JPT3391 MOVIE BLOG

Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is a heartwarming tale about a girl’s adventure into the spirit world, full of ripe commentary on themes of capitalism and Westernization. I haven’t seen this movie since I first watched it as a four-year old, so it was interesting to see that No-Face was not nearly as scary as he was in my preschool mind.

Initial Reactions

This movie was crafted beautifully, and each frame looked like it was painstakingly labored upon to get the minute details in each shot. There is no motion blur to stitch together frames, and this causes the viewer to be able to key in on how artistic this whole thing is. You can probably pause at any moment in this movie and not see any weird motion or anatomically wonky people.

However, something interesting to also note that adds onto this is the framerate and how Studio Ghibli sometimes will hold frames. Something I noticed in the movie, especially when comparing it to other anime films (Akira, I’m looking at you), is that it felt sort of rigid at some points, especially since the lack of motion blur made it harder to connect each frame. Doing a little research, I found that some Japanese companies will employ what is called “Koma-uchi” (example video below, and spelled コマ打ち for all you little weebs who want to dig deeper), where they will hold an image for two or three frames instead of the usual one. This was originally done as a cost-saving measure, but over time it grew appeal as feeling more artistic and also sometimes giving a more natural feel than higher framerates. Studio Ghibli employs this variable timing, and as a consequence Spirited Away drops into lower framerates, getting as low as 8fps. Not that I’m complaining, I don’t mind looking at these beautiful images for an extra fraction of a second.

Themes/Analysis

The major message in this film is a critique on modern-day capitalism and the greed that stems from it. For starters, the whole reason Chihiro and her family got into this mess is because her parents decided to indulge themselves on food that wasn’t their own and assuring that they’d be fine because the dad has “credit cards.” Adding on to this, No-Face absorbs the emotions of the people around him, and when he enters the bathhouse he absorbs the greed that everyone has to the point where he starts eating other people. Something interesting to think about as well is how Zeniba contrasts against Yubaba, and how the latter became so embroiled in money. This leads me to believe the major antagonist film is not Yubaba, but instead the system that put her at the top and perpetuates this culture of monetary gain at the expense of others.

Final Thoughts

For this blog post I will be discussing Sukiyaki Western Django by Miike. Well, as one of my friends put it, this movie was certainly one of the movies of all time. One of the characters in this movie said it best, “Shit just happens”. A lot of this movie felt like “shit just happens” the movie lol.

The movie was so over the top and silly. It felt like I was watching someone play one of the Yakuza (龍が如く) games because of how ridiculous the fight scenes were. I remember when Yoshitsune was trying to retrieve the machine gun from Kiyomori, he literally was sniping him with a revolver. Considering the accuracy of a handgun, especially a revolver of that type, it’s unbelievably impressive. On top of all of that Kiyomori gets hit like 3 times and is completely fine, unlike all the other characters who die after one hit. Then there was the fight between the gunman (who from what I know has no official name) and Yoshitsune. The gunman duel wielding fires at Yoshitsune who deflects all of the bullets with his KATANA. Then the gunman parries Yoshitsune’s katana with his REVOLVER and pulls out a THIRD gun. These two scenes do a good job of showing how ridiculous the fight scenes were and why they were so much fun to watch. I was always on the edge of my seat waiting to see what thing would happen next.

I also never expected to see otaku Quentin Tarantino. I was wondering why at the beginning of the movie there was just some random white guy in the movie when everyone was Japanese until I remembered someone mentioning that Tarantino was in the movie. When Tarantino said that he liked the name Akira because he was an anime otaku I couldn’t help but laugh a little because it was so random. Since this was a fictional universe, I didn’t think they were going to make a reference to stuff in the real world, plus Tarantino being an otaku is funny to me. The scene were Tarantino yells at Ruriko for making bad Sukiyaki and tearing her dish apart was hilarious to me. It was just so bizarre to see the white and western Tarantino go off at a Japanese lady for her subpar Sukiyaki while actually having a high level of knowledge on the dish.

Another scene that made me laugh was when Kiyomori was reading literature to the Heike clan. Kiyomori comes to the conclusion that because the red roses win in Shakespeare’s Henry the 6th, they would win against the Genji clan, and he changes his name to Henry. It was just the silliest logic, but somehow worked in the context of the movie. Watching the sheriff play dead to avoid dying was also humorous since he survives so many times lol.

