More News From The Japanese Film Festival

Monster X Is Guilala

One of the guilty little pleasures in life is 1960s and 1970s monster movies from Japan where rubber-suited guys smash toy cities as sparks fly and firecrackers explode under the rubber-suited feet. If don't like it, well, there's no explaining taste really. When I was a kid and this stuff was on, my mother used to switch it off because it was going to rot my mind. It didn't help - it did its rotting anyway. It's the staple of any child's fantasies to see the norm exploded by the extraordinary, and Japanese monster movies are always full of odd inventions.

Once a upon a time each major studio made a bunch of these movies using pretty much the same kind of special effects technology assembled by the great Eiji Tsuburaya.Toho was first with Godzilla/Gojira, which it revived in the late 1960s to cash in. Daiei had Gamera, and Nikkatsu had Gappa.

Of the major studios of Japana, Shochiku was the last to the party with its lone entry into the monster movie, which was 'Monster X from outer Space'. This 'Monster X' was so-called because they never gave it a name 'Guilala' during the script writing phase and it only got its name through popular voting after the movie was sold to the West. It didn't do so well at the box office so Guilala was forgotten by the wider public for 40 years until Minoru Kawasaki came along.

Minoru Kawasaki is sort of the Roger Corman of Japan; a film maker who is interested in low-budget kitsch-cool films that are pointedly aimed at entertainment rather than any kind of pretension to do with higher cinema - if any such thing really exists.

In the hands of Minoru Kawasaki, the revived Guilala sequel is a political satire and farce that scoffs at the pseudo-gravitas accorded to the G8 Summit held at Lake Toya in Hokkaido; it also points its satire at ex-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and North Korean dear leader Kim Jong Il. The satire is no-holds-barred silly as eac G8 summit nation puts forward a plan to stop the space monster.

It eschews modern Computer Graphics and instead works the 'traditional art form' of monster-suit fighting. It's very charming, and so it should be because Kawasaki strongly believes that a monster suit monster ought to have some kind of charm, otherwise it is simply grotesque. The satire and the monster-mash disguises a fairly interesting infra-psychic reading of how post-war Japan essentially was kept in some kind of emotional immaturity regarding national defense. It's a very interesting film to analyse because it makes no big claims, yet the greater story arc logically leads to the conclusion that syncretic shamanic Japanese deities are more effective than foreign ideas.

'Executive Koala'

Minoru Kawasaki's other film on show at the Japanese Film Festival was 'Executive Koala', a surreal psycho-horror (a 'Psychoala-Horror', according to the director) that reaches out to a Yasutaka Tsutsui meets Frank Zappa kind of space, with a healthy dose of Bruce Lee homage thrown in.

The film roughly tracks the weird and wonderful life of a junior executive for a Japanese pickles firm. Except of course he is a Koala. A guy in a Koala suit goes around behaving like a Japanese junior exec with a dramatic problem. All the while, quite surreal dream sequences and murder scenes unfold. You're never entirely sure what the status of the reality is in the film. It's black comedy on speed. Or perhaps it is Magic Realism on steroids. It's hard to tell because Kawasaki says he set out to break as many rules as he can - and while we don't want to go into the intentional fallacy about whether Kawasaki's intentions matter  or not, the film provides a rich text about identity and how entirely circumstantial identity or even reality might be for a character in fiction.

In that sense it is an outrageously imaginative, adventurous and radically chic film. I can't imagine an equivalent film getting any kind of investment in Hollywood or Australia. It's pretty whacked out.

Talking To Mr. Kawasaki

Mr Kawasaki had a few fun things to say about film making, some of which I'll relate another day. The long and short of it was that he gets to have a career now simply because nobody else wants to make the pictures he wants to make and that they inevitably make their money back in DVD sales.

He also felt that people would appreciate some of his work more if he were dead, because they're sure not getting it while he lives. He's very certain that arthouse cinema as practiced in Japan is Jurassic in its out-dated oulook. He was particularly funny when talking about the great directors.Kurosawa in particular got a ribbing.

Kurosawa would sit after a day's shoot in a restaurant making notes. On one occasion, he got pretty sloshed, and wrote down some notes which he read out: "I want there to be a traditional sliding door. And the sliding door is pulled back to reveal a hippopotamus looking in."

There was a silence in the room. Then everybody got up and laudedKurosawa for his amazing vision. When Mr. Kawasaki was told about this story, he responded, "so you're saying Kurosawa wanted to do 'Executive Koala' but with a hippo instead?"

The Closing Film - 'Departures'

This story about a cellist who fails to make the cut as a professional player, who goes home to his hometown to take up a country life. He answers a weird job advet and finds himself working as a mortician. It's a big hit in Japan this year, starring Daisuke Motoki - he of 'Sumo Do Sumo Don't' fame. Except this one is more like, 'Coffin Do, Coffin Don't'. The film shows that in the absence of rituals people are unable to deal with death, so the mortician comes in to add rituals for the benefit of grieving so that they might cope.

I don't know if it's such a great film, but I cn see the appeal. Together with the Opening Night's seletion you feel that  there's enough emotional breadth to Japanese cinema that it can hold both films and Mr Kawasaki's nutty films under one umbrella.

10,000 People Can't Be Wrong

That's the number of people who turned up for the 17 films in two cities. The Opening and Closing nights were packed in the 800 seat cinema on Tuesday nights. It was in stark contrast to the 20 people who were stumbling out of 'Australia' on either Tuesday night. It is entirely possible that there are more fans of Japanese cinema than there are fans of Australian cinema in both Sydney and Melbourne. You wouldn't think so, but I kind of had to ponder that possibility.