Movie Review: Before We Vanish

Before We Vanish *** / *****

Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Written by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Sachiko Tanaka based on the player by Tomohiro Maekawa.

Starring: Masami Nagasawa (Narumi Kase), Ryûhei Matsuda (Shinji Kase), Hiroki Hasegawa (Sakurai), Masahiro Higashide (Pastor), Kyôko Koizumi (Doctor), Kazuya Kojima (Detective Kurumada), Atsuko Maeda (Asumi Kase), Ken Mitsuishi (Suzuki), Shinnosuke Mitsushima (Maruo), Takashi Sasano (Shinagawa), Mahiro Takasugi (Amano), Yuri Tsunematsu (Akira Tachibana).

 

I have never quite understood people who always seem to complain that any movie over two hours is too long (especially since they also seem to be the people who brag about binging a TV series in a weekend, but I digress). Films are more than just a plot delivery device that should try and get it over with as quickly as possible. But if you are one of those people, I’ll say right off the top that Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Before We Vanish is not a film for you. It runs two hours and ten minutes, and spends much of that time meandering from place to place, content to take its take, even repeat itself if necessary, and simply hang out with these characters. There are moments of explosive violence to keep things interesting – but in many ways, this movie is content to meander with its big ideas and flawed execution. It’s actually one of the more charming things about the film.

 

The concept of Before We Vanish is fascinating. Three aliens have crashed landed on earth, and each has taken over the body of a person (all of them in Japan, oddly enough). The aliens cannot understand humans – and are particularly interested in concepts. The way they learn these concepts is to basically steal them from people by touching their foreheads – the aliens then understand the concept, but the human no longer does. Two of these aliens end up with human guides – Shinji (Ryuhei Matsuda) is returned to his wife Narumi (Masami Nagasawa), who doesn’t understand why the husband she thought had abandoned her is acting so strange – but their bond strengthens over time. The other two end up with Sakurai (Hiroki Hasegawa) a cynical reporter who first sees these two as a good story, until he realizes they’re not joking. Unlike Shinji, these two aliens don’t really develop an emotional connection with their guide – they’re more like psychopathic children.

 

The concept of the movie is fascinating enough that it really does keep you interested in what’s happening for probably longer than it should. As we see people relieved on concepts like family, ownership and work, they all basically act the same – they have been unshackled from the drudgery of their lives, and the things holding them down. When Sakurai tries to rally people to his cause late in the film – giving a big speech to a square full of onlookers, who look at him with blank eyes, you may well wonder if perhaps the aliens are not right, and we need to be wiped out. But Kurosawa doesn’t feel that way – and although the end of the movie gives way to cheap sentimentality – it’s effective just the same.

 

Ultimately, I don’t think that Before We Vanish is quite as clever or original as it thinks it is – or then it feels like for part of its runtime. We are enslaved by our beliefs, and would be happier if we threw them off, and lived more freely, we get it. And yet, in the end it is another concept – love- that will eventually save humanity – a concept that even a seemingly emotionless alien can relate to. No matter how much this movie meanders (and boy does it) it ultimately end up precisely where you expect it to. It’s another interesting film from Kurosawa, who has been somewhat adrift the past decade or so, since moving away from his earlier J-horror (with Cure and Pulse, among others) with Tokyo Sonata – which was essentially the same thing, without the horror. His output since then has been all over the map. This is one of his strangest films, and while I don’t think it’s one of his best, it may well be one of his most memorable in that time. Even if the destination is well known, the journey is interesting.

Movie Review: Creepy

Creepy

Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Written by: Chihiro Ikeda & Kiyoshi Kurosawa based on the novel by Yutaka Maekawa.

Starring: Hidetoshi Nishijima (Takakura), Yûko Takeuchi (Yasuko), Teruyuki Kagawa (Nishino), Haruna Kawaguchi (Saki), Masahiro Higashide (Nogami), Ryôko Fujino (Mio), Takashi Sasano (Tanimoto), Masahiro Toda (Okawa).

