Ren'ai Shashin

A renown photographer, man going by nom de plume Shizuru Satonaka, tells the story behind him adopting a woman's name.

They met a few years back, while Makoto Segawa (Matsuda Ryuhei) was still a student, aspiring to become a professional photographer. From the first sight, he fell for the eccentric Satonaka Shizuru (Hirosue Ryoko), a persona of some notoriety on the campus. She moves in with him and begins sharing his passion for photography. It soon becomes evident that she has an innate affinity for it - her imperfect amateur shots show and tell more than Makoto's technically sound, but cold and impersonal photographs. Makoto is jealous of her which leads to them breaking up when Shizuru receives an award in a photography competition they take part in together.

Three years later Makoto receives a letter from Shizuru. She's gone to New York where she continues to hone her skills as a photographer. Soon he learns of a rumour that Shizuru has been dead for some time now, killed by an unknown assailant. Faced with this contradictory pieces of information, he travels to NY himself to ascertain the truth. What are the chances he'll find a missing person in the 10 million crowd?

While the intrigue thickens in New York, the movie takes a slump there, with lackluster performances by some of the foreign cast, over the top finale and at least one serious plot hole - the movie would end quite a bit sooner if someone was able to put two and two together. The more toned down Japanese part is of a notch higher quality.

In a fashion typical for the director, serious themes are freely mixed with comedic scenes. On a few occasions, the director uses satellite image zoom-in shots that will feature heavily in his SPEC series. I don't remember seeing them in Tsutsumi's earlier works, they might originate here.

The performances from Matsuda and Hirosue are solid, minus Matsuda's narration in English, which gets tiresome sooner rather than later. The movie is composed as an account of the events described during an interview, hence Matsuda uses English, however there is no apparent reason why the interviewer couldn't be Japanese. It would make life easier for both the audience and Matsuda himself.

Interesting watch - an uneven movie, strangely refreshing due to nonconformist plot - a story sad in a brutal way, quite unlike the typical Japanese melodrama. And a proof that a nail that sticks out gets hammered down - considering the 2006 remake.

My point for this movie

If watching this movie left you with a feeling that you have seen it somewhere before, you might be right. The movie's script was novelised by Ichikawa Takuji in Renai Shashin: Mō Hitotsu no Monogatari. The novel was remade as a movie in 2006 and released under the title Tada, Kimi o Aishiteru. The movie, starring Tamaki Hiroshi and Miyazaki Aoi as respectively Makoto and Shizuru, is known as Heavenly Forest in the west. Apart from the names and a very general outline of the story, both movies share little common ground.

Although I assumed the movie's Japanese title is a reference to Ima, Ai ni Yukimasu, another novel by the author which had its successful movie adaptation in 2004, it reportedly comes from a verse in its theme song, Otsuka Ai's Ren'ai Shashin.

Now, if you google for "Renai Shashin", you will mostly get references to the song and a single link to imdb site of Tsutsumi's movie. There's something half-profound, half-ironic in seeing a derived work based on a derived work based on a derived work outshining the original.

Liar Game: Reborn

When a fresh graduate Shinomiya Yu (Tabe Mikako) recieves a box full of banknotes and a black envelope, we don’t need any further explanation. The Liar Game starts again. Along with her, the notorious swindler and psychology prodigy Akiyama Shinichi Matsuda Shota), now a university professor, is pulled into the game.

But hey, where is Kanzaki Nao?

After two seasons in TV and a movie, the eponymous game is back in Liar Game: Reborn. Once again we will witness how twenty or so players risk heavy debt in a game of complex rules, shifting alliances and backstabbing. The rules seem simple at first, but carry hidden implications - finding and exploiting them will allow an underdog to turn the tables and break out of a seemingly losing situation. And rest assured, the tables will turn more than once, this one aspect of Liar Game did not change. Yet this movie does not live up to its promise.

As much as I like Tabe Mikako, she's no Toda. With her gone, it's now clear how much did the show depend on her character. Shinomiya Yu was announced to be a different, more able person than the stupid-naive Kanzaki Nao. Yet it doesn't show - she's just as naive and when she finally appears to act out of her own initiative, it soon ends up in a train wreck, just the right situation for Akiyama to come in and save the day.

A similar case can be made for Makiko Esumi and Ashida Mana, who play Omega and Alice, the masterminds behind this Liar Game. Ashida's appearance was another hyped one - she featured prominently in the trailer and had a dedicated short spin-off drama before the movie. With that much publicity one could expect that they'll be taking a major role in the events of the movie together with a large chunk of the screen time, at the very least giving Yokoya from the series a run for his money. And how did it end up? They have a total of maybe four scenes and play no active role in the game. They might just as well not have been there.

