MOVIE REVIEW: TOKYO FIST (1995)

Art Director/Production Designer/Cinematographer/Editor/Producer/Writer/Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Music by Chu Ishikawa

Story by Hisashi Sato and Shinya Tsukamoto

Starring

Shinya Tsukamoto as Tsuda

Kahori Fujii as Hizuru

Koji Tsukamoto as Kojima

Koichi Wajima as Shirota (Gym Owner)

Naomasa Musaka as Hase (Ethical Trainer)

Naoto Takenaka as Ohizumi (Less Ethical Trainer)

Nobu Kanaoka as Nurse

Tomorowo Taguchi as Tattoo Artist

. . .

“He who leaves the fight unfinished is not at peace.”

-from the N.K. Sandars English language translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh (1960, revised 1964, revised 1972)

“I was on my way home, but the moon brought me back here.”

-dialogue from the film Tokyo Fist (1995)

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Two men-a struggling insurance salesman named Tsuda and a struggling boxer named Kojima-fight over a woman-Hizuru, a competent data entry office worker-in Tokyo. It gets loud. It gets bloody. 

Tokyo Fist is a saga of jealousy and vengeance told in a punitively kinetic style. The camera seems to jitter about with hysterical excitement. Boxers in training assault the lens full-on. The audience is positioned as a punching bag. Brilliant industrial music gets the blood boiling. Yes, the characters are miserable. But there’s tremendous energy driving them. You keep waiting for someone’s head to explode.

Tokyo Fist also features clever use of real world locations in Tokyo mixed with stylishly lit sets. Director Shinya Tsukamoto even incorporates his fascinatingly gruesome stop motion animation techniques from Tetsuo the Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer to convey both inner emotional turmoil and bodily destruction in a more down-to-earth context of economic downturn and social dysfunction. Tokyo Fist is hyper-stylish but the visual flourishes do not smooth over the suffering of the characters. This is a satirically brutal view of Tokyo in the mid-1990s.

In the beginning, things can more or less be said to take place in mundane reality. There are two men, and there’s the woman they’re fighting to win. Everyone is basically someone who probably could exist outside of a movie. Maybe, y’know, the lighting would be less stylish, the shot compositions sloppier, more off-the-cuff, but these folks would still make sense free of the cinema frame.

Hizuru and Tsuda live in a nice enough apartment, and both work tolerable corporate jobs. We see Tsuda and Hizuru as having a happy relationship, at first, but we are soon enough given hints that all is not as it seems. Tsuda seems like a nice guy, but he’s actually jealous and controlling when not taking Hizuru for granted. Tsuda soon enough unleashes a full-on abusive side. He seems to feel entitled to nice things because he works so hard even if he’s both a tool of the system and a lousy partner. Hizuru seems like a doormat, but her passive exterior masks a simmering rage at being stepped on and trapped in a loveless relationship. Hizuru’s also resisting the expectation that she’s supposed to give up her career when Tsuda and her get married-a regressive expectation since it’s both misogynist and unrealistic. It’s misogynist in that it’s based on arbitrary gender roles. It’s unrealistic in the sense that Tsuda and Hizuru are living in the depths of the Post-Bubble Economy Malaise. A single income isn’t the smart way to go if they do stay together. 

Kojima enters the scene as a shadowy figure from Tsuda’s past. Tsuda is tasked with paying out a policy to someone at a boxing gym. So Tsuda goes to the gym. It’s framed as a descent into a bizarre underground cultish scene. Bruised men weep and hang their heads at being freshly defeated in the ring-mind you these are just sparring matches. Tsuda catches a glimpse of men throwing rapid fire punches synched to exaggerated sound effects. Tsuda’s instantly captivated by what he sees. Tsuda is also obviously threatened by it. Something’s stirring within the salesman. Tsuda and Kojima walk past each other, obliviously-except Kojima did see Tsuda. Of course, Tsuda might have recognized Kojima but chose to ignore him, but Tsuda comes across as so clueless that I don’t think he did. Tsuda leaves the gym, eager to catch the train home-but that’s when a first person slasher villain camera charges up behind him-

It’s Kojima. Him and Tsuda exchange words. It’s civil enough, on the surface, but also full of tension. Kojima and Tsuda know each other from the past. It’ll be awhile before We the Audience get filled in on that past, but it is very obviously the source of tension. Tsuda fears the past, and so he denies it. Kojima’s stuck in it.

Hizuru is interested in tattoos and body piercings. To an audience in 2024 this all seems pretty tame, but Tsuda freaks out, absurdly attempting to force her to accept a laser removal and then a skin graft from his ass cheeks. Maybe Japanese society in 1995 was just super uptight about tattoos and piercings. I should also note here that Tokyo Fist has a kind of bleakly funny hysteria woven through it. Tsuda’s moral panic at Hizuru’s ink and piercings is a manifestation of this.