 

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy is a film that returns the Japanese director to his J-Horror roots – particularly his 1997 serial killer drama Cure – which was his breakthrough film. Kurosawa would make a few more J-horror films (notably Pulse in 2001) – before starting to make more traditional dramas – but with Creepy, he returns – however briefly – to the genre that launched his career. Like Cure, Creepy is a masterclass is film style – a slow burn of a film that goes from police procedural in the first half to something much darker in the second. Also like Cure, the film is marred by some sloppy storytelling and some huge leaps in logic the film requires the audience to make. If you can accept those however, than Creepy really does deliver.

 

The film is about Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) – a criminal profiler, who starts the movie as a talented, but arrogant, man who doesn’t see the danger lurking directly in front of him – and that leads to tragic consequences. As a result, he leaves his job, and moves to the suburbs, taking a job teaching criminology at a university, as he tries to repair his marriage to Yasuko (Yuko Takeuchi). His is slowly drawn back into police work –through a cold case in which an entire family – save for one teenage daughter (now an adult) went missing. That daughter claims she doesn’t remember anything, but Takakura isn’t sure he believes her – and starts pushing her, more and more, to remember – and bits and pieces do eventually start coming. There is also the issue of their new neighbor, Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa) who is, well, creepy. But perhaps she’s just socially awkward and weird – nothing criminal about that – although the fact that his wife remains little seen is strange, and his relationship with his daughter is also weird – but not in a way that you can really put your finger on. Yasuko is more creeped out by him that Takakura – who, once again, may not see what’s lurking under his nose.

 

Kurosawa’s strength in these thrillers has always been in his ability to create mood and atmosphere – and not so much in his narrative abilities. That’s true in Creepy as well – which is a masterfully made film in many respects, slowly ratcheting up the tension for more than an hour, before twisting itself into something much more horrific (the fact that it’s so normal, makes it more horrific still). Kurosawa, unlike other directors of J horror, never overdoes the blood and gore in his films – he knows, ultimately, he doesn’t need to. He is also capable of getting wonderful performances from his cast – here in particular Nishijima is excellent as the expert profiler, who becomes so obsessed with one case, he cannot see what’s right in front of him, and especially Kagawa as Nishino, who goes from weird to creepy to something else gradually, but wonderfully.

 

What doesn’t work as well is some of the plotting. While the film is masterfully directed, I do think it takes too long to get where it’s going – it has a tendency to repeat itself. It’s also a plot that relies so heavily on coincidence that even a generous audience member is going to question just how much it leans on it – and just how great of leap of logic the film requires. As well, Yasuko, the protagonists wife, is not as developed as she needs to be to make a late film twist work - seriously the film, which runs over two hours, could have easily found time to make her into more than the main characters wife, which is what was needed to make the twists work.

 

Still, it’s nice to see Kurosawa step back into the genre that made his career – and show off the old chops again. I wish he’d do it more often, because he really is great at it. Maybe, next time thought, he should get someone else to write the screenplay. Creepy is a good movie that with a together screenplay, could have been a great one.

Classic Movie Review Duo: Cure (1997) & Pulse (2001)

Cure (1997)
Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Written by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa based on his novel.
Starring: Kôji Yakusho (Kenichi Takabe), Masato Hagiwara (Kunio Mamiya), Tsuyoshi Ujiki (Makoto Sakuma), Anna Nakagawa (Fumie Takabe), Yoriko Dôguchi (Dr. Akiko Miyajima), Yukijirô Hotaru (Ichiro Kuwano), Denden (Oida), Ren Ôsugi (Fujiwara).

Pulse (2001)

Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Written by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Starring: Haruhiko Katô (Ryosuke Kawashima), Kumiko Asô (Michi Kudo), Koyuki (Harue Karasawa), Kurume Arisaka (Junko Sasano), Masatoshi Matsuo (Toshio Yabe), Shinji Takeda (Yoshizaki), Kenji Mizuhashi (Taguchi), Teruo Ono (Doroningen), Masayuki Shionoya (Ghost).

