Gozu

Gozu is a movie that bores into your soul: it looks deep within you and drags out the hidden phantasmagoric fantasies that we all harbour. It's also the kind of unsettling nightmare that urban-dwellers imagine provincial towns to be, full of brazenly quaint characters with freakish habits. Yet there are plenty of comedic moments amongst the ocean of surreal. Takashi Miike is the master of successfully juxtaposing the horrifically bizarre with humour, of establishing remarkable tones of heightened shock. Gozu is part of British TV channel FilmFour's 'FrightFest' season, a fortnight of classic and obscure horror films. It's August date is designed to coincide with the annual film festival of the same name, that takes place in Leicester Square and it throws numerous gems that I was previously ignorant to. This be one.

I knew Miike from a couple of his other horror works – 1999's Audition and his ‘Box’ segment in the film collaboration Three… Extremes – and enjoyed them both. He is somehow consistently able to exceed the confining boundary of tastefulness without shedding any of the emotional integrity. The central character in Gozu is Minami (Hideki Sone), a nervous young man ascending the Yakuza ladder. He is in thrall to his mentor Brother Ozaki (Show Aikawa) whose mental capacity has seemingly dissipated in the Tokyo smog; Minami is instructed by Boss to assassinate Ozaki in the town of Nagoya away from the capital. But Ozaki’s corpse manages to escape outside a café in the town and Minami is forced to hole up at a local inn and tracks his movements with the aid of Nose, a local Yakuza with a prominent skin deformity.

Sone plays Minami well: not as a sniveling wretch who finds himself in the Yakuza out of broader social weakness, but as an anxious young man of inexperience thrust into a realm of confusion and misunderstanding. He is virginal and fretful around women, so fretful in fact that his sanity deserts him when confronted by an attractive young woman who presents herself as Ozaki (Kimika Yoshino) in female form – don’t ask, that plot development doesn’t make much sense when you’re watching it, never mind out of context – and he believes her. It's how his mind deals with sexual contact – by substituting the woman for a man he knew very well. And thus one of Gozu's central tenets concerns his 'awakening' to the physical.

It’s difficult to discuss Gozu without mentioning the famous scenes, though they will be spoilers. In my opinion it’s very difficult to properly discuss a film – particularly one as abstract as this – without referring to what happens at the conclusion. In the reviews that I’ve been writing in the past couple of months I have, generally, refrained from giving away the endings. But really, it is kind of necessary. And so I will tell you, dear reader, what happens at the culmination of Gozu. THIS WILL BE A SPOILER. The female Ozaki coaxes Minami into intercourse. During their interaction a hand grabs his penis from within her vagina. She proceeds to gives birth to a full grown man: the male Ozaki. Then they all walk cheerfully down the road together. End. Pretty staggering stuff and one’s mouth is very much agape as the credits roll. That wild surrealism surpasses even the other egregiously stark images: a person with a cow’s head appears to Minami in a dream sequence carrying a message and later he catches the innkeeper and her brother in the midst of their side business of bottled breast milk production. But it would be disingenuous to reduce this sometimes opaque work to nothing more than its most memorable and shocking bits. The cow’s head represents the scariest thing in Japanese folklore (even the retelling of the story supposedly reduces its listeners to a catatonic sludge) and to see it reduced to nothing more than a hallucinatory postman is, if nothing specifically tangible, symbolic of Miike’s iconoclastic tendencies. I must confess I don’t really ‘get’ the meaning of the elderly lady squeezing milk out of her breasts. Renewal? Rebirth? Prolonged youth? There’s no doubt however that she (Keiko Tomita) suffers from loneliness. It’s a theme that is prevalent: Minami is repeatedly propositioned by various characters, all suffering from that crippling symptom of advancing age. For him at least that loneliness – which manifests itself largely through sexual frustration – is resolved at the end. Snapshot glimpses of the lives of the innkeeper and Nose are emblematic of the broader stagnation of their lives: they desperately seek some excitement before the natural path of mortality takes its withering course. This endemic sense of waste is exacerbated by the provincial town they reside in, seemingly characterised by decades of inertia and older methods of progress – Minami is desperate to make haste in the location of Ozaki’s body, but Nose and his Yakuza superior prefer to take their leisurely time.

The final word though must go to the Koji Endo, the guy behind Gozu’s music – it’s superbly executed, both in thematic appropriation and emotional effectiveness. To invoke unease, especially in the scenes of rampant surrealism, he masterfully constructs pieces of jarring atonal noise with strings and synthesisers. His use of cello for when female Ozaki delivers male Ozaki is in the modernist vein of avant-garde composers like Iannis Xenakis, and works so well. This curious picture is another tile in Miike’s patchwork career of dramas, action thrillers and horror movies. I haven’t seen too many of his films but in the pantheon of bizarro horror the bat-shit weird Gozu stands pretty high.

