MANGA REVIEW: BLACK BLIZZARD (1956, 2010)

by Yoshihiro Tatsumi 

English translation by Akemi Wegmuller

Edits/Design/Lettering by Adrian Tomine

Title logo designed by Tim Hensley

Published by Drawn and Quarterly in March 2010.

Original Japanese language publication by Hinomaru Bunko in 1956. 

. . .

"If you ask me, the only way we're getting apart is if one of us loses his hand."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Black Blizzard is a film noir on paper. Full stop. It's not an homage. It's not a pastiche. It's not neo-noir. It is full noir. It was created in 1956. It has the melodrama, the psychodrama, the romanticism, the haunted pasts, the moral gray areas, and the (except for the opening pages) black and white visual scheme. Get Seijun Suzuki on the horn and have him shoot it in Nikkatsu Scope. It's ready to go. 

Black Blizzard is, actually, a manga. A comic book. 128 pages all from the mind and hands and sweat of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who would go on to have a long and influential career in Japanese comics. But in 1956 he was in his twenties, just in the first act of his career. All by himself he crafted a feature length crime thriller worthy of anything produced by Nikkatsu or by the various Hollywood studios that fits between two covers. That's the power of a manga writer/artist firing on all cylinders. Writer, director, actors, crew all in one furiously scribbling man. How about that? It's kinda neat.

Much like the genre crime films of yore, Black Blizzard uses crime and criminality most interestingly as a way of exploring moral confusion within people through various melodramatic situations. This isn't about strict realism so much as a hard-boiled sort of romanticism. Doom can be averted only by proving oneself before the eyes of fate. To this end, we have two men-one a young musician recently convicted of murder, the other a middle aged career crook facing a life sentence-handcuffed to each other as they are transported by train to prison. An avalanche derails the train, and our handcuffed pair escape the wreckage to go on the lam. The musician is trying to hold on to his old identity as a respectable young man with a future. The career crook is on a defiant death trip, seeking nothing more than to evade the law for as long as possible, perhaps visit his daughter one last time, and then die in a shootout with the cops. It occurs to the career crook that one of them will probably have to cut off the other guy's hand if they are both truly going to be free. The musician is appalled by this idea, and keeps fighting for a way to break the chain without either of them losing a hand. 

The conflict resolves itself in an unexpected manner which some may find a bit over the top, especially for those who are more familiar with Tatsumi's later, more sophisticated character studies like The Push Man or Abandon the Old in Tokyo. Black Blizzard has two protagonists who seem to represent different aspects of one person, whereas later Tatsumi works would follow singular characters roiling with inner strife and loneliness. Tatsumi started here under the heavy influence of the melodramatic variety of film noir and would later be writing stories comparable to Taxi Driver-but this is a very crude comparison. Tatsumi has his own voice to be sure. Also, I think Black Blizzard stands on its own as a legitimate expression of genre crime fiction. It's fun and stylish in the way those old timey black and white crime flicks could be, even if the ride is more fun than the eventual destination. The plot is a framework for the tormented characters to struggle with existential dilemmas and the burdens of the past. 

Tatsumi's art is stripped down, propulsive, with lots of slashing lines. When we dive into bitter memories from the past those are just as sharp; no dreaminess to these flashbacks, no easy escape. There's even a jolting nightmare sequence evoking the fatalism of noir crime fiction. 

Black Blizzard could, if followed exactly, be a ready to go blueprint for a new cult classic film noir. It also stands on its own as a comic book. 

MOVIE REVIEW: ENTER THE VOID (2010)

 Written and Directed by Gaspar Noe

Director of Photography Benoit Debie

Edited by Gaspar Noe, Marc Boucrot, Jerome Pesnel

Visual Effect Director Pierre Buffin

Production Designers Kikuo Ohta and Jean Carriere

Art Supervisor Marc Caro

Sound Design Ken Yasumoto

Sound EFX Director Thomas Bangalter

Starring

Nathaniel Brown as Oscar

Paz de la Huerta as Linda

…

“Within the 38th consecutive hour of Tetris lies the bardo gate.”

