Ugetsu

 It's always surprised me how little so many classic samurai movies romanticize their roaming warriors. I probably shouldn't be, given that most of them were made while world war two was in living memory. Ugetsu was made less than a decade after the war ended, and its depiction of the samurai is possibly the most unremittingly vicious.

 The script, by Matsutarō Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, takes inspiration from an 18th century book of ghost stories (some them influenced by the same traditional stories which would go on to influence Kwaidan a decade later). But it's almost forty minutes before anything even remotely supernatural happens.

 Not that you'd notice, because director Kenji Mizoguchi makes the war-torn 16th century Japanese countryside into an uncanny, limbo-like expanse, and the roaming bands of wild-eyed samurai into chaotic, ravenous demons.
 In the eye of the storm lies a small village, where Genjurô (Masayuki Mori) and Tôbei (Eitarô Ozawa), two potters, see an opportunity to profit by selling their wares to noblemen while supply is at an understandable low. Their greed gets the better of them, and after an initial venture they decide to head to a nearby city with their families. The trip, even the preparations for it, are harrowing, since their village is soon invaded by rampaging soldiers. 

 The journey is tense and masterfully presented, with a jaw-dropping centerpiece: a gorgeously shot lake-crossing that's unnervingly otherworldly.

 At the gates of the city, a concerned Genjurô sends his wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and his infant son back to the village; he soon lets himself be seduced by a local noblewoman (Machiko Kyō, who might be the first instance of a pottery groupie I've ever seen); Tôbei, meanwhile misplaces his wife Ohama (Mitsuko Mito) while assholishly pursuing his dream of getting some armour and becoming a samurai himself.

 So this is the part where the men let their greed ruin their lives, as foretold early on by a a village sage. Tôbei lucks out in battle, and his dishonourable means gain him great favour from a warlord - only to find that his fortunes came at the metaphysical expense of his wife's. As for Genjurô, he finds that his would-be paramour lives in a derelict mansion with her handmaiden and is clearly, let's say, vitally-challenged. That doesn't stop him from... kind of tacitly accepting a marriage proposal.

 There are a couple of elements in his story shared with a couple of Kwaidan's tales, possibly due to the common sources of inspiration; That impression becomes more pronounced once Genjurô finally makes his way back home for one final supernatural twist. Tôbei's story is simpler, and his fate harder to relate with since he's such a buffoonish idiot. Poor Ohama.

 I actually preferred the journey to the destination and the harrowing war survival story to the ghostly escapades, which is rare for me. Maybe that wouldn't be the case if I had seen this before Kwaidan (which came out more than a decade later), but I'd like to think it's more of a testament to how well those early war scenes are handled. It's a lovely, unique movie that despite some missteps (the final monologue is pretty enough, but works against the film's spell) has aged exceptionally well. And the lake scene really is an all-timer.

Redline

  Here's the plot for Redline: Sweet JP (Takuya Kimura) really wants to win the Redline, an interstellar racing championship, all the while nursing a crush for rival racer Sonoshee (Yū Aoi). He blows his chance to qualify, but gets lucky when two other racers pull out for the championship and he gets voted into the final lineup.

 Unfortunately, the reason people are pulling out is because the race is going to take place on Roboworld - the home planet of race of fun-hating fascist cyborgs (there's a redundant statement for you), a whole race of Galactus wannabes that would like nothing more than to crush anyone who lays rubber on their homeland, in the name of peace.

 And... that's pretty much it. There's a corrupt agent and an interlude in a demilitarized nearby moon where the racers mingle and prepare their rides ahead of the race, but the plot on this movie is minimal; The focus is squarely on the insane detail spilling from every frame. Not just on the action, which is frequent, furious and beautifully animated - but even quiet, minor scenes such as the one where JP tries to buy cigarettes is a visual treat where we get to see the weird nervature on alien currency, a weird, funky rabid merchant, and some gorgeous Mignola-esque corridors in the background.

 The art style on this thing is gorgeous - both scratchy and detailed - and the visual imagination is staggering. The story barely hangs together, but that doesn't matter because this movie is first and foremost about looking cool, and that's something that Redline does exceptionally well.

 Everything gets thrown in the blender. You've got a rockabilly protagonist and his zeppelin-breasted object of desire (who is shown topless while she complains about the angles the news choose to show her from). There's a magic-using race of hot space elves whose racing candidates also function as a J-pop group, and two intergalactic bounty hunters whose visual inspiration clicked for me halfway through the movie, making me laugh very loudly. The last third of the movie is a protracted battle scene that includes the expected racing shenanigans, but also mechs, Robotech-style flying battles, and a giant baby-shaped energy monster. It's a pummeling mix of driving (sorry!) techno, eye-watering visuals and a serviceable but surprisingly sweet-natured storyline. Exhausting, but glorious.

 This is the closest I've seen any studio come to the lush animation of Ghibli and classic Disney, and it's all in service of bringing all sorts of cool stuff to life under the guise of something I'd vaguely describe as the love child of Speed Racer and Wacky Races. I don't really read a lot of comics or manga, so I could only identify a few the many, many references here (Kirby for the Roboworld crowd, some Tesuka, and even a huge spider-limbed nod to master Miyazaki) - I expect proper comic and anime fans will have a field day playing spot-the reference here.
 But even without that dimension, it just looks gorgeous, and the designs are phenomenal and often hilarious. I mean, look at this guy:

  Redline is pure joy, from start to finish. A lush love letter to everything its creators (director Takeshi Koike, with some heavy input from producer Katsuhito Ishii and others from Studio Madhouse) hold dear. It reportedly took them seven years to bring it to fruition and it nearly bankrupted them, so the least you can do is spend a hundred minutes taking it in. Trust me, it's worth it.

Cloud (Kuraudo)

 Kiyoshi Kurosawa spent decades in the trenches directing whatever came his way; Before Cure, he made movies that went from something called Kandagawa Pervert Wars (Veteran of the Pervert Wars was, of course, Pink Oyster Cult's breakout record) to high-budget Japanese Poltergeist riff Sweet Home (I have seen that one, and highly recommend it). Then he made Cure, and from that point onward he took no more notes from anyone; He still does genre work - hell, he made my absolute favourite J-horror film - but he tends to twist genre conventions into sometimes unrecognizable shapes, driven by his weirdo sensibilities and offbeat sense of humour.

 All of this to say: don't expect a traditional genre movie out of Cloud. Elaborating on that is tricky, because it doesn't actually become a genre movie until after the halfway mark - and the genre it eventually settles into might not be what you're expecting.

 But until then Cloud follows the misadventures of Yoshii (Masaki Suda) as he tries to make a living by abusing the core capitalist verbs: buying and selling. After receiving a good sum for some health equipment (by ripping off the people who actually made them) he decides to quit his factory job and get a house in the suburbs where he can move in with his girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa), set up a storage area for his wares, and become a full-time online reseller. He takes on an employee - Sano (Daiken Okudaira), a local, slow-witted youth - and begins stepping up his operations. But his world starts coming apart when his business runs into trouble... and when he starts noticing shady people following him everywhere.

 Everything is handled in a realistic, deliberate manner for the first hour or so, even though this reality feels slightly off-kilter. But as Kurosawa's script starts turning the screws and the nature of the conspiracy against Yoshii becomes clear, things take a sharp turn towards the surreal; The film shifts into a paranoid thriller for a while until Sano pops back into the picture.

 And this is where I'd recommend you stop reading and go watch the movie if you'd rather be surprised. It's an excellent, beautifully filmed, surreal-tinged movie, and you're probably better off watching it unspoiled. 

 So here's the thing: once Sano comes back into the picture, he continues assisting Yoshii with a different set of skills. Which mostly involve guns. As it turns out, this is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's version of an action movie. And it's good action, too! Gritty and low-key, but dynamic and well executed. Don't expect complex choreographies or tons of violence - the feel is closer to a war movie than John Wick.