Kojima visits Tsuda and Hizuru’s apartment. There’s a spark between Hizuru and Kojima. Tsuda picks up on that. Tsuda becomes even more abusive towards Hizuru. She ditches the salesman for Kojima . . . who also turns out to be an asshole. Hizuru is drawn to the boxer’s impressive body, but there’s little for her beyond lust. Kojima has the same regressive outlook on women. Hizuru finds herself trapped in another infuriating relationship with another dead end jerkoff she can do without. 

Tsuda seeks revenge against Kojima by joining his boxing gym. This seems like a joke, since by this time Kojima has already pummeled Tsuda’s face to a pulp during a jealous confrontation. But Tsuda pretty much has nothing but rage and shame to drive him by this point. Hizuru’s ditched him. He no longer takes his salesman job seriously. Tsuda’s all in on a duel to the death. 

Even the larger population of Tokyo is hungry for a death match. We see Kojima earn a technical victory against an opponent in the ring only to get booed by the disgruntled spectators. They didn’t come to see a clean fight. They came to see a man die. Even when Kojima wins he still loses. 

The fighting is, at times, direct and quite nasty, quickly becoming an end unto itself as Tsuda and Kojima seem to mutate into grisly, macho beasts more suited to battling the Hulk as opposed to going on dates in sitdown restaurants. Tsuda and Kojima bring their battle into a boxing gym, which is an all male scene, although Hizuru makes some attempts to get in the game. Literal boxing occurs, but then the literal process of boxing-the training, the drilling, the mindset, the fight itself-becomes a metaphor for the lives of our central trio. In Tokyo in the 1990s jobs, relationships, romance, desire, lust, love-these are all staged upon a battlefield that may be largely notional, and yet the city itself seems to exert some terrible power over hearts and minds. I was never wholly certain if these characters were taking action for themselves or if that terrible city power was riding herd on their asses all the way down the line.

Not surprisingly, Hizuru eventually removes herself from the whole situation . . . but Tsuda and Kojima keep on fighting. The actual Hizuru is replaced by a fantasy image of Hizuru in Tsuda and Kojima’s minds . . . which is probably what was going on even when she was still around. Sucks, but that is so often the case, isn’t it? Neither of these dudes ever saw Hizuru as her own person. Tsuda saw her as a trophy, perhaps as an eventual baby factory to secure his legacy. Kojima just got off on the sex and cuckolding Tsuda. Hizuru’s ultimate fate is ambiguous-which may frustrate some viewers-but there’s no doubt she’s better off far away from this pair of dickheads.

Tokyo Fist builds to a climax that weaves together real world imagery with gory hallucinations. Or maybe they’re not hallucinations. Maybe the central trio-Tsuda, Hizuru, Kojima-are vessels for the collective frustration, pettiness, vindictiveness, and disillusionment of post-Bubble Tokyo. Years of plenty, years of excess, riding a bullet train powered by a corporate fantasy of unlimited economic growth-

-now here comes the brick wall. 

Brace for impact. 

For all the good it’ll do you.

MOVIE REVIEW: A SNAKE OF JUNE (2002)

Writing/Directing/Cinematography/Editing/Production Design by Shinya Tsukamoto

Music by Chu Ishikawa

Starring

Asuka Kurosawa

Yuji Kohtari

Shinya Tsukamoto

. . .

THERE ARE EIGHT MILLION STORIES IN THE NAKED CITY-

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

WARNING: SPOILERS. I JUST DON'T KNOW HOW TO TALK ABOUT A SNAKE OF JUNE WITHOUT GETTING INTO THE DETAILS. 

In Tokyo, a perverted maniac with a flashbulb camera terrorizes an unhappy married couple into rediscovering their sexuality. First within their imaginations, and then within each other. But, ultimately, it is in their imaginations where the real action happens.

The wife works as a suicide crisis hotline counselor. The perverted photographer uses her job as a vector to stalk her and take pictures of her by seemingly masquerading as a person in crisis. The pervert photographs her in private moments, and then he blackmails her into staging a series of solo pornographic fantasies.

The husband-a workaholic clean freak who works at some vague office job-gets rougher treatment. He's drugged, forced to watch a live sex'n'death-by-drowning show deep underground, and then he's strangled by a robot tentacle penis while being kicked in the face over and over again. Hey, this is a Shinya Tsukamoto film, after all. 

This twisted shutterbug, as it turns out, isn't suicidal, but he is on a kind of suicide mission for he has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So, nowadays we might think of him as Pervert Walter White, but I prefer to think of him as Pervert Edmond O'Brien-you ever see D.O.A.? 

Our shutterbug also seems to be in cahoots with some kind of underground sex'n'death cult or maybe it is merely an enforcement agency. Tokyo is portrayed as a concrete and steel maze where people dash about in the perpetual rain between apartments and offices, and not much contact with anything beyond work and home. Lives are so regimented that a diligent stalker could time people's movements, and always know where to hide for maximum peeping. Lives are so regimented that a secret organization has evolved to shock people out of their conformity and anhedonia. The shutterbug with the robo-tentacle prick is, perhaps, the chief enforcer of this cult/erotic enforcement agency.