-William D. Tucker, Tetris enthusiast

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

A man dies. His ghost leaves him. He’s a ghost now. Ghost zips around the city in which he died, bearing witness to the effects of his death.

You ever fantasize about that? About attending your own funeral, or being able to observe the people you would leave behind once you’re dead? That’s the fantasy that drives Enter the Void, a kind of visually audacious spiritual/faith-based porn movie I once purchased on DVD at a Best Buy 10,000 fuckin’ years ago. 

The city is Tokyo. The dead man is a white guy from America who’s set himself up as a drug dealer in a foreign country in order to avoid working a real job which he views as a form of bondage. He’s trying to cut ties to the trauma of his past, but ends up creating nothing but sorrow for himself and the people to which he is connected. 

The dead guy has an uncomfortably close relationship with his sister, who eventually joins him in Tokyo. Their closeness isn’t weird to them, not at first, but it’s definitely meant to push audience buttons, and it also ends up causing difficult feelings for the dead man. 

When the film begins, we are in first person perspective, reminiscent of a video game such as Doom or Wolfenstein 3-D. But instead of firing a gun, our POV character-the future dead man-smokes powerful hallucinogens and we see his grimy, cramped apartment invaded by spirit tentacles that inhale us all into a wild fractal organism’s gullet. Who’s smoking who, eh? 

Or something. 

After our POV guy dies, his spirit seems to be pulled this way and that by strong desires that keep him bound to the world of the living. His spirit is drawn to wherever he senses his sister is or one of the other people he’s tied to by bonds of love or hate or both. Our dead guy even jumps into vivid memories of his past. Much is made of a fanciful oath that brother and sister once swore as children that they would never be apart, and that they would never die. Our ghost begins to follow his past self around, trying to get a new perspective on all the forces and actions that led him to his death. He cannot change his fate, but he can enhance his understanding of how he ended up as a stubborn ghost.

Sometimes mundane real world things become spiritual teleport pads or expressway tunnels traversing the world of the dead. Fire, light, electricity, gunshot wounds, open urns, and inert organic matter offer secret gateways as things which are textbook physical phenomena to the living become charged with mystical power to one who is among the restless dead. 

You ever wondered what it would be like to be a ghost drifting through a strip club? Enter the Void has answers. 

Oh . . . and don’t watch it with the kids. If you do, the questions will never end. Just trying to help.

Enter the Void uses elaborate camera work and highly detailed computer generated imagery to tell a story both cosmic and intimate. It isn’t perfect. The drugs, the sex, the sleaze, the unlikeable protagonist are all gonna be deal breakers for some or maybe even most audiences.

But I find it fascinating that you could have a special effects heavy movie that isn’t about Avengers fighting an evil purple man with a plastic death glove. It also has no known ties to Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or Harry Potter, which is nice. 

And our ghost guy wouldn’t be tied to this world if he were a saint. He would just ascend to the Great Country Buffet in the Sky if he were free of his burdens of guilt and trauma and hatred and lust. Enter the Void is a rare thing: a faith-based movie that skips empty moralizing sermons and actually takes seriously all the bizarre spiritual issues with which it wrestles. 

It’s kinda neat.

MOVIE REVIEW: HELLDRIVER (2010)

Starring
Yumiko Hara
Eihi Shiina
Kentaro Kishi


Written/Character Designed/Edited/Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura
Music by Koh Nakagawa
Action Director Isao Karasawa
Visual Effects Supervisor Tsuyoshi Kazuno
Stunt Coordinator Yoshio Miyaki
Costume Design by Minori Niizaki
Production Design by Nori Fukuda
Cinematography by Shu G. Momose
Produced by Yoshinori Chiba, Akifumi Sugihara, Ryo Uchiyama, Hiroyuki Yamada

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Helldriver is the greatest video game movie never made. What do I mean by that? I'm not totally sure.