 The devolution into gun battles is completely ridiculous, and by design; Sure, Yoshii is clearly a douchebag - he's shown driving everyone around him away, and you could even say that he represents a lot of what's wrong with the world today. But his adversaries are hilariously unhinged, and the fact that they coordinate via internet forums should not be lost on anyone. The people here are driven by dream logic rather than rational or even genre logic.
 As with most surrealism, a rich, wicked vein of humour runs beneath the script, masked by an utterly deadpan delivery. Kurosawa's clinical, controlled direction, the sound design, and fine, committed performances from the actors (especially Suda - his facade of control while he descends into panic forms the backbone to the story) all run counter to these characters' bizarre interactions.

 It all comes together into something that's truly special, but also fairly impenetrable. David Lynch is a good reference, bearing in mind that Kuroswa's take on surrealism is fairly distinct from his. But as long as you're willing to meet the movie half-way, I'm happy to recommend it.

Vampire Clay (Chi o sû nendo)

 When Yuri Aina (Asuka Kurosawa), the owner of a small rural art school discovers a large lump of clay buried near her atelier, she thinks nothing and adds it to the pile of materials her students are due to use. Unfortunately for her and her class... it's haunted. Soon it will be eating people alive, consuming those who would shape it and transforming them into flexible clay/flesh puppets. 

 Unfortunately for us -or for me, at least, since most of you degenerate heathens seemed to somehow enjoy Battle Royale- to get to the good bits we need to trudge through some seriously tedious Japanese teen melodrama. The students, you see, are trying to prepare for the entrance test to a prestigious Tokyo art school - and the teacher is dealing with some rote drama of her own, too, which she takes out on her students. Morale isn't high. There's some rivalry, some supremely underwhelming romance ("oh no, I prepared a bento box for him but he's eating with that other hussy!") and... ugh.

 In between the shallow character beats, there's some mild mayhem as the protean clay blob - which at first seems content to play very basic pranks on the students - picks off the students one at a time, and then uses their shapes to go after the rest. It's a simple premise, but as a story it's an ungainly mess that keeps juddering to a stop only to slowly start shambling towards multiple unsatisfying ending.

 The film's saving graces are its practical effects, which include tons of makeup effects, stop motion, and a little puppetry. Some of it is great, and everything looks very hand-made - I particularly liked a scene where they show someone from the inside out using some cheekily cheap papier maché innards. The bulk, unfortunately, features too many scenes of actresses flailing some half-clay-eaten limb unconvincingly.

 The monster keeps shifting shapes, but when it settles on its true form it looks like a frigging mascot - I think it's supposed to mimic one of those mannequins artists use to model the human form? Not very scary at all.

 The script, by director Sôichi Umezawa, seems a bit more inspired by the body horror of Junji Ito's work than on more traditional J-Horror, but it completely misses the point and over-explains everything, giving the monster a backstory that's simultaneously banal and nuts, unloaded in yet another exposition dump that stops the story dead on its tracks for a while.

 I wanted to like this, I really did... and in very short spurts, it does achieve the sort of absurdity that could have made it special. But then it winds down to focus on its boring-ass characters or its inane plot and fuck that, I'm out of here.

Tokyo Grand Guignol

 Four French directors, working with a mainly Japanese cast and crew, are given equal (tiny) budgets, schedules, and a mandate to shoot something in Tokyo that explicitly invokes grand guignol tradition of gleeful carnage. No frills, no framing story, just four shorts of varying fucked-upness. Let's go!

 First off is Yann Moreau's Endless Love, where Shinichi (Hiroyuki Mori) gets stuck in a time loop. Time loops aren't that great, but the day Shinichi is stuck in is particularly bad - his beloved wife's died less than a month ago, and the Yakuza he borrowed money from to pay for her operation keep sending thugs to put pressure on him. After contacting a suicide agency (as you do!), he finds out that the agency had someone else on file with the same problem - and apparently, they found a way out of the loop... by sacrificing someone else.

 Shinichi successfully tests out the hypothesis with one of the Yakuza, and quickly figures out that it has a second, undocumented side effect - one which he can exploit to travel through time. But that will need a lot more sacrifices.

 It's a silly, mostly non-sensical tale that works mostly thanks to a very committed performance from Mori, slinky, crisp, very stylish digital cinematography, and very solid, Dardenne-esque handheld camerawork - especially during a couple of chases through the city's narrow streets and byways. It looks lovely. There's even a pretty cool one vs. many action sequence with some decent choreography, though it's marred with some truly terrible CGI gore (more on this later).

 Then comes the highlight of the collection: Trahison (treason), by François Gaillard, a director who seems to specialize in Giallo homages. As exemplified by his contribution here, a gorgeous, tale of supernatural menace that goes heavy on dream logic and ambiance.
 Nami (Megumi Nasano) spends her nights dancing alone at nightclubs and drinking moping around her apartment after a nasty breakup. But when she tries on an evil hairpin (we know it's evil because the excellent retro synth soundtrack helpfully turns ominous), she starts being harassed by her creepily smiling reflection (I do wonder if Parker Finn saw this). There's not a lot of story, just some cool supernatural weirdness: A slumbering Nami is molested by her shadow, a hapless neighbour (Haruka Yamamoto) gets killed with the hairpin, mysterious phone calls, an inscrutable cat...
 It all looks beautiful - the lighting and production design brings out the requisite blue and red hues that are what most people take from Suspiria, but pulled off with more elan than usual. There's a lot of off-kilter coolness, some very cool editing, and the lone kill is a vicious, wonderful throwback to the Italian masters. You know the ones I'm talking about. This one's worth the price of admission alone.

 Gilles Landucci's Shadow Hunter is a very otaku fantasy - a pixie-ish twenty-something woman (Satomi Kurebayashi) belongs to a shadowy conspiracy that sends her out to hunt demons (or ghosts) only she can see, to kill them with a special high-tech phosphorus gun.
 The demons are... well, they're basically fucking mimes with the ability to jump into shadows. One of her quarries (Shuhei Ohkawara) ends up getting curious about her, starts haunting her, falls in love, all while Eri deals with some of her own personal shit.
 It's a kind of cute story, but it's slight as all hell and it doesn't hold much interest neither on the story nor the visual department. 'Mimes. Why does it always have to be mimes?', muttered no one, ever.

 And finally we get to Nicholas Alberny's Good Boy, which is... how do I even describe this one. If you were desperately looking for a graphic depiction of exactly what happens to someone's penis during a werewolf transformation and Wolf Cop did not tide you over, you're in luck!
 It follows the (mis)adventures of Hidesaburo (Jigoroh), a callous asshole first seen calling his mistress a whore in no uncertain terms and then carving a rude message on a Tokyo landmark with his penknife. The landmark is the Hachikō statue (which gets its own, very shoddy animated prologue), a depiction of a dog that exemplifies loyalty; Hachi takes exception to this mistreatment at Hideboro's hands by turning into possibly the worst digital effect I've seen on film in a very long time - it looks like a really shitty motion comic, a 2D image poorly manipulated to give some semblance of life:

It looks even worse in motion. A hell of a lot worse.

 The dog bites Hidesaburo and goes back to statue mode. The bite victim then wanders off in a daze, walking through the red light district until Momo (Ayumi Tomiyama), a prostitute, takes him off the street.
 Hidesaburo is, of course, turning into a werewolf, and imprints on Momo immediately, following her everywhere with puppy eyes. This unsettles the clientele and workers at the brothel, leading to a confrontation with the local Yakuza. Unlucky for them, then, that it's a full moon outside...

