1/1/15 (Part Two): Bleed For Your Art

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35mm film, action-comedies, assassins, auteur theory, child actors, father-daughter relationships, Film auteurs, filmmaking, foreign films, Fuck Bombers, Fumi Nikaidô, Gen Hoshino, gory films, guerrilla film crew, guerrilla filmmaking, Hideo Yamamoto, Hiroki Hasegawa, husband-wife relationship, independent film crew, Itsuji Itao, Japanese cinema, Jun Kunimura, Megumi Kagurazaka, nostalgia, set in Japan, Shin'ichi Tsutsumi, Shion Sono, street gangs, stylish films, Tak Sakaguchi, Tetsu Watanabe, Tomochika, vanity project, voice-over narration, Why Don't You Play in Hell?, writer-director-score, Yakuza, Yakuza gang members

Calling gonzo Japanese auteur Shion Sono’s latest film, Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (2014), a sweetly sentimental film might seem a little nuts, especially if you’ve seen the movie. After all, isn’t this the same film that features a young girl “surfing” on an ocean of blood, Yakuza gang members as pick-up film crew, a finale that makes Kill Bill’s (2003) restaurant massacre look like a Hallmark special and a guerrilla film crew who call themselves “The Fuck Bombers” and delight in filming people throwing raw eggs at each other? All true, although none of these are really the film’s raison d’être: at its heart, WDYPIH? is about growing older, losing your dreams and the by-gone glory days of filmmaking (aka: the ones that actually used film). It might come wrapped in a stylish, candy-colored and ultra-gory wrapper but Sono’s goofy epic is, at heart, a friendly little shaggy mutt of a film: eager to please but rather unfocused, WDYPIH? is far from a masterpiece but I’m willing to wager that anyone who’s had their heart touched by the movie-making bug will find plenty to like here.

We begin 10 years in the past, as a pair of Yakuza gangs wage bloody warfare against each other: the Kitagawa and Muto clans seem evenly matched, as both gangs battle for control of the streets, but it’s a precarious balancing act and no one ever seems to be on top for long. The tide appears to turn when the Kitagawas send a team of assassins after the head of the Muto clan (Jun Kunimura) but Muto’s wife, Shizue (Tomochika), single-handedly kills the wannabe-killers, all while her young daughter, Mitsuko (Nanoka Hara) looks on in wide-eyed wonder. Shizue is sent to prison for her hand in the massacre (one would think some leniency would be in order, since it was basically Shizue defending herself against a group of attackers, although the point where she chased an injured guy into the street and butchered him might have thrown a monkey-wrench into the “self-defense” defense), Muto takes a mistress to “help him get through the hard times” and the Kitagawas reorganize themselves around Ikegami (Shin’ichi Tsutsumi), the only survivor of the original attempt on Muto’s life.

At this same time, we meet The Fuck Bombers, a young trio of guerrilla filmmakers led by Hirata (Hiroki Hasegawa), their far-beyond-driven director/de facto leader. The group recruits Bruce Lee-enthusiast Sasaki (Tak Sakaguchi) into their ranks, in order to shoot the action epics that they so dearly love. While out filming, the Bombers run straight into Ikegami, who’s fleeing the Muto house in a state of very bloody disrepair: he lets them shoot some footage of him, because he’s “cool” and then makes his escape. As fate would have it, however, this isn’t the last time this little group will cross paths…not by a long shot.

10 years later, Shizue is ready to be released from prison and her husband wants to give her the best present possible: a movie starring their beloved daughter, Mitsuko (Fumi Nikaidô). Unfortunately, the surly Mitsuko hates acting and has run away, throwing the whole production into jeopardy. Muto dispatches his gang to track her down and return her to him: at the same time, Ikegami prepares his gang to take another shot at the Muto empire and the Fuck Bombers are experiencing a bit of crisis. It seems that Sasaki is sick and tired of talking about making movies: Hirata keeps promising that they’ll make the “film of a lifetime” but it’s always “tomorrow,” never today. After ten years of “tomorrows,” Sasaki throws in the towel and quits, in disgust, leaving the FBs without their “action star.”