Helldriver isn't actually derived from any extant video game franchise. There is no Helldriver for PS3, X-Box, Wii, etc. But Helldriver the movie, which does exist, is a kind of collection of all the over-the-top splatter and sadistic kills that one would expect from one of the major splatter franchises, Resident Evil, House of the Dead, Mortal Kombat, all those games known for their nonstop mayhem and dismemberment, evisceration, and novel, many-tentacled mutations on the prowl for brains, guts, flesh, or just glorious self-destruction in one-to-one combat. There's even a touch of one of those car-crashing franchises. There are car-crashing franchises, right? Yeah, sure, why not? There are video games that involve driving cars real fast, maybe stealing the cars first, and then driving them real fast, something like that. And then there's the Fast and Furious series of movies, which are also strongly reminiscent of video games .  . . yeah, there's some of that in Helldriver, too, I think. It's the "driver" in Helldriver, if you will.

I should say none of this is prologue to a scathing or even particularly negative review of Helldriver. I enjoyed it's lust for pure, gruesome absurdist spectacle. It is exactly the movie it wants to be, and no one will ever take that away from it. It's got zombies, aliens, imagery and costumes right out of Japan's Imperial era,  some rather disturbing moments of zombie sexuality, a really fucked-up scene involving zombie sexual assault and torture, a tricked out Badass-mobile, sword fights, car fights (what Joe Bob Briggs would call "car fu"), self-assembling zombie monstrosities composed of various arms, legs, and torsos of the chopped-up undead . . . it's all here. There's nothing left out--it's even got a vaguely satirical streak, for people who insist on that kind of thing. And geysers of watery, Kool-Aid looking blood. "Hey, Dracula, don't drink the Kool-Aid!" Ah, ha, ha . . . don't know where that came from. There's no vampires in the movie, it just kind of came out of me . . . so, you know, this movie's got pretty much everything except vampires, but here's how you can fix that. Just obtain a copy of Helldriver and copies of whatever your favorite vampire movies happen to be, put 'em on your hard drive, and use digital editing software to splice together your very own underground, so-off-the-map-indie-it-positively-throbs UltraRemixed No Serial Numbers Allowed Bootleg Helldriver With Vampires version of the movie and you're good to go, my dawg, no sweat. I won't tell the Governor if you won't . . . I suppose my point is that this is a movie which exists as a series of very impressively staged spectacles. You could pretty much watch the scenes in any order and the impact would likely not be reduced nor would it be enhanced, although the wonderfully impossible ending scene that plays as the credits roll wouldn't really work at any other place in the narrative.

What the fuck happens in this movie, you ask? It goes something like this: in the near future, maybe the year 20XX, a strange alien life form crashes into Japan and unleashes a cloud of toxic ash which transforms all who are contaminated by it into flesh-eating zombies who sprout these weird, rubbery antlers out of their foreheads that are actually kind of kawaii at times, and fucking disgusting at other times, and, get this, are harvested by freelancers and sold to the yakuza to make highly addictive, snortable narcotics. But there's a problem with the zombie-antler derived narcotics: they can make your head explode. That's right, the antlers are composed of a volatile substance which can explode whenever the filmmakers want to make sure you're still paying attention. Guess which part of these undead fuckers you should target when it comes time to start shootin'?

The Japanese government responds to this outlandish crisis by erecting a giant wall and quarantining the antler-zombies behind the wall. The Prime Minister doesn't want to alienate voters who have zombified family members, and so he doesn't order any kind of extermination effort against the zombies. This is a rather intriguing aspect of Helldriver: the controversy over whether antler-zombies should be given human rights and due process, or just summarily executed. This is a controversial position to put it mildly, and elements within the Japanese government see the crisis as an opportunity to consolidate power and whittle away at pesky individual (uninfected human)liberties . . . ring any bells, citizens?

