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Film: Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler
Release date: 26th July 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 130 mins
Director: Tôya Satô
Starring: Kenichi Matsuyama, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Teruyuki Kagawa, Yuriko Yoshitaka, Tarô Yamamoto
Genre: Thriller/Drama/Action
Studio: 4Digital
Format: DVD
Country: Japan
Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler is adapted from Nobuyuki Fukukoto’s multi-million selling manga series Tobaku Mokushiroku Kaiji, and follows the fortunes of a down on his luck layabout coerced into entering a series of increasing bizarre games of chance.
Tatsuya Fujiwara (Death Note, Battle Royale) takes the lead role as Kaiji, a mid-twenties graduate seeking solace through alcohol, as he stumbles through life working in a dead-end job that fails to stimulate his mind or improve his social standing.
After another soul destroying day, he is visited by an attractive dark-haired debt collector named Endo (Yuki Amami) and informed that he is responsible, as acting guarantor, for a missing friend’s sizeable loan. The choice given to him is to spend the next decade trying, without any resources, to honour the loan payments, or to board the Espoir gambling cruise ship for a once in a lifetime opportunity to clear his debt and gain wealth beyond his wildest dreams.
Initially the game (“paper-rock-scissors”) seems like a straightforward three card contest based on little more than luck. However, strategy soon moves to the forefront when the contestants realise that their very lives are on the line. Many panic, plead and cheat, as dark personality traits emerge in a desperate frenzy of self-preservation. Unlike Steve McQueen in the Cincinnati Kid or Newman and Redford in The Sting, Kaiji is not a naturally gifted card player, yet he is different - he learns, he adapts and, after initially falling prey to an unsavoury trick, he develops a seemingly unbeatable tactical game plan.
However, the whole scenario is an elaborate con designed to force the men into a lifetime of servitude to a shadowy underworld organisation. Once under their control, Kaiji must risk everything and enter two further competitions or die a slow death caused by enforced manual labour...
Director Toya Sato, who started his career making shows for Nippon Television, spends an almost unbearable amount of time between the first gambling scenario and the second trying to set up a fairly simplistic idea: Gangsters need a labour force, con desperate men, offer some hope of freedom through high stack gambling games – simple. Yet, it takes half the movie to properly establish the plot. It is certainly a case of less would have been more; as cutting thirty minutes from the dull opening half would have improved the over feel and pace of the movie.
At times, Toyo Sato seems to think he still has the luxury of his television background by setting aside a sizeable chunk of the movie’s running length attempting and failing to properly develop the characters. Kaiji begins and ends the movie as a good intentioned yet annoying character; Tonegawa (Teruyuki Kagawa) the right hand man to a one dimensional white bearded gangster leader is nothing more than cartoon character bad guy; and with one exception (Endo), there are no substantial character arcs. Even then, Endo’s morph from ‘baddy’ to ‘goody’, and partially back again, is clearly signposted.
The actors often overact to the point of distraction, while the director appears to show a lack of confidence in their ability by utilising internal monologues to display emotion rather than subtle facial expressions. This method is detrimental to the otherwise rollercoaster pace of the movie’s keenly crafted second half, which is kick-started into life by a genuinely tense race between two hotels on a suspended steel beam during a thunder storm. From this scenario onwards, Toya Sato plays to his strengths, and an underlying talent comes to the fore.
The final gambling scenes are exciting and uniquely executed with intelligent camerawork emphasising the heightened emotion, as it shifts between characters, picking up each facial tick and psychological nuance from actors now, thankfully, well and truly reeled in by a director relishing in his task. Second guessing tricks and tactics becomes a joy during a finale that is the epitome of fingernail biting edge-of-your-seat cinema.
If you can survive the ill-judged opening salvo this develops into an exciting piece of throwaway moviemaking. MG
Film: Kamikaze Girls
Release date: 8th February 2010
Certificate: 12
Running time: 103 mins
Director: Tetsuya Nakashima
Starring: Kyoko Fukuda, Anna Tsuchiya, Kirin Kiki, Hiroyuki Miyasako
Genre: Comedy
Studio: Third Window
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: Japan
An ode to individuality, friendship and loyalty in a cynical, somewhat desperate world. Does Kamikaze Girls have anything new to say?