And the rest of the cast? We have series regulars Fukunaga (Suzuki Kosuke) and "Gold Tooth" Tanimura (Watanabe Ikkei) - another pair of sideline commentators. On the bright side, among the players we'll see Hamada Mari reprising her role as Sakamaki Mai from The Final Stage and Koike Eiko in what probably was the most decent performance among the main cast.

The movie features only a single game, "Modified Musical Chairs" and at two hours time it feels drawn out in the middle and ending prematurely in the finale. It seems as if they have originally planned a second game and a different finale, but ended up having to revise the script and had trouble tying up the loose ends.

Is it a worthwhile watch? If you saw the earlier Liar Games and are hungry for more - go ahead, it is ultimately more of the same. A little under-cooked, but most of the ingredients are in place - the games, the mood, the music and most of the cast. Otherwise, you're better off watching - or rewatching - the series. In my eyes, The Final Stage was a satisfying closure. Reborn doesn't bring anything new to the table. It doesn't bode well for the future of the series.

Food for thought

I'm not familiar with the manga and to what extent the drama storyline stays true to it, so I'm basing what I'm about to write on a Liar Game Wiki post. In the manga, "Modified Musical Chairs" was the fourth round of the original Liar Game Tournament. It was held after the "Contraband Game", and had Akiyama and Kanzaki Nao competing against Yokoya and Funakoshi Eiichiro's cult leader character Fukunaga was the leader of extras instead of Ikeda Tetsuhiro's character.

While the producers might have had little choice but to replace Toda's character, there seems to be no apparent reason for keeping Fukunaga out of the game he originally appeared in. I am no less puzzled as to why Yokoya was replaced - he appears in at least one scene in the movie (it may only be a flashback though).

Looking at the game's resolution makes the fact that this game is recycled from the original series story-line most visible. While "Modified Musical Chairs" was replaced in the drama series, its resolution was adapted and used in one of the replacements. Now hearing almost the same lines spoken out for the second time makes it feel distinctly out of place to anyone familiar with the drama series. You simply can't make the same Grand Revelation twice.

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What are your thoughts? Am I being needlessly critical here?

Smuggler

Wannabe actor, Kinuta (Tsumabuki Satoshi) takes on a job as a mover - one who gets rid of inconvenient corpses - after his debt is bought out by an underground banker. He joins Joe (Masatoshi Nagase), a hard-boiled, laconic veteran of the trade, and an older chatterbox of a man who goes only by the moniker Gramps (Gashuin Tatsuya). Meanwhile, two legendary assassins, Vertebrae (Ando Masanobu) and Viscera (Ryushin Tei), are hired by the Chinese to deal with a Yakuza boss, Tanuma. Joe's team is tasked with disposing the bodies after the bloodbath that ensues. That's the first time their path will cross with the assassin's, but certainly not the last, because the angered Yakuza are now aiming for Vertebrae and Viscera's heads...

This is the premise of Ishii Katsuhito's 2011 movie Smuggler, based on Manabe Shohei's manga. The director assembled a pretty impressive cast - apart from the already mentioned, we'll see Mitsushima Hikari, Matsuyuki Yasuko and Kohinata Fumiyo with cameo appearances by several familiar faces.

When I sat down to this one, I expected a movie akin to Samehada Otoko to Momojiri Onna, with its comic-book violence and Pulp Fiction-like dialogues. This one however is noticeably darker, grittier and brutal then Samehada..., falling halfway to Kitano's Outrage with its realistic depictions of violence and gang power struggles. There will be skulls cracking in slow motion and lengthy, detailed torture scenes - the movie is not something to watch to the dinner.

I'm on fence with this one. For one thing, it's a well made piece of cinema, but the excessive violence left me twitching for a substantial part of the movie. Certainly there are people it will appeal to, for me it was too much. I find the more quirky Ishii, like Cha no Aji or Naisu no Mori, far more enjoyable.

My point for the movie

Among many cameo appearences by such Ishii veterans as Kiyokawa Hitoshi, Morishita Yoshiyuki and Terajima Susumu, there's also an appearence by Osugi Ren and Matsuda Shota as a pair of policemen - much like Tsumabuki's own appearence with Oguri Shun in Surely Someday. What's with all the policeman cameos in Japanese movies? Yoji Tanaka (another one from Samehada... cast) must have made it his hobby - I remember him from Udon, and looking at his imdb page, he must have scored a good three or four by himself. I have a hunch that I might have seen some odd policemen somewhere else too, but I can't pinpoint the titles of the top of my head

What are your feelings on Smuggler? Alternatively, have you seen any suspicious policemen around here somewhere?