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a boom time for Japanese Horror (creatively referred to as J-Horror) – with films like Ringu and Ju-On finding international attention, and eventual American remakes in The Ring and The Grudge. Most of these movies were ghost stories of one kind or another – with curses, and death, etc. spreading from one person to another. The genre pretty much ran its course – in both Japan and America – by the mid-2000s, although the roots of Japanese horror ghost stories date back hundreds of years, and never really goes away. Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a director who is somewhat related to the genre – but also somewhat removed. He has done some films that are straight ahead dramas – like Bright Future (2003) and Tokyo Sonata (2008), and has ventured into sci-fi and action filmmaking as well. He perhaps remains best known though for his horror movies – in particular Cure (1997), which isn’t a really in the tradition of J-horror (no ghosts), and Pulse (2001), which certainly is. Kurosawa has been on my radar for years – I particularly loved Tokyo Sonata – but somehow, I never went back and saw his two early horror films to recently.

Kurosawa’s 1997 film, Cure, predates the J-horror boom slightly (for the record, searching for J-horror on They Shoot Zombies Don’t They? Top 1000 horror film list has the first being Hideo Nakata’s Ringu from 1998, the last being 2005’s Retribution by Takahsi Shimzu from 2005 – and although Cure is on the list, it’s not listed as J-horror. Pulse however is), and is actually much more in line with the serial killers films of the era (which, in America, probably started with The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, and includes films like Seven, Copycat, etc.). In the film, a police detective, Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho), investigating a series of brutal murders – all of which are connected, even though they are each committed by someone different. What connects them is a giant X on the victims who usually have their throats cut, and the fact that none of them remember committing the crime. Takabe teams up with a psychologist, Sakuma (Tsuyowshi Ujiki), who helps to give him insight into what is happening. Eventually, they figure out what the audience has known from the beginning – he mastermind is a young man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), who uses hypnosis to control the murderers. Mamiya appears to have no short term memory – constantly asking what is happening, what day it is, where he is, and frustrating Takabe – while also possessing some surprising knowledge about him – especially about his mentally ill wife.

Cure is neatly divided into two halves – the police procedural of the first, giving way to something darker in the second. Plotting has never really been Kurosawa’s strong point – and it isn’t here either. The movie certainly requires one to make some big leaps in logic, and buy some pretty big twists and turns in order to make the story work – including far too much about the history of mesmerizing things in Japan. What Kurosawa does excel at is building atmosphere, and terrifying set pieces – something Cure has in abundance. It may not need all the time it takes (nearly 2 hours) to tell its rather slight story – but there is more than enough to make the film worthwhile, including a perplexing climax, which leaves audiences reeling.

For me, the better film is Pulse from 2001 – perhaps simply because there is nowhere near as much plot as in Cure,

which as mentioned, isn’t Kurosawa’s strong suit anyway. The film is, in some ways, a techno-phobic horror film. Interestingly however, the film never really blames technology for humanity’s downfall as much as seeing it as tool that we use to destroy ourselves. The film tells two parallel storylines – both centering on a character who is trying to figure out why everyone around them is killing themselves – sometimes in bizarre ways. They are draw to the internet – websites that load onto their screen automatically, and promise a connection to the dead. After this, there are overly complicated rules about the dead, and what precisely they are trying to do – and how – and a lot of talk about ash, and literal red tape. Yes, like Cure, Pulse is somewhat confusingly plotted – although this one at least has the excuse of being about ghosts who use the internet, so perhaps stretching credibility wasn’t really high on Kurosawa’s list of concerns.

What Pulse does brilliantly however is create atmosphere. There are a lot of scenes of creepy websites – perhaps a few too many, since they are all kind of similar, yet they are all so effectively creepy it hardly matters. Pulse is a terrifying movie because of all that atmosphere – because of those creepy ghosts coming to get you. I’m on record as saying ghost movies don’t often scare me – but this one did, in part, I think because it so brilliantly brings the ghosts into the real world – and also because the real villains in the film aren’t ghosts at all, but us.

Both Cure and Pulse have their flaws – both could stand to lose 20-30 minutes, which would result in tighter, less repetitive movies with less downtime in them. They could have also used someone else at the screenplay stage just to tighten up the plot a little bit – just to ensure it actually makes sense (I’m not sure it really does in either film). What both films do accomplish – brilliantly in the case of Pulse, is to be deeply unsettling, and downright scary. Pulse, in particular, does this – mainly by following its premise to its logical conclusion. Pulse has aged a little bit in the past 14 years – the first sound we hear in the movie is a dial-up modem, which I think we can all agree is scarier than a circle saying “Buffering” for minutes on end – but it’s still very much relevant and terrifying. Kurosawa seems to want to move away from horror films – so be it. But while he was making them, he made at least two that won’t leave you alone.

