Summing Up 2014 in First Time Watches Part 1

Looking back on this year as a casual film viewer, I have watched too many films. That's not to boast, but having decided to stick to one film a day from the mid-year on, there's been an apparent issue that many films, especially ones that are impossible to see on physical media, I have proclaimed to be great from the early months have vanished from memory completely. It could be an issue of how long a year actually is. It could be a result of too much stimuli to sort through - I am an anomaly that the idea of a film marathon or a film festival is an insane, terrible way to view the movies, seeing five or more films one after another liable to mangle your ability to gauge which was good or not. It could be, frankly, a reflection of how first opinions are hollow. Some films need a second chance, but there were films, difficult to see, that have made a lasting first impression which will be seen in the lists below, suggesting that only when the films linger are they truly the best.

I have not seen enough films to create a decent Best of 2014 list. I intend to create one, mind, catching up with the releases, but only those I want to see, and rather than throw a list out immediately without though at the end of the year, I'd rather take a while even if its when everyone else is writing their Best of 2015 lists. Instead I'll look at the first time watches, not just films, any format of viewing them, that have stood out in an award special just for the sake of my amusement. As long as they wouldn't qualify for a Best of 2014 list, anything can qualify. Since it'll be long, this'll be the first part below...

From http://twinlensfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/
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Best DVD Label: Arrow

One disappointment is that Second Run, another great company, has been neglected by myself this year, whose tantalising releases for this year will be caught up with. But Masters of Cinema, the BFI and Arrow scored some incredible releases, many I still need to get to, Arrow by a country mile winning for that many things they've managed to do. Their project for Walerian Borowcyzk to be critically reassessed completely in Britain is enough by itself to get the award, but the categories you'll over the parts of this special will contain a lot of their hard work.

If there is one concern, as someone who has to be careful economically which how much I buy, there is a danger of physical media becoming incredible expensive and inaccessible for casual buyers to discover these films for the first time. The market will need new people to discover how wide and diverse cinema can be, and expensive releases and limited editions can be problematic, as well for myself with a small budget at hand, in preventing a wider audience from being created. You cannot merely depend on a hardcore fan base, even if it's meant the great releases we've had, so if there was a greater balance in cost and access in 2015 it would be for the best for all of us. That Arrow has decided to create an American branch of their business could be a risk but could also help in this issue, opening the floodgates for a wider selection of films to view.

From http://offscreen.com/images/made/images/article
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Best Production Design:

Winner: Careful (Guy Maddin, 1992)

Honourable Mentions: Youth of the Beast (Suzuki Seijun, 1963); Kaiba (Yuasa Masaaki, 2008/Anime Series); French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1954); Eden and After (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1970)

As the later categories will show, I discovered, or properly introduced myself, to individuals that appeal to everything I find great in film and motion picture art. Animation, as much as live action, is capable of taking you into new worlds, as all the films and one series in this section can attest to. Its befitting to this category that I have a film from the director of the notorious Branded To Kill (1967) here, at the moment he would get to that film, the moment when he has a gang member's flat have airplanes on mass dangling from the ceiling obstructing the space of the main protagonist. Be it 1890s Paris in all its bright colours, of Tunisia, or the far reaches of space and numerous planets where memories of individuals float in their own milky ways, the possibilities of what you can do in the medium makes the obsession with realism in modern cinema baffling and even more patience inducing, more so when the best examples of production design are as capable of showing the real world beyond the cinema without needing to be puritanical in aesthetics. That all the works here have distinct colour schemes is as much a rebellion for myself from shit browns and greys you get in many films recently. The winner couldn't be beaten, a mountain community where silent is golden, taking inspiration from early cinema but transforming it into a strange, richly detailed world of oddballs and haunting locations. Guy Maddin may not have won many awards for this special, but he is the patron saint for this sight finally seeing most of his back catalogue in one giant viewing gulp this year.

Films that were also considered were Rubber's Lover (1996), the original King Kong (1933), Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) and the other Yuasa Masaaki anime series of the year Kemonozume (2006).

