Bonus Ghosts

A comedian attempts to kickstart his career by staying in haunted apartments in 2020's Stigmatised Properties (事故物件). This is the part where I might say, "He gets more than he bargains for," but he doesn't, really. He went to the places knowing they were haunted and, sure enough, they were. The film begins with kind of an interesting tone and the leads are cute but ultimately Stigmatised Properties feels too rote and artificial to generate any sense of life.

The film begins with Yamame (Kazuya Kamenashi) and his partner, Nakai (Koji Seto), performing an oddly vaudevillian routine with an umbrella.

Yamame is in drag and the whole audience is stone faced and motionless, which is really odd for a Japanese audience. I'd expect some courtesy applause. It's the first of many artificial moments designed to move the plot forward.

The only person in the audience who laughs is a young woman named Azusa (Nao Honda) who, it turns out, is such a fan of the duo, she has a little shrine of them at home. She's thrilled when Yamame gives her the umbrella used in the act.

This is intriguing and a bit creepy but it's never followed up on. But Honda is one of the best parts of the film. She's cute and I really like her plaid overcoat.

This movie is initially set in Osaka, which was fun for me to see so many familiar locations. A lot of it also takes place in Kyoto. In the final act, Yamame travels to Tokyo, away from his two friends, but both of them show up with melodramatic timing anyway. That's just one of the things that deflates the climax.

The movie's filled with cheap jump scares but once ghosts start sticking around for more than two seconds they rapidly lose their punch, mostly because director Hideo Nakata can't manage to authentically explore the emotions of such a situation. Yamame is supposedly living in these apartments but we never see him struggling to sleep after a ghost encounter. It's like everyone knows the ghosts will only come on cue.

Stigmatised Properties is available on Netflix in Japan.

The Real Trail

What's a cowboy? If 1958's Cowboy doesn't answer the question I don't know what would. The term has long been applied to any fella with a broad-brimmed hat and a pair of six shooters but, once upon a time, it was a job, it was herding cattle across hazardous frontier. Glen Ford and Jack Lemmon star in this magnificently shot film about a fascinating relationship between two men. The beginning of the film is a little awkward and the ending is strangely abrupt but the stuff between is terrific.

Frank Harris (Lemmon) is a hotel clerk who dreams of driving cattle across the open plains, earning a fortune in the process, and also maybe approval of his girlfriend's father. Frank loves Maria (Anna Kashfi), the daughter of a wealthy and influential Mexican cattle rancher (Donald Randolph).

Enter the illustrious cowboy Tom Reese (Glenn Ford). Frank begs him to give him a job as one of his men. Tom finally relents after Frank gives him 38,000 to help him win a poker game. Tom regrets it later but finds himself saddled with the greenhorn on a long drive south into Mexico.

The relationship between the two is a volatile clash of personalities as the two look for reasons to respect or excuses to despise each other. Gradually, Tom gets to thinking his instinctive dislike for Frank means he's feeling fatherly affections and there's a nice scene where Tom suddenly starts stuttering through an attempt to console Frank over his broken heart.

The friction between the two goes to a new level when it comes to the issue of people's lives. When do they ruthlessly look after the dollar interests of the herd at the cost of men's lives? When do they sacrifice two hundred head of cattle for one man? It's damnably murky and it's a miracle the tension doesn't make them try to kill each other.

The film has some amazing stunts, some of them even performed by the actors. Once scene where Tom has to put a ring on an angry bull's horn must have used a stuntman but it was so cleverly shot it's impossible to tell what shots are Ford and what aren't.

The end of the film is really abrupt and the relationship between Tom and Frank, which feels like it could have taken up another hour of screentime, is suddenly and weirdly resolved. But this is still a damned fine Western and you could do worse on the Fourth of July.

Cowboy is available on The Criterion Channel.