predecessor.

21. A Winter's Tale (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Nowhere near as bad as its trailer suggests and the critics' manual has instructed people to say it is, A Winter's Tale is gentle and charming for anyone willing to lower their defences.

20. Life Itself (my review: coming soon, the Wikipedia entry)

A somewhat too rosy but still lovely portrait of a great writer whose love of movies elevated the medium for audiences and artists.

19. Giovanni's Island (ジョバンニの島) (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Animation, performances, and dialogue filled with personality but brought down slightly by a run of the mill war refugee story.

18. Boyhood (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

A fascinating portrait on the passage of time painted with a wisely understated brush.

17. Guardians of the Galaxy (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

A good movie if slightly over the top in sentimentality, its success I suspect is largely due more to a thirst for the type of movie it appeared to be--affection not only for Star Wars but I think appreciation for Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and, more deeply, Farscape, are seeping in the ground soil of the cultural imagination.

16. Interstellar (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Impressive visuals and performances not quite sabotaged by a surprisingly sentimental, somewhat sexist, and generally conservative story.

15. The Interview (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

A much smarter movie than many critics dare give it credit for and funny, too; an amoral jab at the most ridiculous powerful people on Earth--Kim Jong-un and American tabloid media personalities.

14. High Heel (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

A rather bold story of what you might call a noir transgender superheroine. The bigger than life context nonetheless conveys something of the real difficulty transgender people face when transitioning. And it has some great action sequences.

13. The Rover (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Faced with a world that has proven to be fundamentally without any mercy except what luck provides, two men struggle with their need to perceive meaning in the cruelly meaningless desolation.

12. X-Men: Days of Future Past (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

I think a lot of critics have forgotten this movie but it was the strongest comic book movie of the year, maybe the most perfect rendering of the basic drive behind X-Men at its best--youth facing frightening questions about identity and all traditional figures of authority and comfort proving to be just as flawed and downright dangerous.

11. Why Don't You Play In Hell? (地獄でなぜ悪い) (my review: coming soon, the Wikipedia entry)

A vigorous satire of yakuza films and Japan's obsession with nostalgia, this post-modernist gangster movie in the tradition of Branded to Kill was one of the strangest movies of the year.

10. The Grand Budapest Hotel (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Perhaps the most perfect expression of Wes Anderson's aesthetic philosophy and a joy to behold.

9. Snowpiercer (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

An exciting and brilliantly realised Science Fiction film, a microcosm where even the worst potential form of order to the universe is a lie.

8. The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ) (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Not one of Miyazaki's strongest works, the second half the film is a little bogged down by an uninteresting romance but the fantastic imagery of the protagonist's dreams and a train wreck are still astonishingly wild and beautiful.

7. Only Lovers Left Alive (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

A low key take on vampires by Jim Jarmusch, it's more like an affectionate satire of bohemians.

6. Ida (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Rich in evident influences from the 50s and 60s, this is a gloriously photographed, sombre film about faith in the face of overwhelming revelations of a merciless cosmos.

5. The Zero Theorem (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Terry Gilliam's latest is a return to and an extra riff on the self evident value of imagination in a world that rigorously celebrates universal insignificance.

4. The Babadook (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

An intimate horror film, its terror brilliantly derived from the tenuousness of the critical bond between a widowed mother and her violent young son.

3. Nymphomaniac (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Outside the enforced beliefs of religion, unrestrained self indulgence is contrasted with agnostic asceticism to find the value in each while a curious thread about the divine in life seemingly cannot be repressed.

2. Under the Skin (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

A cool, scary, and melancholy meditation on the instinctive relationship between men and women, on isolation and on the value of empathy.

1. The Tale of Princess Kaguya (かぐや姫の物語) (my review, the Wikipedia entry)

Brilliantly stylised visuals perfectly compliment a story about life and death as veins that permeate all aspects of existence. The organic, the messy, the animal gradually give way to the artificial, the artistic, the dead, and the moon.