Music:

Winner: Wakakusa Kei (Kemonozume (Yuasa Masaaki, 2006/Anime Series))

Honourable Mentions: Yoshida Kiyoshi (Kaiba (2008)); Nagashima Hiroyuki (964 Pinocchio (Fukui Shozin, 1991)); Jon Newton (Unhinged (Don Gronquist, 1982)); Lauren Kirk (Young Man with a Horn (Michael Curtiz, 1950))

Music can be lyrical and it can also be pure noise, and importantly for this category, I'm also thinking of the additional music along with the work of the composers mentioned in being factors for these works inclusion. What matters is if it sticks out and adds to the visuals, draws you in atmospherically. The high level of Japanese entries says a lot, as it proves anime director Yuasa Masaaki has a knack for great music in his work; that's including having opening title songs that, rather than poor J-pop, have something magical in them, the utterly captivating one for Kaiba and the one for winner Kemonozume that most live action movie would kill to have. Beautiful, sweet music to the hard, life affirming jazz, to glitch electronic. And then there's the one that may feel out of place, the drones of the former Video Nasty and low budget slasher Unhinged, a film many would dismiss as a poor film, but a surprise, a great deal of why its memorable because of the eeriness of Newton's droning keyboard sounds. It may put many off, but something as simple as atonal notes can mean a lot in adding to a film.

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Best Cinematography:

Winner: James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957))

Honourable Mentions: Guy Durban (Goto, Island of Love (Walerian Borowcyzk, 1968); Michel Kelber (French Cancan (1954)); Ennio Guarnieri (The Garden of the Finzi Contini (Vittorio De Sica, 1970)); Henry Sharp (The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928))

There could only be one winner, and there were so many films, including those I removed from the short list above, that were exceptional in this category. I learnt of him viewing John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966) last year, and visiting one of the most critically acclaimed films in his filmography, James Wong Howe's work in Sweet Smell of Success is clearly that of a master, a black and white film where the textures of monochrome are fully felt and the environments feel three dimensional as you watch Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster duel with words of venom, a noir mood of threat around newspaper journalists out for blood. So many films could've been included, but keeping to five films, including the winners, for each category, it was a painful but a necessary thing to choose the best of the best. The one that has added meaning in the honourable mentions is The Crowd, one of the many publically unavailable films I saw in the earliest part of the year in mass with other films, one I dismissed as the weakest of those viewings, but is one of the only few to have survived in memory while others I praised higher have vanished from memory. Its tender, thoughtful tone, even if naive, has stayed with me, as has the cinematography, over ninety years old yet still bold and throwing a gauntlet down to films barely five years old now to do better in evoking a world onscreen. It is a fitting irony its lasted in memory, grown, when I felt it was disappointing originally, and says a lot why it's as critically acclaimed as it is.

Other films considered for Best Cinematography were Tout Va Bien (1971), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and its incredible use of first person sequences, Rubber’s Lover (1996), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Barton Fink (1991), Medea (1969), Upstream Color (2013), Assassination (1964), The Horse Thief (1986), White of the Eye (1987) and Morgiana (1972).

Best Screenplay

Winners: Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman (Sweet Smell of Success (1957))

Honourable Mentions: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent and Jacques Rivette (La Belle noiseuse (Dir. Jacques Rivette, 1991)); Kikushima Ryuzo and Tanaka Tomoyuki (Sanjuro (Kurosawa Akira, 1962)); Albert Zugsmith (The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1957)); The Joel and Ethan Coen (Barton Fink (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1991))

The lengthy conversations between painter and his subject that last for what feels like an hour, always compelling; the deliciously funny parody of Yojimbo (1961) and the mocking of honour codes as rebelling samurai hide in the wardrobe like baffled sheep as Mifune Toshiro strides onwards with the right ideas at the right time; the pulp romance as Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone fall in love behind her husband Robert Stack's back; and director-writers expressing writer's block through a mix of horror, the abstract and desperate comedy as an acclaim stage writer unravels trying to write a film script. But you hear a line like "I'd hate to take a bite outta you. You're a cookie full of arsenic." and you realise whose won by a clear mile despite stiff competition. You don't ignore dialogue this nuanced in its nastiness especially when the film around it still has a sting fifty years or more later.

A film that were also considered was Dead & Buried (1981), Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon spinning a compelling little horror story that adds the grittier, nastier content of the eighties onwards.

