Love Exposure vs. Battle Royale

Why had I not heard about this movie?

Not Battle Royale (バトル・ロワイアル) - I picked up that DVD a few years ago (in Australia) and it remains one of my favourites.

I'm talking about Love Exposure (愛のむきだし), a 4-hour 2008 romp directed by poet/filmmaker Sion Sono that I watched tonight thanks to the prescient people at Madman in Oz, who sent me the promo unexpectedly.

I loved it.

If you go to Wikipedia they say that it's "a 2008 Japanese movie, written and directed by Sion Sono. The film gained a considerable amount of notoriety in film festivals around the world for its four-hour duration and themes including love, family, lust, religion and the art of up-skirt photography. It won many awards and positives reviews."

Which is kind of simplistic, really.

This is a film that forces together Quentin Tarantino and Ryuhei Kitamira, a four-hour compendium of self awareness, Christianity, hip fun, tragedy, comedy and farce/flip moments that borders on the hentai (perverse) and hard knocks.

The story itself tips towards some perverted moments and blood/gore, along with cult religion, panties photography, domestic abuse, and a soundtrack that gloriously includes Beethoven's 7th Sypmphony, as also recently used to such good effect in The Fall.

The acting tour de force here comes, equally surprisingly, from Takahiro Nishijima (from J-Pop band AAA) as our hero Yu.

All up, it's a sensationally surprising and engaging flick.


Strangely, enough, too, there's a van on the beach that's a dead-ringer for a van I discovered down the Miura Peninsula (an hour or so from Tokyo) earlier this week.

The van I stumbled across in the middle of nowhere had quite obviously been retrieved from the sea, with no back-story I could find.

I'd gone in search of the Tsurugizaki Lighthouse that was used in Battle Royale, the 2000 film directed by Kinji Fukasaku and starring 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Chiaki Kuriyama and Kou Shibasaki.


I took some happy snaps of said lighthouse, got sunburned, walked for several hours, and discovered some obscure fishing villages as well as a cliff-side walkway that was more dangerous than fun.

It was also crawling with those beach cockroaches I mentioned in earlier entries (Shikinejime, for instance).

But honestly?

I had one of the best times of my life.




BATTLE ROYALE

REVIEW: Project A-ko

At first glimpse, this one’s so damned ‘80s you might want to lunge at the remote to hit eject before you actually give it half a chance - but given that the original (and best) incarnation was actually made midway through that decade, you have to give a little something of your wayward soul.

Others might wince at the slightly hentai (perverted, for lack of a better translation) undertones that filter through right from the opening sequence.

But above and somewhere way beyond those concerns, the first Project A-Ko movie (1986) is a hilarious parody of the anime that preceded it, from shojo girls’ romance tales like The Rose Of Versailles right on through to the Gundam giant robot sci-fi saga. Sometimes in the very same breath, let alone frame, American comics (by D.C. and Marvel), products (Pepsi cans) and even KFC's founder Colonel Sanders are referenced, action set-pieces are tossed asunder, there's a rampant sense of humour as well as homage, and even the name of the series is apparently a pun on Jackie Chan’s 1983 movie Project A.

The plot, such as it is, concerns Eiko Magami – your average red-haired, super-powered schoolgirl (who’s possibly related to Superman and Wonder Woman) – along with her best friend, the cantankerous, hissy-fit chucking and super-teary Shiiko Kotobuki. Into their lives, with a bunch of killer mecha contraptions, bursts Eiko’s old kindergarten rival Biko, along with an entire invasion fleet of aliens.

And that's just the beginning of this glorious 80-minute fiasco.

Add in a script co-written by Yuji Moriyama (Geobreeders), and a dash of Shinji Kimura, an art director who also previously rendered the background art on Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg (1985) and Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and was more recently the art director on Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy (2004) and the superb Tekkonkinkreet (2006).

Then there's the just-right sleazy '80s synth soundtrack by American producer Joey Carbone (who also did Legend of 8 Samurai - see the previous entry below).

"It was great fun doing the soundtrack," Carbone (right) told me back in 2004 for an article we were doing for Anime Insider magazine, since very few (if any) other foreigners had scored anime up till that time.

"The animation company gave me some guidelines, but basically they let me have a lot of freedom to create what I felt was right. To be honest I wasn't really an animation fan when I took on the job, but that movie really turned me onto Japanese anime and I've been a fan since."

For the Project A-ko score, Carbone worked with a group of fellow musicians.

"We did it in Los Angeles, with my buddy Richie Zito - who composed and produced it with me - and I played keys and Richie played guitar. Also Arthur Barrow played some keys, and George Doering played guitar while engineering the recordings. I chose three American female singers to do the songs: Annie Livingstone, Samantha Newark and Valerie Stevenson. I later took Annie to Japan for promotion of the soundtrack, as she sang the theme song, 'Dance Away'. The Japanese producer, director and music editor all attended the LA recordings and seemed to be very happy with what we made."

Check out the original movie directed by Katsuhiko Nishijima - the later OVAs in the Project A-ko series unfortunately don't stand up quite so nicely.