Genkina Hito and It Came From Japan

It is getting close to Halloween and so this post is timely… I am a member of The LAMB (Large Association of Movie Blogs) and occasionally, very occasionally, I take part in some of the events organised by them. Recently I have taken part in Foreign Chops #6: It Came From Japan which hosts a bunch of reviews from LAMB members which are focussed on Japanese horror films.

Apparently this is the second largest edition of Foreign Chops and from what I can see the titles sent in are an interesting mix. There are some obvious titles like, Audition and Ichi the Killer, the splatter-fest Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl and classic kaidan eiga like Jigoku, Kuroneko and Onibaba and more recent J-horror like Ju-On and Ringu.

There are a lot of titles I wouldn’t class as strictly horror since they mix genres. Titles like the kaiju eiga Gamera vs. Guiron and Godzilla vs. Mecha Godzilla, and the dystopian action thriller Battle Royale.

There are even some non-Japanese films including, Bio Zombie and Three Extremes. While Three Extremes scrapes in (just) since only one section (the best) is Japanese, the others come from Hong Kong and South Korea, Bio Zombie is clearly from Hong Kong. It is also pretty unspectacular. Thankfully there are some interesting reviews of classic titles, notably from Silveremulsion with The Ghost of Yotsuya and Jigoku.

My reviews (picked with help by Goregirl) are for Cure, Retribution (representing Kiyoshi Kurosawa), Suicide Circle (probably the most fun I have had watching and reviewing a Sion Sono film), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (an incredible film from Shinya Tsukamoto) and Audition (Miike represented). Three of Japan’s biggest directors, five films that deserve to be seen and probably three of my more readable attempts at film criticism.

As for Halloween itself… on Wednesday I will post a review of a great horror film, a tradition I started last year with Shinya Tsukamoto’s Nightmare Detective.

Sion Sono Appreciation Society Podcast Part 1

Welcome to the Sion Sono Appreciation Society Suicide Season podcast. By Society I mean Goregirl and I, but that’s still a pretty awesome line-up. Anyway this is the first of two podcasts which will analyse some of Sono’s output. The two podcasts originally started out as a general discussion of his films in general but we decided to focus on his titles that gravitate closer to horror. In this episode we look at two of his greatest films, Suicide Circle and Noriko’s Dinner Table. Despite my rather lame attempts at trying to add structure to the conversation this is pretty much two cinephiles discussing whatever comes to mind. We go pretty in depth and there are some spoilers so if you have not watched the films yet then you might want to view them.

I hope you enjoy. My thanks go out to Goregirl for her brilliant performance!

Noriko’s Dinner Table 紀子の食卓 (2006)

Noriko’s Dinner Table                                                  

International Title: Noriko’s Dinner Table

Romaji: Noriko no Shokutaku

Japanese Title: 紀子の食卓

Release Date: 23^rd September 2006 (Japan)

Running Time: 159 mins.

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Starring: Kazue Fukiishi, Yuriko Yoshitaka, Tsugumi, Ken Mitsuishi, Sanae Miyata, Shiro Namiki, Tamae Ando, Toru Tezuka, Yoko Mitsuya

Noriko’s Dinner Table is billed as the prequel to Suicide Circle and while it may be set in the same universe and explore the same ideas it drops gore for a more intimate and surreal story.

Noriko Shimabara (Fukiishi) is an inexperienced girl who lives a quiet and comfortable life with her journalist father Tetsuzo (Mitsuishi), her mother Taeko (Miyata), and her younger sister Yuka (Yoshitaka) in Toyokawa. Noriko craves excitement and wants to head to a university in Tokyo but her conservative father is set against it and wants Noriko to head to a local university. Noriko feels alienated from her parents but finds refuge in the internet on the site Haikyo.com, a place where teenagers from across Japan gather. Noriko grows especially fond of the website’s chief who goes under the username Ueno Station 54. Noriko runs away from home to Tokyo and meets Ueno Station 54 at Locker #54 in Ueno station. The mysterious Ueno Station 54 turns out to be a young woman named Kumiko (Tsugumi) who introduces Noriko to her business named I.C. Corp which offers clients actors who provide role-play services.  Noriko falls into this shadowy world of role-playing. Six months later, 54 school girls act out their roles and jump in front of a train at Shinjuku station. Back in Toyokawa, Noriko’s sister Yuka has become a member of Haikyo and aims to track down Noriko. In order to do this she heads to Tokyo. This sets in motion Tetsuzo’s search for his daughters and his investigation into a cult named Suicide Club.

Noriko’s Dinner Table is based on a novel Sion Sono wrote in 2002 named Suicide Circle: The Complete Edition which wraps around the events of Suicide Circle, resolving questions and expanding on the story and themes.