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Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Lauren Becall (Young Man With A Horn (1950))

Honourable Mention: Shelley Duvall (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (Guy Maddin, 1997))

From http://youmayclap.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/waneandstewart.jpg

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: John Wayne (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962))

Honourable Mentions: Hijikata Tatsumi (Horrors of Malformed Men (Ishii Teruo, 1969)); John Goodman (Barton Fink (1991)); Frank Gorshin (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997))

The discrepancy, in quantity, in actresses to actors in both main and supporting categories is utterly disappointed for myself. It shows I need to keep an eye on great performances by women more. But as it stands, seeing Duvall in a Maddin film was something special, especially as she and Frank Gorshin were utterly memorable in their roles, why they're in their categories, and part of why, for a film viewed as a disappointment, I've become immensely fond of Guy Maddin's Twilight of the Ice Nymphs immensely.

For Best Supporting Actress, it is saddening she passed this year, but it's fitting to say that I have fallen in love with Lauren Becall, as a talented actor and as an individual onscreen in a film like Young Man With A Horn. In all the films I've seen her in, she has never felt like she is playing a weak female character, and even if she is technically a villain in Young Man With A Horn, you sympathise with her as a deeply flawed person because of how good an actress she is. As for best supporting actor, you have John Goodman being Satan incarnate, yet strangely understandable in his psychological problems, Gorshin being a sweet, kooky eccentric, and the masterstroke of casting the creator of the avant-garde dance Butoh, Hijikata Tatsumi, in a transgressive Edogawa Rampo mindfuck, allowed to both use his dance style in his character, and transform a Doctor Moreau figure into a deranged mass of guttural proclamations and spasming twitches as he lolls around on jagged rocks on the beach of his island of artificially created "freaks", something you'd never forget after witnessing. But it has to go to one person; regardless of his politics, regardless of anything that could be said about him off camera, John Wayne is loved because he played men onscreen who are noble even if they are ruffians, and especially in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the meaning gained with what his character does for another played by James Stewart more significant because of the charisma and heart he shows in the role.

Best Supporting Actor entries considered also included Jack Albertson in Dead & Buried (1981) and Kase Ryô in Like Someone in Love (2012).

From http://www.arts-wallpapers.com/movie_wallpapers/Thor-2011-Wallpapers/images/Thor%202011%20Wallpaper%203.jpg

Worse Viewing Experience of the Year

Winner: Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011)

Honourable Mention: Tokko (Abe Masashi, 2006/Anime Series); Dracula In Istanbul (Mehmet Muhtar, 1953); Big Tits Zombie (Nakano Takao, 2010) & Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (Tomomatsu Naoyuki and Nishimura Yoshihiro, 2009); The Devil's Business (Sean Hogan, 2011).

Unfortunately for every good film you see, there are also terrible experiences, and for me the worse aren't badly made, but those that inspire nothing emotionally for me. For the final category for this part of this special, it's worth tackling what was the worse and what I can learn from it. The obvious lesson is that irony ruins films. Two Japanese entries qualify for one, both Big Tits Zombie and Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl showing when you stop caring and languish in being cheap and dumb on purpose; even with their ridiculous titles and base desires, they could've been special if they weren't laughing at themselves and undercutting an earnestness they might've had. Compare them to the very low budget, but sweet and fun pinku softcore film The Strange Saga of Hiroshi the Freeloading Sex Machine (2005), which beats them to a pulp just with having the better title, and great strange films from Japan still exist, but they're being compromised by those purposely catering to the West rather than be what the director desires them to be. Irony, and when people try to be smart arsed with their film knowledge, is what also killed any good Sexy Killer (2008) might've had, which didn't get into the honourable mentions, worse because it's a film that could've been the quirky, Spanish sister to a film like May (2002), female characters on the outskirt of normalcy you get to cheer on. Instead you get another damned movie which references zombie films in dialogue and tires me. The other lesson is that, even if the promise is there, sometimes you'll be disappointed, a Turkish Dracula film that is utterly tedious to sit through when what you imagine in your head is a superior movie in every way. As for The Devil's Business, I want to see more films released by the American company Mondo Macabro, but I'm baffled why they picked up this film, a dull British horror film that shouldn't have any critical praise like it has done; even baring in mind its micro budget and the earnestness in making it, the lack of anything fresh or interesting is not acceptable whether it's a debut feature or your second.

