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.

6/29/14 (Part One): What a Buncha Bloodsuckers

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Batiste Sornin, Belgian films, Carlo Ferrante, co-writers, Dracula, exiles, film crews, flashbacks, Fleur Lise Heuet, foreign films, found-footage, horror-comedies, independent film crew, Julien Dore, Pierre Lognay, satires, Selma Alaoui, Vampire Code of Conduct, vampires, vampires vs humans, Vera van Dooren, Vincent Lannoo, writer-director

By this point in the 2010s, it seems that we’ve seen every permutation of vampire in films that we possible could: we’ve had the vampire as tragic Byronic figure [Dracula (1931 and 1992), Interview With the Vampire (1994)], rat-like monstrosity [Nosferatu (1922), 30 Days of Night (2007)], bumbling idiot [Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)], moony-eyed, sparkly teenager [Twilight (2008)], swinging ’70s hipster [Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), Dracula AD 1972 (1972] and even action-hero [Blade (1998)]. We’ve seen black vampires [Blacula (1972), Scream, Blacula Scream (1973)], female vampires [Queen of Blood (1966), Lady Dracula (1977)] and even non-vampires acting in decidedly vampiric ways [The Last Man on Earth (1964), Martin (1978)]. At this point, are there any vampires we haven’t seen?

Turns out we haven’t seen Belgian vampires yet, an issue which is handily rectified via Vincent Lannoo’s snarky Vampires (2010). In this particular case, writer-director Lannoo’s bloodsuckers are definitely of the more mundane variety: they don’t turn into bats or wolves, hypnotize innocent virgins or wear flared pants. There’s nary a cape to be found and there won’t be any one-way trips to Transylvania to tromp around mist-shrouded castles. What do Lannoo’s vamps do, you might ask? Well, they end up doing a lot of the same stuff that you and I do: they raise families and deal with defiant children, fall in love, fight with each other and make fun of people they consider “beneath” them. They go to school, hold down jobs (when forced to) and live in modest suburban tract homes. On the flip side, they also devour humans and turn to ash in the sunlight, so there are a few minor differences, I suppose. These are not vampires as terrifying, other-worldly harbingers of pestilence or uber-romantic, doomed poets: these are the obnoxious neighbors that you hide behind the couch to avoid whenever they come knocking at the door.

Vampires begins with an extremely funny bit that establishes the kind of world that we’re about to step into. We’re informed that the Belgian vampire community reached out to a small, independent film crew and invited them to come interview and film the community, as a way to open up understanding between humans and vampires. After the first couple of attempts fail spectacularly (some vampires are able to control their impulses better than others), we’re told that a third film crew was actually able to complete their assignment, albeit posthumously (in one of the film’s many clever bits, the film is dedicated to “Jean, Helene, Jose, Clarrise and Jerome’s arm”). In this way, Vampires parallels itself with similar found-footage concepts, such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Blair Witch Project (1999): we’re, essentially, watching the final footage of folks who are no longer with us. With this witty intro, we’re off to the races.

We’re introduced to the filmmakers’ subjects, a small family of vampires led by constantly put-upon patriarch, Georges (Carlo Ferrante). What’s piled up on Georges plate? Well, for one thing, he’s got a wife, Bertha (Vera van Dooren) who’s more “hillbilly” than European sophisticate. He has a son, Samson (Pierre Lognay), who’s managed to violate one of the only vampire taboos by sleeping with the leader’s wife and a daughter, Grace (Fleur Lise Heuet), who yearns to be human, files her teeth down, dresses in pink and has a human boyfriend. He has a contentious relationship with the downstairs neighbors, Bienvenu (Batiste Sornin) and Elisabeth (Selma Alaoui), a couple of old-fashioned vampires who are childless, slightly stodgy and entirely disapproving of their upstairs neighbors’ “wild” lifestyle. In short: Georges biggest problem is the modern malaise of “polite” society.

As the filmmakers continue to roll camera, we get plenty of insights into what it means to be a vampire in Belgium. Their “meals” are delivered by the police and consist of “undesirables” and illegal immigrants (“We’re currently having a wave of black Malians, all of them young, between 20 and 30…delicious!”). Only vampires with children are allowed to have their own homes (explaining why poor Elisabeth and Bienvenu get stuck in the tiny basement, forced to sleep standing upright in their coffins). Each vampire family lives with a human dubbed “The Meat” that provides them with continuous sustenance and no one has to work. For vampires, it’s definitely an ideal situation.

There are, of course, always flies in the ointment and Grace’s rebellion, combined with Samson’s hotheaded stubbornness, are two of the biggest ones. As things come to a head regarding Samson’s affair with leader Little Heart’s wife, Eva (Alexandra Kamp-Groeneveld), Georges and his family will need to make some big changes, some of them decidedly life-changing and rather frightening. The scariest of them, according to Georges? Why, moving to Montreal, of course! Will Georges be able to keep his family together, all while trying his damnedest to uphold the Vampire Code of Conduct (created by Count Dracula, himself)? Will Grace get her wish? Will Elisabeth and Bienvenu get a child? Will Samson ever learn to keep it in his pants? And what about the creepy, skeletal clown vampire, Ronald, that’s propped against one of the walls: what’s his deal? The answers, of course, all lie within…if you dare!