All of these disparate groups come crashing together when the FBs end up getting recruited (in a very roundabout way) by Muto in order to finish his vanity project. With Mitsuko back on board (no matter how unwillingly) and Hirata and the others eager to begin their “ultimate movie,” the stage is now set for some filmmaking magic. But what to film? As someone cannily notes, the Mutos and Kitagawas are preparing for one more, epic, bloody battle: why not turn the camera inward and capture the carnage as it happens? From this point on, the dividing line between fantasy and reality is shattered: as Hirata and the Fuck Bombers “stage” the battle, real blood sprays, real limbs are hacked and real Yakuza members are serving as the crew. It’s the ultimate “snuff” movie, as Hirata and his crew gleefully film the chaos swirling around them, always one step ahead of the gun (and the blade). Who will survive, what will be left of them but, most importantly: will they get the shot they need?

As should be rather clear from the above description, there’s an awful lot of stuffing crammed into this particular sausage-skin, even for a film that comes out a little over the two-hour mark. Despite all of the disparate elements (there are actually even more subplots and strands running through this than I mentioned, including a love story for Mitsuko and Ikegami’s obsession with returning the Kitagawas to the feudal days of Japan’s distant past), however, the film never feels particularly jumbled, probably because the Fuck Bombers storyline serves as the glue that holds everything else together.

Despite the fact that it all fits, however, WDYPIH? never feels as cohesive as it could be: the various threads tend to connect on a visual/stylistic level but don’t cohere as well on a thematic level. Even worse, however, WDYPIH? never quite feels like it completely cuts loose: despite the rather phenomenal level of bloodshed, especially in the climax, the film is actually so good-natured and goofy as to be relatively low-stakes. This is an especially strange complaint when one considers how many people die in this: if the numbers are in the double digits, they might as well be in the triple digits. By the conclusion, however, it seems that everyone is alive and well, ready to begin the next adventure as if everyone had been reset, ala Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. While this might have been some sort of commentary on the illusory aspect of film, it might also have stemmed from the desire to not “harsh our mellow,” so to speak. To be honest, I’m not really sure what the intention was: Sono sets up a pitch-black, nihilistic finale only to wrap it all up with a sunny, almost cartoonish bit and I was mildly confused, to say the least. Perhaps I missed something on the first go through but this particular quirk left me more than a little cold.

On a purely nuts-and-bolts level, WDYPIH? looks fantastic but the over-reliance on chintzy CGI effects, especially blood, really drags it all down a peg or two. When the effects work, such as in the blood surfing setpiece, it works fabulously. When the effects are poorly integrated and too obvious, ala much of the gore-drenched finale, it tended to pull me right out of the film. I can certainly understand the need to use CGI for many of the more outrageous effects (flying limbs, sword through the head, etc) but there are far too many points where an obviously CGI puddle of blood sticks out like a sore thumb. As someone who’s always been hot-and-cold on CGI effects, one of my all-time pet peeves is poorly done CGI blood: even ketchup would be more convincing, for Pete’s sake!

Ultimately, Why Don’t You Play in Hell? was a film that I really wanted to love but I could never quite clear the hurdles to get to that point. The film is never boring and when it’s good, it can be mind-rattlingly good: the blurring of real fighting and filmed choreography, in the climax, is pretty damn genius and there are plenty of genuinely funny cracks about independent filmmaking peppered throughout the script. Some of the fight sequences are also fairly jaw-dropping: the scene where Mitsuko spins around and decapitates an entire room full of assailants is exactly as cool as it sounds. Fumi Nikaidô is actually kind of great as the grown-up Mitsuko (the bit with her and the “broken glass kiss” is pretty amazing) and Tak Sakaguchi was a real hoot as Sasaki (he even kind of looked like Bruce Lee, at times, which was a neat trick) but too many of the other characters come and go without making much impact.

