Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Elaine is the queen of the Rotterdam Festival each year, and she’s back with another great report for us today:
34th ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Yes, I promised you reviews of Susanne Bier’s “Brothers” and the two Kim Ki-duk flicks I’ve seen in the past two days. Don’t worry. You’ll get them, along with a bunch of other reviews of good films and some festival news. First I’m going to focus on a bad film, though, because as much as I’d like to talk about Kim Ki-duk, who is in my opinion the greatest filmmaker currently gracing the planet, I need time to think about all the glowing superlatives I’m going to heap on him. And since it’s much easier to eviscerate a bad film when you’re in a hurry and in no state to think properly, today’s review will be of a bad film. Get ready to sharpen those knives, Miike fans. You’re going to need them.
First, however, an update from the zombification front.
Make no mistake, thinking about what superlatives to bestow on Kim Ki-duk is hard for me right now, because the process of zombification to which I alluded in my first report is well and truly underway. The festival may be a mere three days old, but I feel like I’ve been at it for the full ten days, which bodes ill for the next seven days.
Let’s face it, gentle reader. I’m changing. I’m turning into a zombie, and some eerie sixth sense I didn’t have before tells me that zombiehood is not where it’s going to end. I am destined to turn into something far scarier than a zombie ere the festival is over. Being only in the beginning stages of zombification, I have no idea yet what this something far scarier might be, but I have no doubt it will be bad. Mind-numbingly bad.
Consider what’s already happening to my body, after several weeks’ trying desperately to meet a work deadline and two days’ film-watching. It is frightening.
Yesterday morning, before heading to Rotterdam, I looked into the mirror, both to check if the bags under my eyes were as huge as they felt and to put on some mascara. Staring at my eyes, I got the impression they looked a bit different from the way they normally do. I don’t just mean they looked sunken; that much is a given when you spend as much time looking at screens as I have lately. No, what I mean is that they seemed to have changed colour. They looked... greener. Needless to say, I blamed this perception on weariness; after all, it is easy to get a little paranoid when you’re dog-tired and have seen a few too many strange movies. But when I got to Rotterdam, I met a friend I hadn’t seen for some time, and the first thing she said after “Hey, how are you?” and “Yeah, you look it” was, “Are you wearing green contacts?”
And that’s not the scariest thing that’s happening to me. It seems my brain is turning to pulp, as well. Yesterday evening, I spent some time in between films chatting with Ruth, the lovely girl who sells arthouse DVDs on the first floor of Cinerama, where half of the industry screenings take place. Knowing I’m a sinologist, Ruth asked me what the three blood-red characters on the postcards she’d been given by one of her suppliers by way of merchandise meant. It took me two minutes to establish that they formed the name, “Akira Kurosawa”. I won’t go into the details of the reasoning behind this conclusion, as they wouldn’t be of interest to any but the greatest film and language freaks among you; all I can say is that under normal circumstances, I would have figured out the meaning of those three characters in less than ten seconds, even if they were Japanese rather than Chinese and the second character doesn’t actually exist in Chinese. Which means my brain now functions at approximately one twelfth of its usual speed.
Scary, huh? To tell you the truth, I’m surprised I can still type these reports.
Anyway, I’m kind of busy right now, not to mention feeling a little out of it, so I’m going to stick to one review today. More will follow later.
(And for the record, because I know that some of you ARE great film and language freaks: “Akira” translates as “bright, clear”, whereas “Kurosawa” means “black swamp”. Pretty cool name, if you ask me.)
IZO
(Written by Shigenori Takechi, directed by Takashi Miike)
Half an hour into the film, the lady behind me fell asleep and snored audibly for the next ten minutes. A third of the audience left before the first hour was up, and not just because it was late and they had to catch the last train home. That, really, is all you need to know about “Izo”, Takashi Miike’s latest and most expensive ever crap fest. It is dull. Let me repeat that. The film is D-U-L-L.
Now I know some of you went a little wild at the sight of the “Izo” trailer a while ago. You loved the images of the samurai, the big swords, the vampires, the snakes and Takeshi Kitano and decided that this had to be one hell of a cool Japanese flick. After all, a Miike-Kitano collaboration simply had to result in a film worth drooling over, right?
Wrong. “Izo” holds the distinction of being not only the most incomprehensible Miike film I’ve seen (which is saying a lot), but the most incomprehensible film I’ve ever seen, full stop. I don’t know what Shigenori Takechi and Miike were smoking when they drafted their ideas for the film, but whatever it was, they should lay it off. Taking hallucinatory substances while writing a script is only advisable if your name happens to be Charlie Kaufman.
And yet it could have been so good. Deep down in the mess, buried beneath the tremendous pile of pretentious twaddle that makes up one fourth of the film, is a good premise. A great one, even. And it’s obvious Miike had some money to burn on this project. Both the production values and the cinematography are excellent, and a whole army of major and minor stars shows up for cameos, including the aforementioned Takeshi Kitano. But dear God, the plot. I’ve never seen such a convoluted mess in my life. It’s not just that it’s incomprehensible, although it is that, and extremely so; far worse, it’s dull and pretentious. Try to get your head around that one – a Miike film that is dull and pretentious. Bad, eh?
