Zero Degrees of Separation: My 2011 At The Movies

I am still, it turns out, terribly susceptible to the delirium of festival fever, and in 2011, the temperature cranked past even my own thresholds, with the demented overlap in the last quarter making matters even more grueling. At the end of that week and a half, I was down with a particularly vicious strain of influenza.

Cinemanila was still the sovereign colossus, as domestic festivals go, Cinema One Originals the squirrely daredevil, Cinemalaya the tasteful prude, although they seem to have grown an extra set of balls to let films like Amok slip through. All three had a robust year. And, despite the persistent and exasperating lament that local cinema is on a downward spiral, and despite bully tactics from the big studios, who got their ass handed back to them at one point, and by a delightful indie zombie film at that, things have settled into a groove of comfortable productivity. The year was copious with moments, still not enough perhaps, as it never always is. But at least now there's an envelope to push.

I flew to HKIFF just as the year begun and co-programmed the 4th .MOV a little after half of it had come to pass. And these were the twin piths of my festival year, the latter slightly moreso. I also curated an exhibit for it, designed posters, translated parts of the poetry anthology we launched, had a hand in marketing, got wrung through the logistical brouhaha, was as privvy, in as hands-on a manner as possible for someone a few jurisdictions away from the main team, to the exhaustion, and exhilaration, of running even a festival as small as ours, not to mention the spate of Club.MOV screenings leading up to it, abolished by default with the sudden, saddening foreclosure of Mogwai Cinematheque. After this, I vowed to never again grumble over another festival's snafus and glitches. But I'd do it all over again in a snap. And three years from now, if the world doesn't end as scheduled, I will be.

Movie-going, the communal experience of going out to a screening and watching a film with people, remained my advocacy. And I try, as much as I can, to disqualify torrents and DVDs from my list, charitably allotting one slot for it, with this year going to a film I almost saw in a theater. I did cheat a little with a couple of films I saw publicly, albeit in another country, but the rest of the list are films shown in Manila, never mind the nature of its run, never mind if it even had a run. As long as it wasn't at home on my TV, or worse, on my laptop. I did see a lot of films that way, and I imagine a few could've possibly made the cut. But with or without these rules, I suspect the list won't be too far off from this one.

I did miss Lav's Century of Birthing. I missed Adolf's Isda (Fable of the Fish), too. I missed Teng Mangansakan's Cartas De La Soledad. I missed Victor Villanueva's My Paranormal Romance. I missed Regiben Romana's Sakay Sa Hangin (Windblown). I missed Jewel Maranan's Tundong Magiliw. These are some of my sins of omission, if you will, prey to my usual deficiencies of stamina and time and resources and singled out because they're filmmakers I like. I did get to see nearly all the locally shown foreign product, arthouse staples and commercial tentpoles both, which ran the usual gamut of odious to tepid to fits of spunk here and there that tended to dissipate the further away you got from the works, with only Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, Wim Wenders' Pina, Justin Lin's Fast Five, Gore Verbinski's Rango and Tarsem's Immortals having sufficient traction and exuberance to deserve a shout-out, not to mention Todd Haynes' foray into longform TV, Mildred Pierce. I liked them all, sure. I liked a tremendous amount of films this year, mostly local. But for my 2011 list, anything less than love I had little room for.

1. 20 Cigarettes (James Benning, USA, HKIFF): James Benning asks 20 of his friends to smoke in their respective environments and films what happens to them in the time it takes to finish a stick. His first work that has to do with people rather than landscapes or architecture, has a strand of voyeurism that can't be helped but is also partially the point. As knotty to parse and even knottier to push, this, like all his films, behaves like an installation but it's the conditions of a theater that are conducive to what it ultimately asks of us: the acute observation of duration in stillness.

2. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, Cinemanila): As disingenuous, and as lazy, as it is to invoke the word "magical" for something shot through with secrets and lies and regrets and deaths and the banality of the everyday, regardless of how wryly funny it can sometimes get, no other word feels more apt, even if it's only to describe what random lightning turns the otherwise barren Turkish countryside into. The search for a dead body becomes, for a posse of crusty and haggard civil servants, a night, and eventually a day, of going round in circles, of straying off paths, of detours, the oddest and loveliest being a small village they repair to where the lights go out and an angel appears to serve them coffee.

3. Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy, HKIFF): Later on, when the nature of its metaphysics becomes apparent, you tend to marvel at the purity with which it was poeticized, not least with that single take everybody who's seen it is frothing in the mouth about, and rightly so, and with what is hands down the finest goat acting in the history of cinema. The four times of the title refers to the four lives that supposedly live within us and that we go through during rebirth: man, animal, vegetable, mineral. It is also, incidentally, the cast list.

4. Breather (Pahinga) (Khavn De La Cruz, Philippines, .MOV) : The cancer diary it started out as became something more after Khavn's father passed away during the editing, something closer to exorcism, to magical thinking, but not to eulogy, as it's loss is not so much given over to the part of nostalgia that aches but more to the part that exhilarates. A love letter, really, as much to the filmmaker confronting his own mortality as to the parent who left a hole when he succumbed to his, but also to that brief and immortal time they both spent in the shadow of their longest goodbye.

5. 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, Japan, Cinemanila): Having long parted ways with Seven Samurai as both my Kurosawa and jidaigeki touchstone, here, then, is my substitute, itself a remake but enthusiastically so. The density of the nihilism with which the enemy here is fleshed out demands such an outsize catharsis in his climactic taking down, that no less than half an hour of glorious comeuppance would seem to suffice. Miike knows this. And gives us 45 feral, bloody minutes of it.

6. Big Boy (Shireen Seno, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): A certain warm and often lovely and also familiar strangeness runs through here, as it's not only a film that's both about memory and like a memory, in the way it looks and feels and sounds and threatens to recede or disperse, but also about how every generation's experience of growing up has connective tissues that make them all kindred.

7. Mga Anino Sa Tanghaling Tapat (Ivy Universe Baldoza, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): Three girls grapple with the thorny changes their bodies undergo, as ghosts and portents pool in the luxuriant and poisonous forest around them. Ivy's polarizing but undervalued rumination on sex and death re-imagines the carnal processes of brutal youth as a creepily erotic , maddeningly obtuse horror movie.

8. Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, USA, Domestic Release):

Pitched below the requisite volume of panic and spectacle, of course it's going to go over many heads spoiling for crackle, for racing against time and eleventh hour salvation. But its' grim, procedural sobriety has that low hum of unease and exposure. It starts with a cough in the dark, disembodied and nearby, as if saying here is your doom in small, the littlest of things you can't see, loosed now in a world that connects like a network of veins at the speed of god. If none of this makes you very nervous, you really ought to be.

9. Six Degrees of Separation From Lillia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone, Philippines, Cinema One Originals):

If nothing else, for not being the one trick pony I always felt it was prone to becoming, at least on paper, cynical

as I was

a

t first about how deep the cachet of its subject ran and if it could sustain more than a couple of gags. Antoinette calls this a mockumentary but it veers closer to that freak overlap of documentary and fiction,

and in exalting

Lillia Cuntapay, the iconic bit player, certainly a phenomenon unique to us, it

subtly lambasts how stuck-up the showbiz industry is and how intolerably embarrassing, and distressing, our thrall to it remains regardless. That, and it's also a hoot.

10. Niño (Loy Arcenas,

Philippines, Cinemalaya):

Time's a goon, it's been said, and it is, and sometimes it wins.

Emptied-out desperate things palpitate against

obsolescence and all its useless beauties

, not least being the centrifugal matriarch whose opera star has faded but also the religious finery leeched of their divinities but for the wild hope she hangs on it.

Buenas Noches España (Raya Martin, Philippines-Spain, Spanish Film Festival): Raya's experimental opiate is a bit of a quandary for me, hence its position, as I do like the form, but I like the idea of the form even more, and absolutely love the idea of the form in the context of where his ouevre stands, on the cusp of either repeating himself into perpetuity or going so far out on a limb it's likely to wind a lot of people up, which it did, which it should. Painters and musicians get to color outside the lines the way he does here, sometimes to fanfare, sometimes to indifference, but filmmakers are routinely frowned upon, often by other filmmakers, for merely being curious as to what's on the peripheries of the three-act narrative convention we box the medium in, and are all but lynched when they act on that curiosity. This is also where our national cinema stands at the moment, trying to figure out what it is, and slowly fitting itself into safe absolutes in the attempt, when what it needs to do is to maybe wind a few people up. Cinema is the youngest art, and Philippine Cinema even younger. Too young, in fact, to get all wussy about going out on limbs.