It's neither only films either. I admit I only finished it just before Christmas, but if I'm allowed one hollow first opinion, I want to mention the 2006 anime Tokko once and kick its head in mercilessly. About demon slayers who are part demon, the first scenes after the opening credits, when it goes to quirky sex comedy, were a sobering realisation that this was going to be painful to sit through for all thirteen episodes. Along with live action cinema, I've realised that while great works are still made, from the 2000s onward to now, the quality barrier for even trash has been lost. Cheap, nasty looking digital animation, a haphazard script that is full clichés crushed down to their most lifeless forms, cramming in plot moments just before something is meant to be profound, all the bad things that you get in anime more from the Millennium onwards, and even botching its finale in a random clutter of scenes. It was an attempt to be a throwback to older, more adult anime of the nineties - gore, nudity and even the inexplicable fact that one of the female characters prefers being topless except for a biking jacket for the most part - but it feels fangless, with none of the perversity of older anime or anything that's actually good.

Yet the actual winner is something worse in terms of the morals behind it while better made technically, controversially choosing Thor, one of the Marvel Universe films, for the reason that, barring the sumptuous production design, what you have is the same clichés of a hero learning to become a better person regurgitated without meaning to it, its attempt at profundity merely a label for a visual food product. spending God knows how much money to make what is effectively a trailer for another trailer with no climatic end. By itself, and what it was meant to be a trailer for, The Avengers (2012), it's a thinly structured b-movie that Roger Corman would've wanted re-shots done for to boost up the action quota if he was its producer. This could easily come off as a snob dismissing multiplex cinema as I write this, but it comes off more from someone who wants to go to the multiplex more often but finds most blockbusters dull, done better in a pulp stories from the turn-of-the-century or an older more "reprehensible" b-flick, and looks on like Alan Moore in horror at how much money is spent on these comic book films, not just compared to how much comic books are made for in comparison, but for such little spectacle you actually get at the end for all that money. Norse mythology of Scandinavia has so much that could be shown onscreen that would, like any mythology and all religions, that you could create such incredible, and entertaining, films as a result, but few blockbusters and mainstream films, like Thor, actually use it, instead reducing it to something tedious and bland. Stories of Odin riding a eight legged horse, backstabbing and betrayals, Valkyries and Valhalla, runes and Norse symbols, bizarre incidents like Thor tricking frost giants by pretending to be a bride and dressing up as a woman to get his stolen hammer back, the strange, majestic folktales full of such details and idiosyncrasies that people have spun out over centuries, that would be fun to see onscreen, and instead you get great actors in Idris Elba and Asano Tadanobu twiddling their thumbs and merely saying exposition in silly armour instead of seeing  Ragnarok and monstrous dragons. The waste of such material and money is the real reason, above all else, that Thor was painful to watch, the fact that these Marvel Universe films are seen as high art of entertainment horrifying the more I think about it for how piss poor they are in telling a good story rather than any snobbish attitude to being entertained. I can imagine actually Vikings at a banquet throwing their tankards at Kenneth Branagh, who should've known better as an adaptor of Shakespeare plays, for telling such a dull story halfway through, had him dragged off the stage, and someone else tell one that was actually fun and had more frost giant fights instead.

Iron Virgin Jun (1992)

From http://ecx.images-amazon.com/
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Dir. Maezono Fumio

