GAME REVIEW: RESONANCE (2012)

A Game by Vince Twelve

Producers: Dave Gilbert and Vince Twelve
Executive Producer: Irina Pinjaeva

Programmers: Janet Gilbert and Vince Twelve
Lead Artist: Shane Stevens
Background Artist: Nauris Krauze
Music by Nikolas Sideris, North by Sound
Dialogue by Dave Gilbert, Janet Gilbert, Vince Twelve, and Deirdra Kiai

Cast
Edward Bauer as Ed
Sarah Elmaleh as Anna
Daryl Lathan as Raymond
Logan Cunningham as Winston

Review by William D. Tucker.


A homicide detective, a physicist, a doctor, and a muckraking blogger are all caught up in a search for the secrets behind a highly destructive technology that may or may not be the cause of a massive lab explosion and a citywide blackout. The destructive technology has supposedly been designed as a potential source of unlimited clean energy, but it could also be exploited as a superweapon. There's also a computer database compiling the DNA signature of every man, woman, and child in the United States. Both of these things have been created within the same American city. Coincidence or conspiracy?

There's also some doubts about whether the four investigators can trust one another:

 A conspiracy seems to be afoot with roots in both the federal and city government--is the homicide detective, Winston Bennet, in on it?

 Raymond, the blogger, is looking for a scoop--is he working on behalf of an anti-government faction? Or is he just another stooge of an authoritarian government run amuck?

The doctor, Anna, seems to have some troubled memories in her head--is she sane? Can she be depended upon?

 And Tolstoy "Ed" Eddings is the physicist-and that guy just seems like a bumbling, neurotic loser. If the conspiracy starts hiring bulky men in trenchcoats with automatic weapons this is the guy you'd want to trip to distract the attack dogs.

All four of these characters are placed at the player's command in a point-and-click adventure/mystery that had me hooked from the opening screen. It is fully voiced by a strong cast, has clever writing, and appealing, well-crafted visuals with massive retro-charm. The original score by Nikolas Sideris is pefectly matched to the material, and I listen to the soundtrack quite frequently just to stimulate thinking in everyday life. (I have it cued up in a playlist with music from the Kemco/Seika adaptations of Shadowgate, Dejavu, and Uninvited for the NES. That's a playlist you listen to while gettin' to the bottom of things . . .) The dialogue is clever, humorous, philosophical, deadly serious when necessary, and strongly performed by a lively voice cast, especially the four leads. The story is soaked in the paranoia of the New American Surveillance State, and the plot is as twisty, darkly comedic, and cruel as a gonzo South Korean cinematic thriller. Resonance plays like a lost masterpiece of the 1990s PC point-and-click adventure game boom.

 Not only must you deal with the usual sorts of inventory, logic, and dialogue puzzles, but you must also deploy your foursome strategically in different situations to succeed. This element of team endeavor allows Resonance to play with ideas of perception, professionalism, and ambition. Each character has a different set of priorities, skills, tools, and access to different areas of the game world. It got me thinking, "In a crisis situation, it's almost never the lone individual who prevails." Resonance doesn't quite fully exploit this dynamic, but it makes a noble attempt. One of the dilemmas facing designers of games like this is just how complex do they want to make the various puzzles, and how many different solutions will they build into a given puzzle. Such considerations are measured against the desire to have a smooth flowing narrative, since games like this are much more story-based than a sandbox, open world 3-D type of game. A sandbox game is more about simulating the complexities of a virtual life as one damn thing after another, enlisting the player in crafting the kind of narrative they desire from a range of choices and complex decision trees woven into persistent virtual arenas. A 2-D point-and-click game is more like a movie or a stage play. In fact, I would say Resonance has a lot in common with a stage play, since it emphasizes dialogue, character, and a three act structure with reversals, irony, and revelations of both the plot and the people caught up in it.  It will be interesting to see if future point-and-click adventure games extend the scope and detail of implementing a kind of  "group protagonist" as a player character.

One of the interesting ideas driving the game is how it uses something it calls "Short Term Memory." In order to ask an NPC about something that does not come up as an automatic dialogue option, you must point at the thing in question and drag it into one of your STM boxes. Other items and events become seared into your player character's "Long Term Memory" by various circumstances. Memory itself is a theme in the game, and it is clever how the designers have woven it into the gameplay mechanics. I think that perhaps a bit more could've been done with both the theme and and the gameplay mechanic, but I only came to this conclusion after my fourth or fifth playthrough. It's a meaty, satisfying experience in terms of both gameplay and narrative.

Resonance is the product of a collaboration between the company Wadjet Eye Games, headed by the husband and wife team of Dave and Janet Gilbert, and game designer Vince Twelve. I am pretty familiar with the Wadjet Eye catalogue, but have yet to play any of Vince Twelve's previous games. According to the commentary track that you can switch on during the game (don't do it until you've played through the game once or twice) Vince Twelve had been working on the game by himself for four or five years and then hooked up with Wadjet Eye to bring the game to completion and to market. It will be interesting to see if and when these two entities collaborate again, and what comes of it. Wadjet Eye Game's previous efforts include the one-of-a-kind The Shivah, perhaps the only video game with a two-fisted rabbi as the detective hero. The Shivah is like a one-act or maybe a two-act off-off-Broadway play with strong dialogue and characters tormented by inner conflict. Wadjet Eye has also put out the Blackwell series of paranormal mysteries, which are kind of like a series of clever fantasy novels mixing ghosts and murder plots with a freelance journalist protagonist and her ghostly detective sidekick partner. Vince Twelve seems to bring more of a hard science fiction flavor to the mix. As a science fiction literature fan I think it will be interesting to see Wadjet Eye and/or Vince Twelve come up with more games in the sci-fi mode.


Resonance is a pont-and-click adventure game that demands that the player think through some pretty tough puzzles. Well, they were tough for me. I've never been much of a math and quantitative skills kind of guy. I'm into literature, narrative, words, and there were times when playing Resonance where I became frustrated with this or that puzzle or problem. My frustration had nothing to do with the quality of the game or the design of the puzzles. I was frustrated with myself for not being up to the challenges at hand, and impatient to know where the story was going. But the game is worth the frustration. Of course, if you find yourself pulling your hair out, you can always hit up the various walkthroughs on the Internet. No shame in that. Only you and the NSA will ever know . . .

Which brings me to another set of musings: my enjoyment of Resonance, and point-and-click games in general, is largely a narrative one--in other words I come to these games for many of the same reasons I pick up a novel, or watch a movie. Although I try to tough out the most difficult puzzles, I must confess I often will consult walkthroughts because of my desire to know what happens next. With the exception of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, and Earth Bound, I've never really been an obsessive, hardcore gamer. So I don't feel shame when I come up against something I can't figure out and decide to "cheat." I also find that "cheating" in this fashion usually does not lessen my enjoyment of the games as narrative . . . but something bugs me. What if these games are really puzzles meant to test my will to prevail? What if the more that I cheat every now and again, the more my will to prevail declines, and I find myself, some day in the future, facing a real life locked room puzzle, and with no FAQs, no walkthroughs, no nothing to save me?! What then?! Let's hope it doesn't come to that. But I still can't shake the eerie feeling that each one of these games is a little test, a mini-trial, and I'm not doing so great . . .

I've read in other places that nowadays no one really plays video games alone anymore, at least in the sense that the Internet is now the repository of human knowledge of all kinds, including all the trivia about video games and their solutions. So, maybe, the true test is learning to use the internet, use that collective repository of knowledge, to get through the tough problems. After all, in crisis situations, it is rarely the lone individual that prevails. Such a notion also ties in with Resonance's themes of collective action and collaboration amongst a group of determined people. So, maybe, I'm not a cheater at all.

How about that?

MOVIE REVIEW: BELLFLOWER (2011)

Written and Directed by Evan Glodell

Produced by Vincent Grashaw and Evan Glodell 

Cinematography by Joel Hodge


Original Music by Johnathan Keevil


Film Editing by Evan Glodell, Vincent Grashaw, Joel Hodge, and Johnathan Keevil

Starring
Evan Glodell as Woodrow
Tyler Dawson as Aiden
Jessie Wiseman as Milly
Rebekah Brandes as Courtney
Vincent Grashaw as Mike

Review by William D. Tucker. 


Somewhere in California, two friends, Woodrow and Aiden, entertain fantasies of living like the masked warlord from a certain famous post-apocalyptic action movie. Their shared fantasy needs toys. To that end, they start to build a flamethrower, and make plans for a tricked-out hot rod to cruise the radioactive wastelands in style. Their fantasies are, perhaps, a kind of psychological armor against a world without any real jobs, culture (aside from cricket-eating contests held in shitty hipster bars) or hope, and where the only healthcare is DIY: alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, bacon, and sloppy sex. But Aiden actually seems to have some skill as a mechanic and that flamethrower and that supercar might actually get built. Woodrow's talent seems to have more to do with streetfighting, and with building beverage dispensation apparatus. Woodrow and Aiden, together, make a kind of ideal player character to inhabit their pulpy, second-hand fantasy world.

