Japan Archives - Page 5 of 8 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Shogun Assassin (1980) – DVD

October 16, 20061980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Japan

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, Masahiro Tomikawa, Kayo Matsuo, Minoru Ohki
screenplay by Kazuo Koike, Robert Houston & David Weisman
directed by Robert Houston and Kenji Misumi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Timing is everything when it comes to certain movies. Had I been one of the many who paid to see Shogun Assassin in 1980 or thrilled to it on video for years afterward, I might, too, have a cult attachment to its slick camerawork and delightfully bloodthirsty nature. But as it turns out, I saw the films from which it was culled–the Lone Wolf and Cub epics Sword of Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River Styx–first: no matter how expertly distilled is Robert Houston's scratch remix version, it was never going to match the elegance of construction of those Kenji Misumi classics. If you find yourself in a hurry and can only squeeze in one film with a pudgy ronin and his small, indestructible son, then Shogun Assassin is the one you want; and it immediately gains half a star if you aren't familiar with the originals. But for those with time, patience, and a love of arterial spray, the main event is probably the better bet. Which is not to say that Shogun Assassin is without its virtues.

Three… Extremes (2005) + Hellbent (2005) – DVDs

September 26, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, South Korea, Thriller

THREE… EXTREMES
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
DUMPLINGS-The Hong Kong Extreme: starring Miriam Yeung, Bai Ling
screenplay by Lilian Lee
directed by Fruit Chan
CUT-The Korean Extreme: starring Lee Byung-Hun, Lim Won-Hee
written and directed by Park Chanwook
BOX-The Japan Extreme: starring Kyoko Hasegawa,Atsuro Watabe
screenplay by Haruko Fukushima
directed by Takashi Miike

HELLBENT
***½/**** Image C- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dylan Fergus, Bryan Kirkwood, Hank Harris, Andrew Levitas
written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts

by Walter Chaw My favourite working cinematographer is Harris Savides. His collaborations with Gus Van Sant and his contribution to Jonathan Glazer's Birth demonstrate to me an agility with aspect ratio and rhythm that's particularly pleasing to my own ways of seeing. A close second, though, is Christopher Doyle, the great Australian cinematographer who teams almost exclusively with Asian directors (most notably on the bulk of Wong Kar Wai's visually arresting filmography, Zhang Yimou's Hero, and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe)–his stuff indicative of a kind of lyrical, ritualistic devouring that matches the best of the Asian sensibility in pace and narrative. Doyle joins an elite crowd (Greg Toland, James Wong Howe, Raoul Coutard, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond, Conrad Hall, and a select few others) of cinematographers worthy of the auteur label: a certain mood, a certain style, haunts every frame on which he works with a distinct, unmistakable bouquet. He's an interesting choice, then, as the only constant of an anthology film, Three… Extremes, a sequel in structure to an Asian portmanteau from a couple years back, featuring, again, three different frontline Asian directors, each enlisted to provide a horror-based short film.

My TIFF So Far

September 9, 2006Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Mexico, Sci-Fi, South Korea, TIFF

Seems we’re all a little constipated right now but rest assured reviews are on the way; here’s a quick rundown of TIFFpix screened thus far by yours truly.

BABEL (d. Alejandro González Iñárritu)
It coheres better than 21 Grams, but Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga are really spinning their wheels at this point. A few funny extratextual lessons are imparted: never take a Fanning to Mexico (Elle has almost as harrowing an adventure there as sister Dakota does in Man on Fire); and never trust a director who includes a post-script dedication to his children. As with 21 Grams, though, Babel doesn’t make room for any intentional levity, eventually desensitizing you to all the calculated anguish. *½/****

Late Spring (1949) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

May 14, 20061940s, 1980s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Japan, The Criterion Collection, West Germany

Banshun
晩春
***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka, Haruko Sugimura
screenplay by Kôgo Noda & Yasujiro Ozu
directed by Yasujiro Ozu

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like Robert Bresson or Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasujiro Ozu is one of those great directors with bullyboy supporters for whom the title "great" doesn't begin to scratch the surface. It's not enough for their man to be a pillar of the cinema: he has to be a moral axiom, if not part of the space-time fabric itself, and God help you if you merely like one of his crystalline masterpieces. (We've reached the point where even academics will intimidate you if you take a mildly contradictory position.) But we at FFC are a defiant bunch, so with trepidation I must announce that while Late Spring is a good movie, a solid flick–let's not get carried away. To be sure, there are plenty of thematic strands to suss out of its narrative, making it a film that rewards repeat viewings. Nevertheless, I can't say that it's a destroyer like Tokyo Story or any of the other legitimately great works in Ozu's canon. Don't hit me, I bruise easily.

