Camera Japan (Dutch festival) 2007 roundup

Friday 15-06-2007

Tekkon Kinkreet
An anime that oozes style from the soundtrack by Plaid to the background design with Indian and Indonesian themes to the kinetic action scenes. There is much less oozing on the substance side. The characters are interesting but it all remains a bit black and white :-) 7.5/10

Meatball Machine
With lot's of ickyness, gore, silly bodysuits and even the very Japanese kind of exploitation that is alien tentacle rape this should have been a lot of fun but I still was bored. It could have been that I was very tired after a days work and it being the end of the week and all, so I must be mild in judging it. The main thing is that I had seen all the ingredients before and they didn't cook anything new or even interesting with it. 6/10

Wicked Flowers
I was tired but decided to also go to the midnight screening of this film that was announced as looking like Alice in Wonderland and having 'a thought provoking socio-political message'. Again a dissapointment. It's not all bad but it doesn't look like Alice in Wonderland and there isn't much of a message. It was also too theatrical to be able to totally engage me in my state of tiredness. Add to this that I saw the main twist coming from a mile away and the film ending on a final cliffhanger kind of twist that was just stupid and I was very sorry that I didn't go home earlier... 5/10


Saturday 16-06-2007

Nippon Connection retro: Crazy Love (Japan 1968, 16 mm, 93 Min, Director: OKABE Michio)
An experimental feature (the English title on the print was Crazy Lave :-) that is influenced by all kinds of western happenings of the time such as American experimental cinema (Warhol), Swinging London, Godard, the Beatles and James Bond. It's basically a series of random musical vignettes and as such it becomes a bit repetitive. It's also too experimental or maybe to melancholic to be as funky and happening as I think it wants to be. Still a fascinating time capsule 6/10

Yokohama Mary
A documentary feature about a mysterious ex-prostitute homeless woman that, so we learn, has been one of Yokohama's most famous citizens, a landmark even. Some of the segments could have been edited a little bit tighter but again a fascinating glimpse into other times and the lives of a few people who can stand proud and say 'I did it my way'. 7/10

Love Kill Kill
This is a film with all the elements you might expect in a Japanese indie, bizarre humor, bizarre characters and bizarre situations played totally straight. It's a story about a lonely man who likes watching rough sexploitation movies, a girl who likes to stalk people and a woman who becomes the object of both their desire. The movie is hampered by being shot ugly on video and having only average acting but it's still worth a look 6/10

Faces Of A Fig Tree
A movie in the same category as Love Kill Kill but with more ambition. There is a nice use of artificial light (lots of blue and yellow) and flowing of timelines from the present to the past and back. But this film is also not perfect (I might be in a more critical mode than usual or this festival selection is really a bit disappointing overall). It's hard to find the mood the film wants it's viewers to be in with characters entering and leaving the story almost unexplained and a few abrupt changes in the storyline. It's only at the end that the movie really comes together but then it reveals itself to be very satisfying. 7/10

Hula Girls
A movie based very much on proven formulas, mainly UK comedies like the Full Monty, but they already had me at Hula :-) It's a sweet and fun film with only a bit too much tearjerking for my liking (especially at the grand finale. Why everyone needs to cry, again, at that point was beyond me). it's not an instant classic but a nice way to end this day. 7.5/10

Sunday 17-06-2007

Only one film today but it was an omnibus of 5 shorts so it felt like more. Again the theater wasn't even half full... maybe all the Japanese movie buffs had already been to Rotterdam? :-) Ah well, onto the movie:

Female
Directed by:
Tetsuo Shinohara - Momo
Ryuichi Hiroki - Taiyô no mieru basho made
Suzuki Matsuo - Yoru no shitasaki
Miwa Nishikawa - Megami no kakato
Shinya Tsukamoto - Tamamushi

Like I said an omnibus of 5 shorts that are connected only by being based on stories by female writers and four of them being about sexuality (Ryuichi Hiroki's short seems a bit out of place with a focus on 'escaping the rat race'). They are bookended by fun but slightly out of place quasi-erotic dance numbers that could have been from a Britney Spears, or similar, music video but there is nothing to really tie these shorts together. The directors I was interested in the most, Hiroki and Tsukamoto, deliver the weakest stories. I actually thought that the short made by Suzuki Matsuo was Tsukamoto's entry at first because he has a similar style. The opener by Tetsuo Shinohara has a beautiful mix of nostalgia and erotic tension but the most intriguing of them all, for me, was Miwa Nishikawa's story about a young boy and the mother of a girl from school that takes him to her house to study. The girl is too preoccupied to notice that the boy can't take his eyes of her mother, but her mother does. Of course he is much too young to do anything, but the mother feels lonely so she let's him stare at her. While the other shorts feel, as shorts tend to do, only like sketches this one had that emotional an moral complexity that I would have expected from something associated with Ryuichi Hiroki. So I'm glad to have seen it, but as often the case with this type of anthology, it's a mixed bag that never becomes more than the sum of it's parts. 7/10



Ardvark here again. Thanks Peter, I obviously missed out on some and envy you!

Links:
Peter's Camera Japan topic (contains a bit more info and reactions).
The Camera Japan website.