Now, what the shutterbug does is, clearly, reprehensible. But he also punishes himself by driving a nail through his hand. See, ya'll, it's a faith-based film! The crisis counselor tells him that this is no act of redemption, and that there's no atoning for what he has done. This is a turn for her, because now she's expressing aggression, something she could not do even as her hubby walked all over her, barely acknowledging her presence even as she dutifully cooked him his favorite foods. Hubby even blows off attending a funeral with her so he can sit in a diner and be soothed by staring into the perpetual rain against the window.

The shutterbug provokes hubby into stealing a handgun off of a cop, and thereby turns the workaholic clean freak into a literal street criminal so that he may realize the domestic crimes-condescension, emotional coldness, shaming, controlling-that he has been commiting against his devoted wife. 

In the end, husband and wife see each other for who they really are . . . and they fuck even as the police pound on their front door. The hubby has been humbled into realizing what an asshole he has been, and the crisis counselor is turned on at the sight of him all dirty and wet and pathetic and desperate.  A Snake of June ends within their moment of fucking. Presumably, the police battered down the door, and dragged hubby off to prison, leaving the crisis counselor to pursue her own course-but we end with the fucking on this one. You can do that in movies. (The recent flick Licorice Pizza has a similar "let's just stop before the next disaster" style of ending by having things go to credits before a possible political assassin seizes focus and turns it into a different, bleaker kind of film.)

I think that's what happened.

A Snake of June is a fast film. It's under ninety minutes. It's a hate triangle flick, somewhat similar to Tsukamoto's earlier film Tokyo Fist, in which bored people pummel and pierce themselves into more intense modes of being before exploding into geysers of crimson corn syrup. A Snake of June is more internal. The shutterbug stalker becomes a sinister voice inside the head of the crisis counselor, and a threatening vigilante pervert against the workaholic clean freak hubby. The stalker is clearly a maniac, but he achieves some good in his own mind by stripping the lies away from a dysfunctional relationship. A Snake of June implies that the underground sex'n'death cult/erotic enforcement agency is working in the deep background of many of the repressed citizens of Tokyo. 

A Snake of June is a jittery-hysterical softcore thriller-a Skinamax flick with ideas, goddamnit! It has a memorable black'n'white'n'blue color palate. Unstable, stalkery handheld camera work is used to evoke eroticism as opposed to incomprehensible action sequences. Tsukamoto knows how to deploy handheld camera artistically and kinetically as opposed to using it to cover up dodgy fight choreography. The three lead actors are teriffic. Tsukamoto, of course, plays the stalker, much as he plays similar sinister characters in Tetsuo the Iron Man, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, Tetsuo the Bullet Man, and Nightmare Detective. 

How convincing one finds this craziness may well depend upon your receptiveness to Tsukamoto's purposefully deranged and conflicted view of the city of Tokyo. It's a city of culture and humanity and joy and sexuality. It is also a place of isolation, aggression, disconnection, anhedonia, suspicion, hypercompetitiveness, greed, workaholism. Most ambiguously, Tokyo seems to be a place of radical transformation which can go in any number of directions: death, birth, life, rebirth, change, stasis, peace, war, reconstruction . . . just keep an eye out for the shutterbug with the robo-prick. Dude's intense!

MOVIE REVIEW: BULLET BALLET (1998)

Written/Directed/Edited/Camera Operated by Shinya Tsukamoto
Music by Chu Ishikawa
Costume Design by Hiroko Iwasaki
Produced by Igarashi Maison

Starring
Shinya Tsukamoto as Goda
Kirina Mano as Chisato
Takahiro Murase as Goto
Tatsuya Nakamura as Idei
Kyoka Suzuki as Kiriko

A Kaijyu Theatre Production

...


"In dreams, you can kill people, and never get caught. Tokyo is just one big dream. A dream."
--as spoken by Idei in the movie Bullet Ballet

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

In Tokyo, a woman named Kiriko (Kyoka Suzuki) decides to shoot herself in the head with a Smith and Wesson Chief Special, a mean little gun to be sure. She has a good job. She shares a comfortable apartment with her long-time boyfriend who works as a commercial director and brings down a good income. This suicide, and the violent instrument which allows it, seem strangely arbitrary. It seems that maybe Kiriko decided to shoot herself just to see what would happen. Because she happened to lay hands on the right tool, the gun. She probably wouldn't have done it if there had been no firearm to hand. She probably would've just taken sleeping pills, ended up in the hospital, and maybe some couple's counseling. But the gun in hand . . . no coming back from that.

