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Rising Suns

12 November 2014 | 11:26 am | Anthony Carew

Anthony Carew takes us through this year’s Japanese Film Festival program.

In David Cronenberg’s Hollywood satire Map To The Stars, there’s a droll riff on the en-vogue status of incest movies. Striking while the last taboo iron’s (like, totally) hot, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s My Man is a throttling piece of cinema, a Shakespearean drama delivered with eerie restraint and smothering claustrophobia; Japanese-cult-movie hero Tadanobu Asano and rising starlet Fumi Nikaido each give sterling, searing performances as the pseudo-father/daughter who verily leap across that line that should never be crossed.

My Man’s the standout jam from the 18th Japanese Film Festival, which is, as always, heavy with commercia -comedies and telemovie dramas. But it brings highlights, too; like Snow White Murder Case, a smart, smirking, Rashomon-ish riff on the trial-by-social-media, with Twitter’d #hottakes, gossiped hearsay, and to-camera testimony taken as evidence in the court of public opinion.

Far less impressive is the latest entry in the undead Grudge empire: Ju-on: The Beginning Of The End reducing time-honoured cinematic elements like plot, pacing, characterisation, and empathy to mere placeholders for scenes in which little kids in white face-aint pull screaming starlets into cupboards. Seven films into the series, Ju-on is now operating with brisk, brutal efficiency. Franchise creator Takashi Shimizu also unexpectedly delivers a live action take on Kiki’s Delivery Service, a concept verily born into failure. No man should try and compete with Miyazaki, but this crappy-looking, charisma-less Kiki is even worse than expected.

Animé fans can welcome Patema Inverted, an ambitious, quasi-ridiculous, highly symbolist tale of two worlds of oppositional gravity – each one upside-down to the other – colliding. Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha 2 finds the grandmaster’s famous manga adapted to screen; these the Siddhartha years of ascetic extremism and countryside adventures, for some reason told with zany clichés and an adolescent aesthetic.

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Speaking of adolescents: Japan’s reigning king of bugfuck-bonkers midnight movie merde, Sion Sono (sorry Takashi Miike, you’re second place), has two films in the fest: Why Don’t You Play In Hell?, a yakuza-themed meta-movie that throws genre clichés about like an ape hurls dung; and Tokyo Tribe, a hip hop musical about warring neighbourhood gangs that almost plays like a parody of rap video idiocy. In the face of the utter ridiculousness, drunken stylisation, and screechy scenery-chewing of each, the phrase ‘over the top’ seems woefully inadequate.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Little Forest: Summer/Autumn, a pleasing piece of rural idyll/food porn realism that is literally nothing but Ai Hashimoto picking things from her garden and using them for recipes. The Light Shines Only There’s ruralism is more of the ‘decaying shithole’ variety, its aspirational arthouse auteurism done in by paper-thin characterisation.

Japanese Film Festival dates:

NSW: 13 - 23 Nov, Event Cinemas, George Street, Sydney & Event Cinemas, Parramatta
VIC: 27 Nov - 7 Dec, Hoyts Melbourne Central & ACMI Cinemas