Skykid wrote:JP live action movies: god awful.
Their animated films are some of the finest in the world: even tempered, beautifully directed and paced, and masterfully constructed. The live stuff is often the complete opposite.
What. No. You start a topic called "Japanese live action sucks"? Something surely sucks here, but it's not Japanese live action movies... they have a long and respected history. So I'm gonna rant now.
Try watching these for starters:
Goyokin
Sword of Doom
Tetsuo I-II
Lone Wolf & Cub 1-6
Suicide Circle
Lady Snowblood
Uzumaki
Dolls
Castle of Sand (even tempered, beautifully directed and paced, and masterfully constructed)
Tokyo Drifter
Evil Dead Trap 1-2
Ju-on, Ju-on the Grudge
Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (not a typical, boring kaiju eiga - this is about people)
Sayonara, Jupiter
G.I. Samurai
Razor 1-3
Female Convict Scorpion films
Street Fighter
All Night Long 1-3
Shinobi - Heart Under Blade (it "won" a japanese Bunshun - worst movie -award, but I love it. melancholic and impressive)
Kichiku Dai Enkai
... I better stop here for readability's sake. This was just a scratch in the surface.
Almost anything with Sonny Chiba, Hiroyuki Sanada or Tatsuya Nakadai is well worth watching.
Disclaimer: I don't like ALL Japanese live action. The latest Kitanos have been utter, intolerable garbage, so was Stereo Future and Red Shadow, and everything from Ryuhei Kitamura except Versus, which is great fun ("I grew up in Yellow Stone National park, a natural born hunter!"). The Golgo 13 movie with Sonny Chiba was boring, Gunhed was just plain ridiculous and cheap-looking, most of the pinku eiga is boring (lately I've been watching the Stray Cat Rock films, but even the best ones aren't very spectacular)...
Everyone is always trying to ram Takashi Miike down my throat. Ichi the Killer: ugh, who the heck really enjoys that garbage?
I do recognise his ability - the first half of Audition is very well directed - but the latter just descends into regular Japanese nutso narcissistic bloodshed and confusion. I'm bored of the same old mental breakdown themes.
Takashi Miike has made like a zillion movies, and you should give him another chance. Ichi the Killer is a really extreme movie (I enjoy it, confess..) Audition is great and the end sequence is an integral part of it, but again, not for everyone. Too bad his latest movies have been pale shadows of the times when he always managed to find new aspects in old, established genres and surprise audiences :/
My favorite Miikes (five-star scale):
Fudoh - The New Generation ******
Ichi the Killer ******
Audition *****
Gozu *****
Others definitely worth checking:
Dead Or Alive ****½
Visitor Q ****½
Hazard City ****
Full Metal Yakuza ****
Rekka: Deadly Outlaw ****
Blues Harp ****
Imprint (Masters of Horror episode) ****
Agitator ****-
MPD Psycho *** - ****
The Guys From Paradise ****-
The rest I've seen, but don't necessarily recommend:
Shinjuku Triad Society ***½
Dead Or Alive 2 ***½
Dead Or Alive 3 ***½
Crows: Zero ***
Great Yokai War ***
IZO ***
New Graveyard of Honour ***
Sukiyaki Western Django **½
Zebraman **½
Rainy Dog **½
Ley Lines **½
Young Thugs: Innocent Blood **
Happiness of the Katakuris **
Andromedia **
Bird People of China **
One Missed Call **
Big Bang Love, Juvenile A *
Battle Royale 2 is probably the worst film I've ever had the displeasure of seeing. I wanted the entire cast dead - especially the lead for pulling 'that face' - and I didn't even get that in the end. The Ring bored me, and Versus was offensively poor, and Casshern just got turned the hell off.
Battle Royale 2 is indeed one of the total low-points of Japanese movie-making. It's a grand fiasco. Ringu is still one of the creepiest and best horror films, but it should be watched alone, at night. Ok, Casshern wasn't good at all, works much better in anime form, much like the Devilman live-action which was fun, but really.. the cgi effects are just plain awful. If they don't have the budget, then they should't bother trying. Then again, even new anime/manga can be turned to live action succesfully, like the Death Note movies prove (L - Change the World is a pile of dung, though.. avoid that one!)
I tend to find that I'm put off by a few traits that seem to be a requirement in live action JP cinema: Horrifically cheesy overracting, convoluted (to the point of madness) plotlines, and a general need to be OTT in everything. I think that the need to push the actors to behave in an unnaturally expressive manner works in Japan, because Japanese people tend not to witness such emotional outbursts in real life. So the fantasy on screen is heightened by all these twisted, roaring faces, spitting and bellowing theatrically at each other, and generally looking silly.
Those don't apply to all JP live action cinema, mostly to the ones that have been brought to the west for action-hungry audiences. Interesting theory about the expressive acting.. you might be onto something. Some director's however keep their actors having a straight face no matter what happens, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa. That can be unnatural too to the western eyes.
The only films I liked in the last ten years have been the original Battle Royale and Zatoichi. It's back to Kurosawa beyond that.
You should dig deeper, through the mainstream stuff. There is an abundance of great live-action stuff from the seventies and eighties. Manga-adaptations, sports movies, yakuza dramas...
For my money, the Korean's are doing a much better job of cinema in the Asian field.
They did surpass Japan at one point at the turn of the millennium, when the Japanese didn't come up with anything original and Kim Ki-Duk, Park Chan-wook and co. churned out a couple of masterpiece dramas. Most Korean action films were ok at best (Friend) and usually unbearable (Shiri, Bichunmoo). But the Japanese soon reclaimed their throne again.
GaijinPunch wrote:cools wrote:Machine Girl is ace.
WAY over-acted. Not a bad flick (especially for Japan) but it had some issues. One scene was fucking crazy. Also, it was directed by a Korean.
Totally wasn't directed by a Korean.
This new wave of inventive and funny trash gore is much better than what Daisuke Yamanouchi and other "talents" did earlier, like Red Room 1-2, Muzan-E.
Machine Girl *****
Tokyo Gore Police ****** (great music + the freak club scene!)
Meatball Machine ****
A couple of new/upcoming movies in the same vein I'm trying to catch:
Robo Geisha
Hajirai Machine Girl ("Machine Girl 2")
Grotesque
Yoroi Samurai Zombie
Samurai Geisha
Samurai Princess
http://www.nipponcinema.com/blog/traile ... _for_work/
Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl
http://www.nipponcinema.com/blog/low-re ... stein-gir/
And, err.. this
http://www.nipponcinema.com/blog/hypert ... girl-nsfw/
Others that I'm anxiously waiting for:
Tetsuo - The Bullet Man
Kamui Gaiden - The manga was great, so was the old anime feature film, which combined eastern anime to western adventure tales
Love Exposure - Everyone says it's fantastic, but it's goddamn 4 hours long.. I got many chances to see it in a theater, but I was always too tired and didn't dare to risk watch it in that condition :/
Today I'm gonna watch Drifting Classroom, based on the old Kazuo Umezu manga. Finally, after years of searching... better be good!