Gun metal black and white, hand-held camera on a long zoom--the streets of Tokyo seem to quake and jitter with some immanent, highly unstable energy. An upper middle class man named Goda (Shinya Tsukamoto) goes looking for a gun, hitting up people he observes conducting narcobusiness on the streets, and insisting that he's got the money to pay for a Smith and Wesson Chief Special. But he's not too sharp about it, and various drug dealers and pimps tell him to his face that he's basically a fucking idiot, that you don't do business cash in hand where everybody can see what's going down. Eventually Goda gets ripped off  by a small time crook who sells him a water gun full of dirt. Goda doesn't have a clue about how to make moves in the street life. But he is determined and resourceful. He likes to work with his hands, make things. Goda can't buy a handgun, not even on the black market, in a country where private gun ownership is basically illegal, so he resolves to build his own gun.


Poor Goda. If only he were stalking American suburban communities, where even good middle class children can cop assault weapons and exercise their murderous power fantasies over their fellow children, their parents, whoever they happen to want to punish for their misery, paranoia, and alienation. Goda, my man, you need to give Japan the slip, and hop a plane to Eagleland, the Land of the Free, where the right to bear arms in the War of All Against All is backed up not by dimebagging street dealers, but by oligarchic corporate lobbies like the NRA, who preach the Gospel of Universal Armament. USA, my friend, where it's easier to wage Forever Wars foreign and domestic than it is to get any kind of universal healthcare working--this is the place for you, brother! Your severe and obsessive nature will find not only expression in this land of lunacy but . . . a kind of balm of acceptance. You'll just be one more loony for the bin here in America.

But Goda's a hardcore Tokyoite down to his gritty soul, and a trip to the USA is never considered, although he does spend some time on the Internet trying to figure out how he might smuggle a gun into Japan illegally. Gun enthusiasts in chat rooms with online handles like "John Wayne," "A Better Tomorrow," and "Ringo Kid," tell him he should order all of the components from separate manufacturers and assemble them himself. One dude tells him he should buy a model gun and modify it to shoot for real. Goda decides to go the DIY route and scavenge parts from junkyards. He has to consult with a machinist for some specialist work, but for the most part he does the job himself. He even mixes his own gunpowder, handcrafts his own artisan ball-tipped (how retro!) cartridge ammunition.

(Hey, wouldn't it be amusing to see Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen manufacturing their own weapons in an episode of Portlandia? Sometimes the vegan brownies and the custom-refurbished fixed-gear bicycle aren't enough. Sometimes you gotta get tough. Instead of putting a bird on it, you just might have to put a bullet in it!)

Goda's able to pursue these hobbies because he has a cushy day job as a director/editor of television commercials. But his obsession with seeking out the Gun, the power of life and death, Zeus's own bolt-thrower for the twentieth century and beyond, starts to spill over into his money gig. Instead of cutting clips to sell cars or sake or whatever, he starts putting together montages of war--WWI trench slaughter, nuclear tests, aerial bombing campaigns, artillery tests on houses, and all of it anchored to a repeated image of a hand firing a snub-nosed revolver. Goda is chasing this idea that he can have destruction in his fist, power over life and death, and be a one man army. With a gun in his hand, Goda's twisted logic seems to dictate, he can be the one to wage a war--a Nation of One waging World War 3 against stark reality.

The commercial director's obsession with getting armed recalls Travis Bickle's legendary transformation into a killing machine as Goda stalks his plush apartment with his handmade gun, firing into the mirror, and so on. But the highly internalized nature of Goda's quest for destructive power seems to echo Tsukamoto's earlier movies Tetsuo the Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Bodyhammer. In the Tetsuo movies, normal humans are mutated into hyper-aggressive freaks bristling with cannon and serpentine drill penises--biomechanical machines of war, murder, and rape.

In Bullet Ballet, the action is more realistic, but the movie provides highly stylized imagery of shadows and light, of self-burning and mutilation cut to Chu Ishikawa's pounding industrial-grade music suggesting psychological derangement as opposed to a more fanciful  full body transformation. Goda wants to become the Iron Man, the Bodyhammer, the Nation of One, but, since he's caught up in a more mundane version of cinematic reality,  all he can do is pick up a gun or burn himself with a piece of metal. He can never quite get human cells and metal to merge.

Ah, poor Goda . . .if only you had an enemy to focus your aggression upon. If only you had a side to take, a war to fight, an army to join . . .

One day, perhaps before the beginning of this saga, Goda sees a girl on the subway platform seemingly about to throw herself in front of an oncoming train. Goda intervenes to pull the girl back from the abyss, and she attacks him, giving him a nasty bite on the heel of his hand. This girl's name is Chisato (Kirina Mano). Chisato works as an occasional prostitute and drug dealer with a gang of young punks who work suit-and-tie jobs during the week, and engage in small-time gangsterism on the weekends. Goda becomes obsessed with Chisato because . . . well, she is kind of cute with her micro-skirt and leather jacket. But it's also the suicidal thing. Goda sees in Chisato someone who has embraced the dark side, someone who nakedly courts death, and seeks out opportunities to get into street fights. Winning and losing aren't a big deal to Chisato. Goda has been a striving careerist all his life. It's love at first bite with Goda and Chisato.