 Where to even start with this? The 'plot', such as it is, is all kinds of terrible. And it looks appallingly bad: Not just the CGI, which remains terrible throughout, but the flat, desaturated digital video they went with drains every scene of life. The werewolf makeup, for the record, is pretty fun
 But if you can ignore how it looks, it's a fucking riot. There are a lot of really great jokes (my favorite one being a novel use for a weird stool with a hole in the middle). The morphing penis I mentioned above also got a huge laugh, as did a hapless Yakuza who tries to intimidate the werewolf by flashing him his badass yakuza cat tattoo, Momo servicing a client in multiple ways as she fields a phone call, and a few more very silly gags.
 As an excuse to go all out on ridiculous ideas, it's a success. Shame about the execution. The director of this short also worked on some effects for the others, and a quick search reveals a failed IndieGogo campaign to complete the film (12% of approximately £8000). I guess that explains that. My guess is Trahison wasn't affected because it was conceptualized as practical effects from the beginning.

 On the whole, though? As mentioned above, one of the shorts alone is reason enough to recommend it. The rest are at least ok; I think the main problem, besides that they ran out of money [citation needed] is that most of these are too long: the first one struggles to fill out its prescribed 30 minutes, and the runtime seriously sinks Demon Hunter, which barely has material for half its length. On the plus side, all the shorts have a distinct look and sound, most of the acting is pretty decent, and they all frame different aspects of Tokyo in appealing (or at least interesting) ways.
 With some bits excised out, maybe another pass at the effects, I'd be much more enthusiastic about singing its praises; As it is, I'd happily recommend it on the strength of Trahison, with some heavy caveats for the rest.

Inugami

Somewhere within the mountainous Shikoku Island lives Miki (Yûki Amami), a beautiful, reclusive middle-aged paper maker. She spends her days at her wooden mill crafting large sheets of paper and gathering the roots and herbs she needs to make it along the gorgeous surrounding mountainside forests; Her tools are the same her ancestors used going back centuries, but she wants for nothing more.

 Meanwhile a young teacher Akira (Atsuro Watabe) is assigned a new post in the nearby town of Onime. His arrival will change everything.

 Odd dreams spread like a plague, keeping everyone from getting a good night's sleep. A man comes from Tokyo, kills his family and then commits suicide. The local delivery girl falls over, dead in an instant, her tongue blackened. Meanwhile Miki suddenly finds she doesn't need glasses any more, and looks younger every day.

 Her family, the Bonomiyas, have ancient roots in the area. And an ancient obligation: As Miki learns from her mother, it is the burden of the women of the clan to bear an urn that contains the Inugami, ancient, spiteful dog spirits, that are apparently let loose when the urn bearer lets loose her emotions.

 And Miki, who doesn't wholly believe in faeries, is having a hard time keeping control of herself lately. A burgeoning romance looms with with Akira, for one. But the main problem is the Bonomiya patriarch Takanao (Kazuhiro Yamaji, as a wonderfully hateable douchebag), who's conspires to sell the land Miki's mill stands on, and starts dredging up some uncomfortable, decades-old secrets.

 The townsfolk are well aware of the Inugami curse, and react to their misfortunes in about a rational and sane a fashion as you'd expect in a situation that bears many parallels to witchcraft. As the Bonomiyas stage their annual ancestor festival, tensions come to a head.

 Inugami is a deeply odd movie. It was released at the height of the J-Horror phenomenon (the same year as Kairo) and its narrative is built around a curse; Technically, it more than qualifies as folk horror.
 But writer/director Masato Harada (whose filmography seems to consist mostly of stately dramas and love stories) downplays almost every genre element until the final stretch, and the end result reminded me more of the great South American magical realist family sagas of Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
 The result is a thoughtful, languid, deeply affecting film that judiciously dissects traditionalism and women's roles in traditional Japanese society from multiple angles.
 On the one hand, before Akira, before things went to shit, Miki was completely fulfilled as she was, even with the terrible hand she was dealt* - hell, for most of the movie, she fights to keep things as they are. On the other hand... well, everything. The Bonomiya women are also clear-eyed about their situation; One of them memorably summarizes it as the men treating them "like fleas on their ancestor's sides."
 And to drive home how far we've come as a society, part of the finale is shot in black and white.

 Harada's script (based on a novel by Masako Bando) takes its sweet time getting anywhere, but his characters are well written, the love story is affecting, and the film is full of warmth and low-key humour. The direction is sometimes cack-handed (particularly his subjective handling of a seizure), but for the most part this is a playful, gorgeous movie, with both him and cinematographer Jun'ichi Fujisawa working in concert to convey the beauty of the film's natural surroundings.
 There's a recurring transition technique that slowly turns on lights until the scene is set that is nothing short of beautiful. Harada also stages some truly memorable imagery, from a surrealist dream that repurposes Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson to a gaggle of Shinto priests congregating under a derelict bus stop. 

 The association with the J-Horror movement seems to have hurt the film, which flew under most radars To the point where it's rarely mentioned along with other examples of the genre, if at all. But for my money, it's right up there with the best (for those counting at home: Kairo, Audition, Black Water, this.) That's if you want to count it as horror at all. Which I do, personally, just don't expect it to even attempt to scare you.

*: And the fates really do have it in for the poor woman; She's got the luck of the hero in a classic Greek tragedy, right down to an (easy to foresee) twist regarding Akira.

One-Percent Warrior / 1%er

 This one would have been so easy to screw up.

 Here are the basics: Toshiro (Tak Sakaguchi) is an action movie star who's just too awesome and hardcore for most directors to handle; His last movie was ten years ago, and while critically successful, it was too niche to make any waves.

 The reason is that Toshiro's is totally focused on real action - not just making it good for the cameras, but actually being the best fighter he can possibly be and making his fights as real as possible. This leads him to train in 'assassination jutsu' with actual soldiers, and to develop his own fluid take on a zero-range technique he calls 'the wave'. All this is all presented in a breathless, "just how cool is this guy" style of fluff promotional material that would be grating if it wasn't so spot-on.

 And we soon find out that his quest for perfection, for... let's call it the essence of true badassness, Toshiro's alienated most of the industry and even his apprentices/members of the stunt team (understandable; We see him manhandling and belittling them in that introductory documentary). The guy is driven to the point that he's a complete asshole, but because this is an action movie, we know all that self-aggrandisement comes from a place of honesty. Thankfully Sakaguchi has the screen presence to pull it off, and the script (by director Yûdai Yamaguchi) undercuts some of the grandstanding with a little humour. It's always clear that there's at least a significant element of parody running through the movie.

 Sick of the artificial state of modern Japanese action (complete with a pointed dig at the Rurouni Kenshin movies' more stylised take on martial arts), Toshiro secures a location - an abandoned zinc processing plant in a remote island - and heads there with his only remaining pupil (a very likeable Kohei Fukuyama) to prepare an actual, honest to god action movie - no choreography, just action. Whatever the hell that means, and however he means to achieve it.

 Luckily for him, the universe provides. After running into a hot-shot, effeminate Chinese director who epitomizes everything Toshiro hates (an unsuccessful bit of humour and one of the film's more unfortunate takes), the setup finally starts paying off when a bunch of gunmen enter stage left, shooting indiscriminately and chasing after a teen girl  (Rumika Fukuda wearing a schoolgirl uniform because... of course she is. Japan!).

 The girl is the scion of a huge Yakuza family; Her old man has just died, and dozens upon dozens of thugs led by have descended on the island in search of two freaking tons of cocaine, along with a master assassin (an incredible Togo Ishii), and a psycho teen girl (Kanon Narumi) because, again, Japan.

 Toshiro, of course, starts taking down goons almost immediately, earning the moniker of Jackie Chan among the bemused criminals who find the trail of unconscious thugs he leaves behind. (I'm more of a Bruce Lee, Toshiro observes with his characteristic humility).