There’s definitely a lot to absorb here and I’ll admit to being a real sucker for the film’s discussion about the glory days of 35mm film: they’re preaching to the choir but I still appreciate the sentiment. At the end of the day, however, Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, despite a fairly unique angle and some outrageous ideas, never really seems like it comes into its own: neither as shocking as it probably means to be nor as emotionally resonate, Sono’s film kind of sits in a neutral zone, cooling its heels while much better (and much worse) films wage war around it. The middle-ground is always the safest place to be, but it’s not always the most interesting. While Shion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell? is a good enough film, I can’t help but wonder if it would have been more fun as a spectacular failure.

6/19/14: Uncle Walt Wouldn’t Care

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Allison Lees-Taylor, amusement parks, Annet Mahendru, bad fathers, black-and-white cinematography, cat flu, cinema, Danielle Safady, directorial debut, Disney, Disney World, Disneyland, Elena Schuber, Epcot Center, Escape From Tomorrow, fantasy, fantasy vs reality, father-son relationships, feature-film debut, film festival favorite, film reviews, films, guerrilla filmmaking, independent film, independent films, indie dramas, infidelity, Jack Dalton, Katelynn Rodriguez, Lee Armstrong, lost at Disney World, low-budget films, missed opportunities, Movies, pop culture, princesses, Randy Moore, Roy Abramsohn, sci-fi, science-fiction, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, subversive films, surreal, surrealism, the Happiest Place on Earth, the Wicked Witch, unauthorized film, underbelly of America, Walt Disney

There’s certain things that you’ll only ever get one chance to do. You only get one chance to make a first impression, after all, and you only get one chance to see your first sunrise. You only get one chance to sneak up on someone (unless they’re critically careless, of course) and you only have one chance to perform certain orbital procedures, if you’re an astronaut. You only get one shot at a once-in-a-lifetime moment (if there’s truth in advertising) and certain celestial events will only come by once in any given person’s lifetime: be there or be square, as it were. To this list of one-time events, you could certainly add “covertly shoot a subversive sci-fi/surrealist film at Disney World,” since, for all intents and purposes, filmmakers will only ever get one chance at this particular feat. The filmmaker who beat everyone else to the punch? First-time writer-director Randy Moore, whose guerrilla film, Escape From Tomorrow (2013), will probably stand the test of time as the first and last film to be shot in the Magic Kingdom without the express permission of the Disney Corporation. Does Escape From Tomorrow have any real value, aside from the curiosity factor of its genesis, or did Moore’s shot across the bow spoil the party for other, more subversive filmmakers who might want to take a shot at the house that Mouse built? Tack on your wings, grab some fairy dust and let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Jim (Roy Abramsohn) has just taken his family, including wife, Emily (Elena Schuber), daughter, Sara (Katelynn Rodriguez) and son, Elliot (Jack Dalton) to Disney World for a much-needed vacation when he gets a call from his work: due to some sort of vague restructuring, Jim has just been laid-off. Fantastic. Rather than spill the beans to his loving family, Jim decides to keep the bad news to himself and give everyone the chance to enjoy one last family vacation before things, presumably, go to complete shit. The problem is that Jim seems to be going a little cuckoo: for one thing, he’s become obsessed with a pair of underage French teens (Danielle Safady and Annet Mahendru) and has taken to stalking them throughout the amusement park, his young son in tow. Jim has also begun to see very strange things, including some clichéd “scary faces” on the It’s a Small World ride and assorted “odd” images elsewhere. Is the stress making Jim crack or is he, somehow, seeing through the smooth, happy, plastic veneer of the “Disney dream” and into the cold, dead eyes  that lurk beneath it? Why does he keep running into the same strange people, including an obnoxiously leering man in a motorized scooter (Lee Armstrong) and a strangely beguiling, if rather witch-like woman (Allison Lees-Taylor)? And what, exactly, lies below Spaceship Earth at Epcot Center? Before it’s over, Jim will find himself in a waking nightmare of malevolent fairies, demonic little children, strange scientific procedures, absurd medical maladies and enough surrealism to choke Dali. Welcome to the happiest place on Earth: stay as long as you like, just don’t go poking around in the darkness too much…you might not like what you dredge up.