Aiden and Woodrow go to one of the cricket eating contests where Woodrow competes against a young woman named Milly. Milly out-gobbles Woodrow, and the two exchange digits. Soon, the two of them are taking a road trip to Texas in a car modified to clandestinely dispense whiskey from a concealed reservoir. Woodrow thinks they're falling in love. Milly's having a good time, but she's much more worldly than him. In an early scene her roommate Mike complains that she hasn't paid her share of the rent, and she brushes it off by insisting that the landlord has a crush on her. Milly seems to be okay with using her sexuality to get over on others, and her manipulations, when measured against what some of the other characters do in this movie, are rather mild. What's more morally dubious? Knocking someone's teeth out in a drunken rage, or fucking someone's brains out? I personally cannot condemn Milly for her actions. One of the other characters in this movie is a little more old-fashioned . . .

There are a number of scenes where characters drink and drive. Now that I think of it, I think every scene where a character is driving also shows them drinking alcohol at the same time. No, I'm not getting all Nancy Reagan here, but it seems to be thematically important: the characters have beer for breakfast, beer to make the commute to nowhere (nobody seems to have a job, and there seem to be no jobs to be had) smoother, and beer with whiskey in the evenings in lieu of dinner. Aiden, Woodrow, Milly, and their friends seem to be binge drinkers at best and alcoholics at worst. Drinking  serves to pass the time in a world where there really isn't any goddamn thing to do. Even the police seem reluctant to enforce the law. Maybe the city budget was cancelled and all the cops fired. The movie doesn't come out and say it, but it seems like people are left to deal with shit on their own, no more safety net, no more rule of law except maybe for extreme infractions, and only emergency room care for catastrophic injuries . . .

Bellflower creates a strange and disturbing mood. I went into it expecting, based on the trailer, a kind of romp, and was jolted by the raw pettiness of the characters. At first, Aiden and Woodrow's fantasy seems epic, seems like an adventure. But the movie suggests that it is a kind of macho death fantasy worthy of Mel Gibson and Yukio Mishima. I dug it. It circumvents the all-too-familiar bullshit narrative of regeneration through violence and comes up with something messier and more complex.

I also appreciated the alternately sinister and sentimental soundtrack. It seemed to key into the weird mixture of innocence and rage in which the characters' minds seem to swim. One moment they're having a cutesy drunk cuddle with a second hand porn paperback, and the next they're loosing vengeful obliteration. The music is effective in creating the soundscape of these damaged minds.

I didn't even feel like I was watching actors so much as I was watching behavior. All of the actors are completely unfamiliar to me, and I believe this is a first film from director Evan Glodell. My unfamiliarity with the cast allowed me to see them only as the characters and not as movie stars dirtying themselves up for some art project. There is one scene in particular involving the character of Woodrow where he's puking into a toilet and it looks about as authentic as possible. The outtakes on the DVD provide further confirmation of this . . .

For a movie that deals with heavy, filthy subject matter it has a nice look to it. It's widescreen with a mixture of handheld and calculated types of shots to liven it up. It sometimes seemed to be channeling a little bit of Tony Scott's frenetic acid trails kind of visuals but more grounded. No big action movie scenes here, no human beings outrunning rapidly expanding fireballs, or endlessly spraying bullets from assault weapons loaded up with Hollywood clips. Everything, especially the violence, is rooted in physics and physiology.

Bellflower is, maybe, a pre-apocalypse movie. It seems to depict the last crumbling bits of what it will be like to be an urban dweller in the United States right before shit gets real fuckin' ugly. Or maybe, considering it was released in 2011, it actually is supposed to be a post-apocalypse movie. 2011. We're talking post-9/11, post-Mission Accomplished, post-economic meltdown,  post Iraq War, getting on towards post-Afghanistan, the defeat of universal healthcare by Republican activism and Democratic compromise, and a further degeneration of American intellectual life. People have no interest in science or culture (aside from competitive bug eating and how to make lethal weapons and fast vehicles). No one talks about religion or spirituality, so it's kind of like people have finally given up the pretense that bullshit like that has any substance to it. The world collapses into a tiny group of friends who drink too much, and can't see three feet past their own pain and desire. And their B-movie, fan fiction daydreams nudge them on to conflict and annihilation.

MOVIE REVIEW: MADADAYO (1993)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa and Ishiro Honda 
Based on essays written by Hyakken Uchida
Music by Shinichiro Ikebe
Cinematography by Takao Saito and Shoji Ueda
Edited by Akira Kurosawa and Ishiro Honda


Starring
Tatsuo Matsumura as Professor Hyakken Uchida 
Kyoko Kagawa as Professor's Wife

Review by William D. Tucker.


Hyakken Uchida is a professor at a military academy in Japan, sometime in 1943. He retires from teaching to devote himself to writing and publishing. He moves into a large, comfortable house which is destroyed in an Allied firebombing campaign. Uchida and his wife survive, and move into the former servants' quarters outside another mansion destroyed in the bombings. Uchida and his wife are helped into their new home by the professor's fanatically loyal former students, young, middle-aged, and old. Uchida seems to inspire loyalty in those who pass through his classroom. He is, in a sense, a second, unheralded emperor of Japan, one who inspires loyalty via his decency, whimsical humor, and willingness to let others help him. He exhorts others to work hard for the things they care about deeply, and is kind to animals. He doesn't order anyone to fly planes into battleships. He doesn't dream of subjugating Asia for nationalistic glory. He is a sanctuary of kindness and good humor in a country that has gone straight to hell.

What is it exactly about Uchida that inspires such loyalty? Lots of people are kind to animals, and nice to their fellow human beings. Is it the quality of his writings? It's never explained what kind of things Uchida writes. None of Uchida's followers brings it up, and it wouldn't be unusual if they didn't actually read Uchida's writings. A lot of times the close friends of writers just don't read their work. Why? Too awkward. And would you want to reject a friend just because you didn't like their writing? That would seem kind of petty.

I think the secret to Uchida's appeal is his whimsical humor, his childlike nature, and his willingness to put himself at the mercy of his friends. There are times in the movie when Uchida comes off as more of a stand-up comedian, or a particularly kooky after dinner speaker than a heavy duty intellectual. The desolation of postwar Japan never seems to touch his spirit. He always has some off-kilter insight to offer apropos of absolutely nothing. People in grim circumstances need someone like this, either to venerate as a treasured friend, or to pummel into a gory pulp. Uchida is lucky to be surrounded by kindhearted people. I must confess, there were times when Uchida's quirkiness wore on my patience. I think that this is perhaps by design. It really doesn't matter if Uchida's humor is inane or profound. What matters is the devotion of those who surround Uchida. That's where the heart of this movie lies.

Uchida's followers decide that once every year they will have a "Not Yet Party," celebrating Uchida's continued existence. The word madadayo is a kind of customary cry meaning "Not yet!" that has its origins in a children's game of hide and go seek. The first Not Yet Party is a deeply goofy, drunken affair, that becomes a kind of impromptu musical number. It's a boys' club kind of thing, although in later years Uchida's wife, and the wives and daughters of Uchida's followers are also invited. These later parties are also a lot less raucous, reflecting Uchida and his inner circle's advancing age, and the increasing postwar prosperity and stability of the country as a whole. As the overall situation becomes less grim and desperate, the revelers feel less of a need to give themselves over to total abandon. The Not Yet Parties become a kind of form of humanistic ritual hero worship, with Uchida dispensing advice, in one instance, to a band of seven youngsters. I couldn't help but think, "Are these Kurosawa's Seven Samurai reborn?"

Madadayo is not primarily about World War II, or Imperial Japan's disastrous efforts to rule Asia, but the war is there, and then it is over, and those who survived the bombings must get on with their lives. Uchida and his wife and friends and supporters could have all  been incinerated by the bombs. They are spared by blind chance, and they decide to make the best of their remaining years on the planet, forming a community built on kindness and celebration that functions as a near-absurd floating utopia in the postwar desolation. If at times Uchida and his followers seem to be drinking too much, singing too loud, and partying into the AM, well, all these antics are a kind of spell of protection to block out the grim ruins of war that threaten to swallow up all life and joy. People are no doubt starving to death all over the country, there are probably lots of children dying of  malnutrition, disease, radiation poisoning, and thirst. In a certain sense, Uchida and his followers' revels are deeply perverse. But what else should they do? Roll over and die? Commit ritual suicide? These are people who were never eaten up with hard-line nationalistic fervor to begin with; rather, they are people who are grateful to be alive. They need to celebrate a decent man like Uchida perhaps more than the old professor needs such veneration himself. And so they create something like a nation, or an anti-nation maybe, built out of mutual love and respect. This nation (or anti-nation) is not meant to endure for a thousand years. It raises no armies, collects no taxes, doesn't coerce its members into swearing loyalty unto seven lifetimes, none of that. It will have its time, the remaining lifespan of Uchida, and then it will die, gracefully, and maybe those that survive will remember it, or maybe they won't. Maybe some of those who live on will take its example to heart, and try to recreate some version of it in the future. Or not.