 The film shifts gears completely; Its visual style becomes a lot more cohesive, and the rest of the runtime is devoted to a series of brutal, quick fights, often with inventive gimmicks to liven things up. There's some routine, pointless drama threads in between all the combat, and a late, very half-baked existential twist at least adds some sorely needed nuance to all the braggadocio and swagger of the film, ultimately casting it in a very different light. Maybe. I don't think it's entirely successful, but at least it's interesting.

 Aside from that last tonal swerve (which comes in too late to help), the main risk here is that the movie lionizes its star and his worldview a little too much. I don't know that much of Tak Sakaguchi off-screen, but Toshiro does feel like a mythologized version of his on-screen persona, incorporating many elements from past characters. And while the movie's takedown of more wuxia martial arts styles might be funny, it feels a little mean-spirited.

 Luckily the movie has an impish, subtle sense of humour running through it, and Toshiro as a character is not nearly as insufferable as he could be - Sakaguchi's charisma helps a lot.

 (Unfortunately, it's come out since that the actor has admitted to multiple sexual assaults, which does not.)

 The fights are... uneven, and they do drag on a little - The combination between stealth takedowns and more tactical fighting between one overpowered combatant against many low-level mooks in a drab industrial location reminded me a little of a more brawl-focused One Shot, and it's slightly tiresome in a similar vein.

 If I have to be honest, I've never really enjoyed Sakaguchi's fighting scenes as much as, well, the more choreographed style this movie likes to poke fun at, and with a couple of exceptions, it holds true here; He's very quick, but I don't think he sells the powers behind his punches, and that makes some of his moves come a little close to looking like a slap fight. It's telling that my favorite scene of the movie doesn't even feature him, pitting his two former students against Togo Ishii instead.

 The action director is the prolific Kensuke Sonomura, whose work I tend to love, but there are better showcases for his talents... As there are for Sakaguchi's, by the way - like, say, Bad City.

 But I'm being way too harsh - The action is still more than worthwhile, and while the choppy editing sometimes makes it harder than it should be to follow (everything is framed more to make its star look cool than for clarity) there's a lot to like here, including an excellent final fight. Director Yûdai Yamaguchi uses some fun camera moves and is good at keeping things moving, and the soundtrack is surprisingly decent. It's a surprisingly fun film that works both on a surface level and as a meta commentary, even if it's not always clear what it's trying to say.

The Imaginary

 Rudger (Louie Rudge-Buchanan/Kokoro Terada) is the constant friend and companion to Amanda (Evie Kiszel/Rio Suzuki). Amanda is ten(ish) and Rudger is just three months, three weeks and three days old; That's not a problem, though, since he's just a figment of her imagination.

 The imaginary is a charming, and there's no way around it, very Studio Ghibli-esque account of a few busy days in their lives. When at home, they go on all sorts of adventures in Amanda's overactive imagination; While she's at school, Rudge whiles away the time until she gets back. He lacks all mass but is otherwise material, so he could, in theory, be crushed by a falling sheet of paper. It's tough being imaginary.

 Rudge learns just how hostile soon enough, when he learns that all humans are fated to forget their imaginary friends, and dissolve helplessly in the night. Pretty heavy stuff for a kid's film. Not that he gets a lot of time to worry about it, because soon enough Mr. Bunting (Issey Ogata/Jeremy Swift), a grotesque old man lugging around a My First J-Horror ghost, comes sniffing (literally!) around their mother's bookstore. Mr Bunting, in a wonderful, very Tim Powers-style twist, is an eater of imaginary friends, and apparently Rudge is some sort of delicacy in his estimation.

 Rudge is separated from Amanda and cast out into the very British world outside her house, a dangerous gauntlet where just walking through a crowded pavement is an ordeal (no mass, remember?). There's a few adventures, near escapes, all leading up to a tearful reunion and a final confrontation with their nemesis.

 It's messy, unevenly paced, and features some iffy design work (which I imagine comes straight from the original book's illustrations). It also often feels like it piles on the whimsy a little too thick (this is one of those movies where people's emotions are visible from the next town over). Luckily it makes up for all of that with some luscious traditional animation, gorgeous and often surprisingly weird visuals, and a story that's got deep reserves of both darkness and relatively sophisticated emotional heft.

 Things do get a little too dark, actually, for what it feels like its target audience, which it compensates with a sort of forced cheer which is sometimes distracting. This sort of botched balancing act extends to the emotional moments, which are undercut by the sheer quantity of plot that the film needs to get through.

 Still, the emotional beats are strong, and the plot does take the story to some memorable places. The finale in particular feels like a children's version of a horror movie - It pales in comparison with something like Coraline, but this feels like it skews younger; And Mr. Bunting is such a wonderful, loathsomely fun villain.

 Director Yoshiyuki Momose, writer Yoshiaki Nishimura both come from studio Ghibli, along with many of the employees from production house Ponoc's staff. They've crafted a compellingly weird, unwieldy beast of the film that's not without its problems, but is ultimately unique and very rewarding.

Baby Assassins

 Baby assassins is about two assassins that act like big babies, not assassins that go about assassinating babies - If that's what you're after, you'd be better off hiring The Killer instead. You monster.

 The two titular assassins are Mahiro (Saori Izawa) and Chisato (Akari Takaishi) - two girls just out of high school under the employ of one of those shady assassin agencies we keep hearing about. To keep their cover after graduation, the agency suggests they both get an apartment together, and get a part-time job as a cover (as their handler explains, the agency is more scared of tax men than law enforcement). Very low-key hijinx ensue.

 The movie is bookended by two excellent fights, but spends most of its time indulging in low energy slice-of-life comedy that honestly feels too slight to even qualify as a sitcom - it's more like filler updates on a web comic.

 There's a plot of sorts where the girls inadvertently start a fight with the Yakuza, but it's an afterthought; just the bare bones to give a little structure to the proceeds and provide a big brawl at the end. More is made of the assassin's attempts to get a job, or the very polite, very mannered squabbles resulting from their convivence. For, you see, Chisato is bubbly, outgoing, and quirky (in a very specifically Japanese way that I find pretty fucking annoying), and Mahiro is an antisocial wallflower who can't be arsed with anything that doesn't involve killing (and she even moans about that). Both are complete sociopaths too, which makes their matter-of-fact handling of their assassin duties a pretty funny running gag. Especially when the actress playing Mahiro also happens to be an accomplished stuntwoman, and she can move; The movie really comes to life whenever she gets the chance to flex her muscles.

 Baby Assassins is a pretty anime-damaged film - both girls are pretty trope-filled characters, as is the type of stuff they get up to. Still, there's a lot to like here - they have a lot of chemistry together, as proven by the dialog where they start making fun of the type of unsolicited wisdom a certain type of man might spout. The film frames their job as distinctly un-glamorous and not very well paid, which is a relatively novel take, and there are some pretty solid jokes sprinkled here and there.

 Unfortunately the film spins its wheels for far too long and delves into Japanese cultural aspects that set my teeth on edge (namely, an extended plot point that involves a stint in an extremely childish maid café.) It frequently splits the line between cute and cutesy, amusing and annoying... and the proportions are not always flattering to director Yugo Sakamoto's very loose script.

 Ultimately, though, I think it's successful, just about. The fights, though definitely not the focus of the movie, are a big part of that: they're quick, brutal, and feel hard-won. Izawa is a terrific, scrappy performer who athletically weaves in and out of holds - her fight against the heavy (Masanori Mimoto) easily makes the movie worth a watch; The action director is Kensuke Sonomura, who directed Bad City, so that tracks. There's a lot of blood, all of it digital and distractingly bad, but the rolling around is so good it's easily forgiven.