Drawing Restraint 9 (2006)

May 12, 2006Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Esoterica, Japan, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Matthew Barney, Björk, Shigeru Akahori, Koji Maki
written and directed by Matthew Barney

by Walter Chaw Where Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 falls short of his brilliant, seminal Cremaster series is in its decision to focus on the exploitation of natural resources from whaling through to oil–as filtered through the prism of Japanese industry (using Shinto as the primary test)–rather than on, as in Cremaster, the process and scope of myth-making from the Celts to the Masons to Gary Gilmore. The focus is too discrete for the far-reaching archetypes Barney's disquieting, biomechanical surrealism suggests (he's somewhere at the fulcrum between Salvador Dali and David Cronenberg)–the attempt to articulate the perversity of man's exploitation of their natural resources seems a little like what it is: an artist too good and too provocative to waste his time on something that sells so trite.

Howl’s Moving Castle (2005) – DVD

April 25, 20062000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan

*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki (American adaptation by Cindy Davis Hewitt & Donald H. Hewitt), based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones
directed by Hayao Miyazaki

by Walter Chaw I've never liked it much when the Japanese are drawn to Victoriana, finding parallels as they sometimes seem to between that reserved, sexually-repressive culture and their own, because it most often results in garbage like Katsuhiro Ôtomo's exhausting Steamboy and now master Hayao Miyazaki's disappointing Howl's Moving Castle. Slow, not terribly interested in lore or internal logic, and fatally hamstrung by the choice of actors like Billy Crystal and a zombified Emily Mortimer to voice its American dub, it's a regression for Miyazaki from his last two films (Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away) in almost every sense, starting with his decision to have a lonely young woman as the central character in place of the prepubescent little girls front and centre in most of his masterpieces (the last two films, Kiki's Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and My Neighbor Totoro) and ending with a gross simplification of his usually complex themes of confidence and actualization into a colourless, flavourless drone about the hard-to-dispute badness of war.

Whisper of the Heart (1995) – DVD

April 20, 20061990s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Family, Japan, Music, Romance

***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras D
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki
directed by Yoshifumi Kondo

by Walter Chaw Three years after directing Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki-scripted Whisper of the Heart, and before he was able to complete a second picture for the venerable Japanese institution, ace animator and Miyazaki protégé Yoshifumi Kondo passed away of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Knowledge of Kondo's fate colours the already wistful Whisper of the Heart with another layer of blue (especially if you're a fan of Kondo's behind-the-scenes work on landmark anime like Grave of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke), but it doesn't completely rescue its remarkable humanity from frequent descents into culturally-alien specificity. The obsession with reworking John Denver's hilljack schmaltz classic "Country Road" into an un-ironic ode to the "concrete roads" of the picture's Tokyo-bound little girl protagonist (Shizuku (Youko Honna)), for instance, almost by itself renders Whisper of the Heart a Hello Kitty! for that particular brand of Japanese, Yank-ophile, cross-eyed badger shit. It's a better film if you're Japanese–kind of an amazing thing to say, I know, but the moments that don't reconstitute American "popular" culture through a Nipponese filter manage a fair-to-amazing job of evoking the overwhelming rush of first love. Shame, then, that John Denver appears at regular intervals to remind us of how peculiar a beast cultural diffusion can be.

Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) + Domino (2005) [New Line Platinum Series|Widescreen] – DVD

March 2, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
**½/****
starring David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

DOMINO
ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Edgar Ramirez, Delroy Lindo
screenplay by Richard Kelly
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw Rigorous and principled, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is a curiously slight film for more reasons than the fact that almost a third of it is comprised of archival footage integrated semi-successfully into the story. It's a recreation of a very specific battle in a very specific war that resonates with our Patriot Act/Guantanamo Bay situation, and indeed, that's the target Clooney seems most interested in striking. But without a larger context (the sort that would have weakened its allegorical usefulness), the picture sets itself up as something as obvious as it is minor and feather-light. It's a professional, high-minded, and staid biopic is what I'm saying, a film that says what it says with the stark B&W cinematography of a Dr. Strangelove, but in its icy, humourless way, it's the same stark B&W cinematography of a Fail-Safe, too. It's close and under-populated–and even with so insular and finely-focused a spotlight, it contains at least two completely superfluous characters.

Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) – DVD

December 20, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, China, DVD, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

ゴジラ FINAL WARS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Masahiro Matsuoka, Rei Kikukawa, Don Frye, Akira Takarada
screenplay by Wataru Mimura and Isao Kiriyama
directed by Ryuhei Kitamura

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Applying critical standards to Godzilla is a useless endeavour. You don’t have to be schooled in Kracauer and Mulvey to know there’s something cinematically delicious about grown men in rubber monster suits having at each other, nor do you have to have a seat at the Tisch School to figure out that everything surrounding that is gravy. So the most and least a critic can do is to note that the latest (and perhaps last) entry in the series is: a) a big dogpile on the Green One by most of his old adversaries; b) nearly upstaged by some hilariously derivative human/alien backstory; and c) that you probably know before renting or buying whether you’ll come away thinking Godzilla: Final Wars is the greatest movie ever. You could quibble that nobody bothered to shoot Godzilla with the iconic artistry he deserved, but the monster has never been merely represented by cinema. Like John Wayne or Marlene Dietrich, he’s cinema all on his own.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

December 9, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, based on the novel by Arthur Golden
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw The wounds that WWII opened between the Chinese and the Japanese are still fresh. Over the course of a twelve-year occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese regular army, at least nine million Chinese civilians were butchered–and though the Chinese, lacking a unified defense, bear the burden of poor organization, petty in-fighting, and a fair share of mortal Pollyannaism, the Japanese refuse to this day to apologize for what they have officially dismissed as the standard toll collected in conventional warfare. I believe it’s this–as opposed to the centuries of racial hatred–that has called down the normally quiescent Chinese activist contingent on the suddenly-thorned head of the Steven Spielberg-produced Memoirs of a Geisha, a film written, directed, and produced by Caucasians based on a book by a white author who was promptly sued by the geisha, Mineko Iwasaki, he interviewed for the book on the grounds that he not only betrayed their confidentiality agreement, but also fabricated the fate of her virginity, which she claims was never auctioned off in the way that the Arthur Golden novel describes. True or not, it’s the sort of thing that would be particularly attractive to a Western mind transfixed by the sexy Mystery of the Geisha.

The Beautiful Country (2004); Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005); The World (2005)|The Beautiful Country – DVD

November 23, 2005****/****, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Drama, DVD, France, Japan, Norway, Theatrical

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Nick Nolte, Tim Roth, Bai Ling, Temeura Morisson
screenplay by Sabina Murray
directed by Hans Petter Moland

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
*½/****
starring John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff
written and directed by Miranda July

Shijie
****/****
starring Zhao Tao, Chen Taisheng, Jing Jue, Jiang Zhong-wei
written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke

by Walter Chaw Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland makes films about isolated individuals trapped in simulacra of motion, and his best work is savage and melancholic: a trip taken by broken people to the bedside of a dying mother in Aberdeen; a pilgrimage made by a poet to locate his masculinity in the company of a maniac in Zero Kelvin. Even his first film, the quiet Secondløitnanten, touches on men oppressed by the caprice of nature–of other men driven to their natural state and the situations that melt away the lies that keep our lives liveable. Moland's films are beautifully framed (picaresque, it's not too much to say), capturing in their sprawling, austere landscapes the plight of individuals dwarfed by the mad, engulfing entropy of existence. He's a good fit with American auteur Terrence Malick, in other words–so it's without much surprise that Malick approached Moland to direct The Beautiful Country, a project he'd worked on, on and off, for a period of years before deciding that the producer's role would better suit him in this instance. The result is a picture that looks, sounds, often feels like a Malick film–even more so, it goes without saying, than Moland's early output does, leaving the project something that feels uncomfortably like ventriloquism. And though I'm a fan of both puppet and master, I find that I prefer the one drawing a line to the other rather than pulled around by the master's strings.

DIFF ’05: The World’s Fastest Indian

November 10, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Japan, New Zealand, Sports

*/****starring Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, Chris Williams, Annie Whittlewritten and directed by Roger Donaldson by Walter Chaw Kiwi filmmaker Roger Donaldson follows up his intensely impersonal The Recruit with the intensely personal The World's Fastest Indian, a fictionalization of a documentary he shot some thirty years ago about dotty old coot Burt Munro, who in 1967 set a land speed record for motorcycles under 1000ccs on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Funny how the results of both are sanded down almost beyond recognition: so baptized are they in the scouring attentions of high-grade clichés that they're inhumanly frictionless. See Burt…

The Adventures of the American Rabbit (1986) – DVD

September 19, 20051980s, Animation, Authors: Alex Jackson, DVD, Family, Japan, Superhero