20-Seiki Shônen Chapter 1 (20th Century Boys Chapter 1)

20-Seiki Shônen Chapter 1 (20th Century Boys Chapter 1)
Directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi (Crying Out Love in the Center of the World)
Starring Toshiaki Karasawa (Casshern),Etsusi Toyokawa (Hula Girls)




I've destroyed the world many times before - - - and so have you. With crayon drawings on torn notebook paper. This is what us boys would do to give vent to the berserker rages of all our boyish imaginations. Gleefully, dementedly laying waste to civilizations, perhaps in secret hope of remaking the world from the rubble but this time to our prepubescent whims. Or maybe it was merely out of how diabolically fun blowing up imaginary cities can be. Not to mention drawing all the flamboyant, impossible monsters that blew them up.

Back in the 20th century, flying a 747 into a skyscraper as a terrorist plot rang with similarly feverish delirium- - - crayon drawings on torn notebook paper. That was just nine years ago. Not that you need to be told but this is the world we woke up to after the millennium changed hands- - - boyhood annihilation fantasies as real world genocide scenarios with wackos for architects bent on remaking the world to their whims. Fucked up doesn't quite cover it. And taken one way, Naoki Urusawa's immense manga 20th Century Boys , filtrated as it is through this grand pop sieve of weird viruses and giant robots and shadowy cults, is all about what life is like in this new world we live in, which is what life was like in the old world we lived in except it's more fitful and more rickety and more prone to toxic absurdities.

Taken another way, it's about the vagaries of obsolesence , the way those of us whose destinies have passed us by flail for some kind of bearing in a world that doesn't give a shit like it used to, if it did at all. And the possible devastations getting stuck in the past can wreak on the future. That T. Rex song - - - "I'm your toy, your 20th century boy" - - - has a riff so mighty you can believe how the kids here fell under it like a banner to signal changes. Fed by Marc Bolan's futuresexy androgyny, it was a song on the cusp of a world to come. The irony, of course, and the subtext Naoki is aiming for, is that today nothing sums someone up more as a relic of his time than calling him a 20th century boy.

Taken the same way and minus the millennial divide, this is what Stephen King's It was about, too - - - waking up in a present you didn't expect to wake up in that's agitated by a past that has come to collect. It's not as if it would take a genius to run them - - - the parallels between the two do glare and vibrate. There's the relentless toggling between two timelines. There's the childhood friends - - -boy dominant with a token girl - - - sputtering invisibly through a bland middle age. There's the banding together to thwart an enemy they may have unwittingly loosed. There's the epic sprawl - - -it starts in the '70s and ends in 2015. There's the turned-up volume to everything. Except it's not supernatural bunk Naoki cranks up.

He hews closer to the sort of boy detective sci-fic pop the younger Ray Bradbury and the younger Steven Spielberg proliferated but without lapsing into the dewy cloy they both tended to stoop to back then. And he's as fiendish as King is with story. It , of course, was massive, but also unwieldy and turgid and not the work you uphold to champion King - - - ominipotent turtles and gangbangs, WTF? 20th Century Boys is even more vast but manga always gives itself the room to stretch and breathe and not hurry that Americans seem chronically allergic to, and over its 24 volumes, it moves at a clip but paces its convolutions so it never really disintegrates into the gooey mess we're left with at the end of It.

Given how Tsutsumi's spacing out all 24 volumes across three features - - - and this is merely the first - - - it's a little disingenuous to raise him up for the structural liberties he takes that makes this spry or put him down not only for how the nuances he forsakes activates a little supercompression vertigo but also for how he exaggerates the cataclysm near the cliffhanging end. He does soothe my doubts about the next two to come when he tempers all the heightened arcana that comes with being a kid with all the simmering melancholia that comes with being an adult. 20th Century Boys is all about how hope and ruin, potential and failure, wonderment and exhaustion intersect. And how, to paraphrase another glam rock icon, we can all be heroes in the overlap. Trite, sure - - - but lay in a mighty guitar riff on top of it and it's a banner to fall under.* * *

Departures おくりびと

おくりびと
Okuribito (Departures)
Directed by Yojiro Takita
Starring Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ryoko Hirosue

We talk to our dead during a wake. We converse with them as if the dearly departed could reply back. Oftentimes, we answer for them.

Oftentimes, we like to pretend that the dead are only asleep and it's crucial that they look that way.