I felt like the movie’s greatest strength was it’s visuals. I really enjoyed seeing the fusion between the traditional samurai aesthetic with the stereotypical cowboy western setting. It felt like a weird alternate universe where Japan settled America instead of Europe. It gave me Shin Megami Tensei IV vibes, as they did a similar thing by blending a Medieval European setting with Japanese Samurai. You can really see this in the beautiful set design, backgrounds, and costumes.

Overall, I liked this movie, but I would not say that it is one of the best movies we’ve watched in this class. It was honestly hard to take this movie seriously, especially with how over the top it was. I also couldn’t help but notice how unnatural the English sounded in the movie, which was understandable considering that English was probably not the first language of the director or actors. However, odd phrasing and bad line delivery did take me out of the experience from time to time. Despite its flaws, Sukiyaki Western Django is a fun watch.

A touching story about the relationship of three people in different stages of life but with the same general struggle, Naomi Kawase’s Sweet Bean uses the discrimination of those with leprosy and ties it into an overall struggle of ostracization. I don’t generally have a strong reaction toward dramas, usually thinking they’re boring, but something about old women dying absolutely slaughters my emotions every time, and this one left me in tears.

Initial Reactions

I was afraid that this would have been another slog-fest, with how slow everything moved initially, but this was not the case. The scenes were so dense and full of elements later touched on in the film, that there was so much to think about. For example, in the scene where Wakana is back home, the lack of care from her mother, the spilt beer on the book, and the introduction of the problem with the canary were all necessary elements of this story, but jampacked into a tight five-minute window. Kawase’s meticulous construction of each scene made this movie much more interesting than others, where usually a scene only motivates one part of the story or is completely omittable.

It’s interesting that we watched this movie right after we watched Pulse, since a topic that was brought up was Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s distaste for natural elements and the idea of the eternality of nature, because this movie looooved nature shots. I don’t really mind though, I’m in the same camp as Tokue because I think cherry blossoms are incredibly beautiful.

Themes

This film has two major themes: ostracization and the pursuit of joy. Speaking on the former, this is primarily motivated by Tokue’s character: as a person with leprosy, she’s been in a sanatorium for most of her life, devoid of much contact with the outside world, and then further faces discrimination when Sentaro is forced to fire her due to declining business, a consequence of stigma around her affliction. However, this feeling of ostracization is experienced not just by her, but the other two central characters for varying reasons: Sentaro, having lost his mother while he was in prison and forced to work for a loan shark, feels ostracized and directionless, while Wakana, as mentioned earlier, is neglected by her mother, and to an extent by her classmates as she doesn’t go to cram school.

However, despite all this, Tokue finds joy. She enjoys life in each moment, whether it be passing under the cherry trees or working in the small dorayaki shop. She then passes this lesson on to both Wakana and Sentaro, the latter choosing to forgo the reconstructing shop to sell his own dorayaki at the park, taking in the full experience of being there.

Final Thoughts

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse hits on horror tropes incredibly well in the beginning but falls off really hard in the end. In addition to this, I feel like the idea of ghosts invading the world, specifically through the internet, to be a bit too confusing and full of missteps.

Initial Reactions

If this movie had ended thirty minutes earlier, my opinion about this would have been a lot different. The post-apocalyptic feel of this movie in the last half-hour strayed away from the creepy atmosphere that was present throughout the other parts, and kind of ruined it as a horror movie in my opinion. The shot of the cargo plane crashing into the city was a bit dumb and reeked of a desire to fit into action films, which this movie was most definitely not.

I also do not understand the concept of the ghosts and their powers. In the movie, Harue says that since the ghosts are being overcrowded in their own dimension, they were pouring over into ours and trying to claim it, and because of this, the ghosts weren’t trying to kill us but trap us in our loneliness. This 100% makes sense as a concept, and I thought that this was a great and original idea for the danger in the movie, but we never got closure as to what happens to the people who turn to ashes. As it stands, it appears as if the ghosts do lead them to death, since their ghosts are also present, but doesn’t this defeat the whole purpose of the ghosts invading the world, since the recently killed are now ghosts and take up space in whatever dimension they’re cramped in? The only rationalization I can make is that they get lead to some other pocket dimension of their loneliness (which would have been amazing if Kurosawa could’ve visualized that in the movie), but I that’s too much of a stretch for me to make, as well as a weird solution for the ghosts to make, since they could’ve just gone and inhabited those dimensions instead of invading ours.

Themes/Analysis

The major theme in this movie is about loneliness: the victims all have a sense of loneliness, and the ghosts trap people in their loneliness. However, I think this theme was strayed from (again) in the final thirty minutes in the decision to recognize this whole thing as a global phenomenon. The fact that this is being recognized and experienced by the entire world kind of takes away from the loneliness aspect, because there’s now an implicit understanding that “Hey, everybody’s going through the same thing as I am, I’m not alone.” There’s a feeling of unity in struggle, which detracts from the theme. It can be occurring worldwide, I just think that it would’ve been better if it was a silent killer, which could have also touched on a theme of failure in not recognizing depression as something serious.