This was Akira Kurosawa's last movie. I get the feeling that he wanted to go out on a high note with this one, offer his audience hope and joy, but there's despair simmering beneath all the fun. Kurosawa made movies which command respect in large part because they were unflinching in how they confronted corruption, evil, war, mass destruction, and the sometimes crazed and desperate human will to survive. In Seven Samurai, the title characters wage a brutal war for a bowl of rice a day, and are left out in the cold when all is said and done. The Bad Sleep Well depicted a world where scheming business criminals wantonly murder whistleblowers and flaunt the law. High and Low was a kidnap thriller where the cops turn out to be just as ruthless as the sad, delusional kidnapper, maybe more so. The cops are perfectly sane, and yet choose to do something deeply cruel (and illegal) in the name of justice. Yojimbo gleefully depicts the gang war annihilation of an entire town filled with corrupt and stupid people instigated by a clever ronin more or less because he had nothing better to do. Ran, a samurai version of King Lear, is an exercise in stark, ritualistic cruelty, depicting in a highly stylized manner the destruction of Hidetora, a stubborn and foolish ruler, at the hands of his own family members, and by the hands of the enemies he had accumulated over a lifetime of scheming conquest. In Ran, there are scenes of mass carnage staged as painterly landscapes. The rivers of blood are just splashes of paint. The chorus of dying screams of men, women, and children falling to the blade and the rifle brigade just another movement in the symphony. Kagemusha is more sadism: a fading warlord is replaced by a guy who happens to look just like him. This new guy is destroyed by the inches, until he's just one among thousands of artfully arranged bodies in a gloriously deranged battlefield portrait. Throne of Blood reincarnated Macbeth as a kill crazy samurai who meets an end worthy of Tony Montana, after devoting himself to a life of permanent war in pursuit of absolute power.

But hope, decency, mercy, and compassion were also woven into Kurosawa's films. Ikiru showed how an ineffectual bureaucrat dying of cancer musters himself to achieve one worthwhile thing in a lifetime of waste. Dersu Uzala depicts a friendship between two men that endures some of the harshest weather that nature can throw at them. Stray Dog depicts a policeman who battles evil and murderous rage with his personal devotion to duty. Red Beard explores how an indifferent, pampered young doctor learns to care for the sickly poor. One Wonderful Sunday was a demonstration in how fantasy and young love can blot out the desolation of a former war zone riddled with crime, hunger, disease, and poverty.

I think that Madadayo follows the more hopeful currents throughout Kurosawa's work. It's interesting how it echoes the ideas of fantasy, love, and play that were expressed in the 1947 film One Wonderful Sunday, which was also a film with a grim backdrop of postwar devastation. Ran and Kagemusha were films that played almost like fantasias of destruction and sadism with wild color palettes, gorgeous costumes, elaborate set designs, and a kind of austere theatricality about the acting. After those movies he made Dreams which was pure fantasy structured as a series of bizarre episodes offering surreal meditations on nuclear war, old myths and folk tales, and the human will to survive desperate situations. And then he did Rhapsody in August , which was a drama exploring themes of reconciliation and forgiveness set in the real world, and then he did Madadayo which is set in the real world, yet reflects a kind of fantasy about how an old man might want to exit his long life. Or maybe the movie reflects the fantasies of those who venerated Uchida, and their desire for a certain kind of leader--that second emperor I mentioned earlier.

A hero demands followers. Or is it the followers who demand a hero?

Madadayo isn't a bad way to end a career. But I wonder what Kurosawa would've done after this had he lived a little longer. Madadayo suggests that Uchida and his followers believe they can deny death simply by declaring "Not yet!" but that's a fantasy. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish that fantasy were true, and that Kurosawa just had to say "Not yet!" and he could've gone on making movie after movie . . . whatever. Just some flaky musings of a guy who is never satisfied. The fan from hell. It's better that I have no control over life and death.

MOVIE REVIEW: POWAQQATSI: LIFE IN TRANSFORMATION (1988)

Directed by Godfrey Reggio
Cinematography by Graham Berry, Leonidas Zourdoumis
Music by Philip Glass
Written by Godfrey Reggio, Ken Richards
Film Editing by Iris Cahn, Miroslav Janek, Alton Walpole
Executive Producers Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus

Review by William D. Tucker. 


Powaqqatsi is the thematic and stylistic sequel to Koyaanisqatsi. Both are documentaries without any sort of conventional narration, whether voice over or subtitles or inter-titles, dialogue, interviews, charts, graphs, quantitative statistical data, and both are bereft of any sort of obvious advocacy or messaging. Rather, there is Philip Glass's ominously sublime music which gives a kind of otherworldly voice to the imagery, combined with some sound effects, and the montage effect of joining footage shot in locations around the world. Glass's score is kind of like the script, and the overall montage effect of each movie is a kind of magic which unites humans all over the globe into a grand mythic narrative. Watching these movies is like watching an attempt to convey a global narrative of technology's impact on human civilizations and cultures from the point of view of a divine or semi-divine voyeuristic entity. Or maybe that point-of-view entity is some sort of nascent global consciousness struggling to be born from the sum total of human intelligence, memory, and fantasy, combined with and amplified by a burgeoning worldwide computer network that is, itself, evolving towards some kind of sentience. Koyaanisqatsi offered a strong thematic through-line of technology's displacement of nature, almost Luddite in its suspicion of the sinister grandeur of high-tech human societies. Powaqqatsi is more subtle. The suspicion and skepticism of technology's impact and hunger for resources is still present, but this time it is the human cost which is foregrounded. The shining skyscrapers, mass production factory lines, integrated circuit cities, and weapons of mass destruction which were foregrounded in Koyaanisqatsi are relegated to the background, glimpsed askance, known by their signs and sigils, and the human wreckage their existence necessitates. Powaqqatsi is not quite the headlong plunge of Koyaanisqatsi, but it does offer an unforgettable series of meditations on human beings in action, struggling to survive in a hostile world, with only their muscles, lungs, hands, feet, hearts, and minds to keep them alive against the automated giants stalking the planet.

It's difficult to really describe, objectively, what goes on in Powaqqatsi, since it is not an objective or linear narrative experience. The movie is constructed in a way that confounds the usual flow of time, and collapses spatial distances into simultaneous moments. Human beings from different hemispheres, time frames, cultures, and languages are united via the magic of montage and music. The technological deities, idols, and mausoleums of Koyaanisqatsi are here fractionally manifested as bursts of malevolent flame; dreamy neon lights; schizoid media collages merging Me Generation fantasies of beauty, armored militarism, and delusions of unlimited knowledge and power flowing from telescreens and computer monitors into fashionable new narratives; and the ruins of bombed-out apartment blocs where homeless children squat and starve.


Powaqqatsi focuses on human bodies in motion, struggling en masse to carry sacks full of mud out of some pit, or moving in vast crowds through city streets and open air marketplaces. Humans are shown using knives and other blades to cut fruit and harvest grain. Humans use their legs to walk, or to pedal bikes, or to operate the gas and brake pedals of automobiles. Humans are seen uniting to push a malfunctioning flatbed truck over muddy ground. Humans dance as part of ecstatic religious rituals, or as part of funereal rites, or just for fun. Humans ritually battle each other with sticks in stylized poses, and this is, I suppose, a relief from the mass destruction of missiles, bombs, and napalm from the previous film. Humans of various faiths, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and others are seen praying as individuals, and in communities. Human children stare into the camera as it pans across their faces, many of them hardly able to keep from smiling and laughing, while others look bone-tired, old before their time. And elderly humans also stare into the camera, some looking distraught, bearing the pain of a lifetime, while others seem out of their minds, distant, and still others look pleased as can be, no longer afraid, no longer full of any kind of desire or acquisitiveness.

There is one little boy who puts up his fists, though, and I can't say if he's just playing, or if he is instinctively sensing the presence of the Enemy: an exploitative, technocratic, corporate predator state looking to suck his village, his country, dry, and cast it aside. Stay tough, kid.

Human power to produce agriculture and low-tech and no-tech civilization and culture is gradually sapped by and superseded by super industrial technology. Human cultures without access to high technology become virtual slave labor for power interests from distant lands, or they are simply left in the dust. Many people are in no position to even fully comprehend the seismic changes that technology works upon humanity, although this is not always the case. Other cultures work hard to adapt, and there is the image of a young child enraptured by the neon lights of Hong Kong staring out the rear window of a moving car.

Some of the images which appear late in the movie involve collages of people moving en masse through electronically regulated crosswalks combined with poor mothers and children sitting with no possessions upon concrete. Visually, it comes across as a family abandoned by high-tech society, lost in a spectral sea of marching legs. Some families are left behind as the rest of the world marches on to an unknowable future. There is something mournful about all this, and it is hard not to sense some anger and frustration, as well. Many beautiful things are made possible with technology, including the Qatsi movies. And yet there is a momentum to high-tech change which is ruthless and must be examined, even if the damage has already been done. Powaqqatsi is, in some sense, a kind of memorial to lives lost in the process of transformation, as one kind of civilization supplants another, a new kind of Nature supplants the old one, and begins to take on a kind of life of its own.