The Japanese encoffinment ritual that is the heart of Departures is the most affectionate gesture I have ever seen on screen. It is graceful yet precise; concealing the difficult task of cleaning and disrobing the dead with a hypnotic, almost celebratory dance, knees firmly tucked under, arms rising and falling and fingers fluttering. Fussing like a mother; rigid like a father. Playful like a child. The bereaved family watches closely and become part of the corpse's transformation, from a cold, empty shell to a familiar face that they've woken up to or watched fall asleep in the years that have passed.

As a child, I used to watch my mother suit up for work and I've only remembered recently how I have memorized her morning routine: the perfume behind the ears before anything else, the skirt that she carefully smooths out, the watch, her only jewelry, that she gingerly clicks into place. Watching the encoffinment ceremony feels like watching someone go through his daily ritual one last time.

In refined, thoughtful strokes, Departures paints different scenarios of last goodbyes with such unpredictability in the details that it feels painfully real. The ceremonies do tend to end in tears (quiet, howling) but it's the subtle change in atmosphere---the slightest tics of recognition and submission to fate on the faces of husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters and lovers, and the wistful look of committing to memory the contours and the imperfection that once loved them back---that director Yojiro Takita carefully captures with polite elegance.

Much like us unfamiliar with the Japanese cermony, Daigo is the outsider, the watchful eye that is slowly drawn into a career of encoffinment. Played brilliantly by Masahari Motoki, who first thought of filming Departures ten years ago after reading the memoir of an enconffinment master, Daigo is an awkward mess of insecurity and unfulfilled dreams. Recognizing his own limitation in playing the cello, he and his wife Mika (the luminous Ryoko Hirosue) move back to Yamagata to look for a new job. He stumbles upon an ad on "Assisting Departures" and thinking that it was a travel agency opening, applies for it.

His introduction to corpses is a gag but as he is drawn deeper into the refined precision of the ritual, almost similar to the fret play on the cello, Daigo unravels into his own person and confronts memories he has been running away from all his life.

I'm forgiving the movie for its singular, obviously-staged montage (Who plays cello in a rice field? Even the kurosagi seem to be bothered by it.) because as a joyfully heartbreaking whole, Departures is one of those rare movies that transforms into a shared experience. The movie poses through images difficult questions about life and death, contemplates the answers, and leaves it to us mull over. It's loose structure gives the string of encounters breathing space, making room for Daigo's own personal battles, his struggle to remember his estranged father's face, the quiet brevity it requires. And what I love most, for all its thematic weight, is the movie's light footed humor, most of the time rolling with the funny down its melancholic twists. Unpretentious, the humble film that could, Departures wistfully offers us the gift of how to say goodbye.


(And yes, it is better than any of the 5 nominees for Best Picture in this year's Oscar race.)

5/5

20th Century Boys Chapter 3

If you haven't read the manga, this will mean nothing to you. If you've read it up until the part where the first movie ended, the second to the last shot will either be a massive spoiler or will make you wet your panties. I almost did when I was reading the manga. And I almost did when I saw this.

Yes, sometimes I get embarassingly excitable.

Just go clicky clicky, alright?

20世紀少年 (20th Century Boys)

20世紀少年 (20th Century Boys)
Directed by YukihikoTsutsumi
Starring Toshiaki Karasawa, Etsushi Toyokawa, Takako Tokiwa

20th Century Boys, created by Naoki Urasawa, is a science fiction mystery manga that cleverly combines the careless innocence of youth with the harsher reality of growing up in a world scarred by failure and terrorism.

Fresh from the reeling disappointment of Watchmen (I've seen it twice, am now tempted to lower my initial rating but will let it stay there for the meantime), I was a bit cautious to watch another ambitious adaptation. Still, I thought, not Hollywood.

To put it succinctly, the first installment of the 20th Century Boys trilogy is tha bomb. *Scrambles off for actual words*

Folksies, this is how a comic book adaptation should be made. As a visual medium, the panels should not be the shoot list. A faithful tribute is just an excuse for being lazy. Details, no matter how meticulously brought to life, do not make a movie. Besides, where's the fun in that, eh? Director Yukihiko Tsutsumi is clever enough to filter and borrow only the iconic images of the manga and frames the rest with his own point of view.