Within Japanese manga and anime, Nagai Go is one of the most important individuals within both mediums. Starting in manga in the late sixties, his success would continue on, increasing with his contributions to television anime in the seventies and becoming one of the most successful individuals in terms of volume. Volume of output, volume of successful creations, volume of live action and animated adaptations, and volume of praise he has both in Japan and internationally. He is as vital in building both anime and manga as it is today as Studio Ghibli and Tezuka Osamu, having juggled anything in his career from innovating the super robot genre to bringing more adult content to manga. He is also something, like the acclaimed manga writer Koike Kazuo, who is unapologetically dark and lurid in some of the creations of his. He has gained immense critical praise but not only has his more controversial works, that many would find shocking, not been ignored, but no attempt has been made to sweep them under the carpet. This is someone who has created work for children and popular franchises like Mazinger Z (1972-74) but was also someone who in one of his first manga series, Harenchi Gakuen (Shameless School) (1968-72), got attacked by Japanese parent groups and moral campaigners for creating a degenerate piece of filth. Just watching a few of the anime adaptations alone show Nagai's more adult side, whether they are accurate to his original manga or not. His most infamous creation is Kekko Kamen (1974-1978), a parody of the pop culture character Gekko Kamen, a female superhero who wears as mask, boots, a scarf and nothing else, completely naked in her battles with villains. Ironically with that example, Nagai created it as a joke for his editor, only for them to like the idea, and for this joke to lead to a 1991-92 anime and ten live action adaptations. One that wasn't a joke was Violence Jack (1973-73), which lead to an 1986-1990 anime that is only going to get an uncut version on DVD available in the US next year, which may lead to some very traumatised viewers knowing of the things that were removed and have traumatised myself with without having seen the content itself. Again, as someone who has a lot of his work to explore for the first time, it's obvious how diverse Nagai is. And he is important regardless. But once you know of works like Kekko Kamen and the such you cannot ignore such lurid works, proof if any of how diverse and fluid the mediums of anime and manga are. For better or worse, this mentality, from creating children's work to Violence Jack in Nagai, allows flexibility to take place in creating new stories, unpredictability happening more often.

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On her eighteenth birthday, the titular Jun flees a forced marriage proposal against her mother's wishes, her servant and friend Kurata pulled along with her. As Jun is a super strong Amazon who can break men's necks, even if she is as girly as you could be for a young woman, her mother sends anyone she can to force her to come back, anything from ninjas, a reward for members of the public to find her, even deviants for more twisted methods. Its forty six minutes long, which is both a very short amount of time and yet needs a lot to fill it out. Short because it'll suddenly end meaning you cannot choose a normal length narrative, but you need to find a narrative more appropriate for the length. If I describe the plot for this anime, it would be summed by this - Jun escapes, Jun eludes escape, gets captured, fights her mother for the finale - which is a minuscule plot for a short work with little flesh to its bones. The straight-to-video anime, unless feature length, was usually between thirty to fifty minutes long in their heyday, be it per episode or the one-off, and even a ramshackle one could still be a vigorous shot of content to sit through and watch. The worst kind in this type of anime would likely be the ones that feel like many hours to sit through in such a small space of time. Like many nineties anime, its candy coloured and gaudy. Average animation. The character designs for Jun and her mother are the only distinct aspect. Jun is drawn as a very feminine character, but the many times when she is in a fight she is drawn with a body builder level of muscles, hulking out all the sudden. (You'll notice the discrepancy between Jun in the screenshots shown - all I can say that she finds normal clothes that hide a lot of pounds of muscle). Her mother, to be honest, is drawn as a male villain design from something like Fist of the North Star - giant black eyebrows, a scowl, a monolithic bulk and height - only with breasts and wearing make-up.