MOVIE REVIEW: KOYAANISQATSI: LIFE OUT OF BALANCE (1982)

Directed and Produced by Godfrey Reggio
Music by Philip Glass
Musical Director/Additional Music Composed by Michael Hoenig
Cinematography by Ron Fricke
Editing by Alton Walpole and Ron Fricke 
Written by Godfrey Reggio, Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Alton Walpole
Associate Producers Francis Ford Coppola, Mel Lawrence, Roger McNew, T. Michael Powers, Lawrence Taub, Alton Walpole

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Koyaanisqatsi is a documentary that offers only beautiful music and stunning imagery to communicate a complex view of nature and technology engaging in a grand and terrifying dialectic. Nature is violently displaced by human machines of war, resource extraction, mass production, and mass housing. One is left with the impression, initially, of the earth being punished, subverted, and subdued. But something more subtle and pervasive is going on here, something like a usurpation of nature, but always keep in mind that humans and their productions evolved out of nature. What we are seeing here is the creation of a new kind of nature, one that is based in technology rather than biology. Or maybe it's a mixture of technology and biology. Maybe technology, in this instance, is just "biology by other means."

 No venerable expert talking heads, no portentous voice overs, no editorial cartoons, and a minimum of on-screen text. Watching this movie, one will not walk away with a sense that one should vote for a particular politician or convert to a specific ideology or religion, although there are passages of it which flirt with being Luddite, which comes, I think, from a profound skepticism of the Utopian dreams and cynical schemes which seem to be so intertwined with high-technological societies. There is also an awareness of the exorbitant cost that high tech First World societies extract from the developing world, where many people live in crushing poverty, and do not necessarily understand what the overall aims and goals of the invasive First World fully entail.  And, perhaps, maybe the First World technocrats don't really understand what drives them on, either. Technological progress has an eerie way of erasing what has gone before, and those of us who have grown up in such societies have no memory of what things were like before the advent of globalization, TV, the internet, etc. Koyaanisqatsi seems to suggest that technology is merging with nature to produce a third thing that is somehow both more and less than either thing alone. More, in that some benefit greatly from the new synthesis; less, in that many will suffer and lose their lives and livelihoods to bring about that new synthesis. The movie offers no easy morals or advice. It is more of a portrait of things as they are, reality itself, in all its cruelty and grandeur. If there is a message here, maybe it's something like, "Brace yourself!" or "Ready or not, here it comes! It's already here!"

Koyaanisqatsi's method is pure montage, perfectly synchronized with Philip Glass's alternately majestic and mechanistic music score. Glass's music provides a kind of "machine soul" to many of the terrifying apparatus on display, and then there are other times when the score seems to be invoking a "soul of desolation" to give voice to the massive waste and folly of humanity's violence towards the environment. This is a spiritual movie, but not a dogmatic one. It is spiritual in that it seeks to create new spirits through music, images, and montage that gives voices to the inanimate things which surround us, and to some extent dictate our lives. Glass and director Godfrey Reggio do not hide their terror and skepticism at the new techno-behemoth stalking the planet, and offer up a kind of requiem in picture and sound for the old world now gone.

There are no leading characters in the usual sense, just stunning footage of natural landscapes in the opening sequences, which eventually gives way to mining operations, engineered floods, dams, and terrifying displays of atom bombs, Soviet tanks, and American fighter craft. These displays of destructive power give way to haunting footage of abandoned apartment buildings, desolate housing projects, shining skyscrapers which look eerily like science fictional mausoleums erected no doubt by the Eloi, and then picks up again with a majestic, and darkly comedic sequence which depicts the integration of frenetic human social and  mass production activity into something like a worldaround computer circuit. I suspect the Wachowskis must've had this movie in mind when they made The Matrix some years later. Humanity is clearly depicted as being at war with nature.

But are we destroying the planet, or are we just making it over in our own image? Koyaanisqatsi itself is a product of high technology, a movie, whose purpose seems to be to give the audience a global perspective in such a way that would've been hard to come by in 1983, the year of its original release. No World Wide Web, no Google Earth, no capacity for billions of people around the globe to produce high volumes of televisual content for their own amusement via YouTube, just a darkened theatre to create just the right kind of worshipful mood to pay homage to the glowing screen. Well, all right, I guess there were books and nature programs on TV back in 1983, but I couldn't help but think that Koyaanisqatsi must've been a qualitatively different viewing experience for its first audiences.

All throughout the movie there are images of humans wandering the streets of large cities, herded along by WALK/DON'T WALK signs, and occasionally stopping to stare into the camera. Everyone looks lost. There's a shot of a man alone in some kind of automated facility, tending machines which don't need tending. I can't quite say why, but I want to say that this man isn't lost. He has found his place. Good for him . . . this is definitely one of those movies that invites you to create your own narratives, intimate and grand, as it carries you along to its stunning finale.

The opening sequence begins with the launch of a magnificent rocket of some kind, taking off, I guess, for outer space. There is a rather cruel payoff to this opening scene, at the very end, which gives the movie an effective shape, lends it a quality of myth, of legend. I'm thinking of Icarus here.

But there is also an inquiry into the nature of physical production, of engineering and construction projects on a vast scale. It must be said that dams, tanks, fighter jets, nuclear bombs, and large scale strip-mining operations involve vast numbers of people, and large quantities of equipment, guided by hard quantitative skills involving advanced mathematics, engineering, physics, management, and a lot of other things above my head. If Koyaanisqatsi has within it deep skepticism at our aborning high-tech civilization, then it is also about a system, a beast, which is both inspiring and terrifying to behold.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE INSECT WOMAN (1963)

Starring
Sachiko Hidari as Tome Matsuki
Kazuo Kitamura as Chuji Matsuki
Jitsuko Yoshimura as Nobuko Matsuki
Masumi Harukawa as Midori
Tanie Kitabayashi as Madam Suma
Seizaburo Kawazu as Karasawa
Hiroyuki Nagato as Matsunami


Cinematography by Shinsaku Himeda
Edited by Mutsuo Tanji
Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi
Art Direction by Kimihiko Nakamura
Produced by Kano Otsuka and Jiro Tomoda
Written by Keiji Hasebe and Shohei Imamura
Directed by Shohei Imamura

...

"You've only seen the surface of happiness. I'll show you the real depths."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 


Shohei Imamura's The Insect Woman documents the lifespan of an individual woman, Tome Matsuki, from the Winter of 1918 to the Spring of 1961. It starts with her birth, but does not end with her death. This is not a film that follows the usual tension-and-release formula of most dramas. There's no grand climax, ultimate triumph, or absolute defeat. Tome's life is not one that'll make the history books--she commanded no troops, she signed no treaties, she authored no great works of literature, nor did she found any great institutions or make any unique discoveries. It works in an elliptical fashion, providing a great density of detail about Tome's daily existence, and then switching tracks, taking Tome to a new phase of her life, and a new mass of detail and routine. The movie doesn't always make explicit how she gets from point A to point B in her life, and yet it's mostly clear how Tome's life evolves over time. The film is almost a scientific endeavor, with each scene being a representative sampling of the major events and decision points of Tome's existence.  The film goes against all the usual rules of cinematic storytelling, and yet, in doing so, it achieves an almost perfect sense of the drama of one person's life.

Tome Matsuki (Sachiko Hidari) was born to a family of tenant farmers in a rural village in Japan in 1918. Her first love is her slow-witted father, Chuji (Kazuo Kitamura), who starts sleeping with her when she's still a child. No one tells her that this is incest or that this relationship, by its nature, constitutes child abuse. Chuji himself may not even realize that what he's doing is wrong, as he seems to suffer from some sort of cognitive disability. Their love is not just disturbing, it's absolutely grotesque. When Tome matures into a young woman and has a child, Tome finds that her child will not suckle enough milk from her breasts. On the pretext of alleviating painfully swollen breasts, Chuji suckles the excess milk, and Tome takes sensual pleasure in the act.

Tome grows up, becomes a union organizer in a factory, but is pressured to return to the family's farm. She is constantly smothered by the presence of her family and their neighbors, and is obliged to use her body to get in good with the wealthier family that owns the land the Matsukis farm. She decides to leave the farm and makes her way to the big city, Tokyo, where she works for a spell as a maid for Midori (Masumi Harukawa) who is married to an American serviceman. Midori is pretty upfront with Tome about her mercenary motives for marrying an American. Midori sees the marriage as a potential opportunity to move up in the world, and if that means having a child she doesn't really want to keep her man around, then so be it.

Tome loses her job as a maid, and she finds herself scrubbing the floorboards of a brothel. Tome herself becomes a working girl and comes under the tutelage of a shrewd and tough madam (Tanie Kitabayashi) who is making a killing managing a stable of prostitutes. As a prostitute, Tome attracts the attention of an older businessman named Karasawa (Seizaburo Kawazu). Tome takes on the madam's role when the original is busted by the cops. Tome decides that the working girls need to take a more subtle approach to the trade, and so she urges them to take on a call girl business model. No more brothel. No more having all the prostitutes in one place where they can all be rounded up by cops looking for an easy bust. Now it's by appointment only with an approved list of customers. Tome proves perfectly capable of taking on the madam's role, and she even improves the business, making it just a bit more cop-proof.