Zombie movie fans, ask yourself this question: would this issue even be considered if the alien lifeform had crashed into the United States? Or would the President just go straight to martial law, targeted assassinations, and extraordinary renditions? Oh, and why not go ahead and place the non-zombie populations under surveillance, and start eliminating social welfare programs, regulatory agencies, environmental protections, start revving up the foreclosure cycles, etc. And don't give me any of that bullshit about, "Well, gee, it depends on whether it's a Democrat or a Republican . . ." because we all know that wouldn't matter. Come on, film fans, pay heed to the words of George Carlin: "Take a chance. Tell the truth."

Who the fuck are the main characters in this movie, you ask? The Japanese Prime Minister? The zombies? No, no, not exactly. The characters in this movie are not the most interesting parts of it, in my opinion, although I did appreciate the lead performance by Yumiko Hara as Kika, the chief zombie-slayer, and Eihi Shiina as Rikka, the Alien Queen of the Antler-Zombies. Rikka's got a brother played by Kentaro Kishi, and the character is truly a sick fuck. It's something else . . . more I will not say.

I'll say this. Eihi Shiina is a beautiful and intense actor who gave a memorable performance as a bride-to-be in Takashi Miike's masterful Audition, and was also quite memorable as the taciturn, self-mutilating supercop Ruka in Tokyo Gore Police, which was an earlier effort from Helldriver director Yoshihiro Nishimura. As Rikka, Shiina is buried under some wildass makeup, prosthetics, and costuming that make her look like a boss from a Parasite Eve side story. Shiina gives herself over to the crazed, cartoonish evil of the part, but I missed the subtle intensity she brought to those earlier roles. Yeah, I know, my complaint is totally out of place, but there you have it. I would've liked a little more nuance in this character, but it is what it is.

Yeah, and here's another complaint. Helldriver is clearly the hard labor of a committed cast and crew, and it's quite effective on its own terms, and yet largely forgettable once consumed. I guess it's the perfect definition of entertainment. Director Yoshihiro Nishimura seems to specialize in this kind of gory-goofy type of film. Just hit up his filmography on Wiki or Imdb: Tokyo Gore Police, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein, Mutant Girls Squad, and a score of special gore EFX credits going back to 1995. Nishimura knows his stuff. Tokyo Gore Police really left an impression on me. It was both absurdly funny and really fuckng icky, and it made an impression with it's shameless mutational perversities. Tokyo Gore Police was all about damaged, violent people seeking the edge of somatic experience and transformation packed into a fairly compelling mystery plot. Helldriver is just one damn thing after another. Helldriver's best scenes recall the most adventurous bits of Tokyo Gore Police without quite equaling it. Helldriver is not quite as visually accomplished, either, but it does create some impressive spectacle scenes. It lacks the grimy texture and doom-laden atmosphere of Tokyo Gore Police. The antler-zombies are good for a laugh, but they don't quite achieve the bizarro-pathos of the mutants and predators from Tokyo Gore Police.

Helldriver is pure sensation, featuring many scenes of impressively orchestrated carnage, and a delightfully off-kilter soundtrack. It's fun for what it is, but if you like Helldriver, I urge you to check out 2008's Tokyo Gore Police. It's in a similar style, but with more impact.

 Helldriver does do one thing that Tokyo Gore Police couldn't or wouldn't. It asks the question: "Can you build an aerodynamically feasible device out of the bodies of antler-zombies?"

For the answer, you'll just have to see for yourself . . .

BOOK REVIEW: EXTRA LIVES: WHY VIDEO GAMES MATTER (2010)

by Tom Bissell


Published by Pantheon Books in 2010


...

