Just Movies This Time

Okay, I said I would talk about Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion and The Bourne Supremacy, but it's been so long that it might not make a difference. Here it goes: I really liked Female Prisoner - even though I was misinformed about it's origins - in a movie geek kind of way. The movie was directed by Shunya Ito and starred a stunningly beautiful Meiko Kaji as the title character. I was informed that this movie was made in the 1960s so I was a little shocked by the amount of not so tasteless, albeit gratuitous nudity. It turns out that the film was made in 1972, and is a tale of revenge with a little softcore porn thrown in. It follows the travails of a young woman who was set up by her cop boyfriend to take the fall on a drug deal. She attempts a few times to escape from prison and develops the reputation of a strong-willed outsider. She eventually escapes the prison after the inmates stage a riot. After killing a series of people who wronged her, including a prison guard and a yakuza boss, she finds her cop boyfriend at Tokyo police headquarters, and as a fugitive, conveniently manages to slip into an elevator with no one else in it except her ex-boyfriend. She's one good assassin, at least one has to believe so, if she can do all that without being detected. She goes to the rooftop with her ex, and cuts him good.

The reasons I liked this film are varied - the first being of course, the absolutely beautiful Meiko Kaji. The second being the first flashback scene in which Kaji's character Nami gives herself to the boyfriend. It was done on a stage with moving scenery and was refreshingly creative. Unfortunately, that creativity did not carry through the entire film. The third reason is the hair and makeup, at times ridiculous and at others, very well done for the period. The wardrobe deserves a special mention. I hate the fact that one cannot get a suit in the style and quality equal to the wardrobe of the boyfriend. Also, the coat, boots and hat worn by Nami during the final sequence were awesome. I can't say they were original, but many films have copied the combination since. I liked the hat so much, Ali went out and bought one. I also liked this film because of the low-budget stunts and makeup used in the violent scenes. Apparently, this film has ties to Quentin Tarantino in a really roundabout way. It has been said that the idea for Kill Bill was based on this film. I can't say yes or no since I haven't seen Kill Bill, but the twist is that a song sung by Kaji in the second of the Scorpion movies is used in the films by Tarantino. Strangely in that movie, although Kaji portrays the main character, she plays a different Scorpion, one named Matsu.The tangential stuff really gets me. I was also interested to learn that Shunya Ito directed the first three movies, but was not asked back to direct the fourth. This led to, or so it has been claimed, Kaji's departure from the production company. This is one of those films you might rent because you might never see it otherwise, or because you might want to see an example of early 1970s not-so-mainstream Japanese cinema but as for parts 2 through 4, I have to weigh the cost of renting against the benefit of watching more vacant plot, laughably-violent, nudity-salted prison movies. It's difficult to decide.

I watched The Bourne Supremacy because I'd seen the Bourne Identity, not the one with Richard Chamberlain, a few years ago and that's the only reason. The film opened with promise, but quickly sank into a festival of driving stunts with predictable intrigue (is it intrigue if it's predictable?). I'm not a huge fan of Matt Damon, but after seeing the Bourne Identity perhaps I was expecting more in the second film. I see on imdb that there will be a third film in 2007. In spite of myself, I look forward to it. The film had some really good filming locations in the Western Europe segments, but the Eastern Europe locations were a little clichés, and if you're really wondering whether you should watch this one - you're probably not, but just in case - I'd suggest that you leave this one on the shelf and maybe rent one of the Michael Caine (post) Cold War spy movies in which he portrays the unfortunately-named character Harry Palmer. These films include The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain and the final two episodes Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in Saint Petersburg. Why they bothered with the last two, I may never know.

I've seen quite a few movies since these two, including Gumball 3000: 6 Days in May, Naniwa yuukyôden, Family Guy Presents: Stewie Griffin - The Untold Story, Boca a boca, 2LDK or at least I tried, and a bunch of others I can't remember at this time. Of this list, only Gumball and Boca a boca are worth watching. Ali and I tried to watch 2LDK, which she characterized as a comedy but would often say that it had a lot of violence in it, but the copy we rented was not up to par so we returned it and got Stewie Griffin instead. I wish I hadn't. I'm not Seth MacFarlane's biggest fan, but Stewie was the reason I started watching his stuff. The movie itself is mostly unoriginal material edited together in Family Guy style to explain the existence of Stewie Griffin. Since I'd already seen an estimated 60% of this movie from the Fox cartoon aired weekly, I felt it was a waste of time to see this film.

Gumball is a movie for car fans who like the documentary style film. I use the word documentary lightly, it's not a documentary in the sense that a documentary should be hard-hitting and thought-provoking. It's put together well for the material they had to work with I presume, and it kinda makes me want to rally again but since Sissy is as big as a house and due in just a few months, I don't really have the option for a co-driver.

Naniwa or Osaka Tough Guys is not what I think most people would expect from Takashi Miike, but he explains why quite well in the interview feature. Many of Miike's films use a combination of extreme violence and juvenile comedy as a balance because these films are taken from comic books that Miike read in his youth. I'd have to say that the comedy in this film heavily outweighs the violence. For that reason, and never having been a fan of comic books myself, the film is not ratable. Miike explained that he wanted to remain as faithful to the original Dorkman comic as possible, and I have to assume he did. For that, I applaud his talent. I mention it here, only because he was a supporting actor in Tampopo, but Rikiya Yasuoka plays a supporting role as a yakuza enforcer.

I caught Boca a boca reeeeally late one night on the Cantonese channel and decided to watch it because it was a Spanish film, starred Javier Bardem - whom I thought was somebody completely different but had apparently seen years earlier in the raunchy romance Jamón jamón - was a Spanish film, and because I didn't have a job to go to the next day. It's about a struggling actor in Madrid who is reduced to working at a sex line to make money. He gets wrapped up in a fake affair, a pretense for a murder. Typical, light humour accompanies a series of events which dismantle the façade, and the murder plot is foiled. The actor lands a film in Hollywood, and schmaltzy to the end, the actor flies to Hollywood with his agent, his new girlfriend, and his new best friend: his homosexual, plastic surgeon, fake lover who was the target of the original murder. The only painful parts of this film were watching a French actress choke through her lines as though an unspecified regional American accent was the most distasteful thing to enunciate on the face of the earth, and a Scottish actor doing a really bad impression of an American director who sounded like he learned his so-called perfect Spanish in Sicily. The usual gags and the talent of Kity Manver make the rest of this film easy and fun to watch.