It doesn’t look so bad at first. The film opens in vintage Miike style, which is to say that first we get a little exposition on the production of sperm in young males, and then we turn to a Jesus-like guy hanging from a cross who is killed in an absolutely beastly manner. We are talking about intense pain here, and gallons upon gallons of blood. Then, to make matters even more fascinating, there’s a cut to some black-and-white stock footage of World War II: Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, war planes, bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dying victims, the works. At this point, the film actually looks like it might be interesting – like it might be a meditation on war and evil, life and death, religion and reality, or something like that. But then we cut to some weird people with snakes, in a time that cannot easily be pinpointed, and this is where things start getting bad. You see, the people are talking about Izo (ostensibly the man who died on the cross, who has apparently been resurrected), and the way they talk about him is as follows:
Character no. 1: “His is formless, but he has a form.”
Character no. 2: “He is soulless, but he has a soul.”
Character no. 3: “Therefore, he must be irrationality.”
These are actually a few of the more intelligible lines in the film. The rest are so faux-Jungian, pseudo-Freudian and pseudo-philosophical that they’re downright incomprehensible, and not in a fun way.
What it all boils down is this (I had to consult the fest bible for this, because I couldn’t really tell from the film). Izo is a low-born samurai who in 1865 is executed by the shogun’s men. For some reason that isn’t explained (I think), Izo’s spirit comes to possess the body of a man living in present-day Tokyo (I think). The reincarnated assassin, who doesn’t like being reincarnated (I think), wants revenge, and so goes on a killing spree through time and space, slaughtering everyone from Buddhist monks and politicians (amongst whom Takeshi Kitano, who gets to do nothing interesting and is utterly wasted in his small part) to his own mother. In between acts of random violence, he fucks Mother Earth (I think) and a woman who claims to be part of his soul (I think). As far as I can tell, these women don’t really attempt to stop him from killing. A lot of other people (and gods, and goddesses, and demons, I think) do, but nothing can stop Izo, because Izo is irrationality incarnate, and as an imperfect entity in a perfect world, he is unbeatable, because he is negation itself. Or so we’re told, in what must surely amount to the worst dialogue ever committed to celluloid (and yes, that’s counting a lot of pretentious French flicks).
Now I guess this all sounds like a lot of fun. A murderer with a grudge who randomly moves through time and space to kill people, and gets to screw Mother Earth and be accompanied by a beautiful lady who tells him she’s his soul – surely that’s got to be entertaining, right? Well, no. There are about three chuckles in the film. What remains is two hours of absolute drivel in which:
-- Izo kills lots of people (for the most part in uncustomary bland style – if you’re looking for spectacular samurai fights or vintage Miike-style murders, go watch “Zatoichi” or “Ichi the Killer” again);
-- The powers that be meditate on his being imperfection and irrationality (I use the nouns advisedly);
-- Izo gets to move through time once more to kill more nameless people;
-- Izo’s adversaries, with Izo’s sword in their guts, tell him this hurts (which is funny the first time around, but gets stale pretty quickly);
-- The powers that be get to spout more faux-Buddhist wisdom or vaguely Jungian clichés;
-- Izo gets to kill a few more nameless people in yet another place in yet another time.
And so it goes on, ad nauseam, without much in the way of an explanation or (God forbid) a storyline. No character is properly introduced; no character has a back story or so much as a clearly defined personality, let alone an actual character arc. They just appear, spout a few inane lines, and then either die or disappear, while Izo commits a few more uninspired mass murders. At certain times, this sequence of events is interrupted by stock footage of war and the damage it causes, and these are actually the most interesting parts of the film. I left the screening wishing I’d seen a documentary based on the stock footage Miike shows in the film, rather than the useless two hours he weaves around it. If that isn’t a scathing indictment of a film, I don’t know what is.
Now it may be that there’s something in this for people who are either very, very drunk or very, very stoned, but quite frankly, I doubt it. Because even the greatest stoner wants SOME kind of story in his films, and this film doesn’t have one. It just moves back and forth in time, between reality and a universe Hiëronymus Bosch couldn’t have conceived of, without any coherence, development or emotional involvement whatsoever. Nor are there any good laughs in it; what little humour there is mostly falls flat, and there's not much to begin with. And it’s not even enjoyable on a purely visceral level, because after Izo’s initial demise on the cross, the fights, murders and sex get pretty pedestrian (yes, you read that correctly), and moreover they keep being interspersed with those dreadful, horrible lines which are supposed to pass for dialogue. So, basically, it’s an unexciting splatter movie which makes no sense whatsoever, is short on actual thrills and gags and comes equipped with unbelievably pretentious, un-Miike-esque dialogue in which not even the greatest stoner with the greatest penchant for bizarre dialogue will find any merit.
And you know what the worst thing is? I can’t even tell whether Miike is taking the piss or not. There are times when you feel he’s actually trying to make a point (why else would he include the black-and-white footage and the pseudo-philosophy?), but unfortunately, these are outweighed by the number of times you feel he’s only trying to waste as many stars, bright ideas and funds as possible. Because really, this could have been a fun film. It should have been, what with the originality of the premise and the talent involved. But it isn’t. It’s a giant turd of an incoherent mess which will leave even the most fanatical Miike apologist scratching his head in wonder and disbelief, and rightly so.
So there you have it. The Miike-Kitano collaboration, so awful it hurts. What a shameful waste of potential.
Elaine
Ooooof. Harsh. But I’ve always thought that Miike is a hit-and-miss kind of guy. I just finally saw GOZU and loved it, but that’s not always the case with his work. Great review, Elaine. Keep it up, and good luck with the whole zombification issue.
"Moriarty" out.
