Movies: July 2006 Archives
Like horror movies? Great. Interested in seeing The Descent, that creepy-sounding caving thriller about a group of women who get more than they bargained for on an underground expedition? Super. It's really scary. Just ... do yourself a favor, and if you've managed to avoid seeing trailers or TV spots to date, continue to avoid them until you've seen the movie. The trailer, the TV commercials, even the stupid little MTV promos include key snippets from the film that made me really glad I watched it (via an imported DVD) while I was still in a pristine, unspoiled state. (Well, close to pristine — whoever laid out the program book for this year's Sundance Film Festival chose to illustrate the film's very circumspect blurb with an out-and-out spoiler that I spent the next five months more or less successfully blocking out of my mind.)
Anyway, it made me jump in my chair. Twice. If you're me, that's a very big deal. I'd compare the jolts favorably to those in The Evil Dead, if that gives you any idea. (How old-school am I?)
The other thing about The Descent is that U.S. distributor Lion's Gate has decided that the ending needs a, erm, minor tweak.
SPOILERS FOLLOW!
If you've seen the film, you can probably imagine what the change is — as near as I can tell from following the Mobius discussion (not having actually seen the U.S. version), Lion's Gate has decided to end the film just a couple of minutes early, cutting away from Sarah's dream before she realizes it's a dream. I think this is actually kind of interesting on a meta level — are there other films that send their audiences to the exits in the middle of a dream? Does it matter whether it's a dream or not if you experience it richly, and if you never wake up from it? But at the same time it kind of blows because there are signals within the dream itself (I'm thinking specifically of the uniquely stylized, brightly lit "stairway to heaven" slope toward the light that Sarah scrambles up) that would lead a careful viewer to conclude that he's inside a dream sequence, which could be very unsatisfying. Oh, well. Nobody ever went broke by catering to the "careful viewers" when they made last-minute tweaks to a director's vision. Really, it changes the tone of the film from "utterly despairing" to "a real downer," and I suppose pictures suffer greater indignities all the time.
Hell, Lion's Gate will likely commit a much greater crime against horror fans on October 27, with the release of Saw III.
True, it's hard to imagine a more aggressively prefab "indie" than Little Miss Sunshine, which seems to have been conceived and written to pander to as broad a demographic swath outside the mainstream (well, right next to the mainstream) as possible. It's about a dysfunctional family road trip. Its cast of quirky characters includes a suicidal Proust scholar, a mute teenager taking cues from Nietzsche, a suffering but stoic wife, an ambitious but fundamentally bone-headed husband sending all the wrong messages, a cranky, dirty-minded grandfather who sends the right ones, and an adorable little girl.
Screenwriter Michael Arndt puts them through their paces with a rigor that evolves from the tautly clever storytelling of the opening sequence, which introduces each major player and establishes their foibles, to a more slipshod narrative built on metaphor, coincidence, and forced reconciliations.
Every critic's least-favorite scene in the film seems to be the hospital caper that leads directly into the film's tedious home stretch, and that's where I really lost interest, as well. However, the performances are very appealing (Abigail Breslin? Next time you see Dakota Fanning, tell her she can kiss your ass), and music-video veterans Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris direct with a forthright confidence and simplicity of expression that propels the unlikely yarn through some rough spots.
And then, in the final reel, something miraculous happens — the film climaxes as the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant finally welcomes little Olive, a guileless underachiever in a hotel full of tiny, highly sexualized painted ladies, onto the stage. Suddenly, the film squares up what feels like about a dozen contradictory impulses -- it's simultaneously dopey and wise, riotous and sublime, splendid and vulgar -- and, for a few moments at least, and if only from my seat in the room, all was forgiven. Clunky though much of the film had been, and cranky though I was just a few minutes earlier, I had a happy grin plastered on my face as the credits started to roll. That's worth something.
Kevin Smith is another one of those filmmakers who seems to pay a surprising amount of mind to what his critics say about him. He's known for locking certain writers out of screenings, and publicly ripped into Good Morning America critic Joel Siegel for verbalizing his displeasure as he stormed out midway through a press preview of Clerks II a few days before its opening. (The altercation might have made Smith feel better, but he came across as terribly childish.) Now maybe he knows there's no such thing as bad publicity, maybe he's just got excessively thin skin, or maybe he's just really stressed out about the performance of his new movie -- a return to the indie-fabulous New Jersey slacker milieu he hit paydirt with more than 10 years ago, when Clerks played at the Angelika for what felt like a full year.