 More importantly, despite all the stuff that grated and the cultural differences, both actresses are pretty good and their characters ultimately come off as at least somewhat charming (one much, much more than the other; Sorry, Chisato).

 I mean, it's a movie where both assassins ride a single bike on their way to the climactic battle - and once there, they fret about whether it's ok to leave it out in the street. Weebs will lap this stuff up, but there's just about enough here for the rest of us too.

River (Ribâ, nagarenaide yo)

 Director Junta Yamaguchi and writer Makoto Ueda's follow up to their delightful Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes doesn't stray too far from their first film together. This time around they focus on a sleepy town that gets trapped in a two-minute time loop - think Groundhog day, but with an ensemble cast in Bill Murray's situation. And the short length of the loop makes a huge difference, too.

 The film is anchored around the staff and guests at a traditional country inn (a ryokan, if that means anything to you) - specifically Mikoto (Riko Fujitani), who works there as a maid - as they start adjusting to their new bizarre reality. As soon as the two minutes are up, they get sent back to whatever they were doing at the start of the loop - physically reset, but with their memories left untouched; Mikoto goes back to standing by the river that runs behind the inn, for example, while a guest always finds himself in the bath (and for the first few loops is seen running around half-naked). 

 Hilariously, after they get a handle on what's happening, the staff decide to keep running the inn to the best of their ability and make their guests' stay as pleasant as possible given the circumstances; As far the owner sees it, the inn's weathered snowstorms and floods, so a time loop is just a new challenge that they need to face together.

 As you'd expect from the creative team behind it, River is exceedingly clever in both form and content. It is a much more cinematic film than Beyond..., with some nice cinematography (courtesy of Kazunari Kawagoe) to go with its sometimes manic handheld shots, and it mimics the script's time loops by having the film consist of a string of two-minute one-take-scenes*. For a while it even matches each side of the edit between the scenes by shooting Makoto in the same position, from the same angle as the locations switch.
 Ueda's script expertly adds complications as it goes along, and paces the introduction of new characters with the clever (and very cute) conceit that people who were doing a monotonous action (like eating rice) take longer to realize what's going on before they go out looking for an explanation.

 Because the premise is much simpler than on Ueda's previous script, this one finds much more time for comedy: a full-on farce as the already freaked-out staff has to deal with their even more freaked-out customers, a gentle romantic story between Mikoto and a co-worker boyfriend (Yuki Torigoe) who is about to move out to France, and even some very, very slight and quickly dispelled darkness as a couple of the locals experiment with death.

 There's a sweet theme in that some of the characters feel like they are at fault for causing the time loop - the sense that time is leaving them behind, and a staunch refusal to let anything get too heavy; There's no situation that can't be resolved by talking it over. It's both cute and very cutesy, if that makes sense. A cosy movie. That sort of thing often repels me badly, but I liked this one well enough.

 The two-minute length of the loop is a genius touch: it's just enough time for people to get together and start working towards something just before the loop ends, and the movie mines a lot of laughs from the exasperation of people getting interrupted by it before they go back to whatever it was that they were doing.

 It does get a little histrionic, repeatedly providing the harried staff with bite-sized crises that fit the loops' durations a little too neatly, but there's enough variety to the situations and a sense of progression that it never really hurts the movie.

 Familiarity is a little bit of a problem. The film shares a lot of the crew with Beyond..., and there are a lot of shared plot elements as well; the way people adapt to their situation is carried over, as is their willingness to start playing around with the new rules of their reality. The ending is... well, I'm not a fan of the direction they took with it, but it's satisfying in that it gives everyone something to work towards together, and it suggests that both movies might exist in the same universe somehow.

 There are also some issues that the script fails to explain. At one point it begins snowing, which the characters do address, but later when the snow is gone no one comments on it. Easily understandable given a budget film's usual constrained shooting schedule, I guess. Less forgivable are a couple of chase scenes where the hunters give their quarries a ridiculous amount of lead time. A few of the scenes are also very improv-theater like, with conversations where both characters oversell their lines a little too hard.

 Overall, though, it's pretty funny and extremely likeable, if a bit lightweight. It's been a good few years for Groundhog-Day-alikes, what with Palm Springs, Boss Level and Happy Death Day; This one's the cleverest out of all of them, but also the one that has the least impact. Still a great way to spend two minutes over and over and over again.

 *: I didn't time them because I reasoned "why wouldn't they do it that way?" However, a few of the scenes do feel shorter; If I ever rewatch it I'll come back and comment whether the movie follows its own rules or not.

Audition

 Just in case you're not aware of Takashi Miike's Audition: go watch it now. It's best to go in knowing as little as possible about it... other than the fact that it might be best to avoid it if you're not up for a little grisly mayhem.

 The film follows Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower and successful businessman who decides it's time to remarry. Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), a friend who works in the film industry suggests that the best way to meet and covertly woo prospective candidates is to hold an audition; he holds the right for a made-for-TV drama, and suggests that Aoyama sits in with him during the audition process; Aoyama, to his eternal shame, accepts enthusiastically.

 Early on in the process, Aoyama is impressed by one of the applicants, Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), whose introductory essay strikes him as unusually touching and mature (it's pretty morbid, but hey). He pretty ignores all the other hopefuls, and when he finally interviews Yamazaki, he basically blurts out some compliments - it's an uncomfortable scene, but she seems to take it well.

 From there, they start dating. As it turns out Yamazaki wasn't particularly interested in landing the role, and seems to genuinely like Aoyama. And for his part Aoyama, despite agreeing to the audition and some horrible sentiments expressed during the search (he compares finding Mrs. Right to getting a new car, for example), is revealed to really be searching for an actual connection. It doesn't excuse him, but this is probably the best possible result for the whole creepy, abusive audition scheme. 

 Except that there are warning flags all over the place. His buddy and partner in audition crime Yoshikawa just doesn't like Yamazaki, and can't follow up on any of the references on her resume. Oh, and we also get a few inserts of Yamazaki at home, motionless, waiting for the phone to ring, while a cloth sack in the background writhes. This is not going to end well.

 Yamazaki disappears while she and Aoyama take a weekend break at the coast, which takes us into the investigation phase of the film as Aoyama starts following up on what little he knows of his love interest. The search leads him to some pretty dark places, as the film's tone veers from light-hearted comedy to more standard Miike territory. By which I mean: we get a shot of a severed tongue flopping around in the floor.

 By the end we reach a grand guignol climax which is what the movie is best known for, and despite losing its luster to the casual violence of the causal violence we've been subjected to in mainstream entertainment within the last decade (not to mention the French New Extremity), it's still powerful, cruel, and shocking. Not the least because of everything that came before.

 I'd also like to highlight the fever dream that comes before that scene, which is creepy, illuminating and hilarious in equal parts (this may be the only time we'll ever see suspense being generated from a man trying to avoid a blowjob).

 It's hard to talk about Audition without unduly spoiling it or saying anything that hasn't been said a hundred times before. I think the most important thing, though, is that this is a legitimately great movie, and not just in the 'cult' sense that it's crazy and shocking. There'd be nothing wrong with that, obviously, but this movie doesn't need those qualifiers; The third act craziness is integral to the film, and it only adds to its tragicomic energy, all-pervading sadness, and surprisingly sophisticated themes.

 The script (by Daisuke Tengan, based on a novel by Ryu Murakami) takes its time and patiently maps out Aoyama's character through his actions. It has a subtlety and complexity that leaves more modern genre exercises that touch upon similar themes (like, oh, I don't know, Barbarian or Promising Young Woman) looking simplistic and too on-the-nose.