All this time, Tome's daughter Nobuko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) has been growing up back on the farm, and enduring a sexual relationship with Chuji. This kind of romance, if you can call it that, seems to be a village institution. Nobuko at first seems to be following the same pattern of her mother's life, but Nobuko sees herself as starting some sort of co-operative farm of her own. She is more infused with the democratic spirit of the times, and wants to be a leader of the co-op and not just a submissive laborer. When she comes to the city to join her mother she is seeking investor funds to start up this venture, and this brings her into intimacy with the lecherous Karasawa, who is more than happy to ditch Tome for a younger woman.

Along the way, Tome's life, and its tiny scale, are measured against the world-historical events of the day: Hirohito's surrender; agrarian reforms imposed by the occupation government; riots and the discontent of the people at being under the thumb of a foreign power; and the struggles of a fallen imperial aggressor state to transform itself into an enterprising democracy. To what degree Japan achieves such a lofty goal is debatable. Tome's life is a kind of measure of this success, as she, herself, transforms with the times, taking on whatever role is necessary to survive and advance in society. Tome's daughter Nobuko is a further measure of Japan's ongoing evolution as a nation-state entity. The road out of the ruins of militarism is especially harsh on women coming from poor backgrounds, but they meet these challenges with vitality and pragmatism.

I have to admit, it was hard for me to watch this movie and not bring my own morality to bear in judging the characters and their relationships. I've sat through many films about macho characters using unlimited violence to slaughter paper tiger evildoers by the baker's dozen. And here I am getting uptight about depictions of incest and Karasawa's seduction of the much younger Nobuko. Like a lot of Americans, I can watch people getting shot, tortured, exploded, eviscerated, and all kinds of massacred, but I flinch when it comes to frank depictions of sexuality that fall outside of my own definitions of what is and is not normal.

I don't think this movie is promoting incest, or prostitution, or even May-September romances,  it is simply portraying life as it was lived by specific people in specific circumstances. Director Shohei Imamura is not letting himself off the hook via the usual dramatic and/or cinematic contrivances. There are no larger-than-life heroes framed against majestic backdrops, there is no great catharsis or display of mayhem to make the uncomfortable aspects of life go away, none of that adventure movie by schematic tension and release bullshit. The rhythm of this movie has more to do with how life is lived. People don't change because of sudden, melodramatic or spiritual insight, but rather they are molded, over time, by their families, societies, and individual personalities into who they are, what they might be, and what they eventually become.

BOOK REVIEW: CITY (1952)

by Clifford D. Simak


Published  in novel form by Ace Books in 1952
City, Huddling Place, and Census published in 1944.
Paradise and Hobbies published in 1946.
Aesop published 1947.
Trouble With Ants published 1951.

...

"Where man would follow metal, the dogs will follow ghosts."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

After World War II, in the imagination of Clifford D. Simak, reality took a strange turn. All the nations of the world decided to unite as one, and become the planet state of Earth. Its capital was Geneva. War was outlawed, the old  national borders were erased, and a new era began. United humanity re-purposed atomic power as an unlimited source of energy and ended scarcity and want, and devoted themselves to developing what we would call artificial intelligence of a very high order, and soon the world was filled with sapient robot companions and laborers. Humanity, across many generations, used mysterious techniques, no doubt involving genetic engineering, to teach dogs to speak, and soon this program of elevating animals to human levels of communication and cognition spread to all the mammalian creatures of the planet. Violence and the eating of meat are outlawed, and all the beasts of nature, whether predator or prey, come to live in peaceful fellowship.

Truly, paradise.

Well, not exactly. You see there are these mutants. The mutants are hyper-individualists who decided they didn't want to be part of the global nation state. Not so much because they had serious political objections, but more because they had developed such powerful facilities of cognition, and the hypnotically compelling inner lives to go along with such advanced capacities, that they ceased to care what society, any society, thought about them. The mutants weren't violent or warlike. They just stopped giving a damn about society's rules and expectations, and even its larger goals. Let the utopians, the robots, and those talking dogs deal with it. They'd rather not be bothered.

Hey, I guess it's not paradise.It's not without some conflict. No paradise without its discontents. But not too bad.

Yeah, that transition from the city to the wilderness. It's another quirk of Simak's future vision. Instead of crowded megalopolises, humanity decides to spread out, and partly it's fear related to cities being targets for bombs. For awhile there, no one knew how the last global war was going to play out, and so humanity began to abscond from the city, and--

Oh, but did I tell you about Juwain, the Martian philosopher? Yeah, there's Martians in this book, too. Well, there's the one Martian, in particular, Juwain, and his transcendent, fix-all philosophy, Juwainism, and it's kinda funny how that one played out . . . some people couldn't handle the transition from cities, you know? Some people just clung to the old ways, of an ever-expanding humanity, glittering skyscrapers, just stack humankind by the floor, up, up, and up. You'd think most humans, if they could accept towering apartment complexes, they could handle the vast interstellar gulfs. You'd think. Just a Jaunt to Mars to get the rest of Juwain's notes, or something like that. Some people prefer to stay home in a number of senses.

And heaven exists. It's on Jupiter. Now, you won't get there by praying, but you do have to engage in a kind of transubstantiation of the flesh to be able to handle it. Brave young astronauts must be subjected to a form of pantropy--modified to endure the harshness of the Jovian world, but maybe Heaven's not all it's cracked up to be . . .

And then there's the cobblies. Only the dogs and other animals can sense the cobblies, those intrepid movers of furniture, who refuse to manifest in any comprehensible form when photographed. So rare that humans stooped to hoaxing photos and embellishing stories about hauntings and possessions in order to convince themselves they weren't losing their minds. We elevated the dogs, but the dogs could've returned the favor, it would seem, in certain matters of perception. It's that human arrogance, my friend, we don't like the idea that the lifeforms we breed into existence could maybe surpass us somehow, some way.

I guess we gave a kind of pass to the robots. We made them as happy slaves, much like Asimov's early take on robots, but Simak's robotic protagonist, Jenkins, evolves and grows across the generations, and becomes thoroughly human, even downright elderly. Jenkins may remind some readers of Anne Rice's vampires, but without the blood-lust and aristocratic ennui. This loyal robot retainer is witness to generations of the family Webster, which is basically the family of humankind. The canine philosophers of many generations hence even come to call humans websters. That is: "websters" replaces "humans" in canine vocabulary. But about the robots. We create the robots in our image, make them happy in bondage, and, eventually, let them evolve their own way, towards a strange kind of robotic freedom. But even this is due to our human arrogance, you see. We like that human shape. We like it even more when it's shaped in invincible steel, a vision of our armored dreams of hegemony and horror. But Jenkins evolves past our human arrogance, I think, but we the humans set such an acceptable form in motion.

Which brings me to the ants, to critters with decidedly unacceptable forms. You gotta ask yourself: why doesn't humanity elevate the insects, the spiders, the scorpions, the cockroaches, the moths, the butterflies, the whales, the dolphins, the octopuses, the squid, the lobsters, the crabs, the snails, and all the other creepy-crawlies? 'Cause we're bigots, that's why. But bigots, in the long run, seldom have their way in Simak's visionary future history.

Simak's book, City, is full of wild and woolly speculations. It's an exercise in purest make believe. It's science fiction of a kind that doesn't seem to have too much currency anymore. It certainly isn't "hard" SF. You won't find any loving descriptions of heavy-duty megadeath future war equipment being used to wage high body count libertarian revolutions against nanny governments on the moon, or Mars or wherever. No striving intergalactic capitalists or armored mecha soldiers here. No paeans to the glory of dying like some kind of shiny, space-age Spartan in mortal combat with vicious catmen, or anything of the sort. Simak's book is unsettling in its mellowness. He puts most of the technological magic into the black box, as it were, and focuses on the story and the themes. The characters are there to help serve as guideposts in the overall evolution of humanity, and, later, the robots and animals, as one civilization supplants another one, and much is lost, good, bad, spectacular, bizarre, to the erosion of centuries, of millenniums. There's no World War III, thank the cobblies, just time, a worldaround sickness at the prospect of more nationalistic barbarism, a refusal to be hypnotized by the false-power spectacle of Cold Wars and nuclear arsenals, and the many Laws of Unintended Consequences.

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 . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: IT'S ALIVE (1974)

John P. Ryan as Frank Davis
Sharon Farrell as Lenore Davis
Daniel Holzman as Chris Davis
William Wellman Jr. as Charley
James Dixon as Lt. Perkins
Shamus Locke as The Doctor
Andrew Duggan as The Professor
Guy Stockwell as Bob Clayton
Michael Ansara as The Captain
Robert Emhardt as The Executive


Cinematography by Fenton Hamilton
Editing by Peter Honess
Music by Bernard Herrmann
Written, Directed, and Produced by Larry Cohen

...

"There's only one thing wrong with the Davis Baby . . ."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

We begin at the Davis household. Lenore Davis (Sharon Farrell) is going into labor pains. Hubby Frank (John P. Ryan) gathers her and his son, Chris (Daniel Holzman), into the family car, drops Chris off with a family friend, Charley (William Wellman Jr.), and it's off to the hospital. In these early scenes, we get to know the Davis family. The father is a bit of  a joker, doing funny voices, keeping up everyone's morale. Lenore is more serious, very much into the idea of becoming a mother. The son, Chris, is eager to have a younger sibling, not jealous at all, a nice kid.