17-year-old Momoko (Fukada) is fiercely individual. Eschewing modern fashion in favour of the rococo style, with which she is forever obsessed, she also treats the people around her with a curiously cold detachment. When her ‘useless’, wannabe gangster father (Miyasako) is run out of the city for selling counterfeit designer merchandise in a scheme that incurs the wrath of both Universal Studios and Versace, Momoko is taken to the countryside to live with her grandmother (Kirin Kiki).
Keen to continue buying her favourite frilly dresses, Momoko begins selling the remainder of her father's counterfeit clothes, and before she knows it, into her life rides Ichigo (Tsuchiya), a sullen, hot-tempered teenage biker girl. Ichigo is also fiercely individual, though her external toughness masks an inner desire to belong and be accepted, even if it’s by just one other person.
These two girls have nothing in common except that they have (different) wild imaginations and slightly skewed views of the world around them. Will their antagonism give way to friendship? And will that friendship survive the challenges life throws at it?
Kamikaze Girls is a film that defies easy categorisation, and this proves to be to its endless benefit, as it shifts gears from zany comedy to odd-couple ‘dramedy’ and, finally, to a tense and gritty urban showdown.
Held together by loveable characters, whose good and bad traits are given equal airing, the story rips through a succession of increasingly bizarre situations and sequences that truly dazzle the heart as well as the eyes and brain. And while the story feels haphazard, it never feels false, even in the final third when the characters inch towards scenarios that are more structured and ‘written’ than what has come before. If a viewer is not entirely sure how seriously to take the face-off that forms the climax, director Tetsuya Nakashima is astute enough to quickly right the course and reassert the film’s offbeat tone before the narrative - alternately madcap and reflective - careens off the rails. It is a measure of the film’s infectious nature that, even during what at first feels like a forced climactic conflict, the audience is always willing to ‘go with it’.
Nakashima’s genius is in making the ordinary memorable, and the absurd relatable - all the while making sure that almost everything is, simply, incredibly funny. The madcap first ten minutes features a rapid succession of bravura images: a love-at-first-sight encounter between a drunk woman, projectile vomiting in a way that would make Linda Blair’s head spin; a petty criminal prostrate and sobbing after losing his nerve on a ‘hit’; the view of Momoko from underneath a cow; the camera angle from the point-of-view of a baby being born; another baby born - wearing a tracksuit! And it continues, with the director employing every nifty trick in the cinematic book - rewinds to the rococo period; to-camera asides; summarising flashbacks and cartoons (“so you kids don’t fall asleep”). A cynic may argue that these are simply cheap tricks, style over substance, and they would miss the point completely - like the central characters, Nakashima goes his own way, according to his own whims and wants. It is the perfect stylistic choice for a narrative about teenage outsiders.
If there is one niggle, it is that the film suffers from a short, second-act lull after its utterly riotous introduction to the life of its protagonist, perhaps waiting a little too long before introducing the second half of its central odd couple, Ichigo. Stalling its pace to fill in her back-story, the film’s opening forty minutes play like two first acts in sequence, before beginning its ‘odd-couple’ story where the two very different girls find, if not common ground, then a definite kinship based on mutual alienation. This is not to take away from the performance of Anna Tsuchiya, who turns one of the more common cinematic clichés - the bad girl who wants to be loved - into an endearing, three-dimensional character that the audience feels and roots for, but her initial appearance effectively ‘catches’ the pinball-like narrative.
What pulls the film through during this slightly sluggish period is its characters - broad, over-the-top, but with a novelistic attention to the little details that lends them richness. Ichigo (…of the Ponytails) is prone to spelling mistakes, mispronunciation and, most memorably, spitting in between threats (“She spat!”). She also makes a habit of head butting Momoko when she is cross. Momoko’s father is gullible, sentimental, and prone to severe depression during bad times and impossible cockiness during the good. Her one-eyed grandmother can pluck insects out of the air with Ninja-like precision.