 This is a story about a man who uses predatory tactics for... well, not the right reasons, nothing could justify that - but there's nuance to his character and the script smartly underlines his humanity. It strikes a good balance between condemning his actions and personality (a key late scene shows some truly callous behaviour at a past conquest) and making us cringe at the consequences; The shitstorm that he unleashes is both provoked, deserved, and out of all proportion. Meanwhile Yamazaki ends up being a brilliant movie monster (kiri kiri kiri) that is also a broken, tragic figure who operates under mistaken assumptions and commits several unforgiveable acts - hardly a feminist avenging angel.

 Technically, it's unimpeachable. Director Takashi Miike and his usual collaborators make the first half of the story - a slow burn drama/comedy - endearing and very, very funny, with editor Yasushi Shimamura being a key player; Some short, slightly glitchy editing schemes, interspersed with more traditional, cinematic long takes, give the story a lot of energy, as well as becoming important later when missing chunks of  those scenes come back to give characters more context. It meshes nicely with some of Miike's non-traditional choice of shots like having characters in a conversation alternately talk straight to the camera.

 By the time wire saws and acupuncture needles come up, we're completely invested in the story. That's the key ingredient in the ending's uncanny intensity, aside from Miike's obvious directorial chops. Audition is often lumped in with J-Horror and... well, it's understandable - especially as it was produced as a follow-up to the seminal The Ring by some of the same companies - but it's more of a genre outlier, along with Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure. Any way you slice it (or pierce with acupuncture needles) though, it fully deserves its classic status.

One Missed Call (Chakushin ari)

 One Missed Call's premise almost reads like a parody of J-Horror: Young people in Tokyo start receiving a voice message from themselves, timestamped from a couple days in the future, which plays out their last few seconds before they die. And once they inevitably bite it, someone in their contacts list gets a similar message. Oh, and these calls always arrive with a creepy ringtone!

 Not even the Mighty Takashi Miike can save this story (screenplay by Miwako Daira, from a novel by Yasushi Akimoto). He can, however, make it look stylish (there's some terrible-looking camera effects early on, but luckily it simmers down quickly - the rest of the movie goes down very easy). And the sub-genre's conventions - already ossified back in 2003, when this came out - are almost always engaging.

 The plot of the movie hews very, very closely to the template set down by The Ring. Once it becomes apparent that there's some sort of supernatural menace preying on her university friends, Yumi (Kô Shibasaki) starts trying to find out more about the curse, with the help of a mysterious slightly older man (Shin'chi Tsutsumi) who's been on the case since the beginning. The investigation leads them to a family with a history of violent abuse (a major plot point) and a few pretty effective scares.

 No psychics in this one, thank goodness; Well, actually, there is one -an exorcist- but he's part of a fairly funny subplot about a TV show that catches wind of the ghostly phone calls. One of the few cases of a J-horror movie (successfully) sneaking in some satire - the only other one I can think of right now is Suicide Club.

I wonder if Marie Kondo ever had to deal with shit like this. Now there's an idea for a J-horror movie!

 The investigation -a traditional element of the ghost story which almost always lends structure to J-Horror- is interesting, and while the plot ends up tangling itself into knots by piling on multiple twists and red herrings and a (very obvious) Ringu-style fake-out, there are some genuinely cool reveals. Most of the time, though, it's dumb and derivative. Not to the extent that it stops the movie from being fun, but enough that it overshadows almost everything else.

 Miike's pretty restrained here - it could almost pass for a normal teen-oriented J-horror flick. A good-looking one, though, with good atmosphere. And he and his frequent editor Yasushi Shimamura pull off some unshowy but interesting sequences where the past intrudes seamlessly into the present. There is some fun stuff with the hapless police department (led by regular Miike collaborator Renji Ishibashi), the aforementioned TV production crew, and an excellent, very disgusting apparition later on.

 To be perfectly honest, some of the dumb parts are pretty fun, too, like a severed hand busily operating a clamshell phone, or an attempt to foil the curse by cancelling a mobile plan. I mean... come on, that's pretty funny; I did wonder if the whole thing was taking the piss, which is something I've found myself pondering a lot over the years while watching even the most craftsmanlike of this particular director's movies. It's an auteur thing. If this one is tongue in cheek, though, it's plays it too safe, staying too faithful to other, oh-so-serious J-Horror staples.

Kwaidan

 A three-hour collection of ancient Japanese ghost stories? Hell yes.

 Kwaidan collects four folkloric stories that were popularized in the west by author Lafcadio Hearn in a few books published at the turn of the twentieth century... as reclaimed by Yôko Mizuki and directed by Masaki Kobayashi (of Harakiri fame). There's something very pleasing about the continuous cycle of adaptations there. Keeping the old stories alive.

Do not fall asleep first in a party with monks, those guys are -thorough-.

 The first story - The Black Hair - is the most influential, particularly in Japanese horror: A poor samurai (Rentarō Mikuni) leaves his wife (Michiyo Aratama) to marry into a rich clan in far-away Kyoto. He comes to regret his deeply shitty decision and after a few years abandons his new life to go back to his old one. He finds his old estate in disrepair, but his wife - looking exactly as she did when he left her - welcomes him with open arms. That is, until he wakes up the next day and gets chased around by tangles of black hair. Hey, don't look at me like that - it works. Mostly. OK, it did make me laugh a couple of times. But it's amazing, too.

 The Woman of the Snow, meanwhile, is more of a fable, and this is where the film really hit its stride for me. Two woodcutters get stranded in a snowstorm and take shelter in an abandoned shack. There they're attacked by a Yokai (basically, a ghoul/spirit/ghost/etc.) taking the form of a beautiful woman (Keiko Kishi); she freezes the older woodcutter to death, but takes pity on the younger one (Tatsuya Nakadai) and lets him live... on the condition that he never tells anyone what happened that night.

 As the years go by, the young woodcutter meets another beautiful woman... also played by Keiko Kishi! Welp, you can probably see where this is going. They have three children, and share a happy life until Minokichi puts his foot in it in the same way people always do in this type of stories.

 Hoichi the Earless is the longest and most elaborate of the film's chapters. It even has its own prologue: a reenactment the battle of Dan-no-ura, a huge sea battle where two opposing samurai fleets faced off against each other, leading to the near-destruction of the Taira clan and the death of the infant emperor.

 A shrine is erected near the site of the battle to pacify the spirits of the many warriors died that day. Many years later Hoichi (Katsuo Nakamura), a young blind musician who's being looked after by the monks there, is summoned by a samurai to play for his lord at his house over several nights. The monks recognize that he is being drained of life by ghosts, and come up with a plan to save him - but commit an oversight, with horrific consequences.

 Finally, In a Cup of Tea is a more playful, slightly meta story where a writer tells the story of a samurai who drinks another man's soul in a cup of tea, leading to a fight with his ghost and his ghost retainers and a fun twist ending.

 This is a gorgeous, gorgeous film, with some staggeringly beautiful, complex sets accompanied by almost psychedelic matte paintings of the sky - sometimes there's eyes painted on them. It's got a very theatrical feel and many of the special effects are just lighting changes. Aggressively artificial and stagebound, but very effective.

 The film does tend to ramble on - even split into four stories, the pacing is a little glacial. I didn't mind it too much except on Hoichi the Earless, where a lot of the narration comes from Hoichi himself, singing the exposition along with his biwa; That got old pretty quickly.

 Other than the singing, though, Hoichi's segment is the clear standout; It's not just a great story (all of these are), but it's also the most transportive of the film's segments and the one that hits the hardest.

 The writing is stately and tries to convey the (beautiful) stories as respectfully as possible, which makes for a somewhat sedate film. It might not be particularly scary, but there's a reason these stories have survived a millennium or more - and this film more than half a century.