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The real worth, if you can find it, in this anime is if you can appreciate the absurdity of pulp that is churned as continuously like sausage meat, looking for the kinks within each one. The faults, the odd ideas, the good ideas, the inexplicable things. Even the nature of this type of material is interesting to me, admittedly because being twenty or so years old now this type of anime is now very different from what it is now. Even average animation with Iron Virgin Jun is better than average computer aided animation. The anime is interesting for me more in the churned out nature of this kind of storytelling, the same story as many other similar tales but with new weird additions and faults, rather than as a "good" work, which I'm not going to suggest. It's strange attempts at humour, its peculiar plot, the many things that make it a "bad" anime also the rewarding things in its slight form. There is one contentious issue with Iron Virgin Jun that will put many off, a reminder that its original creator Nagai Go is also someone who has created some perverse ideas, although whether the follow is from the manga I cannot confirm. Affectively her main henchmen, Jun's mother calls forth a group called the Golden Cherry Boys to help her force Jun back. With cartoonish, mechanical animal heads where their crotches are, including a swan and a turtle, their main task, to put it politely, is to deflower Jun under the apparent belief her mother has that losing her virginity will snap her out of her "deluded" concept of escaping marring to continue their family's power and economic gain. Never mind that there is no nudity, no sex of any sort, and likely chops out most of the original manga's content, an erotic work. That it little blood let alone gore. That Jun, while some of the male characters help her when her back is in the corner, normally destroys everyone in her way including most of the Golden Cherry Boys. This aspect, particularly the jokey tone to it at points, is immediately going to offend someone for understandable reasons. I didn't know this was going to be in the anime upon seeing it for the first time, only knowing the title and Nagai was involved. It is still unsettling in places for me personally as well. But...it becomes more of a tasteless inclusion that is incredibly absurd. When it consists of animal heads and the desecration of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake at one point, I'm reminded that, in reality, something like the Golden Cherry Boys shouldn't be something to waste time on to criticise. That time should be spent on creating something that doesn't include that sort of thing to the objecting individual who'll hope their own creation is more popular. Far more offensive for me are the moments of stereotypical brattishness of Jun because no sane person who watches this, like myself, is going to take the tastelessness of the Golden Cherry Boys seriously, but stereotypes are more common problem.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ni1OwyIWLwQ/TMT6twOvoAI/AAAAAAAAAH4/
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What this is instead, and is the thing that makes Iron Virgin Jun interesting to me knowing its junky anime, is a mere slither of a peculiar area of pulp storytelling most of us know of but is rarely defined. Works which are not intentionally being politically incorrect or offensive but, forced into a tight, impossibly short deadline, delirious, maybe feted by alcohol or lack of sleep, where the creator(s) has to create something to keep the viewer/reader continuing to take interest in their work, having to do so through the most shocking content or weirdest idea they have in their mind. Perversely, evidence this anime qualifies for this term, is that it's trying to be a metaphor of how Jun has to grow from being a teenager to an adult woman. Her decision to go against her mother and be independent is effectively depicted with the two battering each other in a comic book finale scene rather than as a drama. Even the Golden Cherry Boys have a symbolic meaning in this way even if its a creepy way to depict it. (And the manga might've been more weird for this from just reading the Wikipedia summery). It even goes as far as having actual symbolism in how in one moment Jun sees an island out in the sea upside down, told she will only be able to reach it when she sees it the right way up. This is something of interest in pre-2000s anime, moments that don't work which are yet are fascinating in how they were even considered to be done and were put in the final work. You wonder watching anime like this what the maker(s) were thinking, but as a trashy work the result of these sorts of decisions are strangely watchable.

From http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31qBmk9I-SL.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

It is notorious how punishing deadlines for manga can be, as well as how much material for each release is required, punishing as a career from what is documented. In this position it wouldn't be surprising a work like Iron Virgin Jun was created, something as a result of a certain type of imagination and trying to write something that would grab a reader. And it is well known how underpaid animators are, anime a profession for those willing to sacrifice a lot of basic things to consider taking on as a job. A work like Iron Virgin Jun feels like the result of a manga pushed through by whatever peculiar ideas its creator had recreated for a straight-to-video anime as much a product to sell as it was an adaptation. You could find despair in the fact that something like this is made as much as a commodity only, but instead I find it more interesting to find entertainment in the inherent idea this was made in the first place, regardless of the flaws and things that cannot be defended at all. I can imagine this anime being created by people fed on long nights awake working on frames and ingesting a lot of Cup Noodle as basic nutrition, the back-story of how it was being made, as I try to imagine it, as much part of its story as the actual narrative. Iron Virgin Jun is too conventional to get on the list, but it's perfect to show this manic aspect of certain forms of entertainment, a frenzy of getting a work created along with the fevered ideas that were from the original manga, the result a strange mix altogether. I can just marvel at the fact it exists, decades later on, how it's come out of meat grinder as it is, the things that stick out amongst the merely watchable.

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Personal Rating:

Only for the incredibly curious. A work like this is obscure for clear reasons, even if it still managed an American DVD release. For those who want to explore how perplexing straight-to-video anime in the nineties could be, even if the work is not that good, this is worth digging into for those who intentionally find the most obscure works intentionally. If you will find it tedious to sit through, or find aspects offensive, aesthetically or in content, I don't recommend it. It's not the strangest you could find but nonetheless a good example of how a certain medium like anime can produce oddities that inexplicably exist. 