Right off the bat, let me get the kudos out of the way: against absolutely all odds, Randy Moore was able to covertly shoot a film at one of the most “shenanigan unfriendly” places on Earth, get it edited in secrecy (supposedly in South Korea) and get it released into theaters, all without bringing Disney’s eternally sharp ax down upon his noggin. For these facts alone, I can only say: Bravo to you, good sir, bravo. Escape From Tomorrow is a film that should not exist, by any stretch of the imagination, yet it does: this, in itself, is more accomplishment than many films ever see. Moore and his cast and crew were able to shoot the film on the run (certain shots were planned out months in advance and actors rode the rides over and over in order to perfect the takes) and the finished product doesn’t necessarily feel like an ultra-low digital video feature (not all the time, at least). The black and white cinematography looks quite good, most of the time, and Moore is able to use some surprisingly evocative lighting, which must have been no mean feat under the shooting conditions. This is a film that could easily have ended up looking like someone’s covert concert footage (“Quick, security’s coming: stuff the camera under your coat!”) but it rarely, if ever, does: that’s a pretty big achievement all by itself. If Escape From Tomorrow were a children’s’ book, it might be “The Little Engine That Could.”

On the other hand, despite its back-story, genesis and intent, Escape From Tomorrow just isn’t a particularly good film. Moore had a great idea (shoot a film at Disney World, guerrilla-style, that exposes the seamy underbelly of the American dream) but his execution ends up being muddled, clichéd and, worst of all, decidedly uninteresting. For one thing, the film isn’t nearly as surreal and odd as it thinks it is: much of the “creepy” imagery takes the place of decidedly old-hat things like “scary faces” on animatronic dolls (yawn), suddenly jet-black eyes on people (double-yawn) and surprise “demonic faces,” ala the Paranormal Activity films (again?!). There are a few genuinely surreal moments/images once Jim descends below Epcot Center but these end up being a bit “too little, too late,” by that point. Some of the Disney imagery is used to good, surreal effect (the witch is a nice touch, as are the hazy, druggy scenes that surround her) but a lot of it is pretty trite and wasted: the whole “cat flu” angle is aggressively stupid and seems tacked on, to boot, while the closing fairy image has surprisingly little impact.

By its very definition, Escape From Tomorrow was always going to have some inherent filmmaking issues: if there’s one thing that guerrilla filmmaking doesn’t really lend itself to, it would definitely be polish and fine-tuning. To that end, the acting in the film is pretty awful, across the board, with Jim and his family being some of the worst offenders. Roy Abramsohn is a thoroughly unlikable presence as Jim, which has equal parts to do with his off-putting acting style (“big and dumb” come to mind) and the rather icky character, itself. There’s no point in the film where Jim following the teenage French girls ever comes across as anything more than creepy and pervy: if there was some kind of deeper meaning Moore was going for, it was completely lost on me. For the most part, Jim just seems like a scuzzy jerk and his various fantasies involving the young girls are both pathetic and severely creepy: if I was his wife, my first call would be to the police and my second one would be to a good lawyer. Moral questions aside, however, is the basic notion that Jim is a truly odious character: whiny, self-absorbed, neglectful of his wife and kids, prone to extramarital affairs at the drop of a hat, callous…none of these qualities seem designed to endear him to the audience, which seems to be the point…but to what end? Like everything else in the film, Jim’s constant assholery seems to exist “just because.”

