Pistol Opera

2001 Suzuki movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Pretty much the same as Suzuki's Branded to Kill except with a female protagonist and a lot more color. "Stray Cat" is ranked third in the hierarchy of assassins and needs to kill "Hundred Eyes" in order to reach the top. There might be a pay raise involved.

This one just didn't sit right. It's a very colorful movie and I'm a sucker for colorful movies, but the colors in this felt more like plastic supermarket colors to me. The characters were just kind of there, mingling with all those colors as they tried to shoot each other, and I just didn't have any interest in anything they were doing. What they were doing actually made very little sense, and although that's just fine (maybe even the norm for a Seijun Sukuki flick) if the visual and the style are cool enough to make it all worthwhile even as complete nonsense, this one didn't quite offer enough. The final ten minute climactic fight scene (predictably against the exact person I figured would be involved) is visually stunning, indeed a sort of opera sans songs. There's a poetry to the surreal backgrounds, stagy color usage, and character movements, and I'm glad I stuck around to see it finish up. But really, the trailer for this, one that I remember as making Pistol Opera seem like it would be a solid ninety minutes that looked like that final ten minutes, is the only thing you need to see. You'll understand the plot just as much, and you'll still have time to watch a better movie, like Branded to Kill or Tokyo Drifter.

Fighting Elegy

1966 romantic drama

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Piano virtuoso (but only when he plays with his penis) Kiroku attends an Okayama middle school in 1930's Japan. He falls in love with Michiko, the daughter of a Catholic family who lives in the same house. Perhaps to hide his true feelings and his frequent unwanted erections, he focuses on picking fights with gangs and trying his best to break rules at school. He's expelled and moves away where he continues to pine for Michiko's piano.

This is more Seijun Suzuki, but it's such a different Seijun Suzuki that you might not even realize it. There's some flashes of Suzuki flare (most notably, a classroom scene and some shots that really couldn't have been anybody else's). I absolutely loved the comic fight scenes, completely baffling and unrealistic. Apparently, this is a satirical look at the youth of 1930's Japan, but I'm not nearly intelligent enough to "get" all that. This might not be as exciting as the other Suzuki movies I've seen, but it's worth the time.

Youth of the Beast

1963 yakuza movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Tough guy Jo joins two rival gangs Yojimbo-esquely in order to solve the mystery of the death of a pal and maybe avenge that death. Violence ensues.

This is the first of Suzuki's incomprehensible yakuza films, and it's cool that he came out swinging. It's more comprehensible than Branded or Drifter, but there's still enough flamboyance and visual flare here to make it completely obvious that it came from the mad mind of this one-of-a-kind director. Very 60's and very stylish (almost Bondish), Suzuki's got an eye for color and physical geometry. A final gunfight in a tortured setting, one in which our hero finds himself at an early disadvantage, and a much earlier scene involving a one-way glass and complete silence are so ingeniously shot that it gave me wood. Literally! Shapes within the sets are also used to frame characters or physically display the conflicts. Tricky? Sure. But it makes for a fun and fancy free violent romp that I'm sure Tarantino loves. Oh, and like the main guy in Branded to Kill, it looks as if this one might also have cheek implants. What the hell? I'm adding a cheek implant label in case I see Branded to Kill or Eraserhead or Alvin and the Chipmunks or U-Turn any time soon.

Tokyo Drifter

1966 yakuza b-movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Powder-blue suited Tetsu follows his boss into the straight life but meets obstacles everywhere he steps, namely an old rival gang. Oh, snap! He decides to drift, leaving his girlfriend and his father figure of a boss behind. Then things get complicated.

Suzuki was fired by his studio for making "incomprehensible" movies. This incomprehensible movie's got lots of stylized action and a genius eye for color, stuff that could make Tarantino stick his hand down the front of his pants never to be seen again. The soundtrack, which apparently consists of a single song, is oppressive, but with a wry humor and unique vision, this thing's really fun to watch. Loved the loads of goofiness in that climactic dance club scene. I do prefer Branded to Kill though.

Zigeunerweisen

1980 avant-garde B-movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: An intellectual befriends a nomad who may have murdered a woman. They meet and, I believe, fall in love with the same woman. As the years pass, they may or may not get involved with each other's wives. They may even be the same person. If you've ever seen a Seijun Suzuki film, you'll know why I'm having trouble with this one. It's either difficult or I'm a complete idiot. Or both.

As expected, a stylized effort from Suzuki although it isn't the same stylization that made those oddball 60's films (Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter) so brilliant. This is so slow moving and so completely Japanese, and it sort of sucks you in, forces you to look around its meticulously-constructed strange new world, and almost hypnotizes you, setting you up for a knockout ending. It's chaos unfolding in slow motion. There are surreal touches (crabs emerging from the private parts of a woman washed up on a beach, all of the characters in the film watching a fireworks show that doesn't seem to exist, rocks falling onto the roofs of houses), but for the most part, everything seems realistic on the surface. Beneath that surface, however, is an entirely different matter. This sort of hit me like a Japanese David Lynch movie. As a matter of fact, the opening scene is a close-up of a record playing (the song is the title of the movie) during a creepy conversation between unseen characters (a conversation that is perfectly duplicated later on) which reminded me of Inland Empire. I believe Suzuki's modus operandi is to keep things open to interpretation; in fact, I think I remember reading something about how he doesn't even want to understand his own movies. In this one, he seems to be toying with the characters a little. It seems to me that the two main male characters might be two sides of the same protagonist, and I'm not sure how many actual female characters exist either, especially since one woman plays at least two different characters. The whole movie could be an allegory that has to do with a clash between East and West cultures. The intellectual and his wife seem more American/European; the wanderer and his wives and lady friends seem more Asian. And then they die or don't die. I'm sure it means something. And that's the beauty of this lovely, sometimes chilling, movie--it's the kind of movie that you can't stop running through your mind. It'll even force you to turn off the cd player in the car on the way to playing disc golf.

Note: This is considered the first of a trilogy (thematic or style rather than characters/plot) filmed after Suzuki was fired from his studio for not making movies correctly. I can't wait to see the others.

Me, directly after my cerebellum was extracted: