Here are some brief
impressions on the two films I saw on Wednesday, July 24th:
Uzumasa Jacopetti
A reference to the «magical realism » of South American novelists
could be helpful in describing this quirky yet bleak family drama, but so
would a reference to the homegrown lyrical humanism from the land of narrative
excess. Truth is, Uzumasa Jacopetti is a very
challenging film, sometimes nearing dramatic catharsis, but mostly indulging in
tiresome digressions, a perfect example of the Janus-faced nature of Japanese
storytelling, at once looking eastward and westward with stricken uncertainty.
Rooted in the depressing reality of the titular Kyoto neighborhood, the
narrative often drifts into a parallel world of abstraction thanks to its
expressionistic depiction of casual murder and the strange perspective of
building a house out of large flying magnets. The result isn’t entirely
satisfying, with some enlightening "slice of life" episodes managing
to create a captivating and earnest social panorama that is constantly
flattened by the recourse to bothersome fantasy elements. Hence, the recurrence
of absurd violence and the constant intrusion of aggressive industrial
sound, while it adds an intriguing dimension to the film, also robs it of its
legitimacy as an engrossing melodrama. The subplot involving an idealistic cop
never really gets off the ground and the whole experience of the film
eventually becomes a daunting affair aimed at schizoid sensibilities.
The narrative concerns family man Shoji’s effort to build a customized
house for his wife and son using large round magnets and cowskin walls.
Entrapped in a cluttered apartment in Kyoto’s busy Uzumasa neighborhood, the
rationale behind his project is as sound as can be : to engineer a
solution to his lowly existence through a flight of wishful thinking,
relegating the mundane aspects of poverty to a mere afterthought and making
reality itself appear porous and malleable. But wishful thinking is not enough
to build a house; one also needs money. But that money needs not be obtained
through tedious labor in the loopy narrative world of the film, for Shoji soon
crosses paths with a helpless local cop, who commissions his help in punishing
local criminals who have eloped from justice. But while this job provides Shoji
with a few million yens, it quickly turns his wife into a frenzied mass
murderer. There is no strong emotional motivation for her to do so, just the
malleable texture of reality as warranted by the protagonist's project. But in the end, despite
the piles of corpses amassed at their feet, Shoji and Sana can be united in the
simple dream of a house, which binds their family together halfway between the
gutter and the stars.
Pondering on the feasibility of a
flying magnetic house.
Straight from its expressionistic opening, featuring Shoji at work on the
prototype of his intricate magnetic apartment in a stuffy industrial decor,
Uzumasa Jacopetti doesn’t abide by traditional narrative rules. While he relies
on a mostly controlled, intimist mise-en-scène, director Miyamoto often
digresses, using contrapuntal sound to infect the realistic settings in which
the story takes place. Sound is actually the primary vector of absurdity here
for it creates a constant distanciation between the urban auditive background and
the industrial noise from Shoji’s dream world of flying metal disks. The use of
exacerbated squishing sounds near the end as a means to portray three parallel
events (the consumption of crab fried rice, sex and a jog through a mud puddle)
further distances the narrative from reality and into the dream world of film,
where not only is everything possible, but everything can become undifferentiated. The recourse to casual murder also helps deconstruct the dramatic
structure of the film, away from reality and into a dream world of childish
abandon. This is emphazised by Sana’s shocking addiction to casual murder
halfway into the film. Helping her husband in beating up criminals, she
develops a taste for blood, which is found akin to her systematic destruction
of insects. From her childish outlook on life, it seems that even the act of
murder can be playful and spontaneous. And so is her confidence in Shoji’s
hairbrained project. As for ours, it seems to rest in the constant abandon of
our disbelief, which is violently encouraged, even in the face of true-to-life poverty and crime.
Uzumasa Jacopetti is certainly a challenging film, but it is also quite
self-defeating, putting its greatest dramatic assets and most powerful imagery
(the sensuous panorama of urban and semi-urban life) constantly at odds with a
morbid sense of wonder and some aggressive reminders of industry. Hence, Shoji’s candid proposition is marred
by the depressing acts he must carry out in order to materialize it.