Despite the film’s voluminous shortcomings (it’s basically just a great concept and a few nicely atmospheric shots, the very definition of “style over substance”), there are inklings of the film this could have been. For one thing, nothing at all is made about the inherent link between crushing consumerism and the “Disney dream,” nor is there any insightful commentary regarding the homogenized “Disnified” vision of the world that the amusement park conglomerate foists upon the globe. If Moore avoids any “big” issues, he also manages to completely miss the small ones, as well: there would have been a truly interesting, nightmarish story here if we could only have focused on Jim’s mental breakdown, exploring his fractured psyche as he begins to fall to pieces midst the hustle, bustle and happy families of the Magic Kingdom. There are some genuinely disturbing avenues to explore with Jim and the French teens, as well, but Moore is all too content to just give us some surface ookiness before retreating to the “safer” ground of stereotypical “demonic” activity. The part where Jim and his young son exchange a lascivious leer while ogling the young girls is at least 1000 times more disturbing than the one where the girls get “creepy faces”: any examination of this angle, however, runs the risk of becoming truly subversive and Moore never gets anywhere close to that particular demarcation.

Ultimately, Escape From Tomorrow will stand as a curiosity and missed opportunity, more than anything else. Owing to its truly unique genesis, Moore’s film stood a very good chance of becoming one of those pop culture milestones, like Jodorowky’s Holy Mountain (1973) or Banker’s Toad Road (2012). Instead, the film ended up being fitfully engaging, occasionally interesting and fairly atmospheric, none of which are praise enough to keep it in the cultural zeitgeist for very long. To be honest, I’m not surprised that the Disney corporation chose to respond to Moore’s film by summarily ignoring it, rather than attempting to suppress it through legal avenues. With the proper focus and a truly subversive goal, Moore’s film could have been the kind of thing that would give Disney executives nightmares for a lifetime, let alone the residual effect on a generation of filmmakers raised on the notion that “Walt Disney” is synonymous with “purity.” What Moore actually turned in, however, was a rather tired sci-fi/fantasy that happened to utilize Disney as a location but failed to dig any deeper into the actual mythology.

There’s a truly terrifying, subversive and harrowing film that could have been shot at Disney World, a film that would be impossible to forget or deny, something that would play on the public’s positive association with Disney while reminding them that large corporations tend to grind up humanity for fuel. Escape From Tomorrow isn’t that film, however, which is a pity: thanks to Moore’s film, we’ve probably lost any chance to really peel back the skin and see what makes the mouse tick.

6/9/14 (Part Two): Father of the Living Dead

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1960's films, behind-the-scenes, cinema, Civil Rights Movement, documentaries, documentary, Elvis Mitchell, film criticism, film reviews, film theory, filmmaking, films, George Romero, guerrilla filmmaking, horror, horror film, horror films, independent film, independent films, interviews, Jr., Larry Fessenden, Mark Harris, Martin Luther King, Movies, Mr. Rogers, Night of the Living Dead, Pittsburgh, Prof. Samuel D. Pollard, Rob Kuhns, Robert Kennedy, Russell Streiner, social upheaval, societal changes, talking heads, the 1960s, The Birth of the Living Dead, visual effects pioneer, Whine of the Faun, writer-director-producer-cinematographer

By 1968, the Summer of Love was officially over: the war in Vietnam was in full escalation, racial tensions led to race riots in the inner cities and the disastrous Altamont Free Concert was but a year away, although neither Robert Kennedy nor Martin Luther King, Jr. would survive to know about it. The Zodiac Killer was still killing, the Cold War with the Soviet Union was still decades from thawing and the hippie “revolution” of the early-mid ’60s had failed to bring about the kind of lasting, peaceful change that adherents hoped for. Hope had been replaced by anger: the 1960s had failed to fix anything and the system was just as broken as ever. Into this caustic stew of fear, anger, war and turmoil slipped a humble little film that would go on to revolutionize not only horror films but the world of cinema, in general. When 27-year-old college dropout George Romero first unleashed his seminal horror film, Night of the Living Dead (1968), on an unsuspecting populace, little did he know that the film would permanently change everything that came after it, directly influencing the next 46 years of horror filmmaking.