Making links between the two films is interesting as we get an insight into who orchestrated the chaos of Suicide Circle and their motives. Whether you wanted an explanation of the site haikyo.com or a behind-the-scenes of some of the most audacious moments of the first film you will get it but as a follow-up to Suicide Circle’s gory events Noriko’s Dinner Table feels very different thanks to its restraint in dealing out black humour, horror and violence. They never overwhelm proceedings but inform them. Noriko’s Dinner Table shows that Sono has grown as a writer and director and he has thought carefully about what he wants to film.

I was ripe for growth

In essence this is a mystery/family drama about existential growth. Noriko’s Dinner Table leaves behind the spectacle of mass suicide and gives a more fulsome examination of the issues of alienation, the generation gap between parents and children, and the battle between individual authenticity and conformism.

Suicide Circle Suicide Club 自殺サークル (2002)

Suicide Circle                                                       

International Title: Suicide Club

Romaji: Jisatsu Sakuru

Japanese Title: 自殺サークル

Release Date: 23^rd June 2002 (Japan)

Running Time: 94 mins.

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Starring: Ryo Ishibashi, Akaji Maro, Masatoshi Nagase, Saya Hagiwara, Hideo Sako, Takashi Nomura, Kimiko Yo, Rolly

Although Sion Sono started making films back in 1987 it was 2002’s Suicide Circle which truly put him on the map with its mix of black humour, social observation, and an audacious opening in which a whole bunch of commuters at Shinjuku station get soaked in a whole lot of gore.

25^th May, Shinjuku Station. The place is packed with commuters waiting to go home. Nobody takes any notice of the fifty-four smiling school girls who gather at edge of a platform as a train approaches until they link hands and jump in front of that train. This is the start of a wave of suicides that strikes Tokyo which coincides with the emergence of a J-Pop group named Dessert. The police are uncertain as to whether this is suicide or an accident but when a mysterious phone call from a hacker named ‘the Bat’ tips off Detective Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi) about a suspicious website (maru.ne.jp) that tracks the suicides before they actually happen the police begin to investigate.

Sono’s films regularly examine issues surrounding identity in modern Japan. These issues have long been a source of ideas since his earliest films which regularly focussed on outsiders. He usually explores these issues using genre frameworks like comedy (Love Exposure), crime (Cold Fish/Guilty of Romance), and melodrama (Himizu) and sometimes he combines genres, which makes his films wildly unpredictable. Suicide Circle can be counted as his horror picture as we get familiar genre trademarks amidst his exploration of identity and suicide.

Hey let’s all kill ourselves!

One can watch Suicide Circle and exult in the glorious black humour and horror since it features many absurd situations and grisly death scenes with copious amounts of gore and blood splashed around¹ but for Sono the real horror is what drives people to commit suicide and the existential crises that modern people face.

Sion Sono Season

It’s a short season and it features a silly banner but I don’t care. This is a quick biography of Sion Sono and I hope to review some of his works in the coming week. I want to write about a number of directors and since this is Sion Sono Season he goes first.

Sion Sono has had a varied career starting as an avant-garde poet before ditching a course at Hosei University for a career in underground filmmaking although he never turns his back on poetry which will recur in his early films. In 1987 he won the Grand Prize at the PIA Film Festival (PFF) for his film A Man’s Hanamichi. The PFF is designed to discover and support new filmmakers and following his win he received a fellowship with PIA and wrote, directed and starred in numerous films which contained underachievers, serial killers and other outsiders. These films regularly toured the international festival circuit and helped establish his name.

It wasn’t until the 2001 film Suicide Circle when he truly became a well-known cult director. Suicide Circle (which has special effects by Tokyo Gore Police director Yoshihiro Nishimura) is a satirical film dealing with pop culture, mass suicides, and a bewildered middle aged police detective played by Ryo Ishibashi (Audition) trying to understand it all while being assailed by deviants and horrific sights that challenge his perceptions. Following this success he expanded on the film’s world by taking it into different mediums such as novels and manga and a belated sequel named Noriko’s Dinner Table which was made in 2006.

Suicide Circle was a massive success and has set the tone for the rest of his films. Despite trying a gangster film (Hazard – 2005) and comedy-drama (Into a Dream – 2005), both starring Joe Odagiri (Adrift in Tokyo, Bright Future), he has continued to explore the darker side of modern Japan with a series of extreme titles including the ero-guro film Strange Circus (2005) which features sexual and mental abuse and incest, the aforementioned Noriko’s Dinner Table which deals with alienation and suicide, Exte: Hair Extensions (2007) which stars Chiaki Kuriyama (Battle Royale, Shikoku, Kill Bill) and is a far more mainstream J-horror title and then Love Exposure (2008) which stars Hikari Mitsushima (Sawako Decides) and can only be described as a religio-psycho-sexual mindmelt.