Final Thoughts

For this discussion post I will be comparing the Ringu to the American adaptation of the movie The Ring. Overall the films are very similar, almost all the plot points are the same. The biggest difference between the two movies are the backstory of Sadako and Samara being different.

Sadako had psychic powers in Ringu, she was killed by her father Ikuma, her mother also had psychic powers, and her father was a doctor. 

I had expected that they would change the ghost’s background to fit the new setting, America, for The Ring, so that much was not surprising. In The Ring, Samara (the ghost) is not even the biological daughter of the Morgan’s (who I believe were horse ranchers), but was adopted. She has psychic powers similar to Sadako, but there were some other things that differentiated her. The thing that was probably most different was the extent of Samara’s power in comparison to Sadako. Sadako was able to attack Reiko far away from a TV once when they were on the beach, but Samara’s influence seemed to be much stronger. She influenced anyone who was cursed to draw certain pictures or scribble rings, she could make water come out of the tv and phone, she was able to somehow place hair in Rachel (the reporter’s) throat, she was able to use telekinesis to move the tv to attack Rachel and move the cover back over the well to trap Rachel in it, as well as being able to burn people. She also was able to drive people crazy such as her mom (as well as the horses who committed suicide).This version of the ghost seemed a lot more threatening than Sadako, although I think that appearance wise Sadako was scarier. When I saw the reveal of the ghost’s face I chuckled a bit since I thought it just looked a bit goofy. One other thing that was different was that in The Ring it was her adoptive mother that killed her, not her father.

They do replicate a lot of the powerful scenes from Ringu very well such as the scene where the reporter’s son watches the tape and they are horrified and try to cover their son’s eyes, the scene where they hold the corpse in the well, as well as the scene where they find the well under the house. It pays a really good homage to the original movie, especially with the cinematography. 

In The Ring the TVs are a lot more menacing than in Ringu. In Ringu there often would be a TV looming in the background, but in The Ring a TV literally attacks Rachel. Not only that, the TVs constantly turn on by themselves (which I don’t remember happening in the original), which was pretty creepy. The most impactful scene with the TVs is the scene where they show all the TVs through the apartment windows in Rachel’s apartment complex, as it shows how Rachel is quite literally surrounded by Samara’s influence and it makes it feel like she can’t escape her.

To be honest it was hard to be scared during this movie since I knew what was going to happen based on the first movie. Since I knew copying and showing the tape to someone else would save her, I knew that Rachel was not in any real danger in the second half of the movie, so it took a lot of the tension out of the movie. I also wasn’t really scared by the first movie, but I will admit that I think this movie was a bit scarier, especially when comparing the victims faces in Ringu vs The Ring.

I did notice that when Noah looks through Anna Morgan’s file, there was something written about her in Japanese as well as their being Japanese art in Mr. Morgan’s house. I thought that was a cool nod to the Japanese origin of the original story and movie.

I liked that they addressed the dilemma of removing the curse in this movie, since in order to do so you must curse someone else. I honestly was surprised that they didn’t talk about it in Ringu, they kind of just ignore it.

Overall I thought The Ring was a decent adaptation of Ringu, as it was pretty faithful to the original movie. It was definitely better than the American adaptation of Godzilla where they inserted a random character into the movie that wasn’t originally in the movie. It was definitely a fun watch; I would recommend it if you are curious as to how the two movies stack up to each other.

I am a BIG fan of horror movies. However, for some reason I’ve only watched American remakes of Japanese horror films like Ring or The Grudge, and not the original movies themselves. This made me excited to finally watch Ringu, an excitement that was not let down as this was one of the best movies we’ve watched. It was tight, it was creepy, and most of all, it was interesting.

Initial Reactions

For starters, the pacing in this movie was insanely good. With a runtime of only 90 minutes, Nakata manages to pack so much in there that there isn’t a single moment where I felt bored and was waiting for the next scene to roll around. Some of the movies we’ve had to watch have been slogs, but this one kept you on your toes at all moments.

One thing I especially liked about this movie is that we don’t really see Sadako or how she kills her victims until the end. I think the touch of mystery really elevates this, adding a heightened tension that wasn’t seen in earlier movies, especially in the typical slasher films that preceded this one. Plus, something that was lost in the American remake was that they decided to show Sadako’s (or in the film, Samara’s) face in the end, which was just a Linda Blair, The Exorcist rip-off, and I think just leaving it to just Sadako’s eye made it a bit scarier, since I don’t think I would have been frightened by a sneering fourteen-year-old.