Things change. Back then, the Angelika wasn't a chain and the Weinstein company was still called Miramax. On the evidence of Clerks II, Smith himself has done some changing. There's still some of the same nerd banter, some of the same shock-value sex talk, and there's still the Jay and Silent Bob schtick. But there's even more of the earlier film's anxiety about dead-end careers, and maybe it says something about the Hollywoodization of Kevin Smith that he's gone from regarding a job as cashier as something you're sentenced to (the infamous original ending of Clerks depicted not-even-supposed-to-be-at-work-that-day Dante getting casually gunned down by a robber) to something aspirational -- assuming you figure out a way to take financial ownership of the cash-register keys your fingers are drumming against all day long. Dante spends this film weighing the prospect of the easy life in Florida, working a cushy job provided for him by his fiance's daddy, against his roots in suburban Jersey. (Crucially, Rosario Dawson also wants to fuck him, and she lives in Jersey, which makes his eventual choice a little easier.)
So Smith's wearing his heart on his sleeve this time around, and I don't blame him. It's been kind of a rough 10 years for him, after the general acclaim that greeted Chasing Amy dissipated to be replaced by the abortive struggle to get Superman Returns off the ground and the debacle that was Jersey Girl. He takes the film’s best-friends-forever theme so seriously that Dante’s buddy Randall gets a long, heartfelt monologue on the subject during the final reel. Hardcore Clerksheads may well find this moving. I didn’t. The duds-to-gags ratio is way too high and the general aesthetic (visual and verbal) way too crummy for my taste -- I couldn't recommend it in good conscience as more than distraction or time-filler. But I laughed out loud here and there, and I was really grateful for the presence of Dawson, who knows her way around a movie camera.
This post may contain SPOILERS.
The film Lady in the Water is set in and around a multi-cultural Philadelphia apartment building where a mythological healer, a guardian, an interpreter, and some kind of guild are living. They do not know what their roles are, but the narf from the building's swimming pool needs their help. And since she is wearing his shirt and reading his diary entries, it's the building superintendent's job to find them. But he's not very good at this. For one thing, he asks a film critic for help. (I know. Stupid.)
Living elsewhere in the building is a friendly but quiet writer working on a book that will change the world forever. He's played by the film's writer and director, M. Night Shyamalan.
Hanging around outside is a grassy, wolf-like creature that wants to bring harm to the narf. This is a scrunt. (M. Night Shyamalan apparently never used this term in a Google search.) Up in the trees, we're told, is the Tartutic, a trio of evil monkey-like enforcers. And at the end of the film three guys in monkey suits do indeed drop out of the trees. The scene in which this happens is very funny, but I do not think M. Night Shyamalan meant for it to be.
I'm not saying Lady in the Water is a terrible movie -- certainly it's not as bad as the preponderance of pans it has received might suggest. There's a lot to admire here. Shyamalan's almost preternatural facility as a director of action (and inaction) on the screen finds a really good match in ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle's moody camera fu, which recalls, for me, his recent work on the interiors-heavy Dumplings and 2046. (If there's a living D.P. who's better at working out and exploiting the geometry of a particular set or location, I don't know who it is.) And Paul Giamatti is just astoundingly good -- as long as the film revolves around the hilariously named Cleveland Heep and his relationship with the lady from the water, a frustratingly muted Bryce Dallas Howard, it's pretty much golden. Giamatti brings something that's all too rare in supernatural stories -- a smart, credulous protagonist who spends his time accepting and absorbing his predicament and figuring out how to handle it rather than moping around and whining about how impossible and/or unlikely the whole situation is. He can also be really, really funny, which is welcome in a story that needs the laughs.
Everyone else spends most of the film with dour expressions on their faces, and labored bits of whimsy, like the bodybuilder who only works the right-hand side of his body, only serve as distraction. The problem gets worse toward the film's end, as the story gets more urgently complicated and Shyamalan forces all the supernatural creatures his script has yet described on screen in a anticlimactic show-me-the-monster creaturefest.
Speaking of distraction, I really wonder at Shyamalan's insistence on interjecting himself into his own films. With Lady in the Water, he moves from making Hitchockian cameo appearances to playing a significant role. He portrays a brilliant, unheralded author -- a move that might register in his own mind as playful, but comes across as self-absorption. (The irony is that, as good a director as Shyamalan has proven to be, he's not much of a writer.)
And who knew Shyamalan's hackles were raised so high by his critical notices? Bob Balaban, playing a joyless movie and book reviewer named Harry Farber (because it's hard to imagine why Shyamalan would have beef with Manny Farber, this must be a tip of the hatchet to Movieline's Stephen Farber), breaks the fourth wall at some point during the third act as he delivers the kind of observations about the rules of horror film construction that Kevin Williamson brought into vogue and made passé over the course of three Scream movies. The joke in this case is that he's proved wrong -- Shyamalan is willing to violate whatever rules of story construction he's aware of if it means he can have a film critic eviscerated on screen by a critter with teeth. I don't object to the gag, but the tenor of its execution is so chilly and remote that it feels angry, like the director is barely kidding.
But the film is no failure of sheer imagination. Shyamalan delivers one half of a smartly directed, slightly goofy fairy tale. Even as it collapses under its own weight -- and more so than in previous, more gimmicky films -- I admired Shyamalan's confidence in his own vision. He's certainly not afraid of looking foolish.
In the near-future science fiction world of A Scanner Darkly, narc agents are polymorphous detectives, wearing “scramble suits” that cycle, both visually and aurally, through scores of identity fragments to avoid detection by face-recognition systems. It’s a striking idea in literature, and in film even more so — especially in this film, which places a layer of abstraction between its cinematography and its audience, retracing the filmed images of easily recognizable actors as moody, moving line drawings. When the technique was used for the movie-length freshman-dorm-room conversation that was Waking Life, it felt precious and gimmicky. Applied to a more downbeat brand of existentialism, like this free-flowing, almost meditative version of Philip K. Dick’s classic novel about the tactics of drug police and the personal costs of addiction, it’s a kind of genius.
If you watch enough movies, every so often you get that special feeling that the one you're watching right now is sui generis -- a one-of-a-kind viewing experience that, although it may not match any kind of cinematic ideal, is transfixing and fascinating. Singapore Sling is one of those movies. Directed by the Greek auteur Nikos Nikolaidis, it’s a pitch-black neo-noir old-dark-house sex-horror comedy featuring ample helpings of nudity, bondage, torture, general fiendishness, and very poor table manners.
You know you’re in for something special from the very first scene, which depicts two women outdoors in a thunderstorm digging what can only be a grave. (Looks like they’ve done this before.) The one scooping rainwater is wearing stockings and garters under her rainslicker but is otherwise plainly nude from the waist down. The film begins riffing on Otto Preminger’s Laura almost immediately, with the arrival on the scene of a soused detective on the trail of the killers (?) of a woman by that name.
Turns out the two women are a psychotic mother-daughter act. Having dragged the unconscious detective into their old house, they briefly — between giggles and bouts of sex play — discuss what to do with the fella (plant him in the garden?). But before long Mommy’s found a journal in his pocket with notes on his investigation — and the safest bet seems to be tying up their now-silent captive, whom they’ve dubbed “Singapore Sling,” and torturing him to discover why he’s asking questions about Laura.
As odd as this business has been so far, things don’t get really weird until the younger woman develops a thing for Singapore Sling. (“He smelled of blood, sweat and fear,” she explains in voiceover. “He excited me.”) She steals out of bed in the middle of the night to have sex with him, an act that culminates in the expulsion of vomit on his cheek. She comes back to bed afterward, and Mother awakens and starts addressing the audience: “That little whore — cette petite putain — she thinks I have no idea of what happened. Well, I heard it all, and tomorrow we’ll have it out.”
And so it goes. Before the film’s over, getting raped in his bed is the least of the poor guy’s worries. He’ll be bound, gagged, electrocuted, and pissed on. He witnesses a dinner scene that qualifies as one of the most repulsive meals in cinematic history (I’m still not sure exactly what those women were eating). And, of course, because this is both a descendent of film noir and a psychological horror movie, he’ll have delivered unto the doorway of his soul a very special kind of madness. (This shit is so sick it anticipated a scene in Se7en by about seven years.)
The film’s backbone is its justly infamous scenes of bondage, violence and degradation, some of which are fairly elaborate and specific in their fetishism. (The costumes, too, are gothic-fabulous.) But Singapore Sling’s soul is in its playful absurdity. Nikolaidis claims that he thought he was making a comedy, and I believe him — there are elements here and there that are either so far over the top they qualify as self-parody (in flashback, the daughter gets taken from behind by her father, who happens to be a mummy) or are simply performed with such loony conviction that you know the folks involved had to be kidding. Meredyth Herold, who plays the daughter, has to come in for special praise in a role that requires not just frequent nudity and one fairly punishing-looking bondage scene (by which I mean: ow), but also several monologues delivered to the camera that balance an overstated childish naivete with the suggestion of insanity. And it’s in that hint of real instability that the film finds power to disturb, grinding toward an unpleasantly misogynous climax.
(I will trot out that laziest of criticisms and complain that it’s too long, the delirious illusion of a waking nightmare not quite sustained through 112 minutes.)
While it’s most assuredly a specialized taste, Singapore Sling is fairly sophisticated visually. Composition within each frame is varied and interesting, and Aris Stavrou’s monochrome cinematography ably apes the golden age of film noir. It’s rendered on Synapse’s DVD with blazing white highlights and deep blacks — there’s not much shadow detail on this disc, but Synapse has done a spectacular job making what must have been a pretty ragged source print (there are crappy English subtitles burned in to the image) look fairly pristine. (Scratches and other blemishes start to show up in the film’s latter half.) I’m guessing the blacks have been crushed significantly compared to a film print, but this is a good-looking DVD, and probably as close as most viewers are going to get to a repertory screening of this thing.
If this all sounds like your idea of a good time, invite your horror- movie friends over and try it on a double-bill with (the awesome) Cemetery Man. Also, definitely check out the director's Web site (warning: embedded MIDI version of “People Are Strange”), which is similarly crazy.
As anyone who's clutched the arms of his chair during a screening of (the original version of) Ring or felt a tightening of her chest during (the original version of) Pulse can attest, there's something about Japanese horror movies. It's not that the stories are so much more sinister than their Western counterparts (although there are an awful lot of vengeful ghosts in the Japanese afterlife, which is a rather disquieting notion), but that there's something in the Japanese filmmaking tradition that gives the supernatural plenty of room to live and breathe on screen. Where American horror movies generally put the monster in your lap, their Japanese counterparts have a way of making you meet them halfway -- drawing you in, piquing your curiousity, expertly suspending your disbelief, and finally, with exquisite timing, sending the coldest shiver down your spine.
J-horror has been in serious vogue for the last eight years or so, but the country didn't figure this shit out overnight. The tradition goes all the way back to Kinugasa's A Page of Madness, released in 1926, and maybe even farther. One of the best-known examples of Japanese horror filmmaking is 1964's Kwaidan, which isn't grab-your-chair scary but manages to work up a pretty good head of creep anyway. It's an anthology film based on ghost stories by Lafcadio Hearn, a Western author who took root in Japan in the late 19th Century, and was apparently tailored to make a splash with Western audiences. The first story is about a Samurai who abandons his wife only to come crawling back to her years later, with dire results; the second has to do with a deadly woman who shows up in very bad weather — apparently the very personification of hypothermia — and is definitely not to be fucked with; the third details the sad story of Hoichi, a talented biwa player who is recruited to sing ballads in the middle of the night for the spirits of dead Samurais and loses his ears for his trouble; and the last, especially curious one, deals with a fellow who sees an odd man's face appear in a cup of tea -- for some reason, not sure why, he reminded me of Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train -- and comes to regret gulping it down.
Each story is a gorgeously mounted production, with the art direction taking center stage via ornate sets (at one point I felt like I was seeing the inspiration for every PlayStation 2 adventure game ever made) and deliriously expressionistic backgrounds. (Just as a stranger in this film is never an ordinary stranger, a sky is never just a sky.) And if you let yourself slip into the right frame of mind, each segment is nicely creepy in its own way. The main liability here is an overly indulgent pace — the Criterion DVD is over 160 minutes, and the new (NTSC) DVD from London-based Eureka's Masters of Cinema collection clocks in north of three hours — that makes proceedings soporific as well as occasionally scary.