*½/**** Image B Sound B+
screenplay by Norm Lenzer
directed by Fred Wolf and Nobutaka Nishizawa

"And you come up with images in [Invincible] that are so remarkable, including these countless red crabs in this one, that are so frightening to me–because they are life, yet they are mindless and they just keep going on and on despite whatever we think or whatever we hope."
-Roger Ebert to Werner Herzog

"The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the Song of Life."
-Item 10 of Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration"

by Alex Jackson There are a few basics tenets I have followed during my initiation into the world of film criticism: 1. That art is made up of subject matter and a perspective; 2. Frivolousness is not a substitute for offering a perspective–rather it is a perspective in and of itself; 3. Artist intentionality is less than meaningless, as perspective is often constantly being informed by greater cultural, social, and subconsciously psychological forces; 4. In light of tenets 1,2, and 3, one should be careful of dismissing the film you are reviewing, in particular because most of those you will be tempted to dismiss are frivolous, and dismissing them only advances their mission to secularize and marginalize the cinema.

Pom Poko (1994) + My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) – DVDs

September 12, 20051990s, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan

POM POKO
*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras D+
written and directed by Isao Takahata

MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMADAS
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
screenplay by Isao Takahata, based on the comic strip by Hisaichi Ishii
directed by Isao Takahata

by Walter Chaw Two films by the other guy at Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata's Pom Poko and My Neighbors the Yamadas have the director deviating extravagantly from his masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies–one of the bona fide classics of the anime medium–by hopping from that film's heartbreaking war idyll to these films' anthropomorphic mysticism and broad slapstick. Anime gets a bad rap in the United States for being either pornographic or inscrutable (indeed, much anime pornography is inscrutable)–it's an easy way to dismiss an entire medium as foreign and/or amoral, but as a blanket condemnation it's as misguided at its essence as deriding black-and-white pictures, or talkies, or films altogether–and the truth of it is that for every memorable anime, there are probably fifty forgettable ones. As that ratio holds pretty steady for all films, though, the problem for fair-minded folks approaching the medium for the first time boils down to a picture with, crucially, a pedigree like Pom Poko.

The Brown Bunny (2004) [Superbit] – DVD

August 1, 20052000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Japan

***/**** Image A+ Sound B+
starring Vincent Gallo, Chloe Sevigny
written and directed by Vincent Gallo

by Walter Chaw Its final cut a full thirty minutes shorter than the one that was shown to widespread derision at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny is laced with melancholy and a crushing sense of loneliness. Every shot is either a claustrophobic interior contemplation of Gallo at the wheel of his van, a highway unrolling endlessly before him, or a long shot of Gallo standing in the open and at a distance: isolated and diminished. For all of its excesses, the picture is excruciatingly modest–almost meticulous–in its slow unfolding, culminating with a now-notorious fellatio scene that runs ten minutes and presents sex at its most insectile and threatening.

Premonition (2004) – DVD

July 26, 20052000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Horror, Japan

Yogen
*½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C-
starring Hiroshi Mikami, Noriko Sakai, Maki Horikita, Mayumi Ono
screenplay by Noboru Takagi, Norio Tsuruta, based on the comic by Jiro Tsunoda
directed by Norio Tsuruta

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I could spin many a yarn about the kernel of goodness trapped inside Premonition. As the tale of a teacher named Hideki Satomi (Hiroshi Mikami) who finds supernatural newspapers that predict horrible events, it's poised to say plenty about the information age, the anxiety of which is manifested in the fact that Hideki is either helpless to stop the events or winds up physically wasted as a result of trying. But the point of mentioning that is scotched by the production team's total obliviousness to thematics, which makes any exegesis purely symptomatic. There's a swell sociology paper somewhere in Premonition's context within the rest of the J-Horror canon, but its pleasures are largely as an artifact rather than as something to be enjoyed on its own terms.

Steamboy (2004) [Collector’s Gift Set] – DVD

July 17, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Japan, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Sadayuki Murai and Katsuhiro Otomo
directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

by Walter Chaw Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira is both the best and the worst thing ever to happen to anime in the United States. For the believer, its Blade Runner cyberpunk ultra-cool was an eye-opener, but to hold the film up as the standard for the medium means that a lot of people looking to it as their introduction believe that anime is a little excitement cordoned off by long stretches of confused, gravid exposition. It tries to condense hundreds of pages of metaphysical text into scientist characters delivering what seem like endless exchanges in high-minded gobbledygook. Akira's popularity obscures the finest examples of the medium, films that manage to balance serious metaphysical musing with actual forward momentum (the two Ghost in the Shell films, for instance); to tell adult tales in affecting ways (Grave of the Fireflies); to redefine genre thriller (Perfect Blue), action (Ninja Scroll), and fantasy (Princess Mononoke); and to present children's fables as artifacts that are as useful for adults as they are for kids (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro). Akira isn't the greatest anime film, just the most well-known, and it's worth speculating how its notoriety may have retarded the maturation of American animation.