Themes/Analysis

One of the major motifs in this movie is technology. Sadako’s curse is motivated through the viewing of a VHS tape, and the video must be spread in order to avert death. However, I don’t think this a critique on the influence of media in our lives, but instead the movie is showing the television as a gateway to something much deeper, much akin to the power of the sea also seen in this movie.

A good way of interpreting horror movies is looking at what the monsters symbolize within the movie, like how in Babadook, the titular monster is representative of the mother’s struggles in raising her son. In this vein, Sadako can also represent this: Reiko’s struggles with raising Yoichi. Yoichi is constantly forced to live independently, despite being a literal child, and is constantly disconnected from his mother. This is further added on to as Reiko becomes obsessed over the tape and the mystery, and it seems that the only way Yoichi could connect with her is by watching the tape himself, putting his life at risk (albeit unknowingly) just for his mother’s attention. Reiko never really does anything for Yoichi until the tape forces her to.

Final Thoughts

This movie is what people should think about when they think of a “rollercoaster of emotions.” Swallowtail is a long drama about a group of disenfranchised people referred to as “Yentowns” that ranges from bringing you to tears to making you laugh from absurdity. Overall, I’d probably put this movie right outside my top-ten, it was pretty good but seemed a bit long, especially with a subplot that I think was completely unnecessary and filled with plot holes.

Initial Reactions

This movie is a trip and a half. I wasn’t really invested in the character of Fei Hong, even during his weird redemption arc because it seemed too little too late, especially since selling Glico out felt so long ago in the context of the story (and plus, Glico wanted to be in the music industry? Exclusivity is a weird thing to sell when she’s not exclusive). I did however, pretty much like everybody else in the movie: Glico finding her footing as a music idol was uplifting, and the scene where Ageha finally gets her namesake butterfly tattooed on her was emotionally compelling.

The subplot I didn’t like that was referred to earlier though was the interaction between the reporter and Glico. For starters, why would the reporter initially trust someone clearly cracked out and not in the right mental state? On top of that, how did the prostitute and reporter know it was Sado (or whatever his name was) who was killed? It’s not like his body was reported in the news with a name since it was buried with no indication of being found. And why wasn’t Glico’s room cleaned out in that timespan? That scene occurred so early in the movie that the room being in the exact same state seems to be impossible; someone should have cleared it out for the sake of destroying evidence.

And to top it all off: What was the whole point of this? The only thing that this whole subplot established that couldn’t be written around was the introduction of the reporter character, who is completely useless in the larger context of the story. This added unnecessary time to a two-and-a-half-hour movie that really hurt its overall enjoyment.

Themes/Analysis

I think the major theme of this story is metamorphosis. This is best seen in the characters of Glico and Ageha: Glico goes from a hooker scrapping for extra cash to a music star, and Ageha’s transformation can be visually seen, as she goes from having a caterpillar drawn on her chest to a Swallowtail Butterfly tattoo, emblematic of her growth into a Yentown. However, one thing to note is that despite these transformations, they don’t forget their roots. Glico ends the movie back in the junkyard, and Ageha, in the process of getting her tattoo, has a flashback of her times when her mom was alive.

Final Thoughts

The 1997 film Hana-bi, released in the west as “Fireworks”, by Takeshi Kitano is a subtly beautiful film. The story primarily focuses on Nishi, an ex-detective who retired from police-work after an incident that caused his partner to be paralyzed from the waist down as well as two other cops to be injured or killed. With Nishi out of work and his wife receiving treatment for leukemia, Nishi takes out a loan from the yakuza in order to make ends meet. When the mob begins pressuring Nishi to pay back his debts, he buys a used taxi, paints it like a police cruiser, and proceeds to pull a heist. After successfully making off with the money, Nishi sends some of it to the wife of the cop that died during the earlier incident and then takes his wife on a vacation to the beach. The yakuza and cops, both having realized that Nishi pulled the heist, follow him. As the police confront their former colleague on the beach, he asks for a moment alone with his wife before they arrest him, during which time the film closes with Nishi and his wife standing on the beach before the sound of two gunshots are heard.