Bad City

  Kaiko City is... Bad City.
 It's the sort of place where Gojo, a top-level Yakuza (played by Lily Franky) can shrug off a bunch of charges (with the help of the prosecutor!) and then immediately announce a candidacy for mayor. His plan? To use an urban renewal project as cover to build a few casinos. He needs the Korean mafia at his side to do that, so there's a bloody coup brewing as his second in command (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi) tries to take over with the help of a silent knife-wielding psycho (Tak Sakaguchi, well utilized).

 There's so much corruption no one can do anything against this madman. So one of the few clean prosecution officers in the city goes and does what you do in those situations: put together a crack, off-the-record task force, duh. These policemen and -woman (Hideto Katsuya, Masanori Mimoto and Akane Sakanoue) all come from the serious crimes unit, and their old boss is taken out of jail to lead them (Hitoshi Ozawa).
 The plot is pretty straightforward, but you wouldn't know that from watching the movie for a while; The storytelling is muddled, throwing a lot of names and complications into the mix without a lot of explanation. The film's a throwback to Japanese '80s VoD police thrillers, but since I haven't seen a lot of those what this reminded me most of is the more recent The Roundup films.

The glamour shot.

 Luckily all the crime means that there are a lot of fights as our secret task force tangles with Gojo and his cronies -  and this is where the movie absolutely shines. Early on there's a great fight against a baseball team's worth of Korean mafiosos which Ozawa beats down with a megaphone (the movie isn't devoid of humour, and this fight includes some great prop comedy), and the finale is a rolling brawl where a handful of people face off against a mall full of thugs. The action is varied but mostly consists of large punch-ups, sometimes with bats and knives, and while it's mostly realistic (or, to be more precise, 'realistic',) there's some cool silliness like Takaguchi being just too damn awesome to let himself be hit by bullets.
 It's a very low-budget production, but that's not as noticeable as it could be. There's some extremely dodgy-looking digital blood in one of its rare gunfights, but other than that it's pretty smart about not letting its reach exceed its grasp.

 Writer/Director Kensuke Sonomura is only a couple of movies into his directorial career, but he's been an action coordinator and a stuntman for decades. His experience shows: the choreography here is tight and everyone gets a chance to show off some pretty cool moves.
 He does stumble when trying to keep his story threads straight and/or compelling, and when trying to add in some drama (cutting a plucky reporter minor plot would honestly enhance the movie somewhat). Worst of all, at one point you find out one of the good guys had some information right from the beginning that made pretty much the whole plot irrelevant (this is known as The Force Awakens school of scriptwriting). But the characters are likeable, the violence frequent, and Hitoshi Ozawa's gruff charisma help hold things together when people aren't creatively mauling each other on-screen. It's an enjoyable bit of silliness.

As the Gods Will (Kamisama no iu tôri)

  You can't be prolific and consistent; That's just common sense. And when you're as insanely prolific as Takashi Miike... well, you're definitely going to have some turds composting in between the folds of your bloated filmography. To reach those sort of numbers, you simply can't give a fuck about what you're making a lot of the time.
 If Blade of the Immortal was Miike's 100th film, then by my count As the Gods Will was his 94th - the second and final film he made on 2014. And it is an absolute stinker.

 Shun (Sôta Fukushi) is a whiny piece of shit of a high-schooler, one of those insufferable "woe is me, my life is so boooooring" pieces of shit characters that's got not one but two beautiful girls pining for him*. So of course he gets a sort of supernatural intervention, in the form a group of sentient toys that hijack all the high schools in the world and force the students in them to play children's games... to the death.
 It actually starts out pretty promising! Juvenile, sure, but it opens up in media res, with a bunch of students up to their ankles in beheaded classmates, and cuts back and forth in a pretty engaging way until it's clear that an animated daruma doll popped out of a teacher's head and is now playing red light, green light with the kids - and if it catches anyone of them moving, their heads explode in a shower of blood and red marbles.

I give this movie one finger out of ten. Doesn't even deserve two.

 But as soon as we're all caught up, the kids start talking and the script (by Hiroyuki Yatsu) rears its misshapen, incompetent head. It's based on a Manga by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Akeji Fujimura, and holy fuck is that ever obvious; all the typical bottom-of-the-barrel formulaic manga stench wafts out and immediately overpowers anything else, voiding any chance that this could ever be any good; Constant pauses (...), people just muttering each other's names and constantly explaining what just happened to each other, tropes instead of characters, screaming, cheap melodrama. Plot holes, constant dramatic emphasis, bullshit philosophies and folks acting in deeply stupid ways to 'enhance' the drama. Fuck. This. Shit.
 Plotwise, Shun keeps making it through increasingly bizarre, deadly games (shooting hoops with a giant good luck cat statue, playing werewolf with an extreme snowboarding bear) and running into fellow high-school survivors - two love interests (Shoko Takase and Hirona Yamazaki) and Takeru (Ryunosuke Kamiki), your stereotypical anime psycho. But honestly, the only game that holds interest is the first one. While things do get admirably ridiculous now and again - you can see why this, on paper, would have caught Miike's eye - unfortunately it's all diminishing returns after that first game.

 This might call to mind Squid Games, but... honestly? It's just more tripe in the vein of Battle Royale (a movie I personally kind of despise, but is still miles better than this) - teens forced to kill each other to arbitrary and bizarre rules equals easy symbolism without the need to have anything to say; let the critics and viewers fall over each other to say it for you.

 Worst of all is that Miike is on full professional mode and shows way too much restraint by only implying most of the carnage, or diluting it with magical realist touches like the red marbles at the beginning (which, to be honest, was pretty cool; it's the only good one, though). Dammit, I want to see those pieces of shit get carved into smaller pieces of shit; Here, when someone gets a deadly case of the splits, we never see flesh tearing or get to linger on the aftermath- just a glimpse of a little blood pooling. This, from the guy who brought us Ichi the Killer! Who the fuck thought it'd be a good idea to hobble him with the Japanese equivalent of a PG13 rating?

 It's not a complete complete waste of time. There's flashes of fun every now and then, some amusing cruelty, and the material brings out a little of Miike's anarchic spirit every now and then. The X-TREME polar bear is funny. Not enough - not even nearly enough to justify watching the whole thing, though.
 I'm sure it's not even near the bottom of this director's films quality-wise - I've only seen, at a guess, twenty or so, and the very worst probably never made it out of Japan. But it definitely is the worst one of his I've seen, and I really wouldn't want to see him doing worse than this turgid, bloated (almost two hours!), inane, fucking stupid pile of reheated, anime tropes that were never above piss-poor to begin with.

*: Also, he sucks at Resident Evil 6, and by extension sucks at choosing Resident Evil games. Fuck that dude.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Dorosute no Hate de Bokura)

 The premise is irresistible: a fly-in-the-wall's view of how a bunch of friends and co-workers find a window in time that connects two monitors. Whether one of them is anchored two minutes in the past, or the other two minutes in the future, is not a useful way of looking at it - For this bunch of goofballs, it's enough that they can chat with their future selves, and prank their past ones.

 Café owner Kato (Kazunari tosa) discovers the time window when he closes up shop and heads up to his apartment one flight of stairs up. There he receives a message in his Apple TV from himself, who's downstairs, two minutes in the future; so when he incredulously runs to the computer screen downstairs, he finds himself repeating the message he gave himself.

 From there the situation spirals as his much more enthusiastic friends (Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Masashi Suwa, Yoshifumi Sakai and Aki Asakura) get involved, all incredulous at first and then desperate to play with the possibilities allowed by this breach of physics.

 They soon devise an ingenious, Primer-like hack to be able to extend the amount of time they can see forward/back to (by bringing the two monitors to the same room, like a pair of mirrors facing each other), get into trouble with petty criminals, use their time powers to survive, and finally run into the movie's highest-concept time conceit, which comes straight from either a silver-age sci-fi classic or a great 90's action/sci-fi movie, take your pick.