 Goda starts stalking the underground club where Chisato hangs out, but he runs afoul of the rest of Chisato's gang who think the guy's some kind of too-old-for-the-scene creepazoid. In particular, young punk  and would-be gang leader Goto (Takahiro Murase) really starts to hate on Goda. For one thing, Goto thinks he's Chisato's steady (he isn't), and for another Goto starts to realize that Goda might be tougher than he looks. Don't discount the bourgeois strivers, young man, they got plenty of pent-up depravity to spare.

Goto's not the real leader of the gang, however. That would be the diabolical Idei (Tatsuya Nakamura), who owns the underground club where the young punks gather to rob salarymen, have sloppy sex, and shoot heroin. Idei supplies the drugs and the real estate, but he doesn't seem to want to expand or become a power in the underworld. Idei is a kind of anti-gangster. His game isn't so much to become the next Scarface as it is to incarnate a hipper, more rock'n'roll version of Shoko Asahara. Idei's trip is to see just how fucked up things can get before it all comes crashing down around his head. Life is just a violent dream with no purpose or possibility of escape so do what thou wilt. Idei is less a gangster than a cult leader disguised as a gangster.

Goda gets sucked into the gang's street wars with rival outfits which take on an expressionistic, phantasmagorical  look of shadows and smoke all illuminated with the searing flashes from a robotic welding arc. The gang rumbles happen like storm systems rolling across the land--they're just arbitrary manifestations of rage and violence, stage managed for maximum theatricality by the brilliant Idei who always knows the right aesthetic moment to shut things down for the evening. In the nightmare world of Bullet Ballet the human  propensity for violence takes on a perversely recreational air. Everybody ought to go join a gang and find an Enemy. It's just the thing to do, you know?

But some of these players are seeking a more authentic form of darkness. Chisato and Goda are both playing with the fire of self-destruction. So is Idei, but Idei wants the whole world to burn with him. Goto is still caught between bourgeois values and his desire to go whole-hog with everyone else's suicide trip. Goto, for all his macho posturing, isn't a true killer. But maybe that's because he hasn't found the right target . . .

Bullet Ballet is a black and white masterpiece of madness, self-loathing, and grandiose fantasies of self-destruction. Although it seems to be the first Tsukamoto film to take a more realistic approach to exploring his essential themes of radical transformation, the city of Tokyo, and the consequences of violence, Bullet Ballet creates its own sinister reality. The various crazed, self-torturing characters bounce off each other, exchanging obliterating impulses, outlooks, and roles seemingly on contact in this insane drama of interpersonal warfare.

MOVIE REVIEW: TETSUO THE BULLET MAN (2009)

Starring
Eric Bossick as Anthony
Akiko Mono as Yuriko
Yuko Nakamura as Mitsue
Stephen Sarrazin as Ride
Shinya Tsukamoto as The Guy


Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
Written by Shinya Tsukamoto and Hisakatsu Kuroki
Music by Chu Ishikawa
Cinematography by Satoshi Hayashi, Takayuki Shida, and Shinya Tsukamoto
Edited by Yuji Ambe and Shinya Tsukamoto
Production Design by Shinya Tsukamoto
Costume Design by Mari Sakurai
Produced by Shinichi Kawahara, Masayuki Tanishima, and Shinya Tsukamoto


A Kaijyu Theatre Production


...

"You don't want me inside you. You don't know what I'll do."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 


Anthony (Eric Bossick) has nightmares about a boy with a vibrating face of molten slag. His wife Yuriko (Akiko Mono) has the same nightmares. She's willing to talk about it, but Anthony keeps it inside. Anthony keeps a lot inside.

Like his resentment at how his father, Ride (Stephen Sarrazin) a retired bio-tech researcher, insists on conducting monthly blood tests on Anthony and Tom, Anthony's son. Ride claims he wants to make sure that Anthony and Tom aren't developing leukemia or other diseases. Anthony has tried to convince Ride that they can get those kinds of tests with their regular health care provider, but Ride insists. Ride's wife, Mitsue (Yuko Nakamura), died from some sort of inherited illness. Ride seems to believe that only he can keep his son and grandson healthy from the ravages of inherited disease.

Anthony is walking back from his father's place to his apartment with his son while talking on the phone with Yuriko when an economy car comes zooming down a tunnel. Anthony tells Tom to get out of the road, to stand against the wall. The car comes to a halt a few feet from Anthony. The driver is in shadow. There's something menacing about this vehicle. A father's worst fears are realized when the car backs up at high speed and runs Tom down. Anthony runs after the car, helpless to stop this new nightmare unfolding in waking life, and sees something both horrific and strange: a little arm is reaching out from underneath the front end of the car, fingers grasping the grill of the murderous economy car. The arm is seemingly mutilated, but maybe it's just transformed . . . into the same awful consistency of the molten slag face of the child Anthony and Yuriko both saw in their nightmares. A new vision of horror: steaming blood pours from beneath the car. But the blood looks more like liquid metal . . .