Frank spends hours in the waiting room, chatting up the other expecting fathers. Some idle chat about a guy stirring his coffee with a pencil. Something about too much lead in the water supply. Doesn't he know that pencils are made with graphite, not actual lead?

All this is build-up for the revelation of horror: screams, and a delivery room full of mutilated corpses of doctors and nurses. Lenore is unharmed, but in shock. What the hell just happened? Did some maniacal slasher kill the medical staff, and kidnap the Davis baby? Not exactly . . .


Frank and Lenore Davis were expecting a child. What they get is a rubbery demon that tears out people's throats with its sharp fangs. The cops and the surviving medical staff quickly come to the conclusion that the Davis baby was born some kind of ultra-aggressive mutant. It's decided that it must be hunted down and destroyed with extreme prejudice. Frank Davis is eager to kill the thing, mutant, demon, whatever the fuck it is. He's already decided it's not really human, just some aberration that should have never came into the world.

Frank is also eager to get back to his job as a public relations agent at a major corporation. But his boss forces him to take a three week vacation. This is a pretense to eventually fire Frank, but Frank doesn't know that. Frank has become a liability to the company as a PR man. He's become known in the media as the father of the mutant.  Frank is hounded by reporters eager to get a statement from the father of the murderous monster baby.

Meanwhile, Lenore is losing her mind. She can't quite confront the reality of the situation. Frank and Lenore decide not to tell their son, Chris, what's going on, and they enlist Charley in this scheme by convincing him to not let their boy watch any news casts. But how long can this denial of reality go on? Chris is a smart kid, too, and he starts to suspect something is not right. Part of what It's Alive is all about is denying reality. There's a theme going on here that people try to deny whatever is unpleasant and will go to great lengths to cover it up.

 What exactly is the monster baby? Was Lenore impregnated with the Anti-Christ? Was God feeling randy enough to plant a Second Coming? Not exactly. This movie suggests that the monster baby was the result of birth control drugs that Lenore had been taking, and maybe other environmental and pharmaceutical factors. The movie further suggests that there's pressure being placed on the cops to hunt down and kill the mutant baby so that agents of Big Pharma can destroy the corpse and prevent a conclusive autopsy which would prove that unsafe meds caused the mutation. This conspiracy angle is just barely sketched into the movie. It's basically a couple of guys talking in a hallway. It's interesting, but not the strongest aspect of the film. I don't think it really matters what exactly created the monster baby. The idea is, "What if you're expecting a child, and instead you get a murderous monster?" The quasi-science fictional explanation is superfluous hand-waving.

The cops bumble around darkened buildings, some of them getting killed off by the mutant. For a mutant baby, it sure gets around, claiming victims here and there. The baby is never seen all that clearly or for long periods of time, but it's clearly a rubbery beast. In one memorable scene, the mutant kills a milkman in his truck. You just see the outside of the truck, hear the sounds of screams, bottles shattering, and then a flow of blood and milk mixed together coming out of the back door of the truck. I dunno, maybe it's symbolism . . .

Eventually, Frank decides that he has to kill the baby himself, which is good because none of the cops in this movie can shoot worth a damn.  At first, he tries to present this decision as doing the responsible thing, but on another level this is Frank fulfilling a selfish fantasy: of eliminating the unwanted mutant, of making the hated thing go away, denying the unpleasant reality. Frank's journey towards confronting the mutant, facing reality, is where this movie's true strength lies.

It's Alive is totally absurd, but it has some striking moments. John P. Ryan holds it all together as the father who is determined to kill the mutant baby. He brings a naturalness and intensity that is surprisingly understated. The best scenes involve him negotiating with his boss, the cops, the doctors, all of these scenes involve Ryan trying to convince himself, as much as he is trying to convince the other people, that he is ready to kill the mutant, that he feels no connection with his offspring whatsoever. And yet his voice and his face quiver with barely suppressed emotion. Why the strong feelings, if he has already committed himself to destroying the mutant? The movie provides a poignant and surprising climax.

MOVIE REVIEW: LORD OF ILLUSIONS (1995)

Starring
Scott Bakula as Harry D'Amour
Kevin J. O'Connor as Philip Swann
Famke Janssen as Dorothea Swann
Joel Swetow as Valentin
Barry Del Sherman as Butterfield
Joseph Marder as Ray Miller
Joseph Latimore as Quaid/Fortune Teller
Daniel von Bargen as Nix



Cinematography by Rohn Schmidt
Original Music by Simon Boswell
Editing by Alan Baumgarten
Production Design by Steve Hardie
Art Direction by Mark Fisichella and Bruce Robert Hill
Costume Design by Luke Reichle
Written, Directed and Co-Produced by Clive Barker


NOTE: This review is based on the Director's Cut version of the film.
...

"I have so much power to give you. All you have to do . . . is beg."

...

Review by William D. Tucker.

Lord of Illusions is a blend of noirish paperback detective story and writer/director Clive Barker's very own brand of gruesomely sublime horror fantasy literature.

In the 1980s, Barker wrote a series of short story collections known as The Books of Blood wherein he created a highly literate yet stomach-churningly gruesome aesthetic of horror literature. Barker's stories aren't about silent slashers with faces hidden behind Halloween masks or athletic gear or radioactive mutants or aliens clawing their way out of your chest. Barker's horrors are tied to desire, to sex, and to the obsession with power and transformation. His villainous characters, especially, often seem obsessed with accumulating great power, with imposing their rigid wills upon reality.  There's also a strong influence of BDSM, most obviously in the novella The Hellbound Heart, and its gruesome movie adaptation, Hellraiser. Anyone who's seen Hellraiser is familiar with Pinhead, the body-piercing fanatic from another dimension, who is still to this day, for better and for worse, Barker's most enduring contribution to the pantheon of horror cinema's memorable monsters.  Barker's characters often seek oblivion in the pursuit of taboo pleasures. He further expanded the scope of his vision with novels like 1987's Weaveworld, which brought his style of extreme horror to an epic fantasy adventure saga of hidden worlds and magical beings.

Lord of Illusions is a brilliant synthesis of the gruesome side of Barker's horror with the literary aspect, creating a world where mundane reality and hidden worlds of magic co-exist, interpenetrating each other in ways subtle and spectacular.

Sometime in 1982, a death cult led by a man named Nix (Daniel von Bargen) was plotting its very own Helter-Skelter out in the Mojave Desert. But Nix has a one-up on Charlie Manson: real magic derived from occultic powers of destruction. Nix can levitate, summon a living entity of fire, and, most insidiously, get inside people's heads. A group of armed ex-cultists show up to put the kibosh on Nix and rescue a young girl held hostage within the cultists' hideout.

One of these ex-cultists is a man named Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor). Swann used to be Nix's most fervent disciple. Swann confronts Nix. During the confrontation, Nix puts his fingers into Swann's skull, and manipulates his mind. But Swann's allies manage to come to his rescue with a shotgun and some pistols. After a shootout, in which the cult leader is wounded, Swann uses a strange mask which he screws into Nix's face and skull to magically bind the dark magician and seal his evil away forever. The implication is that Swann used his magic talents to construct the bizarre mask, talents that Swann no doubt learned from Nix. Some might call this ingratitude, but sometimes one must do a little evil to do a lot of good.

Years Later: enter a New York private detective, Harry D'Amour, who battles villains mundane and occultic and is played with a mix of two-fisted competence and surprising compassion by Scott Bakula. D'Amour has a history of dealing with otherworldly powers, and his most recent case involved some sort of exorcism in Brooklyn. The details are vague, but the case, which involved a bloody-mawed albino demon possessing a child, has left D'Amour burned out on occultic cases. A plain clothes detective from central casting shows up at D'Amour's apartment to offer him a case and a chance to get out to the West Coast: a fraudster has skipped out of the Big Apple for California. D'Amour takes the case.

But anyone who's read a Raymond Chandler book knows that the first mystery is just a lead up to the second, and so it is with this case. D'Amour trails the fraudster to a fortune teller's office. D'Amour is coming up the stairs when the dude comes tear-assing back down the stairs. D'Amour senses something strange is going on, and so he draws his gun and charges into the palm reader's office. The palm reader, Quaid (Joseph Latimore), is there, but has been turned into a human pin cushion by a psychopathic torturer, Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman). Butterfield likes to stick people with blades crafted from surgical steel. D'Amour gets jumped by a neo-Nazi thug(Joseph Marder) with filed down teeth, and Butterfield makes his escape while the detective sends the skinhead on a pilgrimage through the window to pay homage to the pavement three or so stories below. D'Amour tries to figure out what's going on with the palm reader, but the man is mortally wounded. He only has time to give D'Amour a palm reading and an ominous clue about the "coming of the Puritan" before he expires.