Movie Review: Tokyo Sonata

Tokyo Sonata ****
Directed By: Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Written By: Kiyoshi Kurosawa & Max Mannix & Sachiko Tanaka.
Starring: Teruyuki Kagawa (Ryûhei Sasaki), Kyôko Koizumi (Megumi Sasaki), Yû Koyanagi (Takashi Sasaki), Inowaki Kai (Kenji Sasaki), Haruka Igawa (Miss Kaneko), Kanji Tsuda (Kurosu), Kôji Yakusho (The Robber), Kazuya Kojima (Mr. Kobayashi).

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is mainly known for his horror films. He has made great examples of Japanese horror like Cure, Pulse, Charisma and Séance – some of which have been ruined by American remakes, and some are still waiting to be ruined. So in a way, his latest and best film, Tokyo Sonata, is a departure for him as it is not a horror movie in the traditional sense of the word. And yet, there is certainly a degree of mounting dread, and a certain amount of terror and uncertainty in the film. It couldn’t possibly be a more timely film, as it deals with the effects of the economic downtown in a global economy. And yet, Tokyo Sonata resonates for more reasons than that.

Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) was the director of administration for a large Japanese firm, until they realized they could cut costs by two-thirds simply by outsourcing this function to China, and he is let go. Humiliated at being a middle aged business man now unemployed, he doesn’t tell his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) about his firing, but instead heads off to “work” every morning. He tries going to employment agencies and to other job interviews, but is dealt one humiliation after another. The employment agency says he has zero chance at getting a job at the rate of his last one, and in interviews they want him to demonstrate his skills right in front of them during the interview. How do you demonstrate that you’re good at administration work? Simple, he doesn’t.

So he spends most of his time in libraries and in large concrete squares where they give out free food. He is surrounded by other men in his situation, as well as the homeless – the line between them getting thinner and thinner by the day. He meets a friend from school, Kurosu (Kanji Tsuda), who is in the same boat and has been for months. He offers advice on how best to fool his wife, but not on how to get another job. Eventually, Kurosu takes the easy way out. But Ryuhei cannot do that. When he finally lands another job, it is as a janitor at a shopping mall – the happy employed people going about their business all around him as if he isn’t even there.

But the fact that Ryuhei loses his job doesn’t cause the problems in his family – they just bring them to the forefront. The other three members of the family are all dealing with their own problems, and cannot share them with the other members of the family. Megumi goes about her routine as the dutiful housewife, but now that one child is over 18, and the other about to enter high school, she really doesn’t have anything to do, and is getting bored. When she discovers that Ryuhei is out of work, why doesn’t she offer to get a job? Because that’s not what she does.

Their oldest son, Takashi (Yû Koyanagi), is now out of school and sees no prospects for him in the modern Japan. When the law changes, and allows Japanese citizens to join the American army, he jumps at the opportunity. Their younger son Kenji (Inowaki Kai), accidentally starts a “revolution” in his class, and instantly regrets it. He wants to take piano lessons, but his father refuses to allow him. He does so anyway, stealing his own lunch money to pay for them. This is a family who hasn’t communicated with each other in years.

For two thirds of its running time, Kurosawa’s film plays like an updated version of an Ozu film – using the family as a microcosm through which we can view all of Japanese society – in this case one that is crumbling all around them, and heading uneasily off into a modern, globalized world. But just when we think we know where Tokyo Sonata is going, Kurosawa throws one curveball after another at us – a robbery turned hostage taking, an envelope full of money that is found, and people chasing children through their neighborhoods. For some, this is when Kurosawa loses his way in this film. But I find the last act absolutely necessary to the fabric of the movie. It wakes the characters up out of their daze, and moves them off into the future. The future is not bright (a reference to another Kurosawa film), but it’s there in front of them – and for the first time it appears that this family maybe willing to face it with their eyes wide open.