Anthony feels something exploding inside himself. He flips out, his body twitching and vibrating, going into a kind of dance. The crashing music seems to signal the loosing of some strange, awful power, and a new Tetsuo is born!

Much as in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, the man of metal in Tetsuo the Bullet Man is also born of rage at the murderous loss of his son. This homicidal act also echos the act of vehicular assault which created the Metal Fetishist in the original Tetsuo the Iron Man. Does filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto have a fear of being run over by a car? Maybe so. I recall reading somewhere that Tsukamoto rides a bicycle, and so maybe he feels some anxiety at being run down by some monstrous machine (bicycles also figure prominently in Tsukamoto's films Bullet Ballet and Nightmare Detective). There's also the tragedy of a parent losing a child. This seems to be a concern which has grown out of Tsukamoto's real world development from a single  auteur filmmaker to an auteur filmmaker with a wife and children who keeps one foot in the world of advertising and for-hire filmmaking. Tsukamoto's movies always seem to reflect his personal obsessions and concerns even when they are works of pure fantasy. Indeed, Tsukamoto's fantasies are never just that. Fantastic powers and mutations come at the potential loss of one's sanity, bodily integrity, and the peril of mass destruction.

This peril of mass destruction is something Tsukamoto seems to have an ambivalent relationship with in the Tetsuo movies. Tetsuo the Iron Man seemed to embrace the annihilation of the old world, as embodied by the city of Tokyo, as something to be celebrated. A lone metal fetishist pursues a milquetoast salaryman with the intention of inspiring uncontrolled mutation and ultimate creative destruction. It also had a sexual element: the unleashing of destructive powers was seemingly some sort of atomic orgasm combined with infectious psychic mutations of the libido. Tetsuo II: Body Hammer involved a whole cult of metal fetishists organized with the purpose of tormenting a salaryman into remembering his secret past. Tetsuo II also addressed the destruction of Tokyo as a necessity, perhaps to make the world safe for parents and offspring. It was to be an end to all wars of mutation, as it were, since it was the city of Tokyo itself, born out of cutthroat capitalism and high technology, that required men of flesh to become men of metal to keep up the pace of production.

In all of these Tetsuo movies, the mutations are triggered by a figure known as The Guy, or Yatsu. (I'm guessing Yatsu must mean 'guy' or 'person.') The Guy, or "That Guy!" as Anthony refers to him at one point, is always played by Shinya Tsukamoto, perhaps as an on-camera manifestation of his behind the lens role as director and mastermind of the on screen carnage. Tsukamoto seems to be saying that each of these movies is a kind of experiment where the author/director is tormenting some poor protagonist to provoke a radical evolutionary response, to become a monster, and always for sinister purposes. The Guy's motives are tied to his resentment of the modern edifice of Tokyo, and perhaps reflect Tsukamoto's dark side as an artist.

Tsukamoto in real life is both an artist with a taste for the dark side and a hardworking family man. These movies seem to be explorations of these sometimes conflicting roles. The provocative artist side of him desires to transform reality, to defeat crass consumerism, and blow minds to bits. The family man side of him has bills to pay, responsibilities to shoulder, and people to love and protect. It's almost like two different personae reside within the same man. One has a serious resentment towards the structures and strictures of 21st century capitalist society, and the other depends on them. Tsukamoto uses these movies to play out these conflicts, and to show the price paid no matter where we fall on the destruction/dependence spectrum.

The Bullet Man is also a creature responding to the pain and cruelty of the world, the world as played by Tokyo. In this movie, the Bullet Man is besieged by grief, a wife who is angry that he let their son die, and the heavily armed contractors of a sinister corporation. Powerful interests want to make this Bullet Man go away, but this new Tetsuo won't go down without a fight. As Anthony's mutation progresses, he becomes a roaring, slag encrusted war machine, bristling with cannons, and enraged by his inability to control his transformations.

Interestingly, and perhaps inspired by American comic book superheroes, the Bullet Man tries his best not to kill people, only to wound and disable them. This creates some dark comedy when the Bullet Man battles the Blackwater-style contractors. Instead of executing them outright, he just settles for blowing off their arms and legs to calm them down. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

The Guy, once again incarnated by Tsukamoto, is the driver of the murderous economy car. He knows what Anthony is hiding inside, and wants to bring it out into the open. The Guy tortures Anthony with menacing phone calls and emails. It's a tribute to Tsuakmoto's skill as a director that he is able to conjure menace from economy cars, cell phones, and emails. Part of it is how he directs the movie to put the audience into Anthony's disturbed mental state, but a large portion of the movie's intensity comes from Chu Ishikawa's epic score and sound design. This is a movie which constantly rumbles with ambient menace, and impacts with furious percussion. I can't adequately describe it, it's just something you have to experience. Crank up the volume on this one.