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)

From http://www.jposter.net/images/products/funeralroses.jpg

Dir. Matsumoto Toshio

I like to write about unconventional films, but there are some cases where the film in question has so much I could talk about, and are truly unconventional, that I feel daunted in trying to type this review. Funeral Parade of Roses is such a film. But, as with this film, there is a reason for this that I can write about if I am unsure what to say - that you could never get a film like these today, which is disappointing because a film like this feels more advanced and progressive than some of today, but a film like this is forty or so years old. Funeral Parade of Roses is playful and provocative in everything it does differently from other films. Set within the political and artistic hotbed of late Sixties Japan, the film follows Eddie, played by real life transsexual Peter, a male cross dresser who is in conflict with a rival drag queen over the affections of a drug smuggling cabaret manager Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya). Eddie is a psychologically complex person, flashes of his childhood and adolescence seen throughout the film which show what is bubbling under the surface of his makeup and elegant appearance. Shot in stark monochrome, the film is a hybrid of multiple cinematic forms, a narrative feature which yet has documentary interviews with drag queens and Peter the actor himself spliced in-between, a tone varying from the serious to the cartoonish.

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The film never becomes stale or procrastinates despite its tangent heavy tone, always on an interesting point. It not only has real documentary footage, but porn shoots within the narrative, and reflective the director's avant-garde and installation film making, experimental films within the film that we see by themselves and being created by the avant-garde filmmaker characters that make up the people that Eddie interacts with. The fiction is designed to pull along the reality with it, while the fiction itself is layered and filled with various and different sorts of material shown to the viewer. The result disrupts but also creates a narrative structure which places further importance on story points when they are returned to, that of Eddie's complicated life, as well as flesh the real content, set with Japanese gay subculture, out. It allows the director to be more flexible, to have humour against the serious, to the point of ridiculous, sped up handbags-at-dawn spats and literal dialogue balloons, and have a tone that can even lean on exploitation-like uses of sex and grit. At times the sexuality is pronounced and close to a pinku film. 

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The open, matter-of-fact view of its gay subject matter is refreshing, having fun with subverting gender - three women at urinals for example - and is also unapologetically erotic and titillating. Peter, when made up in full make-up or when the camera lingers over his body in the shower like it does on actresses in other movies, is unbelievably beautiful, to the point as a heterosexual man I will add him, in this film, as one of the most gorgeous individuals filmed on a camera I've seen. That he is charismatic and a good actor makes this better, something to be proud of that he would later become the court fool, an important side character, in Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985). (It is odd I can say his filmography also contains a Guinea Pig film, but that's why Japanese cinema and its ease in blending different areas makes someone like Sean Penn look lazy). Funeral Parade of Roses enforces on me particularly, as a viewer interacting with cinema in direct communication, that my own personal sexuality is an attraction to femininity, all the things stereotypically attributed to it and when it is reconstructed by women and transgender people - curves, heightened facial features like eye lashes, clothing and textures, the more open ability to express thoughts and emotions than many males etc. The film is as much on the nature of gender by proving beauty is pansexual, seeing the drag queens and transgender women in this, their lovers and clients as well, and how gender and sexuality is fluid even if many of them prefer acting and dressing as stereotypical images of women, wearing the most stylish boots and dresses they can afford, and being immensely glamorous unless a female gang makes derogatory comments and a fight breaks out between them.

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Structurally, the narrative is as playfully put together as the experimental sequences, chronology out of order for large portions of it, built up as more is revealed, a pastiche of Streets of Shame (1956) or A Woman Ascends The Stairs (1960) with a subversion of a famous tale I cannot actually name because it'll be a spoiler for the ending. Together they create an enticing character drama as it's build up with flashbacks in Eddie's life. The film throughout always feels bold, still daring today. It comes from an era that may have been terrible for many things, for things that feel quaint now - of pot smoking and equal opportunity nudity - but the film is as much a view of the melting pot of art, social interaction and sexuality that is vibrant. The direct references to real life art and subculture "happenings" in the film add a historical importance, documentary on the period in Japanese society, particularly footage of a protest/conceptual art piece in the middle of a street, the titular parade of the film's title involving men dressed in tinfoil gas masks and black clothes. It's also a film catching when the tide would roll back, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, the spot where this parade becoming empty, paper banners left scattered on the ground, or the isolated and wounded protestor stuck in an apartment complex corridor by himself with no one of his group to protect him from the police. As we take interest in Eddie's life, we have as much interest in the (real) world around him in digressions on various topics. This is something badly missed in most art cinema of the present, the layers of culture that would be embedded in the background of the main narrative. Viewing this film, and those in the same vein like Throw Your Books Away, Rally In The Streets (1971), feels like an adrenaline shot.