In similar fashion, the light-hearted jokes peppered throughout are systematically defused by the
dreary showcase of mutilation and torture, giving the film a distinctly schizoid and unfocused feel. As for the varying degree of emotional
involvement shown by the protagonists, it constantly puts the credibility of their
actions in jeopardy, especially given the extreme nature of these actions. But most importantly, the film is self-defeating because it
generates interest in a realistic universe that it constantly challenges. In
the end, magic DOES triumph, but that merely provides an anti-climax, making Shoji’s
plight and unlikely success all the more unintelligible to us. For a superior example of Japanese humanistic fantasy, one should turn instead to the uplifting cinema of Satoshi Miki, whose recent Instant Swamp is a key example of the successful bland of human drama and unbridled fantasy that the present film fails to achieve.
** This intriguing, but
self-defeating adbsurdist melodrama constantly undermines its own dramatic
potential through the multiplication of loopy ideas.
Big Ass Spider!
As clever a meta-joke as you’ll find anywhere in the film, the title of
this flat arachnid romp perfectly embodies the lack of innovation within. As it
suggests, we are in the presence of a contemporary reworking of the giant
monster movie of the 1950s and 1960s, when the radioactive scare was at its
height and the catastrophic sci-fi narratives were legions. Today, it is growth
hormones that are to blame, and the clean-cut teenagers of old have now been
replaced by rude service workers. However, everything else is just as it was way back when :
overdone tribulations, campy dialogue, crappy FX, underwhelming action and
improbable science. It’s fun, but it’s dumb and forgettable, a mere passtime
for a rainy night out with your better half. But hardly anything worth
mentioning otherwise.
The skeletal premise focuses on Alex, a bug exterminator inadvertedly thrown on the
path of the titular arachnid, struggling to rid L.A. citizens of the
beast as well as to find love in the person of a cold, blonde military
operative also hot on its trail. It’s all a tedious cat and mouse game as the humans run around town and the
spider constantly grows bigger and bigger, eventually nesting atop a giant
skyscraper from which it throws sticky webbing on incoming helicopters and cinder blocks on passerbys. As if things weren't bad enough, there’s also a clichéd Mexican sidekick thrown in the mix to provide
comic relief, and a tired-looking Ray Wise hamming it up as a discouraged military
man. If you've seen any number of such films in the past, you should know what to expect almost all the way through…
There's very little inside or outside the
frame here.
There’s nothing really positive to say here, expect that Big Ass Spider! is
not bad. It is an earnest effort in formulaic b-movie fare, but it never
manages to find a distinctive voice amidst an already overcrowded genre. There
are fun little nods to monster movie classics such as Alien and Aliens, but there’s very
little in the way of original gimmicks or plot twists. That is why the most fun
you will probably derive from the screenplay is when characters brazenly declare that they
are faced with "a big ass spider"! Other than that, the narrative
very much runs on tracks, using olden tribulations over and over in a bid never
to bring the spectator outside of his comfort zone, basking instead in tried
and tested formulas meant for slight kicks. Spider escapes from corpse. Bites
mortician, then escapes through a vent, while being chased by the protagonist.
After that, it escapes into the sewer, setting up a scene in which the army personnel
finds a roomful of cocooned victims, reaches up to the surface for some
mayhem and wiggles a bit to provide a highly underwhelming climax. The end. There’s nothing to catch you off guard here, but
an absolute barrage of gags that will make you smile and cringe alternatively.
There was no inspiration involved in making this film, especially from lead Greg Grunberg, who tries hard to
come off as a quirky everyman, but fails for an absolute lack of charisma. His
Mexican sidekick and unlikely love interest similarly come off as obligatory,
blandly characterized archetypes worthy only of superficial dialogue and
motivations. There’s Ray Wise in here too, but he runs on autopilot in a role
unfit for his expressive potential. Further adding to his defense, I must say that director Mike Mendez is no
David Lynch. Hell, he is no Jean-Baptiste Andrea. He is just some guy with a
camera and a childish fascination with the harmless genre narratives of old, but
without the talent necessary to update on those narratives and give them a
truly contemporary feel. He also lacks any sort of technical means to bring
some of his greatest ideas to fruition, including a would-be exhilarating
action scene set in a busy park, but which comes out as a weirdly choreographed
ballet of bad effects and unconvinced acting. The whole thing actually never really lifts off
the ground, and the extra-short, highly unexciting climactic confrontation
doesn’t help bringing a much-needed sense of breathd to this project, which
dies as candlelight under the wind right after the final frame.