"As incomprehensible as it may seem, I have some how spent more than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent with it. I can think of only one personal activity I would be less eager to see audited in this way, and it, too, is a single-player experience."
                                           -Tom Bissell
...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Tom Bissell is a video game junkie. No question. He is also a very smart and articulate writer, and, like William Burroughs with heroin, he writes about his addiction, his master, with obsessive zeal and even offers up some brilliant critical insights into video gaming as addiction, as a multi-billion dollar industry, as an art form just now being broadly recognized as such, and as a path to self-destruction. His book Extra Lives is an entertaining and disturbing mixture of memoir and journalism. He combines descriptions of his experiences playing video games with interviews with some of the most successful game designers currently working to create an intriguing dialectic between a subjective confessional narrative and a critical consciousness aimed at picking the minds of video game designers and theorists, and exploring what it is that we seek when we play video games.

What is it that we seek when playing video games? For Bissell, it would seem that his title says it all: more lives, more life, we want to crawl into some other identity, usually one that is heavily armed, and essentially immortal and indestructible. Sure, you get killed all the time in games, but then you just go back to your last save point. Video game death is almost never permanent.

But Bissell is also looking for quality stories and characterizations, and he makes the case that video games are in a kind of renaissance in terms of games' capacities for deep stories, open-ended game play, and sophisticated characterizations. Video games are now capable of visual spectacle above and beyond what's possible at the cinema, that earlier, cruder form of virtual reality. Moreover, video games allow you to take control of the action. The player is totally in control.

Except when those arbitrary cut scenes kick in, and then you have no choice but to follow the plan laid out by the game designers. Bissell asserts that this tension between freedom of play and the coercive demands of an overarching narrative that intrudes on the illusion of freedom and empowerment one experiences while gaming is one of the key hurdles video games must overcome in order to achieve . . . but Bissell doesn't resolve the tension. He merely illustrates it.

But if one stops to consider what he's suggesting, he's basically calling for video games to be able to offer completely free-form, endlessly variable experiences. The ultimate merger between the demands of narrative in the literary sense, and what Bissell refers to as ludonarrative, which could be characterized as the the story which grows naturally out of the act of play, would basically be an extra, or second, life. It's a paradox. It's a mindfuck.

Think about it. Gaming is absorbing because it is an escape. And the more detailed and graphically and aurally impressive games become, the more we want to play them. But if a game were to totally replicate the free form experience of being alive, it would include massive amounts of minutiae which might destroy the gaming experience, to make it so demanding that it would cease to be fun. Even if the game was a fantasy experience including magical powers and heroic deeds it would be work to keep up with it. And then you would go looking for some other form of escape . . . to escape your escape . . .you 'd need not just a second life, but extra lives.

It makes me think of the Konami code: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, START.

How many lives does the obsessive gamer require?

And talk about a warped sense of entitlement. It's not enough that our high tech civilization gives us such advanced amusements, but now we expect them to substantially or even completely replace our meatspace lives. But maybe there's something to this. If we all just stayed home and became absorbed into virtual existences, maybe we'd be less inclined to drive fossil fuel powered vehicles and engage in real world wars of adventure and folly. Of course, the electricity expenditure would go up, but where are people driving to, anyways? There are no jobs to go to. Most people are overweight, out of shape, and disinterested in meeting face to face.  Now, everyone works from home as the ultimate hi-score warrior, conjuring up second and third and fourth lives from the digital void. Game on!

Bissell's logic is that of the junkie chasing the ultimate high. The junkie who has come up against the outer limits of his accumulated chemical resistances. Bissell doesn't hide the fact that being hooked on video games has come at a high personal cost: a damaged work ethic and seriously strained, perhaps even broken, human relationships. Bissell is to be commended for being up front about this aspect of gaming addiction. He isn't exactly apologetic, but he does acknowledge the rather steep downside of his devotions.

This downside is illustrated by his adventures playing Grand Theft Auto IV while coked out of his mind with a buddy. They made a point of playing GTAIV while coked-up. Sometimes the Scarface poster isn't enough.