Kourei (Séance)

Some time ago I have reviewed Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Shokuzai. While writing the article I have realized, much to my surprise, that I have yet to see any of the director's movies. Since then, I was looking for a chance to see one of his movies. And it's hard to find a better occasion to watch a ghost movie than Halloween evening.

Junko (Fubuki Jun) is living a modest, monotonous live in a countryside with her husband, a sound engineer (Yakusho Koji). You'd think nothing out of ordinary, apart from the fact that she is a spiritual medium. She can see ghosts, communicate with the dead or gain information about people and events by touching their belongings. This is as much a gift as a curse to her - while she can help people who consult her, she's unable to hold a regular job due to her extrasensory perception kicking in at the wrong moment - as depicted in the scene when she takes up a part-time job at a family restaurant. Moreover, she broods over the fact that - due to her abilities being in the most part involuntary and hard to control - she can't prove them and is looked upon suspiciously by others. An unexpected chance arrives when a psychology student she was in contact with invites her to join an ongoing police investigation. A girl has been kidnapped. An accident has put the supposed kidnapper into coma and the trail runs cold. The police is skeptical, but will follow any clue if it can bring them to the kidnapped girl. Junko sees this as a chance to prove her abilities to the world and turn around her mundane live. A handkerchief the police passes her allows her to trace the girl's whereabouts. Much to her surprise, the girl turns up unconscious and malnourished in a trunk her husband takes with him when he goes out in the wild on recording sessions. Instead of handing the girl over to the police at the spot and likely making her husband a prime suspect, Junko concocts a plan that will put her in the spotlight as a spiritualist that has solved the case for the police. The events take the turn for the worse when the girl they now hold in custody dies and begins to haunt them...

Kourei is a 2000 TV movie loosely based on Séance on a Wet Afternoon, British film from 1964 starring Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough. Either that, or they share the common source material - novel by Mark McShane. While they do share the outline of the story, the differences are fundamental and run deep, if the article on the book that I base this opinion on is correct.

In the novel, Myra - Junko's novel counterpart - is the one who kidnaps the child in the first place. She wants to establish herself as a first-class spiritualist. She's also the breadwinner of the family, as the séances she holds are the main income of the family. The husband Bill is unemployed and passive, unable and afraid to talk his wife out of her plan. Myra's motivation is her ambition, Junko however, while also seeking recognition, is dragged into the case more or less by chance and large part of the reason for tricking the police is her desire to put her husband out of suspicion. Myra is also a fraud, while in Junko's case we are led to believe she is the real thing. It also seems as if Yakusho's character had more backbone than Bill, though I don't know how Bill's character develops with the story, so I might be wrong here.

Much like in Shokuzai, the music is minimal, mostly ambient and used in the scenes depicting the supernatural. The exception again is a track played on bagpipes, much like in the 3rd episode of Shokuzai, used in one particularly unsettling scene.

The film's cast features several other well known faces - Kusanagi Tsuyoshi as the psychology student, Ittoku Kishibe as his professor, Kitaro as the police detective and Osugi Ren in a small role as a restaurant customer.

The pacing is slow and much of the film's value is conveyed through the mood and atmosphere, between the lines. Also, don't count on the movie to scare you senseless - it was a plus for me, as I'm not a horror person, but taking this movie for a token asian horror in lieu of Ringu, Dark Water or Ju-on might leave you disappointed.

My point for this movie

The scary scenes are nice and all, but the real strength of this movie lies in the depiction of the relationship between the wife and the husband. They seem distant from each other, much like any other stereotypical Japanese marriage. But the same can be said about them being distant from the rest of the world, the wife due to her abilities, the husband due to his aloof personality and solitary nature of his work. Perhaps it's this quality that brings them together. Before the incident, we see them together eating dinner, engaged in small talk about the husband's work. We see the husband coming home after work while the wife is holding a séance for a customer, we see him lying down and breathing out a cloud of fog when she's conducting the ritual. Yet they do not talk about it later, nor do they speak anything about her powers until they find the girl. I assumed he might not know about them, and even if he does, it will somehow cause a rift between them. It doesn't happen. It seems he accepted her, knowing about them all along, and will go to great lengths in order to protect her.

What's your favourite Kurosawa Kiyoshi movie? What would you recommend next? Cure? Charisma? Or maybe something entirely different?