None of these characters are broader, more over-the-top and richly realised than Kyoko Fukada’s Momoko - a breathtakingly beautiful, endearingly sweet teenager who is nevertheless magnificently selfish and nihilistic, apparently tired of human interaction. The character is almost serene in her perverse, pseudo-angelic superiority (as when her 10-year-old self tells her mother that: “humans are cowards in the face of happiness”). Fukada’s gears shift so smoothly, one never questions Momoko’s contradictions, even when she moves from sternly defending her Rococo-inspired, frilly dress to glibly encouraging the hot-tempered Ichigo make good on a vague threat to kill her. Indeed, before the narrative dictates that she come out of her shell, Momoko’s selfishness should alienate audiences. That it does not is a testament to Fukada’s intuitive performance and natural charisma. If the protagonist wrongly thinks that the world revolves around her, there is no denying that this film gratefully orbits its leading lady.
Infectious, joyous and uplifting. Perfectly tempering cynicism with genuine warmth, Kamikaze Girls is a true delight. JN
Film: Knife In The Water
Release date: 21st June 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 90 mins
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Leon Niemczyk, Jolanta Umecka, Zygmunt Malanowicz
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Studio: Odeon
Format: DVD
Country: Poland
This wasn’t Polanski’s first outing as director (that took place some seven years earlier) but this film had a lot riding on it, not only his potential career but also the current re-establishment of the Polish national identity. This film spurred the move away from Poland’s output of ‘boy meets tractor’ heritage films, as film historians have dubbed them. In 1962, a young director persuaded the National Film Council of Poland to deviate from this type of cinematic output and instead fund his small narrative driven film. Though reluctant - as Poland was still in a status of influx post World War II - the producer Stanislaw Zylewicz held sway with the powers that be, and the resulting film was Roman Polanski’s Knife In The Water.
Andrezj (Niemczyk) is a vain, controlling journalist who counts boat and wife (in that order) as two of his most treasured assets.
While driving towards a relaxing weekend away, cruising in the partially rebuilt Polish countryside, the couple picks up a dirty downbeat hitchhiker (Malanowich). Krystyna (Unecka) instantly takes a shine to the free living vagabond, which does not go unnoticed by her older, wealthier husband.
Once upon the boat, the two men begin a childish day of competitive one-upmanship not for the affections of Krystyna, but rather for their own male ego. Inevitably, this rivalry goes too far…
The direction is almost faultless. The restraint Polanski shows to concentrate on the story he wishes to tell and not get drawn into a bigger picture narrative is admirable. The countryside of Poland is seen through the farm land outside of the city, with only glimpses of the background seen as the boat travels down the river into a psychological heart of darkness.
Some would say that the film’s use of camerawork, or more noticeably the lack of, hints at a director either lacking in flair or uncertain about the vision they have for the film. Those criticisms simply don’t apply here. The minimal motion in the camera adds to the claustrophobia that Polanski establishes in the vehicle, and continues in the close quarters of the small pleasure vessel. Even the Mazurian Lake District, where the film was shot almost entirely, looks more like a single lane canal. The cinematography places the audience in a position where cabin fever is the most likely reaction from audience and character alike.
The dialogue, particularly between Niemczyk and Malanowich is excellent and the regression from supposedly mature adult men to children warring over Alpha male supremacy is so wonderfully subtle that it’s only apparent once things have gone too far.
All the actors are excellent in performance. The constant childish interplays between the two male leads could, in less delicate hands, come off as forced, perhaps even slapstick. The actors present such honesty and belief in the narrative that there is never any doubt of the male characters’ descent into immaturity.
Jolanta Umecka creates a beautiful and restrained performance. It is nothing short of a work of art as she carefully manoeuvres her husband out of the driving seat of their relationship and into her well worn passenger seat. Like a modern day Lady Macbeth, she plays an emotionally manipulative game of chess with her husband who believes they’re still playing drafts. To her credit, it is all done without coming across as a mischievous Puck-like caricature.
The choice to lead with a heavily diegetic score seems like an obvious choice now, but the decision to make a film with an almost non-existent thematic score was brave and extremely fitting. Shunning non-diegetic sound takes away another layer of filmic convention the audience is familiar with. This in turn reduces the audience’s ability to distance themselves from the events Polanski has set in motion, causing them to have to deal intimately with the tension portrayed on screen. The film abounds with everyday familiar noises - rather than allowing the viewer to take refuge in a flowing musical score, the tension is immediate, and brings itself into the intimate world of the viewer.