The extra 20 minutes of material (including a brief sex scene in the second episode) seems to make the new European release a no-brainer, but I've got to say that I miss the vivid colors of the older Criterion transfer. Criterion's picture is quite a bit darker and shadow detail is lacking, but the image is in my eyes more filmlike overall, gives the painted backdrops a chance to blend more smoothly into the image, puts some blood in the faces of characters, and emphasizes the film's extravagant visual qualities. The new DVD's colors are frankly bland by comparison. (You can see a side-by-side comparison of three different transfers of this film, including the Criterion, at DVDbeaver.com.) Without having access to a properly timed theatrical release print, it's hard to say which transfer has the more accurate color — but, for what it's worth, if I feel like watching this again I may well reach for the Criterion version.
Summer's other shoe dropped last weekend, when Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest singlehandedly revived a moribund box office, proving that people do, on occasion, still want to go out to the movies. Dead Man's Chest isn't much without Johnny Depp, who's given the lion's share of screen time on this go-round -- Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley barely register as more than set dressing -- and the terrific VFX work by ILM, which continues to pour on the R&D; where computer-generated characters are concerned. But it is a triumph of the Disney marketing department, which, having taken the spaghetti-flung-against-the-wall approach to so many projects lately (remember that other feature-film franchise based on a theme-park ride, The Haunted Mansion?) finally found something that sticks.
The script has several amusing-enough scenes -- and it's much less convoluted than the first film in the series, which is a big plus in my book -- as well as all the winking elements of a half-parody, half-homage to classic Hollywood adventure films, from Tarzan the Ape Man all the way up through Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Gore Verbinski is no Steven Spielberg, and he can't invest this thing with much personality or panache. The action scenes, some of them replete with physical and visual gags, feel stagebound rather than truly kinetic, and the characters are curiously restrained. Is it fun? Kinda. But it's also two and a half hours long, which spreads the fun that exists fairly thin. The sense I got was of a very expensive rush job, the first of two big-time sequels hustled through production to meet an arbitrary mid-summer release date and help put blank ink in the corporate accounting books.
It makes me wonder, given the current business rigors of blockbuster filmmaking, with box-office numbers more visible in the media than ever before, if anyone in Hollywood these days is being given a chance to develop their skills. It's not that it's impossible to make a somewhat personal film in the context of the big Hollywood studio picture. Brian De Palma and John Woo put their unmistakable stamps on the first two Mission: Impossible movies, and although the third installment was an exercise in TV-ready blandness, it was at least made by a director (J.J. Abrams) who specializes in TV ready blandness. Poseidon was basically ridiculed, but I admired its grisliness as well as Wolfgang Petersen's ability to get mileage out of big water in small spaces. (It's a fine B movie.) Bryan Singer's Superman Returns was personal in its way -- you felt Singer really identified, somehow, with Big Supe floating up there in outer space -- but, a single terrific action sequence aside, it lacked the breezy sparkle it needed and was way too reverential toward its 1978 predecessor.
But the biggest surprise of the summer for me was that Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand, while certainly nothing special, didn't suck as much as I expected it to. Singer's version may conceivably have been a little more thoughtful or coherent — and, granted, Ratner had two fairly successful films to build on — but on the whole X-Men 3 just seemed to demonstrate that, at a certain level, high-octane VFX work and cinematography can basically obscure, or make irrelevant, a director's personal style (or lack thereof). Maybe Kevin Smith's Superman Returns wouldn't have been a disaster area after all.
I know movie critics are supposed to disdain big-budget, mass-market blockbusters, but it always disappoints me to see a whole summer go by without some big, glossy air-conditioned entertainment winning me over. The last big-budget tentpole release I remember really admiring was Spielberg's War of the Worlds (the first half of it, anyway), and it was Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 before that — neither of them directed by spring chickens. Maybe my taste in film is ossifying along with my old bones, but it doesn't seem like the new generation of directors is measuring up to guys like those in terms of the kind of thrilling, violent, meticulously constructed action film that only a hundred million dollars or two of Hollywood studio money can buy.
What’s life like inside the U.S. military prisons at Guantanamo Bay? Working with testimony from the “Tipton Three,” a group of young British men rounded up in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, director Michael Winterbottom’s combination of documentary and dramatization recreates the conditions of their incarceration. It’s grueling business, full of stark depictions of solitary confinement, cruel “stress positions,” and brutish interrogation tactics meant to elicit confessions -- not to suss out the truth, but to browbeat a man into saying something that will justify his incarceration after the fact.