Bissell comes across as a guy who is seeking unusual, obsessive, and dangerous experiences. He was in the Peace Corps for a stretch until he dropped out, he's worked as an embedded reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has burned through relationships with women at a rapid clip, and he has also Hoovered large quantities of cocaine with a friend while fanatically playing Grand Theft Auto IV. His consciousness seems to be divided between the here and now and some sort of idealized zone of continuous peak experiences. As a reader, I was captivated by his engaging, intellectually substantive, and humorous writing style, but I also wondered what it must be like to be friends with this guy. I would imagine his friends and family worry about him and his well-being. I hope he gets a handle on his appetites. It would be a shame to lose such a talented writer.

----

I've talked mostly about the personal side of Extra Lives. But the book isn't all druggie confessional narrative. Bissell went out and interviewed a some of the people who were instrumental in creating games such as Mass Effect, Far Cry 2, Braid, and Fable 2. These are all excellent pieces of reportage and analysis, and the most I can say is read them for yourself. They are most enlightening.

But something about this book really got to me.

 Tom Bissell  writes the single best obsessively detailed description of the experience of playing the original Resident Evil  for PS1 that I have ever read. It is also the only obsessively detailed description of the experience of playing the original Resident Evil that I have ever read, but sometimes you just grok a winner when you're in the presence of one, you know? Bissell breaks down that epochal game's technique: its deliberate pacing, the Mystery Science Theater quality voice acting, the camera angles which obscure as much as they reveal and create anxiety and make you wonder from which direction the enemy will strike, the sinister ambiance of the scoring and soundscaping, and then he goes one better: he creates a brilliant interpretation of why the controls for the very first Resident Evil game kinda sucked. In Bissell's view, the clunky controls augment the terror, the anxiety, the suspense, and function in a way antithetical to the first person shooter games which were then, and still are, all the rage.

In an FPS, you want responsiveness, you want to be able to mow down the enemy, reload instantly, and move quickly to avoid being surrounded or cornered, but in Resident Evil the player character can't just shoot from the hip. You gotta press the button to draw your weapon, then you gotta press buttons to position your character to aim at the enemy, and there's no goddamn cross-hair! There's no on-screen targeting icon to indicate whether you're actually locked on to the zombie or hunter or giant spider or undead attack dog--all you can do is hope you're pointing in the right direction and fire at will. In an FPS, the design of the controls facilitates fluidity and fast paced play. In Resident Evil, you are forced to be deliberate with every step you take, each hallway you choose to explore, every shot fired because you're unlikely to survive too many full-on encounters with the enemy, and the supplies of ammunition are severely limited.

And then there's the typewriters and those ink ribbons. In order to save the game, you gotta find an ink ribbon, and then you gotta get to a room with a typewriter. Every time you save, you use up an ink ribbon. The supplies of ink ribbons are not unlimited, so saving your game becomes as much a part of your strategy as how you use your ammunition, whether you choose to fight every monster you come across, or beat a strategic retreat.

Bissell describes all of this brilliantly, capturing the mindset one evolves to survive in such a dire gaming scenario, and how such games frustrate and addict those who play them in equal measure. As I read Bissell's description, I thought back to when I first got a PS1 and how one of the first games I got was Resident Evil. Most of my Christmas vacation was spent plugged into that sinister mansion. Hours passed like seconds. I played from three in the afternoon until seven in the morning, woke up at five p.m., played 'til seven or eight in the a.m., and I went a week without seeing any sunlight. In Florida. And Resident Evil wasn't all fun. It made me want to pull my fingernails out, just to try and jack myself back into real life with some overwhelmingly agonizing act of self-torture. It made me scream and swear and invent new uses for the words fuck, shit, goddamnit, and mother long before I had ever read a David Mamet play or watched an Angry Video Game Nerd video. It fucked with my patience and my sleep cycles, and it also hooked me like few other things. Playing Resident Evil gave me some idea of what it was like to be a junkie.