The cops show up, and since this is Movie Reality, they let D'Amour go after a few preliminary questions. Actually, that guy who D'Amour threw out the window? It seems he just got up and ran away, so I suppose the cops don't have any good reason to hold him for questioning. D'Amour intuits that some very strange shit is happening, and, soon enough,  after his name and picture are printed in the paper in connection with the torture-murder, he is contacted by a  fastidious man named Valentin (Joel Swetow) on behalf of Dorothea Swann (Famke Janssen). It seems that the dead fortune teller has a connection to Dorothea and her husband, Philip Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), who is a David Copperfield-scale professional illusionist.

Dorothea meets D'Amour in a graveyard, and the private dick is immediately smitten with her beauty.(I imagine anyone driven to a graveyard under mysterious circumstances only to find themselves face-to-face with Famke Janssen would probably have the same response.) Dorothea wants to figure out why the fortune teller was murdered and what, if any, threat may be posed to her husband, the illusionist. Dorothea tells D'Amour that Philip has some connection to the slain palm reader, and she wants to know what that is.

D'Amour takes the case.

Lord of Illusions is a mystery, and I suspect that I am already giving too much away, so I'll try not to summarize the plot anymore. What I like about this movie is that it is a hybrid of several different genres, mystery, horror, and fantasy, and it mixes these elements with great skill. The mystery draws you in, the horror gives weight to the violence and death within the mystery, and the fantasy elements suggest a whole other plane of reality that is manipulating the mundane world for mysterious purposes of its own. It explores the concept of magic as something which is just beyond our everyday experience, but not impossible to attain. There is also the danger, in this world, that the evil forces that also use magic can sweep out of the shadows to destroy you mind, body, and soul. Magic is a power that can be used to liberate humans from their humdrum existences, or it can torture us with madness. It would also seem that those who use magic can develop a lust for power. The movie offers a pretty sophisticated take on how magic works and how it affects the hearts and minds of those who practice it. There's no escaping the consequences of magical actions for good and for evil.

I also like the cast of this movie. Scott Bakula does the action hero stuff well, but he also brings a sense of vulnerability to the part. There are a number of scenes, usually after brutal physical combat, where he is seen lying in bed with bottles of booze and painkillers nearby, recovering from his injuries. Arnold would just shrug off the pain, maybe even walk through a plate glass window just to relax. D'Amour's also a decent detective, and he knows that even when dealing with the occult it's still those mundane clues, that book of contacts in the drawer, that used cigar in the ashtray, the offhand comment that reveals the hidden depths of a person's motivation, that makes the case and saves the day. Bakula displays a fair amount of compassion, too. He seems credibly upset at the loss of life, which happens a number of times in this movie. Overall, Bakula makes for a smart, compassionate, two-fisted champion in the face of dark forces.

I believe this was one of Famke Janssen's first major roles in a movie. It's certainly the very first movie I ever saw her in when I was a teenager watching way too much cable television without parental supervision during the 1990s. Nowadays she is famous for playing Jean Gray in those X-Men movies. She's obviously a very beautiful woman, and that beauty is used skillfully in counterpoint to the essential fear and sadness at the heart of the character of Dorothea. Why is a woman this beautiful and wealthy this unhappy? What is she so afraid of? Janssen isn't afraid to bring a creeping fear bordering on paranoia into her performance. It makes you wonder what's going on inside her mind. What is she hiding? Why?

Daniel von Bargen is utterly unwholesome as cult leader Nix. He relishes fucking with people's minds. He luxuriates in his own corruption, gleefully tormenting a twelve year old girl with a vicious baboon on a chain, or sticking his fingers right through the flesh and bone of someone's skull--no doubt utilizing some long forgotten technique of torture learned from some forgotten tome. The role is a standout for Daniel von Bargen, who is usually cast as cops and other authority figures on account of his solid, fatherly presence. Here, he dresses in rags, makes doom-laden pronouncements, and embodies all sorts of malevolence physical and spiritual.

Kevin J. O'Connor plays Philip Swann as a man unable to enjoy his success in life. He is perennially distant from his beautiful wife, Dorothea, and cannot accept the acclaim lavished on him by his audiences. Is it because he feels guilt about building a fortune as an illusionist who uses real magic? Real magic that he learned from a man that he murdered? O'Connor doesn't so much play this kind of anhedonia as he does embody it. The way he piles himself in a chair, listlessly sucking on a Havana cigar, it's all routine, all just keeping up appearances. O'Connor's performance is strikingly natural for such a fanciful movie.

Joel Swetow plays Valentin, who is Philip Swann's stage manager in a number of senses. Swetow plays him as a fastidious man, bordering on the obsessive-compulsive. He is equally devoted to Dorothea and Philip, but he is another character who seemingly has something to hide. He is instantly put off by D'Amour's slovenliness and trades some amusing one liners with him during their scenes together. Swetow is one of those actors I don't think I've ever seen in another movie aside from this one. I looked him up on IMDB and I was pleased to find he was still working. He's got a demo reel on his IMDB page, and it looks like he's been cast in a lot of supporting parts: villains with accents, a supernatural being in a black trenchcoat, and even one of Randy Weaver's neighbors in a made-for-TV movie about the Ruby Ridge standoff.

My favorite performance is by Barry Del Sherman as the sadistic Butterfield. Del Sherman is another actor I could not remember from any other movie, but, upon looking at his IMDB profile I discovered he'd actually played small roles in a handful of movies I had seen before, such as Suicide Kings, Alien Nation, American Beauty, and There Will Be Blood. Del Sherman plays Butterfield as simultaneously detached from most human emotion yet with a penetrating intellectual concentration on his goal. He isn't a torturer just because he's a sadist, but because he believes it's the only way to reveal truth. And what is his goal? I can't reveal that, but I can tell you that he is very much a detective, a kind of diabolical foil to D'Amour. Sherman has a very intriguing moment late in the movie where someone asks him about his bag of tools, and he provides a surprisingly understated yet substantial answer. He isn't the usual cackling cinematic sadist, but comes across as an intensely intellectual, disciplined, yet totally ruthless man, who has been on a long journey, and done a lot of dark things. Watching this movie again, I wondered if Butterfield had ever in his journeys spent time hanging out with John Yoo, David Addington, or Dick Cheney, maybe spent some time as a consultant to a Neoconservative think tank . . . the imagination does wander . . .

Lord of Illusions has effective special effects, using a mixture of practical mechanical effects, makeup, and some ambitious, if not wholly effective, CG. The CG elements consist of a strange figure made of geometrically folding and unfolding  . . . sheets of paper? Paper cranes? And then the figure turns into a kind of flying fish, I think, but the whole thing doesn't quite come off, but I think I get the overall idea. A strange presence invades a house, and the people there have to contend with it . . . see the movie itself for the full story. The best special effects are in the opening and climatic scenes of the film wherein the magical forces in play are allowed to clash in full force. The climax, wherein the evil force behind everything is unleashed is spectacular. It's an orgy of madness, a battle to the finish, and a confrontation with the past all in one.

There's another quality to this movie that I like that's a little harder to pin down. It's a very writerly movie. Clive Barker is not just a filmmaker but a novelist, short story author, and a playwright for the stage, as well as a visual artist. You can see some of his drawings and designs in some scenes. But with Lord of Illusions, Barker elevates the usual characterizations one finds in horror cinema with something that he no doubt learned as a novelist writing long form narratives: a sense of history, a sense of emotional complexity, moral ambiguity, and the way people change, or don't, over stretches of time. None of these are the usual values one expects or even demands from horror flicks. I think most people, certainly most people I know, go to horror movies for the snuff movie aspect: they want to see people geeked in novel ways. A machete to the head. A scythe up the ass. Coils of intestines on a meat hook. A chainsaw to the genitals. Barker himself is no stranger to outrageous gore, as anyone who has read his horror short stories, The Books of Blood, or seen the first two Hellraiser movies could tell you, but I appreciated the fact that he decided to go for something deeper, and more ambitious with this film. The characters in Lord of Illusions don't just exist to be hacked to death by some lumbering boogeyman. They seem to have existences beyond the cruel exigencies of the horror film, and each one's suffering and potential death counts for quite a bit. Even the villainous characters evoke a certain amount of empathy, and failing that, fascination. We want to see even the evil ones live just to find out what novel horrors they will bring into the world.

Horror movies nowadays consist mostly of remakes of played-out slasher film franchises, the kinda bullshit you think audiences would've consigned to the straight-to-DVD market at the turn of the millennium. But Freddy and Jason and that endless stream of Saw sequels keep on coming. The Saw series in particular is about the purest form of the geek show in American horror cinema that I can think of, almost majestic in its single-minded desire to derive entertainment from the sounds and images of human beings getting tortured to death.