The film’s power comes in part from its acceptance of its protagonists' claims that they wound up in Taliban country as a result of naiveté and bad luck rather than any political impulse. To be sure, their decision to trek into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 qualifies as a Very Bad Idea, and it's hard not to wonder what, exactly, they were thinking at the time. (In a certain light, the film's title can even be read as a bit of very, very black humor.) But even if you question their motivations, the treatment depicted here remains brutal and sub-human — not something a nation can be proud of. Given the worthless “evidence” that kept the men locked up for more than two years, it’s genuinely distressing to think of others still being held, without trial, under similarly bogus pretenses.
One of the things I appreciated most about Winterbottom's approach was that he treats the prison guards and questioners as something other than two-dimensional monsters. As reprehensible as their actions are, you get the feeling that they're just military men, in over their heads and following orders as best they can. It's a subtlety of direction — the cruelty of their swaggers and threats reads as the product of an environment that brings out the worst in people -- that feels authentic, and it's the kind of nuanced performance Winterbottom has always been good at eliciting. The result is a film where, despite the clearly unbalanced relationship between captors and captives, nobody on screen is in a position of real power or authority; it's a road movie and a prison movie and a nightmare of ideology run amok.
Takeshis', Takeshi Kitano's crazy, weird, indulgent, breathtaking, strangely titled fantasy, is as entertaining as it is puzzling — a marvelous movie about movies with a sense of humor and a surreal streak. Kitano appears in the film as himself, but he stars as his own doppelganger — a studio bit player first seen in clown make-up — and the film imagines how the hapless fellow's life might be changed by the resemblance. On the evidence here, Kitano seems to regard celebrity as a catalyst for confusion, with movie viewers having a natural tendency to conflate an actor's screen persona with his real life, and perhaps, given the right conditions, to confuse their own lives with those of their big-screen role models.
The hapless Kitano shares a face and a surname with his celebrity double, but he's a convenience-store clerk and a failure as an actor, too old or too mild to nail his auditions (some scenes have a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god quality that may be the director's way of expressing gratitude for his good fortune in the industry). His fortunes don't change dramatically, but his circumstance does when he happens across a cache of weapons and elects to indulge a streak of the old ultraviolence, Kitano style. The narrative isn't especially important as such, providing only a structure for a series of playful vignettes that reveal a filmmaker's view of the world. The same actors pop up in more than one place, perhaps expressive of a director's knack for casting, and the forward-moving narrative is broken up by nonlinear edits that are a clue to the point of view they express. A key question, answered definitively in the final reel, is not just whether we're seeing reality or fantasy, but in whose mind the cinema-dreams are taking place.
Well, the big dream is Takeshi Kitano's, of course. Proceedings are peppered with references to his previous body of work — including his deadpan editing style and several trademark moments of sublime and unexpected beauty — that add to the reflexive fun of the whole experiment, and there are a couple of scenes that express the sense of displacement that an actor must feel on a green-screen set as his performance lives in a more elaborate environment. There's a Seinfeldesque soup tyrant played by two different actors in close proximity; a Sopranosesque Yakuza who wants to make it in the movie business; and, in more familiar territory, an idyllic third-reel gathering of a group of disparate characters on a beach. (As it must be in a Kitano film, the scene ends with the arrival of riot police advancing on heavily-armed Kitano.) The sizable cast of actors, many of them rather famous in Asian cinema, makes a very good impression in what are mostly small roles, and even the tap-dancers from Zatoichi have a cameo appearance. (What's really missed is a score by Joe Hisaishi, Kitano's trademark collaborator, which might have brightened the proceedings or added considerable poignancy.)
I can't make a case for Takeshis' as a masterpiece on the order of Hana-Bi or Sonatine, or even as a cheerful, self-contained diversion like Zatoichi or Kikujiro. In fact, if you don't have a genuine affection for those movies, there's not going to be much for you to grab onto -- except perhaps the general deliciousness of the imagery and the wry dream logic that's sustained throughout. That probably explains the film's failure to secure U.S. distribution. Fortunately, it's recently become available on an English-subtitled Japanese DVD that's available from the usual sources. Highly recommended to Kitano fans; all others proceed with caution.