Oblivion

Just a quick appraisal of Tom Cruise' sci-fi vehicle Oblivion from earlier this year, recently released on DVD. And it's actually not that bad. Oblivion isn't extraordinary but it remains entertaining with satisfyingly executed themes of alien deception, lost love and social pariah. Cruise plays Jack Harper, a soldier-cum-technician who keeps a watchful eye over the drones that protect vast tidal power stations, along with his 'teammate' and lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). They inhabit a post-apocalyptic Earth which humans are soon to depart from.

The plot presents a decent twist, the visual effects are smooth and ephemeral and there's a dream-sequence/love interest for Harper in the shape of Olga Kurylenko - all the ingredients for a good science fiction movie. When we remember how many shit films have eminated from that genre and how easy they are to mess up, this is still a fine achievement for writer/producer/director Joseph Kosinski (who also did Tron: Legacy, although that got a bad rep I don't think it was so bad - well the Daft Punk bits were good). Architectural and vehicular design is suitably futuristic (NB: not futurist) and pretty cool, all minimalist transparency and rounded clean lines; and the music, scored by Anthony Gonzalez or a.k.a.'d as M83, keeps to the tasteful side of uplifting and electronic.

Although it's a standard Earth-and-humanity-is-great and love-overcomes-all flick this is entertaining enough not to have been a complete waste of time and money. Not to mention the appearances of Jaime Lannister (for whom Nikolaj Coster-Waldau will surely be forever known as) and Morgan Freeman in Mad Max stylee apparel. And if those drones aren't a canny allusion to the illegal drone strikes carried out by the US military on Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and many others then I don't know what would be.

The World's End

The Cornetto trilogy has sadly come to a close, nine years after Shaun of the Dead. The World’s End is yet another riotously intelligent Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg-penned film, relying not only on simpleton wit and sound comic timing but poignant social allusions to the golden age of irresponsible youth. Instead of the zombie homage of Shaun of the Dead or the police action thriller references in Hot Fuzz, the duo focus on robot-science-fiction and clever aliens. In that sense it’s sort of a Doctor Who episode only with more drinking and swearing.

Dan King (Pegg) is the immoral cad still wallowing in the hedonism of his 90s teenage heyday, attempting to get his tight-knit drinking cronies back together for a pub crawl they failed to complete in their youth. It’s an attempt to return his life back to those glory days – and one night in particular. He is a man still yearning for those days: he sports the same kind of New Romantics look as back then and listens to the same music (a soundtrack full of 90s gems from the likes of Primal Scream, Stone Roses and Happy Mondays), and pales in comparison to the successful careers and families his comrades have since embarked since then. Psychoanalysing the central character isn’t really the point though. Anyway, he gets them together (Martin Freeman, Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan) and they have a pint in twelve different pubs around their home town of Newton Haven, finishing in the eponymous World’s End. But they find that their dreary home has lost its quirky locations and charisma in the face of the franchise obsessed modern society, with characterless lookalike pubs caustically mocked. Plus the inhabitants they had previously known have become alien robots with sloshy blue mechanical blood (not unlike the white stuff the androids have in the Alien films).

On a serious note, it’s a smart commentary on how the confining bureaucracies and franchises of our modern internet world have sucked the life out of towns and replaced it with the kind of vacuous, safe-for-all-ages grey yawn. On a silly note, it’s a just an excuse to smash robots and cover ourselves in blue goo and lipstick. The World’s End is also a faithful portrayal of what growing up in an English village is like – desperately dull.

Underpinned by a typically superb cast, The World’s End doesn’t immediately seem to possess the cult classic traits of the others but maybe that’s just a status it will acquire over time. There are some odd plays – like Frost playing a profession-driven square who is completely unlike any other of his weirdly foolish characters – but this is still a fine comedy worthy of its place in the much-loved Cornetto canon.

Song for the day

Melody Prochet follows me, so should you

Spring Breakers

‘Spring break, spring break forever’ is the paradox whispered throughout the second half of Spring Breakers. Although Harmony Korine’s delicious new film came out several months ago it's worth, I think, a slight reappraisal. Or at least another look. Actually the whole concept of re-examining stuff a few months after the critical hype is interesting – a feature lost in the internet age in which blogs race to get their opinions out before their rivals. Thus we see knee-jerk opinions and overly dramatic attention baiting reviews. It's a little sad maybe but understandable as we all (myself included) strive for as many clicks and pageviews as possible.

And on the subject of overly dramatic and attention baiting things we return to this film. Although initial critical reaction was largely positive, those that didn't like it really didn't like it. Glitteringly stylised photography and seemingly misogynistic, one could understand some of the misgivings. It seemed to bristle with a haughty arrogance, stubbornly sure of its thematic footing yet sniggering at the higher-than-thou irony of putting some Disney stars (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens) in scenes of drug-use and rapacious sexuality. That core of self-amusement is stamped the whole way through Spring Breakers – calling the religious girl Faith (Gomez) is just a further example. It’s deliberately bizarre, full of absurd images and scenes like James Franco’s cornrows and being tried in a court clad in nothing but bikinis. Franco is actually superb playing the leeringly creepy Alien, a local small fry gangster with visions of misguided self-aggrandisement. His richly gangster-ised accent and materialistic obsession is utterly convincing, and yet another peculiar role choice in what is becoming an exceptionally versatile career.

What actually happens? Some girls rob a store in their college town then go down to Florida for spring break. They traipse around drinking and snorting cocaine, then accidently become involved with Alien. That’s about it. To be honest describing the premise feels like it misses the point. It’s a film of purposeful excess, highlighting the hideously ostentatious culture surrounding youthful party breaks and isn’t designed to be much more. People who like films (or rather, like to know a lot about films so that they can impress other people) are used to spending time trying to decipher the singular universal meaning behind a Terrence Malick conclusion or David Lynch ending. Korine turns this obsession with 'knowing' what something means on its head by constructing a movie that draws its tendrils from many themes - youth, drugs, sex - but without imposing any kind of commentary on it. Writers always try to apply some profound meaning to the work of someone with a cult-like reputation like Korine, a tendency that he seems to be making fun of; when in actual fact it’s just the shallow bravado it appears to be. It's nothing more than a face value film, made for the fuck of it, to irritate and draw outrage and it does so brilliantly. Spring Breakers pokes fun at the very idea of inferring meaning from art.

(By the way, I do recognise the irony of me inferring a meaning from a film designed to mock the process of inferring a meaning).

Only God Forgives

Initial reaction for the new collaboration between Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and American actor Ryan Gosling was pretty split. Many were strongly put off by excessive violence and the generous helpings of blood and internal body parts, others found their seedy interpretation of the Thai underworld to be the staggering feat of photography that it is. Only God Forgives is controversial, not least because the previous Refn-Gosling combination was the celebrated modern classic Drive. The latter was more of a mainstream crossover for Winding Refn who is usually to be found overseeing opaque art house pictures. Though there was always a focus on luscious aesthetic, it was a feature running parallel to a distinctive and unambiguous plotline. Only God Forgives is different, chocker block with grey narrative areas – there are more dream sequences and metaphorical scenes. Perhaps this was a deliberate artistic direction change for the Dane, a chance to draw in new audiences and critics with Drive before blowing them away with the challenging surreality and dark alleyways of malice and wanton violence on show here.

The story focusses on a pair of expat American brothers Billy (Tom Burke) and Julian (Gosling) who involve themselves in the Bangkok criminal underworld, whilst running a local Muay Thai boxing ring. Billy gets killed (that's not a spoiler - it happens near the start) bringing their viciously matriarchal mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) from America. Julian and Crystal become embroiled with the local policeman Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) and his penchant for sword swinging in a never ending lust for revenge.

Scott Thomas is brilliant as the menacing and tyrannical Crystal; she glitters in her scheming, revenge obsessed way, coaxing and manipulating all around her. The relationships she has fostered with her sons are laced with Freudian nightmare: allusions of incest between Crystal and Billy are frequent. Julian appears to be outside of that, and the matriarchal fall guy for all that goes awry. He is a complex character, torn between courting his mother’s approval and the haphazard botched set of ethics he condemns Billy’s perverse antics with. His composed exterior bristles with relaxed rationality, yet there is a rage that boils red raw underneath – he is said to have murdered his father. This duality just about escapes from another withdrawn Gosling performance in which he again utter very few words. There’s no doubt that he has perfected that look of his – the esoteric half-smile and enigmatic far-away look in his eyes on a foundation of threatened hyper-violence.

Julian seems to have some kind of in-built equilibrium, a quid pro quo sense that some things must be taken in return for his criminality – hence the penitent ending. These punishments are meted out by Chang, the most fascinating character in this picture. He acts as a self-appointed moral executor in a city bereft of law or justice. Although his carnal judgements are based on his own idealistic morality, there is too little time given to his character as a person – only a perfunctory glimpse of a happy home, replete with wife and daughter. His character is carefully guarded, and seemingly beyond reproach; it’s a shame because a deeper examination of his psyche might have a laid a sterner foundation for the limb-hacking carnage he inflicts on those he deems wrong-doers. Okay so he’s probably supposed to be a kind of anarchic angel but it’s not a feature expanded upon enough, and so it just looks like gratuitous violence.

Though there are some character flaws, this is maliciously seductive: it’s a beautiful looking film, based on dynamic photography and pulsing electronic music (brilliantly soundtracked by Cliff Martinez of Drive fame). It renders the film an utterly captivating watch. Only God Forgives is a neon bleached blitz, sometimes highly stylised sometimes gritty and difficult – but always with that Refn aesthetic in mind (though he is significantly influenced by the 60s and 70s Chilean cult filmmaker Alexandro Jodorowsky – to whom OGF is dedicated to – who also dabbled in the phantasmagoric and surreal). Its look really isn’t that different from Drive: both take place in dark urban environments, lit only by the vice and torment of its inhabitants. But this is grislier fare with more obscure motives and not for the faint of heart, yet it remains wholly compelling. If anything though, it’s a darker continuation of Drive rather than a distinct move away from.