The Guy, who in this movie is presented as some sort of corporate saboteur, has something special in mind for the Bullet Man, something unexpectedly grand and ambitious. It's not the unbridled sexual anarchy of Tetsuo the Iron Man, nor is it solely the revelation of dark secrets from the past, as in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer. It has partially to do with unveiling the past and something else which I won't reveal. But I would say it's rather a clever twist on the surreal logic of the Tetsuo movies. It makes me wonder what Tsukamoto has in mind for Tetsuo 4, and, yes, I do hope he makes a fourth one.

First time leading man Eric Bossick gets put through his paces on this one. I gather from his IMDB profile that he has done voice overs  and motion capture for video games such as Silent Hill 4, and that he has had  roles on Japanese television dramas. There's also a great picture on his IMDB page of Bossick, Tsukamoto, and Robert De Niro together at the Tribeca Film Festival. Bossick is no replacement for Tomorrwo Taguchi  who so memorably embodied the previous two men of metal, and I don't think he's meant to be. Bossick brings more of a fragile, wounded dimension to the Bullet Man. But he is also quite convincingly crazed and fearsome, and a helluva sport to be buried under the elaborate molting slag make-up and costuming prostheses.

The Bullet Man is also a triumph of make-up and practical effects. To watch it go through it's different transformations is quite impressive. As the Bullet Man molts and mutates, his wife Yuriko has the opportunity to show tenderness towards this monster, evoking some version of Beauty and the Beast. The scene of Yuriko pulling the molted chunks of slab from Anthony's head is unexpectedly moving. And The Bullet Man's final form suggests a wholly new and terrifying frontier for the Tetsuo franchise . . . but you'll just have to see for yourself.

It should be noted that this film is mostly in English, with only a few lines of dialogue in Japanese. This was done, I guess, to try and increase its commercial viability in the United States and other English speaking markets. The effect is uneven. All of the Japanese cast members are clearly speaking their lines based on phonetic memorization, and the effect is rather artificial. Bossick has no problem with the English, and Tsukamoto's scenes with English dialogue are played for perverse humorous effect, and that compensates somewhat for the lack of fluency, but the overall impact is less than perfect. But it does give the movie a strange sound and feel. The dialogue itself is not bad, actually, and shows a good deal of finesse, it's just the delivery is off, and I feel that it puts the obviously talented Japanese cast members at a bit of a disadvantage. But Tsukamoto makes a skilled go of it.

It comes off better than what was attempted in 2007's Sukiyaki Western Django, which was a mash-up of Spaghetti Westerns and samurai movies directed by Takashi Miike. In that movie, all of the dialogue was recorded in phonetically memorized English, and it was all thoroughly ludicrous. The movie featured a hugely talented cast, and some memorably orchestrated carnage, but the dialogue was almost incomprehensible and undercut the whole endeavor. I had to watch it with English subtitles. Tetsuo the Bullet Man deploys it's dialogue much more effectively. Even if you don't catch every last word, the flow of the story, and the emotions of the characters are all pretty easy to follow.

Tetsuo the Bullet Man is a worthy entry in Tsukamoto's surrealistic ongoing saga of rage, mutation, and creative destruction, played out against Tokyo, that high-tech edifice of civilization. Watching it reminded me of a line of dialogue from an earlier Tsukamoto film, Bullet Ballet, where one of the characters referred to Tokyo as a dream. The character, a drug dealing gangster and junkie, seemed to suggest that the mainstream society of civilization and laws was an illusion, and that it was the underground, outlaw existence which was real. Of course, one must consider the source of this bit of druggie philosophy, but the Tetsuo movies seem to be concerned with a similar inquiry:

Is civilization the dream, the fantasy? Is ultimate reality the mutant of rage inside the human heart? Does it take a radical act of creative destruction to unleash reality? Or can we choose our reality, be it civilization or unbridled chaos and war?

MOVIE REVIEW : HAZE (2005)

Written, Directed, and Edited by Shinya Tsukamoto 

Starring Shinya Tsukamoto, Takahiro Murase 

Music by Chu Ishikawa

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A man is trapped in a narrow tunnel, somewhere underground. He has no memory of how he got there. He's not even sure if he remembers who he is. He remembers a woman's face and her voice saying, "I'm sorry." He also has a vague recollection of fireworks going off, possibly a dream or an idle fantasy. The fireworks are going off by themselves, with no people around to light them. The man is frightened by his confinement. He is in pain. He discovers a wound in his stomach.

 

The man tries to maneuver through the tunnel. It seems to be some sort of maze, maybe an underground sewer system, long abandoned.