Covering the first five volumes of the sprawling, kaleidoscopic epic, the movie moves at a brisk pace, which is very necessary since this is first and foremost a mystery story that goes back and forth the past and the present. 20th Century Boys hits the ground running with an ominous conversation between two prisoners locked up in separate cells hinting at a darkness that blankets the country before transitioning to 1973 (the actual opening of the manga), where a boy named Kenji plays along to the opening riffs of T. Rex's "20th Century Boy" on a broom as the crunchy guitars ROAR its way through sleepy classrooms. Later on we see Kenji (Karasawa) in 1987, drained and tired and forced to smile as he tries to balance running a grocery store with taking care of a baby his sister has mysteriously left behind.

When one of his regular patrons disappears, Kenji decides to take chance at visiting the client's home to check if the family left behind any form of payment and discovers instead a symbol on a wall that is connected to his childhood.

In another area in the city, the police find a body that is drained of blood, possibly connected to a virus that has been killing hundreds in Africa. Has it reached Japan?

And some place else, a cult is born, worshiping a messianic masked man simply called "Friend," the symbol that Kenji saw printed across the cult leader's mask.

It is the same symbol that one of Kenji's childhood friends writes a letter to him about before dying a few days later.

The key to solving the mystery is in Kenji's childhood and in his circle of friends. And this is where the 20th Century Boys truly shines. The flashbacks are infused with such relaxed nostalgia where the kicked-up dirt mixes with sweat and snot, and bullies are rampaging giants who can break your bone at a whim. The warmly-hued scenes of playing in the fields also serve as a grating and ultimately heartbreaking contrast to the complex lives the grown-ups are leading. Evil is no longer getting your ass whupped or imagined villains straight from the pages of comic books. Evil is failure, the postponed dreams that grow more distant as the years pass, but also as palpable as murder, terrorist bombings, and betrayal.

The screenplay wisely omits a few scenes from the manga, with a couple of rewrites (the back story of Donkey comes to mind) for the sake of pacing, but I don't mind at all because the soul of the movie is intact and not drowned out by the nifty special effects or a stoic reverence to the source material.

Much like Stephen King's novel "It," 20th Century Boys follows the lives of childhood friends who have grown apart but are reunited by a pact they made decades ago. And Tsutsumi never loses sight of the movie's center: That it is possible to confront the monsters and giants we have always feared because true friends will always have your back.

In the movie's climactic showdown on the eve of the new millennium, even if I knew what was about to happen, I continued to cheer on for Kenji and his friends, secretly hoping for a different ending. Tsutsumi has made me care for these characters all over again, and differently from when I was reading the manga. It's a different experience altogether.

Now, that's how you do it Mr. Snyder.

4/5

20th Century Boys

No longform manga since Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira rocked my planet harder than Naoki Urusawa's 20th Century Boys - - - except maybe his Monster, which I haven't read yet. Moviebound for years now, a teaser's out at fucking last. And a teaser it is. Superlative use of that T Rex riff notwithstanding, it isn't much . . .but if you've read the manga or if you're not in kindergarten anymore, this will make you drool more than that potentially sucky kid's movie with Robert Downey in red armor coming to brand us stupid in a few weeks.

Kantoku Banzai

Loopier than Takeshis from the looks of it. Funner, too. Big on the serene brutality of his noirs- - -Sonatine, Hana-Bi , Brother - - - as I am, I could live with Takeshi taking this phase of his a few more movies down the line. Has its own weird voltage,give it that. Funny, too. And the world needs a new Kitano movie as often as he can make 'em. Does wonders for the environment.

End hero worship. Cue trailer.

Sakebi (Retribution)

Hideo Nakata’s got game but not even he can touch Kiyoshi Kurosawa as J-horror overlord. Visual intelligence alone gives Kiyoshi dibs. And the way his movies - - - Kairo, Cure, Charisma- - -get under your skin and stay there until it grows cultures of unease. I give. I've been stealing from him wholesale, and shoplifting bits from Nakata as well, over the last month doing this scriptwriting gig. He's been out of the horror loop for a bit. Sakebi is his comeback. Goody.

Tonari No Totoro

Yummy fur.

