KAMIKAZE CINEMA
KAMIKAZE CINEMA: MILOCRORZE: A LOVE STORY AND DEADBALL
I don’t know what it is about Japanese movies lately, but they seem to be doing everything to outdo their own levitra without prescription ottawa reputation for balls-out craziness. But apparently when American movies and TV shows start aping the blood-spraying viscera and game-show zaniness previously reserved for the Japanese, it’s time for the Japanese http://www.fingermedia.tw/?p=1322817 to up the ante. With the upstart label Sushi Typhoon nurturing a talented roster of directors, actors and FX artists (many of whom wear interchangeable hats) in cahoots with producer Yoshinori Chiba (who produced no less than FIVE films playing at this year’s festival, including Deadball, Yakuza Weapon, Cold Fish, Helldriver and Karate Robo Zaborgar), the Japanese low budget gore film has been given an injection that’s keeping a lot of underground craftsmen busy.
Director Yudai Yamaguchi (Battlefield Baseball, Meatball Machine, Cromartie High School) revisits baseball buffoonery with Deadball, celebrating its world premiere on July 15 with Yamaguchi, star Tak Sakaguchi and producer Yoshinori Chiba in person.
When Jubai Yakyu accidentally kills his father in a bizarre baseball accident, he vows to never viagra professional scam play ball again, and grows up to be a violent juvenile delinquent (37 year old Tak Sakaguchi, convincingly playing a 17 year old) who achieves involuntary celebrity status for killing gangsters and serial rapists. Thrown into a brutal detention home where the guards exercise overzealous anal violation and serve human vomit for breakfast, his punishment involves being forced to play baseball for the juvie league, where delinquents are pitted against each other in a perverse spectacle for the neo-Nazi prison warden.
When the team is carted off to a crumbling, isolated concrete schoolyard for their first game against an outside team – the sadistic sexpots of St. Black Dahlia High School – with an audience consisting of a handful of Nazis, a Klaus Nomi-lookalike and a female pop-idol duo (?) – it dawns on Jubai and his motley crew of teammates that this particular bloodsport is a fight to the death. But as if the belles of Black Dahlia aren’t bad enough, the warden has a secret weapon up her sleeve that will prove more than just a physical challenge to the supernaturally endowed pitcher.
As with many previous Chiba productions – Fudoh, Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police, Mutant Girls Squad – Deadball is an over-the-top bloodbath full of absurd situations and characterizations with no grounding in reality, and that’s part of the fun.
Director Yoshimasa Ishibashi is well known to fans of Japanese weirdness as the creator of The Fuccon Family (aka Oh Mikey!) and Vermiliion Pleasure Night, for which he appeared in person at Fantasia 2001 (despite what imdb incorrectly lists as the respective release dates). In his schizophrenic, psychedelic, musical fairytale samurai film Milocrorze: A Love Story – for which he will appear in person on July 15 – the talents of rising Japanese star Takayuki Yamada are showcased through three different roles (and when I say different, these characters couldn’t be further apart, marking the actor’s versatility).
In the Willy Wonka-esque framing story, Ovraneli Vreneligare is a small red-haired office worker (played by a child actor) who lives alone in his gingerbread house, biding his time uneventfully until one day he sees a beautiful woman named Milocrorze on a park bench and falls in love with her, only to be thrown into the clutches of uncontrollable heartbreak for the next 300 years (after which point he is 37 years old). With no warning we are thrust into another story involving a tough-love youth counsellor (Yamada) in shades and a pimped-out white suit who “gives great advice to wimpy assholes” through his popular hotline. Dispensing horrific dating advice to the teenagers desperate enough to phone him, he berates and humiliates his callers before breaking into choreographed dance numbers flanked by two scantily-clad women. In the third, longest and unchronologically edited segment, Yamada plays Tamon, a lovelorn loser whose florist girlfriend is hijacked by highway hooligans while he sits by helpless. Determined to “become a real man” who will never again be victimized, he goes from barroom brawler to merciless samurai as he makes his way from back alley tattoo parlours to a brothel full of candy-coloured courtesans in pursuit of his lost love.
Production design is through the roof, with bright pinks and greens, technicolor sunsets, alternately saturated and blown-out (a color scheme in fact reminiscent of Fantasia 2009 award-winner Memories of Matsuko), while the violence is manga-ized with bubbles and bolts. Ishibashi’s commercial/TV skit background is certainly a benefit in the style department but don’t expect too much in the form of a narrative thread.
One thematic thread that does run through both films is a self-reflexive poke at the perceived crisis of masculinity that’s been gripping pop culture for the last decade. With the depiction of violence as a desperate, maladaptive strategy for maintaining control, of weakness as almost exclusively a male problem, and even cross-dressing characters that physically call traditional notions of masculinity into question, gender politics are addressed and subverted through cartoonish exaggeration. Of course, there is so much onscreen mania that subtext like this is really secondary. A more pressing mandate: to suck it up and play ball!
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DEADBALL has its World Premiere on July 15 at 11:55pm and screens again July 16 at Noon, with director Yudai Yamaguchi, star Tak Sakaguchi and producer Yoshinori Chiba in person. More details on the film page HERE
MILOCRORZE: A LOVE STORY screens on July 15 at 7:00pm in the Hall Theatre with director Yoshimasa Ishibashi in person. More details on the film page HERE.