Films like Vampires live or die (no pun intended, I swear) by how insightful their commentary is, since this is, technically, a satire and not a regular-old horror film. In that regard, Vampires is pretty exceptional, finding some rather ingenious ways to blend discussions of Belgian and French-Canadian politics/mores within the context of a modern vampire family. The notion of the police “feeding” the vampires in order to take care of their own political issues is pretty biting (sorry!), as is the discussion of how humans aid and abet the undead: another great bit occurs when the family goes to buy Grace a new coffin for her “death-day” celebration (pink, of course) and we get to hear why the human coffinmaker, Jean-Paul (Julien Dore) is so willing to work with vampires. After all, who else ever buys more than one coffin in their lifetimes? A guy’s gotta eat, right? There are also some pointed insights into the vampire notion of education, which entails watching (and laughing at) gory horror films and practicing the proper way to bite victims (in a bit that closely resembles CPR training). The vampire school is held in the same location as the human school, albeit at night. As the human school administrator admits, they’ve rarely had problems with the vampires, save for the occasional spot of blood on the walls and that one kid who went missing at Halloween years ago: pretty good odds, as far as he’s concerned.

The film also attempts (and largely succeeds at) the same kind of meta-commentary that informed another Belgian pseudo-documentary, the incendiary Man Bites Dog (1992). In that film, a film crew follows around a serial killer and ends up assisting him in his crimes, unwittingly at first but more enthusiastically as time progresses. The point is pretty clear: there’s a fine line between being an unbiased observer and being an accomplish. In Vampires, we got a similar bit when the film crew observes the pen where the vampires keep their human quarry: as the humans beg the film crew to let them out, the crew refuses, on the grounds that interfering would upset the natural dynamic that they’re going for. It’s a thought-provoking notion and throws shade on a generation that would rather capture an incident on their iPhones than actually help someone: the point is as relevant today as it was back in 1992.

While Vampires is stacked to the rafters with political and social insights, there’s also plenty of room for more traditional comic beats. In particular, Grace’s desire to become a human is extremely funny (although it becomes poignant in a later scene that provides a breath of fresh air from the film’s overriding atmosphere of sarcasm), as is Samson’s generally shitty attitude: teenagers suck, vampires or not. The bit where Samson and his friend, Steve (an American who toured with the Doors, played a long gig and woke up as a French vampire, complete with accent), kidnap a mentally disabled man from a hospital (“Now we have The Meat AND The Vegetable!”) is particularly mean but leads to one of the film’s best set-pieces as the dumbass duo accidentally convert their victim into a vampire and must then chase him about in order to “put him down.” Georges exasperated response (“You really are little jerks”) should be familiar to any parent who’s ever dealt with a willfully obnoxious kid. We also get a great bit involving Grace and Samson insulting each other with increasingly hurtful insults (“Slut!…Cocksucker!…Babytooth!…Priest!!”), as well as the priceless “Gift of the Magi” bit wherein Grace only wants to become human, while her human boyfriend would love to be a vampire: oh, you crazy kids!

The acting in Vampires, especially from Georges and his family, is quite good and goes a long way towards selling the concept: if anything, everyone underplays which makes it all that much more plausible. I was particularly taken with Batiste Sornin and Selma Alaoui as the stuffy “old-schoolers.” At first, the pair seem like kind of one-note parallels to the more modern upstairs clan but become increasingly endearing and sympathetic as we learn more about them. Ferrante is excellent as Georges, bringing quite a bit of multi-dimensionality to the role, although I was always rather confused by van Dooren’s distinctly white-trash take on Bertha: it was the only performance that seemed overly goofy and over-the-top.

While Vampires works spectacularly well as a nasty little satire, it’s less successful as a first-person POV/found-footage film. Oftentimes, the perspective is confusing, making it unclear who, exactly, is supposed to be shooting the footage. We also get several flashbacks, fashioned as old-school newsreel footage, that further confound the issue: are we to believe that the film crew is somehow able to record their interviewees’ flashbacks? Color me baffled, to say the very least. There are also some tonal inconsistencies that prove a little jarring, including a truly horrifying attack on an apartment building that feels like it belongs in a different film. None of these issues are particularly deal-breaking but they certainly detract a bit from the movie’s overall impact.

At the end of the day, Vampires is an easy recommendation for fans of both vampire films and pseudo-documentaries (iffy perspective or not, the documentary aspect still comes through loud and clear and is very reminiscent of Man Bites Dog). While the film is generally easy-going and more witty than shocking, it’s still got plenty of eye-opening bits (the discussion of vampire sexuality, by itself, opens up a pretty big can of worms that includes incest, polygamy and implied pedophilia), as well as enough genuine blood and guts to satisfy the horror crowd. While it’s not always completely cohesive, Lannoo’s Vampires is always entertaining, frequently laugh-out-loud funny and often extremely insightful. If you thought that you’d seen every kind of vampire available. give Vampires a shot: these vamps may not sparkle or mention “the children of the night,” but they sure do look a helluva lot like average, everyday people. By itself, that’s pretty damned scary.