 It's breezy, slight, often very funny, and ridiculously well-made. The film is put together as a series of extremely long takes edited together seamlessly, but unlike obvious inspiration One Cut of the Dead, it doesn't really call attention to the gimmick. The shots are carefully planned and shot with an unobtrusive handheld camera that follows one character or another; Director/cinematographer/editor Junta Yamaguchi deserves a lot of praise for how crisply he presents the action devised by scriptwriter Makoto Ueda.

 The film is terrified of losing anyone to the mild mindfuck at the heart of the story - every time a complication is added, most of the characters basically huddle and explain things to each other, trying to cut things into as small pieces as possible (I was surprised no sock puppets came out at any point). This is the film's biggest problem, as it kills pacing several times in the movie; At least some of it is due to cultural differences, as I've noticed these sort of exposition issues in a lot of Japanese media. The same goes for character's slightly exaggerated personalities and acting.
 The other issues are minor - there's a couple of chicken/egg script problems, as well as a couple of too-convenient elements (just how long are Apple TV cables anyhow?)

 But it feels petty to hold these issues against an otherwise what's essentially an immaculately crafted trifle; It's slight, sure, but it's also ridiculously clever, inventive, and full of energy. The characters are likeable and their fooling around with a potentially mind-breaking glitch in reality entirely endearing.

Onibaba

 "The Hole/ Deep and dark/ Its darkness has lasted since ancient times"

 Say the stately kanji superimposed over an open pit in the middle of a wind-stirred field of tall grass. Then the title comes on to cymbals and a discordant note, followed by a vigorous, jazzy theme.

 I've been meaning to watch Onibaba's for ages, as I like these old Japanese folk-drenched stories; but that's not quite what writer/director Kaneto Shindō had in mind; The film's a deeply fucked up but unjudgmental psychodrama about civilians caught up in other people's wars.

 It centres on two women - one middle-aged, with wild hair (Nobuko Otowa), and the other her young stepdaughter (Jitsuko Yoshimura). They're introduced ruthlessly murdering two fleeing soldiers -got to love that stark shot of blood splashing on the susuki grass- then stripping them and throwing the naked bodies into the pit. Later, they take the soldiers' arms and armour down to a local broker who'll sell the items back to the one warring army or the other; he pays them with a couple bags of millet, which the women take back to their hut. There's a nest of crows on their roof. How's that for symbolism?

 Kiyomi Kuroda's gorgeous black and white photography manages a lot of very striking images, with a lot of focus on the women's very expressive eyes.

 I guess it's a living. Barely. Hey, I'm not going to judge- I've seen enough samurai movies to know the effects of their wars on the peasantry. The film, luckily, underlines this; While the action never leaves this one field, the news from abroad are dire - Kyoto has fallen, and armies rove the land, killing and raping and taking, as armies do. The way it's described is near apocalyptic: "As if the earth had turned upside down." 

 Complications arrive when their neighbour Hachi (Kei Satō), who had been conscripted along with the young woman's husband, returns from the front lines a deserter. He brings bad news: the husband was killed by a mob when they tried to rob a farm. Later, he gleefully describes how he killed an enemy soldier while he was taking a shit in the bushes. This movie is bleak.

 In any case, Hachi soon starts sultrily coming on to the young woman. And despite him... well, being a complete dipshit who vents his sexual frustrations by screaming and running around in the fields like a lunatic, I guess he's the only man available so they quickly start boning. For a while I got worried the movie was going to go down a different path there.

Hachi piles on the charm.

 The older woman doesn't take it well - not because her stepdaughter is sleeping with a ne'er do well who lived while her son died, though she absolutely plays that card - but because she's worried that the girl will leave her for Hachi, and she needs the help to continue their line of work. And because she's also horny as fuck, and when she offers herself Hachi coldly turns her down; Brutal.

 And that's the main conflict here. A very (very) slight, but pretty cool supernatural element is introduced later, and steers the film towards its very cool, folk-horror-ish final destination.

 It's a simple, primal story set in a sort of amoral limbo bounded by the whispering, constantly shifting susuki grass. It's aged beautifully; I can see why so many consider it a classic.

Versus

 Versus was pretty well received back when it came out - I remember a lot of acquaintances talking about it, and people kept recommending it to me because I liked 'that Japanese stuff'.

 Unfortunately, Anime doesn't tend to be among the Japanese stuff I like. And man, is this movie ever anime-damaged. A disappointment twenty-odd years in the making.

 You can tell exactly what director Ryûhei Kitamura was into back then by watching this: A lot of Matrix, a lot of Tarantino, a lot of Evil Dead, a little of chanbara (samurai) films. Which, fair enough, that's pretty much what all of us nerds- pardon me, geeks, were into. But Kitamura only lifts the shallowest, most juvenile elements for his pastiche, and besides some fun energy and gore, he doesn't really bring much else.
 How shallow of a pastiche is it? When our hero has to find some clothes, the first thing he comes across is a leather trenchcoat.

There be wankers in them woods.

  There's an opening crawl that's so elaborate and pointless it plays as parody; The plot is some nonsense about an ancient confrontation between an evil Shinto priest (Hideo Sakaki) and a pure hearted samurai (Tak Sakaguchi) - the priest wants to control a portal between life and death, the Samurai wants to protect his lady (Chieko Misaka), whose blood is needed for the priest's evil ritual. Oh, and there's zombies because the portal doesn't let anyone in these woods die properly.

 That's just the prologue. These people, and some other mooks, all reincarnate many centuries later - The Samurai as an escaped convict, almost everyone else as Yakuza, and the girl as... a girl they've kidnapped.

 None of them are aware of what's happening, except the priest, who is a yakuza boss this time around, and is pulling the strings to finally do whatever it is he wants to do.

 But it takes a while for the movie to get to that. First we must endure a long stretch where they posture for ages without doing anything, trying to bring some Tarantino cool to the movie by way of tired old anime tropes. Holy shit is it painful to watch.
 I hate the main character with a passion - he's one of those manga antiheroes that's so cool, so above it all they come across as almost narcoleptic, constantly whining about having to do stuff... an absolute piece of shit character. The girl is a blank, constantly waiting for this shitstain to validate her, and the mooks are a one-dimensional collection of anime stock characters without a single shred of charisma between them. You've got the serious, honorable one, the serious one with glasses and long hair, the psychotic clown who looks like he might pull a face muscle from all his mugging, the incompetent one that's so caught up in his panic attack that he looks almost feral... OK, that last one at least was entertaining to watch. Probably not in the way intended, but as trainwrecks go it's a fun one.

 Then there's another bunch of characters that appear out of the blue. Literally, I have no idea what they're doing in this movie, and they barely interact with the... let's call it story. I'd complain, but they're way more fun and interesting than any of the main characters, with the highlight being a psycho pixie (Hoshimi Asai) who turns up and starts punching people. No posturing, no bullshit, only punching. She gets a really funny death, too.

 It's pretty clear the plot in this doesn't matter in the least - it's just an excuse to string together the scenes Kitamura wanted to do; lots of fights and shootouts, all reasonably fun but without any real choreography. It's all about looking cool, not doing cool stuff, which is a shame because they do put in some effort - there's even some wirework involved.

 For your money you also get Zombie killing, some silly jokes (some of them even work!) and lots of very over-the-top gore. Chintzy, very Matrix-inspired techno music, camera work that's all over the place (including a pretty well done Michael Bay homage, of all things) and all the forest scenery you could possibly want.

 I like the movie's energy, at least when it gets going, and I like some of its goofy humour. I wanted to like its "let's go to the woods and film some cool shit" ethos. Hell, I'd even agree that some of it does manage to be cool, when it's not trying too hard. Shave off an hour, preferably all the early scenes with the Yakuza, and it'd be watchable.