The core theme of Hana-bi is that of mortality. Early in the film it is established that Nishi is no stranger to mortality. His wife has been battling terminal Leukemia, and their family had only recently gone through the loss of a daughter. Later, Nishi is the only one to walk away unscathed from an incident involving an armed suspect that paralyzes his partner, Horibe, injures one officer, and kills another. The resulting guilt weighs heavily on Nishi throughout the film. Nowhere is the theme of mortality more present than in the journey of Horibe, whose family abandons him after his paralysis despite him having previously been a loving husband and doting father. This abandonment leaves Horibe deeply depressed, and he attempts suicide. For both Nishi and Horibe, mortality looms over them like a spectre, yet they each respond their mortality and the mortality of others in their own ways. Nishi is often shown in quiet contemplation, and he shows his wife much devotion, tenderness, and care. Nishi also takes personal responsibility to take care of the widow of the officer that died, meeting with her at times and sending her money after the robbery is successful. Despite his generally sympathetic and calm disposition, Nishi’s actions and life are punctuated by outbursts of extreme violence and bloodshed. Nishi’s violence, however, is always focused and has a specific goal in mind. As for Horibe, his injuries and resulting paralysis set him on the path of depression and an eventual suicide attempt. After this, Horibe picks up the hobby of painting and creates surrealist works of animals with their heads and eyes replaced by flowers. These paintings are themselves symbolic of mortality, as the flower is, like a firework, only a brief but beautiful existence. In the end, the film does not have a conclusive message on how one should face mortality, but it instead shows that the beauty of life can be appreciated despite how brief it is.

For this blog post I will be discussing the movie GO by Yukisada, which revolves around the daily life of Sugihara as he struggles to find his identity in Japanese society as a Japan-born Korean. I really enjoyed this movie, watching Sugihara was so much fun since he was such a chad. He is the toughest guy at his school, he read a book while at the party instead of doing drugs, and outran a train at the subway station. He is always on the sigma grindset. His hairstyle also looks just like Kasuga Ichiban from the Yakuza series (龍が如く) which made me like him even more.

The main themes that the movie explores are racism and identity. As a Japan-born Korean (Zainichi), Sugihara (as well as his Korean friends and classmates) experience a great degree of racism in Japan. This can be seen in the way the basketball team treats Sugihara at the beginning of the movie, when the male Japanese students harass the Korean girl in the subway, and when Sakurai becomes scared of Sugihara once she learns he is Korean. There is also a lot of discrimination towards the Japanese from the Koreans, as seen from the teacher at the North Korean school as well as Sugihara’s former classmates from the North Korean school. This is really exemplified in the scene where Sugihara’s teacher finds out Sugihara is going to a Japanese school and he gets really mad, beats him up, and calls him a race traitor. The movie really does a good job of showing the tension caused by this racism through these scenes. Another way the movie shows this is through the first names of Sugihara and Sakurai, Sakurai’s being extremely Japanese (Tsubaki) and Sugihara’s being very foreign/Korean (Lee Jong-Ho) serves to further show the divide between them in the moment Sugihara tells Sakurai he is Korean.

There were some scenes that gave me hope, such as when Sugihara and the Japanese police officer sit down together and have a coffee and smoke together. It was nice to see them get along, as the police officer should have arrested him, but he didn’t (partially since he didn’t know he was supposed to) and they were able to have a nice wholesome moment.

The other major theme of this film was identity, and it really focuses on how Sugihara doesn’t conform to traditional identities. Being somewhat of a delinquent and having a wild hairstyle shows how from the start Sugihara doesn’t fit societies expectations and breaks the mold. He challenges what it means to be Korean and Japanese in an effort to find his own identity. This can be seen in the scene where he is at Sakurai’s house, and he discusses the meaning of Japan’s name where he says that no one knows what it actually means. By saying this Sugihara is implying that the Japanese identity itself is meaningless. The reason Sugihara had such great respect for his friend Jong-Il was because he challenged the North Korean identity by saying that North Korea was never a legitimate country. In the end, Sugihara decides that these identities are not important to who you are as a person, which is exemplified by the line where he says to his dad at the end of the movie in Spanish “I am not Korean, I am not Japanese, I am grass without roots.” This shows how Sugihara has found himself, and is no longer bound by the chains of the identities society has forced on him.

I was not prepared for Jong-Il’s death, they really did him dirty. It was just so sudden, which is why I think it hit me so hard. The scene where Sugihara sits in a theatre watching Rakugo and reading Shakespeare as he cried really tugged at my heartstrings. It also helps contextualize the Shakespeare quote at the beginning of the movie.

I think this may be my new favorite of the movies we’ve seen so far. It was just such a fun watch, and I really enjoyed the characters and story of GO. I honestly could see myself watching this movie again just for fun.