My point is that Barker proved himself to be a much too intelligent filmmaker for standard horror fare with Lord of Illusions. Which is why he hasn't directed another film since. It hasn't helped that all three of Barker's major directorial efforts, Hellraiser, Night Breed, and Lord of Illusions, have met with resistance from production executives, and varying degrees of censorship from the MPAA. Hellraiser is probably the one movie of the three which was able to reach audiences with an R rating and be relatively uncompromised, yet it is also arguably the most simplistic of the three. Night Breed was butchered by clueless executives who wanted more of a pure monster movie, but is still a fascinating piece of work, very ahead of its time. Lord of Illusions was released theatrically in a compromised cut, but is now widely available in a Director's Cut on DVD. Maybe Barker is just sick of dealing with the endless compromises inherent within the Hollywood machine. As a writer and a painter he can create without mindless interference and the inevitable evisceration of substance which follows the ordeals of test screenings and focus groups and other art-by-committee atrocities. Still, it would be nice if Barker got back in the saddle for one more directorial effort. It'd be all the better if it was something of the flavor of Lord of Illusions, another supernaturally themed mystery-thriller, maybe another outing with Harry D'Amour, a little older, a little wiser, a little more scarred. One can hope.

MOVIE REVIEW: MODERN TIMES (1936)

Starring 
Charlie Chaplin
Paulette Goddard


Written, Directed, Produced, Original Music Composed by Charlie Chaplin
Cinematography by Ira H. Morgan and Roland Totheroh 
Editing by Charlie Chaplin and Willard Nico
Production Design by Charles D. Hall
Art Direction by J. Russell Spencer

Review by William D. Tucker. 


The Chaplin is a Tramp! And this Tramp starts out with a pretty good job in the midst of the Great Depression: tightening bolts on incomprehensible bits of machine parts as they race by on a manic conveyor belt. Chaplin's boss dictates to the workers via an Orwellian telescreen, and his one dictate seems to be "Faster! Faster!" And so the workers on the line pick up the pace. Chaplin has to tighten two bolts at a time, so he's armed with a wrench in each fist. He takes to his work with crazed intensity, even if he does get a bit flaky and start applying the wrenches to the buttons on people's coats and dresses and even the occasional pair of nipples. Chaplin ends up losing his mind because he can't keep pace with the work, and the boss conducts a bizarre experiment on him involving a feeding machine that looks like it was designed by Survival Research Laboratories. Does Chaplin show up with a fully automatic assault rifle and start killing at will? Does he go on strike? No! He dances! He spurts people in the face with an oil can! He takes a ride through the gears of the grand industrial machinery! He makes all kinds of merry! He is happy as can be! And to be this kind of happy in the heart of the industrial beast one must clearly be insane. Later for that cushy factory job.

Chaplin finds himself out of work and on the streets. While strolling along with his inimitable walk he gets caught up between striking workers and strikebreaking pig cops. The cops drag Chaplin off to prison for being a communist agitator, and it looks like his spirits are sure to be crushed. But he ends up consuming large quantities of cocaine by accident and he becomes supercharged with energy. With this burst of energy he battles an armed gang trying to bust out of lock-up, and the Tramp becomes a savior of the prison warden. They even give him a pardon and, what's most important, a letter of reference so he can get a job.

Meanwhile, the lovely Paulette Goddard finds herself barefoot in the streets after her father is gunned down during a labor skirmish. Rather than become a ward of the state, she decides to strike out on her own, and try to skip and prance and charm her way into a job and a new life. She crosses paths with the Tramp when she nearly gets caught stealing a loaf of bread. Chaplin tries to take the rap, and thereby end up in jail again where he was actually having a grand old time, and penitentiary sure beat hell outta the madness of working the factory line . . .

What does it take to survive in a world of brutal, dehumanizing labor, state repression of labor strikes, and all pervasive poverty and starvation? You gotta get tough. You gotta get organized. You gotta have solidarity with your fellow workers. You gotta stand up to the pigs and the oppressors. Or you can just get goofy. Chaplin gets goofy.

But I'm not sure the Tramp ever made a choice, exactly. He's just that kind of guy, you know? All he wants is to cruise through life, not take on too many obligations, eat well, and maybe find a nice girl to spend time with. Make time to roller skate, sing, and dance. If he ends up as a labor agitator, a rebel, a thief, and a gangbuster those are just side effects of his good time, you know what I'm saying? What kind of victory would it be, anyways, to win some bogus concessions from management, and still be tied down to that goddamn factory line? Better to cut loose of such attachments, and cruise through reality as if it all was just one big Saturday afternoon stroll.

Modern Times is a delightful fantasy, a liberating blast of gentle anarchy. Yes, real life is a lot uglier, and much more insane. But the central idea, as I take it, is that a person can find freedom and dignity in the midst of grim circumstances through play, and through this play you can negate the systems of command and control, oppression and obedience, that the bogus, arbitrary, unthinking authorities of the world are obsessively trying to perpetrate upon humanity.

There's a nice little moment where the cops are trying to get Chaplin to heel, and he just keeps on walking, politely refusing their demands. No Molotov cocktails, no lawsuits, just as if to say, "No thank you. You may keep your authoritarian bullshit for yourself. I'll not be needing it." Of course, Chaplin does it without the superfluous words.

What more can I say? Chaplin was a brilliant physical comedian, filmmaker, musician, actor, he did it all. Paulette Goddard is quite beautiful, and cunning. Unlike Chaplin, she has seen death up close, and so she applies her willpower to the art of survival. She is a perfect compliment to Chaplin's unconscious agent of anarchy. There's a reason why people who draw up lists of the greatest movies ever put Modern Times on the list. It helps that it's imminently watchable and hilarious. The set designs are mind-boggling and fun. The comic timing is as hectic and athletic as a Jackie Chan martial arts comedy.

What a team-up that would've been! Chaplin and Chan!

Better that it remains an idle fantasy, and not some CG grotesquerie.

BOOK REVIEW: THE RUINED MAP (1969)

by Kobo Abe

Translated by E. Dale Saunders
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1969
Originally published in Japanese 1967

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A nameless private investigator takes on the case of a missing husband, a Mr. Nemuro. He goes to a small town somewhere in Japan, and tries to figure out where Mr. Nemuro went. It doesn't help that the man disappeared six months ago, and that it has taken so long for the wife and the wife's brother to hire a detective. The P.I. narrates his tale in the first person, and the names of the town and several pertinent organizations have been purposely redacted from his first person narrative. His investigation takes on an abstract quality. One gets the sense that this mystery and the people involved could exist in any small town or city.

The P.I. has a kind of knack for seeing things in minute detail. At times, he seems to focus obsessively on details of rooms and streets and people's attire to the point that he misses the big picture. Early on, he narrowly avoids running down a child in the street. Later, he meets with his estranged wife and he seems to have a rather distorted sense of why they had to part ways. Like in many marital conflicts, each blames the other for the separation, and the P.I. is tinged with jealousy that borders on the absurd. One moment he's specualting about her cheating on him, and the next he idly fantasises about her having a lesbian tryst with her young female employee in her dressmaking shop. Every statement, each exchange, every last change of mood and odd utterance is analyzed for hidden meanings and secret threats. The P.I. was suited for his profession, and doomed to failure in marriage.

Or maybe the P.I.'s hyperawareness is his weakness as an investigator as well. Each person he interrogates, he takes on a slightly different persona the better to draw out pertinent information. His theory is he must be a kind of blank slate, an actor, willing to take on the persona which best gets his given subject talking about what he needs to know. Brilliant . . . but there's always the risk that these ideal personas merely push his subjects to tell him what he wants to hear, and not the truth. Also, his suspicious nature may prevent him from believing the truth of statements which contain vital clues.

The Ruined Map plays with the tantalizing ambiguities inherent in human communications, especially when people are trying to hide their feelings and obscure the truth. The novel is set up like a hard-boiled mystery to give people plenty of reasons to equivocate and deceive one another about hidden motives and illicit schemes, but by the end of it I was left with the impression that Abe is suggesting that all human interactions are, on some level, profoundly uncertain. We can never really know what goes on in someone else's head. How do we know if someone is lying to us? And don't we all tell little white lies now and again? Deception, at some level, is absolutely necessary for normal human interactions to proceed apace. Radical honesty would tear us apart. But what happens if our lives are entirely made up of little white lies? Couldn't the case be made that one little white lie after another adds up to a big ol' pile of deception? That might very well be the case. And there might be absolutely nothing we can do about it.

And where does that leave the P.I. in terms of identity? If he has committed himself to being a kind of protean Everyman, altering his identity to suit whatever case and whoever he is dealing with at any given moment, then who is he? Is identity something essential and unchanging? In Abe's novel, this is not the case. Identity is something you can put on, take off, and fine tune in endless variations. At least, that's how the P.I. approaches things. That's another part of the guy's particular talent it would seem.

But what happens if you lose track of yourself? Sure, the P.I.'s a pro, that wouldn't happen . . . but what if?

The Ruined Map draws you in with a genre mystery set up, but then goes on, by gradual degrees, to take you into truly bizarre territory. I found it to be surprisingly unsettling, although it is hardly sensationalistic or gruesome in any extreme sense. But it wore on my psyche, screwing with my genre expectations, and then dragging me into a wholly unexpected fictional zone. I admired it, but it was also somewhat unpleasant, and a bit infuriating. I've read a number of other Abe novels in English, and have found most of them to be much too abstracted and absurdist for my taste, although I did enjoy The Box Man and Inter Ice Age 4. I think I was hoping, as I read it, that this book would be closer to Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, but instead it was thoroughly Kobo Abe. Well, the man's name was on the spine. I have only myself to blame.