Tonari No Totoro
Directed by : Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away)



The whimsy's there if that's your thing and there are days this is like a down blanket for me, something to keep warm in - - -that bus stop vignette and my wanting to play it over and over again as if looping would somehow enable me to cross over, there's no way you can break that down to a science, no way to peg why it works in the way it does, no way to do it again, not even Miyazaki himself tried. Could be the wet, shimmery palette's what makes it - - -and the whole piece ,really - - - so immersive, a kind of hush. Also the absence of anything going on in the usual sense of anything going on - - -two sisters billeted in a country house, their mother in a hospital and oh, next door lives a family of snuggly tree spirits that help them plant a tree, take them on a bus ride and later flying through the night. It's ambient, almost. The magic circle aura holds until you get the sense that the supernatural never overwhelms the natural, that there's a certainty to the creeping uncertainty in its peripheries- - -and you get it. Miyazaki would go on to do more ornate work - - - wiser, prettier,better. But what he nailed here that he won't nail again to such a degree is what Erice nailed in El Espiritu De La Colmena : that blinding headrush of what it's like to be a kid - - - and the sense of wonder and threat that come with it. And he nails it not because the magic he taps into makes those wisps of foreboding go away, like they do in neo-Disney mollycoddle. But precisely because it doesn't. * * * * *





Post Written for the Ghiblogathon.

Two By Pen-Ek

Last Life In The Universe (Ruang Rak Noi Nid Mahasan )
Director: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Ploy, Invisible Waves)
Starring: Tadanobu Asano (Ichi The Killer, Cafe Lumiere), Sinitta Boonyasak (Bite of Love)


Boiled down, this is about opposites attracting - - - chaos and order, scatterbrained and anal, free spirit and suicide fetishist. The arcane physics of desire. Also, the milk of every other hackneyed formula love story. It pushes the same buttons: the soft electricity of attraction, the sweet endorphin of emotional rescue, the wistful possibilities of happiness. But the (mis)matching of Tadanobu Asano’s bookish nerd and Sinitta Boonyasak's flighty hostess is bonded more by ghosts of shared regret than anything sexual (but we get there eventually) or romantic, stranding them in a hermetic world of their own design , speaking in fractured tongues as they fumble to master that inarticulate speech of the heart, the last lives in an impossible universe that isn't forever but, for a brief shining moment ,is magic. * * * * *

Mon-rak Transistor
Director: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Fun Bar Karaoke, 6ixtynin9)
Starring: Supakorn Kitsuwon (Tears of the Black Tiger, Suriyothai), Siriyakorn Pukkavesh (Adventures of Iron Pussy)



Village kid meets village girl, they fall in love, she gets pregnant, he gets drafted, she gives birth, he deserts the army and becomes a pop star. Then their troubles begin. Screwball for the way it crams surfeits of melodramatic incident that could bloat two telenovela seasons then plays them for absurdist pleasure. Satiric for the way it harbors a nostalgic fondness for such overwrought soap opera tropes at the same time appearing to take affectionate digs at them. But there are genuine emotions fueling these soap opera tropes we malign. It's what makes them persist. Those flitty-tatty feelings we're all oh-so ironic ,or probably just too chickenshit, to express. And later, all artifice and agenda is dropped. A picture on the wall speaks volumes of regret. A damburst of tears and a tentative hug speak of a love that's too scared to come out of hiding. And the climactic ,inevitable reunion disarms then stabs me with the flitty and the tatty, full-on, guard down, right through the heart. Pow. And I'm a mass of blubber. Nice trick, Pen-Ek. Crafty bastard.
* * * *

Sutâfisshu Hoteru(Starfish Hotel)

Hey! It's the rabbit from Donnie Darko! In Japan!

Sutâfisshu Hoteru(Starfish Hotel)

Starring Koichi Sato(Samurai Resurrection), Tae Kimura(The Sinking of Japan), Kiki (Vital), Akira Emoro (Memories of Matsuko)
Director: John Williams (Firefly Dreams)


Emits Donnie Darko freakout , does that rabbit suit ,shapeshifting to slippery aura of Alice when we get to the Wonderland brothel ,as a fictional world bleeds into the real. Uh huh. Like the Lewis Carroll cop-out, it could all be so much headnoise for preoccupied salaryman Koichi Sato. Guilt pangs ,because he's a dork who prefers reading mystery novels over getting it on with hot wife Tae Kimura and who does get it on with hotter stranger Kiki and her mineshaft of skeletons. Then hot wife disappears and - - - curioser and curioser? You wish. Gorgeous, yes. Muted and gauzy and proper, right. None of which computes as the palpable hallucination it's aiming for. Or should, if it isn't. No grasp for confusion,then. The mystery bland where it wants to be viscous. The plot thins rather than thickens. And the tacked-on coda comes too late to up the ambiguity. And doesn't anyway.* *