Cinematic cornerstones seem to appear after great times of national conflict. The Soviet Union had The Battleship Potemkin after the 1905 revolution, Nosferatu came post World War 1 and the fall of Germany’s economy. Knife In The Water taps into the fear of emasculation that many of Poland’s men were coming to terms with, and delivers a masterpiece born out of pain and beauty that speaks to a nation, whilst legitimising cinema as art for all to enjoy. DL
Film: Kill Zone
Release date: 8th March 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 88 mins
Director: Wilson Yip
Starring: Donnie Yen, Simon Yam, Sammo Hung, Jacky Wu
Genre: Action/Martial Arts/Crime
Studio: Cine Asia
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: Hong Kong
With the martial arts talents of Sammo Hung and Donnie Yen, spectacular fight sequences were a given, but Kill Zone doesn’t rest on its laurels.
Simon Yam’s Inspector Chan has devoted his career to putting Mob Boss Po in Prison. When escorting a witness with indisputable evidence of Po's wrong doing to court, his police van is rammed at high speed by a car driven by an assassin. The wreck kills the witness and his wife, but spares the their young daughter. Chan is left with a shard of glass in the back of his head and upon removal, doctors discover a tumour in his brain. The knowledge that he doesn't have long left makes Detective Chan all the more determined to bring down Wong Po.
Having taken responsibility for the victims daughter, in failing health and due to retire soon, Chan goes from a good man with a burning desire to put a bad man behind bars before it’s too late, to a man who’ll do anything to accomplish his goal - legal or not. He can count on loyalty from his small group of officers, but faces opposition from Inspector Ma (Donnie Yen), who has been assigned to take over the unit when Chan retires. Ma seems rigidly by the book, but he too has a dark past...
The central issue of Kill Zone is the transformation of Chan and his men from good men determined to serve justice to villains out for themselves. Sammo Hung’s mob boss acts as an impetus for their descent, but doesn’t force Chan and the others to do anything. At times, it seems that Po is as much narrative mechanism as he is character, in that while he is the reason for Chan’s downward spiral, he is not orchestrating it. Yes, Po is the nominal ‘bad guy’, but how far can the ‘good guy’ go before he crosses that line.
Sammo Hung’s performance as Po is excellent, and couldn’t be more removed from his usual, genial persona. Po is not a pantomime villain, rather he is a dangerous man, determined to hold onto what he‘s got. In that respect, he is all too human.
Without a doubt, though, it’s Simon Yam that makes Kill Zone tick. Inspector Chan is the type of role Yam has specialised in lately, although never with this much depth of character. He is undoubtedly a good man, but at the top of a slippery moral slope. While Chan’s criminal actions will undoubtedly make the world a better place (Po is a vicious murderer, after all), the tragedy is that they won’t just cost Chan’s limited future, but that of his men as well. Chan is so single-minded about his goal that he never comes to realise this, making his moral crusade more of a dark obsession that has to end badly. Yam, a fine performer in even the most mediocre of productions, brings genuine humanity and moral ambiguity to Chan.
Good as Kill Zone is, though, it‘s far from perfect. Donnie Yen, while brilliant in the action scenes, just doesn’t have the acting chops, and seems out of place in such a dark, brooding crime film. Also, while suspension of disbelief should be a given, in a world where beating down a police officer in front of several witnesses, mostly fellow officers, doesn’t land you with a custodial sentence, it’s no wonder the cops have to resort to morally questionable actions.
Although it’s most effective as a dark, gritty crime story, Kill Zone also has a number of top class action scenes that will please fans of the genre. Patience is a virtue, though, as we have to wait fifty minutes or so before the film fully explodes. Until then, there are several ‘teasers’, most of which involving Po liberally dishing out beatings to the police because, as mentioned, he’s beyond reprimand in this version of Hong Kong. The movie’s signature action sequence has to be between Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung, however - a clash of the titans indeed. It’s Donnie Yen’s speed and agility against Hung’s brute strength and power, and it’s one of the most memorable fight scenes committed to film for some time.
Kill Zone is a successful merging of a gritty crime drama and a martial arts movie, and marks a potential transition point for Hong Kong cinema - a grown up martial arts film. We can only hope that others take note and follow suit. PD