Rob Kuhns’ exceptional documentary, Birth of the Living Dead (2013), gives an insightful and in-depth look into not only the making of Romero’s classic film but also the societal issues and developments that made the film not only possible but necessary. Night of the Living Dead was a new kind of horror film for a new era of horrors: when the horrors of Vietnam were being beamed into homes on a nightly basis, the same old “haunted house” scares weren’t going to work anymore. Kuhn’s film does an amazing job of showing just how truly groundbreaking NOTLD was, especially concerning its views on race and the family unit. By the end, he actually managed to give me new respect for a film that I’ve idolized for more years than I care to remember: no mean feat and a pretty sure sign that Kuhns is a filmmaker to keep an eye on.

Birth of the Living Dead takes us through the entire process of NOTLD, beginning with Romero’s background making short films for Mr. Rogers (I was surprised, to put it mildly) and beer commercials before taking the filmmaking leap with his first attempt, Whine of the Fawn (what a name!). When his art film tanked, Romero decided to try his hand at horror and the rest, as they say, is history. Romero served as cinematographer, director and editor, while the entire cast pulled double (sometimes triple) duty both in front of and behind the scenes. Some of the most glorious moments in the film come from the fascinating behind-the-scenes insights that Romero shares about the making of the film. Some of my favorites include the special effects experts who constantly smoked cigars while working with explosives and fuses, the actor/producer who built a wooden bridge with his own hands and the fact that the crew only got their sound edit after actor Russell Streiner (who played Johnny in the film) challenged the owner of the sound lab to a chess match: he won and the crew got their sound mix. For anyone interested in filmmaking, particularly ultra-low budget guerrilla filmmaking, the behind-the-scenes stories about NOTLD are absolutely priceless and worth a watch all by themselves.

Far from just being a “making-of,” however, Kuhns film is filled with plenty of insightful “talking head” interviews and commentary on the era that was directly responsible for Romero’s chiller. We get plenty of great stuff from independent filmmaking majordomo Larry Fessenden, whose enthusiasm for Romero’s film is absolutely infectious, along with historians and critics like Elvis Mitchell, Mark Harris and Prof. Samuel D. Pollard. In a truly magical bit, Mitchell talks about seeing NOTLD at a drive-in, when he was 10, and how it absolutely changed his life. There’s also plenty of on-point discussion about the casting of Duane Jones as the lead in a time where a strong, black hero in an all-white film would have been not only eye-opening but revolutionary. This was, after all, the era where one of the biggest black movie stars of all-time, Harry Belafonte, was not allowed to touch Petula Clark (a white singer/actress) in an advertisement. The fact that Ben’s race is never brought up in NOTLD was totally radical: for the first time in popular cinema, a leading black actor was just allowed to be a man, instead of a symbol. There’s real power in the stories about how the black inner city adopted Ben as a true hero, especially when they’re told by commentators who were actually in the theaters at the time of the film’s screening.

As a film, itself, Birth of the Living Dead is a complete success. The structure is well-organized, the footage and interviews are perfectly integrated and everything has a really exciting, kinetic sense of energy. Even better, Kuhns utilizes some really badass “Sin City-esque” red-and-black graphic-novel-type animation for many of the behind-the-scenes bits, making the whole film even more visually appealing. Birth of the Living Dead looks and sounds fantastic, although that just ends up being icing thanks to the fundamentally solid information being shared. If you’re a fan of Night of the Living Dead, Kuhns’ documentary is an absolute must-see, helping to fill in any gaps and offering up a virtual treasure trove of previously unknown insights. If you’re a fan of independent filmmaking, Birth of the Living Dead is a must-see for the ways in which we see Romero and his small band of true-believers literally wrestle this iconic film into being. Basically, if you like movies in any way, shape or form, you owe it to yourself to see Birth of the Living Dead: documentaries about horror films don’t get much better than this.