The man becomes frightened. He tries to tell himself that it's just a dream. If it's a dream, it can't hurt, he reasons.

Something grabs him. He goes flying down the tunnel. He has no control over his body. At one point, he is confined in some sort of chair or gurney--he can't quite tell if he's sitting or lying down. He is motionless before a strange hole in a wall. A hammer or bludgeon swings out of the hole and bashes him repeatedly on the skull. Now he has a wound in his head and in his stomach.

The man speculates further: was there a war? Am I a prisoner? Was I captured by some wealthy pervert? Was this maze constructed to key into my darkest fears?

The man is pitched forward into the dark. He lands with his teeth against a metal pipe. The man is dragged by whatever is controlling the maze with his teeth scraping against the metal pipe for an interminable length of time. His pain and fear are intense. The sound of the teeth racing against the pipe is unendurable.

And the worst is yet to come . . .

Haze is a horror film that locks its protagonist inside a nightmare world constructed solely to induce a profound state of despair and confusion. The maze is the workshop. Inside this shop are the tools of pain, confinement, disorientation, disturbing visions, and much more. The film runs about fifty minutes and offers no easy answers. That's another aspect of its horror. Most horror films are about tension and release. Tension is built as characters are stalked by some malevolent person, force, or creature. There is perverse release when the characters are butchered one by one. There is, at the end, a ritual destruction of the dreaded bugaboo, be it a lunatic in a mask, a vampire, a werewolf, some dual-jawed extraterrestrial--whatever it is, it goes up in flames, it gets a stake through the heart, a fatal trip through the airlock into the outer dark, three silver bullets in the pump, pick your poison, ye monster hunters and sally forth.

That's the usual trajectory of a horror flick. Haze takes on a more difficult challenge. Instead of some person in a mask or a guy in a rubber monster suit, it creates an inescapable maze which is haunted or cursed or maybe just constructed to practice evil. The very environment and the effects, physical, psychological, and spiritual, it causes within the anonymous man are the enemies here.

The maze seems to operate according to some bizarre, hallucinatory logic. It's purpose is to torment the man trapped in it. Perhaps the maze is being controlled by some malevolent force or being. Maybe the maze itself is alive and not very nice. Or maybe it's alive but indifferent to the pain and suffering it causes to whoever happens into it. Like the inexplicable prison in the cult classic 1997 film Cube, the maze that the anonymous man is trapped within defeats all investigations or attempts to resist its power.

The man is played by writer/director/editor/art designer Shinya Tsukamoto who is probably still most famous for his film Tetsuo the Iron Man. Tsukamoto's films often deal with the theme of radical transformation within the context of the ultramodern city of Tokyo. His heroes and heroines start out as average, salaried cubicle laborers and undergo mutations into monsters, fighters, criminals, murderers, sadomasochists, voyeurs, and sexual adventurers. Tokyo is both the incubator for such transformations and also the enemy. Its towering skyscrapers and corporate cultures of conformity exist as necessary adversaries to promote creative destruction within the protagonists' souls. Sometimes the adversary is embodied by a person, usually played by Tsukamoto himself, who torments the primary characters, and acts as a catalyst for transformation.

 

But just as often, the adversary is a pervasive environment, the city of Tokyo itself, or the nightmare labyrinth conjured for this film.

The production design is of central importance to this film, obviously made on a low budget. There are few special effects shots. I can only guess that they constructed sets or shot in and around existing industrial structures. Claustrophobia is the organizing idea behind the visuals, and so that limited field of vision does dual work. On the one hand, it reflects the horror of confinement, and on the other it serves to narrow the focus and jack up the intensity of the experience. There is no excess to this film. And yet, it could be argued, it is all excess, of a kind. Overall, it serves as a potent rebuke to overbudgeted torture-porn movies and tweeny vampire romances that true horror is a matter of vision, execution, and thematic substance, and not a result of 3-D gimmicks and pandering.

(Interestingly, I found a YouTube clip of an interview with Tsukamoto where he reveals that the last movie he saw in a theatre was Avatar 3-D. He rather intensely liked it. He even speculated about doing a Tetsuo 3-D . . . perhaps the greatest horror is yet to come . . .)

Tsukamoto gives an effective performance as the anonymous man trapped in the maze. He brings some nuance and even a touch of ironic humor into his nightmare situation. There is also something vaguely humorous about a man grasping for real world explanations within a nightmarish reality. The notion that reality is slippery, that it is impossible to distinguish a dreaming state from a waking state, is the underlying theme. This also ties into Tsukamoto's ongoing exploration of radical transformation and monstrosity, but here it takes a bizarre and somewhat obscure turn. I won't reveal the ending. Mostly because I'm not sure I totally grasp what's going on at the end. But I have my suspicions. One of my suspicions is that this is a movie more about the journey than the destination, and so the ending, even if impenetrable, is more a formality or inevitability than the true point of this film.