 

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

It's subject matter is still unconventional, in the climate that we still occupy where the notion of transgender, though respected, is in the realm outside of conventional gender politics rather than fully embraced as many would desire. But that is not enough for an abstract rating, as it could mean a film as good as this or a patronising drama with less than good quality filmmaking depending on what was made. What does so here is a presentation which, on another viewing, is still unpredictable and throws new angles on the material. It's a film with a lot to take in. It has a consistent, fascinating, and most importantly, engaging drama in its centre, but Funeral Parade of Roses is also different still in what you'd presume cinema is in the modern day, a difference somewhat needed again. Suddenly there are repeats of a man sneezing, in the middle of a dramatic beat, the frame almost slipping, unexpectedly in one moment, not connected to the main story, what would be seen as redundant in modern cinema, but fills and expands the tone of the film here for greater impact. Snippets of interviews and footage from other sources are intercut into scenes, disrupting and effecting them, adding texture and character. The blend of fiction, reality and artificiality creates an unpredictable tone, such as a dramatic scene suddenly turning into a Japanese period drama through a character's preferred dress and a specific music cue chosen, without becoming ironic, always empathetic to all the characters. Whilst retaining a straight forward narrative, the film's structure is inherently unconventionally.

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Personal Opinion:

What makes the Sixties in art in general enduring for me is, while a lot of it could be self indulgent and pretentious, it still possesses art that is still original and fresh today to see or listen to. The indulgence is enchanting, backing away from the predictable, and in cinema, even a wobble of a handheld camera feels like a flourish, accidents or things done on purpose bringing technical and aesthetic style rarely seen today. In the case of this film, it means a lot to take in on multiple viewings, a film that is easily accessible but also revealing new things on each viewing I have of it. Once it gets to the end, capping off with an unsettling yet poetic ending that reinterprets a legend in a pansexual light, it also succeeds as existing in its own type of cinema, the blurring of genre and tone you get in cult cinema, particularly art films like this, where it never becomes tedious even if one found it frustrating. Moments feel like they wouldn't be carried on into filmmaking of later decades but they stand out nonetheless as very distinct filmmaking which I wish was still frequently done. 

Videotape Swapshop Review: Shogun Assassin (1980)

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Dirs. Robert Houston & Kenji Misumi

Strangely, a film like Shogun Assassin is as famous for being a Video Nasty despite, as recent documentary releases on the Video Nasty debacle prove, it wasn't even a candidate for the prosecution lists. Its of course a film as famous as the original Lone Wolf and Cub films it was built from, one of the few re-cut and re-edited versions of an original, foreign work that is still loved, not looked down upon like a dubbed Hong Kong martial art film, and in some ways is loved more than the originals and not necessarily for nostalgia reasons. Seen in its remastered form, literally rebuilt and probably better looking than the original release of it was, Shogun Assassin shows itself up to be an impressive work by itself.

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Its a conventional manga based samurai story, though because its adapted from a manga from Koike Kazuo, it has some pretty insane content that would increase as the original Lone Wolf and Cub films went on. What really stands out for the film, why it has a Medium rating, is its composition, how the film was made, which makes it far and away more alien, existing in its own universe. With its dubbed voices, comic book violence and brilliant cinematography, I could have dreamt the film up rather than have seen it. The music is incredible, its dated synthesizers ominous and adding a cathartic power to the visual content. As much as I liked the Lone Wolf and Cub films that made this one, Shogun Assassin is the more atmospheric interpretation.

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Personal Opinion:

For a full review, read my Videotape Swapshop review here. Also take a look at the Video Nasty reviews by my fellow authors if you are interested.