My Mother (2004) + Exiles (2004)

July 14, 20052000s, Adventure, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, France, Japan, Music, Portugal, Spain, Theatrical

Ma mère
*½/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Emma de Caunes, Joana Preis
screenplay by Christopher Honoré, based on the novel by Georges Bataille
directed by Christopher Honoré

Exils
***/****
starring Romain Duris, Lubna Azabal, Leila Makhlouf, Habib Cheik
written and directed by Tony Gatlif

by Bill Chambers Even after the Hays Office lost its stranglehold on the screen trade, mainstream American erotica remained a largely intellectual affair. Rather than try to get you off, films like Paul Mazursky’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge were interested in examining the fallout from sex. Meanwhile, France was cranking out Sylvia Kristel movies, and the raincoat crowd could enjoy even such highbrow fare as Last Tango in Paris for long stretches. If the legit French sex cinema ultimately bore a closer resemblance to red-blooded American filth in the ’70s (and not just ethically: the ‘X aesthetic’ was like dumbed-down nouvelle vague), it makes sense that it would chart a course parallel with stateside porno’s gradual descent into the penetration abyss. But while the (d)evolution itself is an organic one born of desensitization, things have progressed along a more self-conscious path in recent years, with the incendiary work of Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Michael Haneke helping to foster the impression of contemporary Gallic life as a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah.

Layer Cake (2004); 3-Iron (2004); Palindromes (2005)

May 12, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, Romance, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

LAYER CAKE
***/****
starring Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, Kenneth Cranham, Michael Gambon
screenplay by J.J. Connolly, based on his novel
directed by Matthew Vaughn

3-IRON
****/****
starring Lee Seung-yeon, Jae Hee
written and directed by Kim Ki-duk

PALINDROMES
***½/****
starring Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Masur
written and directed by Todd Solondz

by Walter Chaw Producer Matthew Vaughn makes his directorial debut with the Brit underground gangster flick Layer Cake, and he does it with a sexy, cool savoir-faire that runs slick and smooth. It's softer than Jonathan Glazer's fabulously decadent Sexy Beast (most of that due, no doubt, to there being no baddie the equivalent of Ben Kingsley's Don Logan in Vaughn's film) and more coherent than Paul McGuigan's Gangster No. 1, but it slips snug into the same conversation. Now that Guy Ritchie's been gobbled whole by his very own vagina dentate, it stands to reason that Vaughn, Ritchie's producer on Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, would seek to fill the void left in the only U.K. pop genre with any sort of international currency all by his own self. Yet the product of Vaughn's hand isn't so much an imitation as it is a refinement: not better necessarily, but calmer–closer to the lounge lizard James Bond of the 1960s than to the feisty punk Michael Caine heisters from roughly the same period, though Layer Cake is infused, of course, with a healthy dose of nastiness and post-modern irony.

The Cat Returns (2002) – DVD

March 24, 20052000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Japan, Romance

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Reiko Yoshida
directed by Hiroyuki Morita

by Walter Chaw With the frantic, infernal energy (and cats) and even a little of the barbed social satire of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Hayao Miyazaki protégé Hiroyuki Morita's directorial debut The Cat Returns is undone a little by its hysteria but salvaged by its artistry and smarts. A familiar tale for fans of Studio Ghibli, the film follows plucky schoolgirl Haru (Chizuru Ikewaki in the Japanese track, Anne Hathaway in the English dub) as she saves a mysterious grey cat from certain flattening, thus earning her the dubious boon of eternal gratitude from the Cat King (Tetsuro Tamba & Tim Curry). After being cursed with a yard-full of cattails, a pocketful of catnip, and a locker-full of gift-wrapped mice, Haru receives the ultimate prize of betrothal to the Cat Prince (Takayuki Yamada & Andrew Bevis)–a fate she seeks to avoid with the help of portly kitty Muta (Tetsu Watanabe & Peter Boyle) and the stately Baron (Yoshihiko Hakamada & Cary Elwes). Haru's journey is essentially one of perspective as she evolves from a silly sort of girl into a person who's learned to trust that her instincts are good and that her courage is, indeed, up to snuff.