Hey folks, Harry here in Sitges. I'm going to be seeing Nakata's DARK WATER on the big screen later today... along with THE DISCOVERY OF HEAVEN, TED BUNDY, LA SIRENE ROUGE and a ton of great genre shorts... Sigh.... You San Francisco readers enjoy the film... Nakata is one of the real horror geniuses that we have nowadays. Here ya go...
Hi Harry and Jay,
Here's a review I received from "Usumcasane" of a very Japanese horror flick named Chaos. The film was directed by Hideo Nakata (The Ring series) and it is playing at the Four Star theatre in San Francisco on Oct. 9. Would you mind putting this up asap so some of our readers could get a chance to see it in theatres.
Thanks,
Atul
Have you ever noticed how, once you pass a certain threshold of obscurity, the various blurbs you can find about films on the internet are next to useless?
Chaos is one of those films. I had no idea what I was going to be seeing, I just went, because I knew it was by Hideo Nakata (The Ring, Dark Water) and the Japanese have got the horror genre sewed up, nailed down, tied to a stake in the backyard and calling them "SIR!" these days.
Anyway, Chaos is NOT a horror movie. But it's excellent anyway. What is it? It's a neo-noir, and a high-quality straight-up one at that. At the beginning, a woman is kidnapped. It's pretty straightforward for about five minutes, then it starts getting twisty, jumping around in chronology and showing you what -really- happened, that sort of thing. And the twists are great, I don't mean it's straight-forward in that way. It's just clear and character-driven, without much in the way of gross stuff, minimal violence, just suspense and a lot of shifty people with shifty motivations, the way a good neo-noir should be. Will it confuse that one friend you've got who sits next to you in the theater and keeps asking questions like, "Was that the guy that shot the other guy?" Well, yeah. But it's an excellent flick... apparently the spirit of Raymond Chandler has gone overseas for good.
If you're lucky and this gets posted fast enough, you can see this film at the Four Star in SF (23rd and Clement) until Wednesday the 9th. If you
miss it (which I almost did... who knew they were going to get Chaos, for God's sake? They're not even having a festival and the movie's around 3
years old), you can find it on dvd at the usual places (one of them being www.dvdasian.com Until next time, stay away from the red-taped doors,
-Usumcasane
