"Why me, and not you?"

Organ is ostensibly about a pair of cops that run afoul of an organ-smuggling ring, but that turns out to be misleading and irrelevant. Organ is actually a nightmare of indignity, mutilation, and degradation, the brainchild and directorial debut of Kei Fujiwara, who'd previously contributed to Shinya Tsukamoto's infamous Tetsuo.

I'm really not sure how to describe this movie, but I guess it's easiest to say what it isn't. It's not like the Nishimura gross-outs I've been following, those are actually fairly conventionally plotted and shot, they're just really campy and audacious poor-taste comedies like Peter Jackson used to make. Organ takes itself deadly seriously, and operates on some kind of mean dream logic I wasn't entirely able to process. The overall flow of the movie is such that it's impossible to tell whether any particular bodily flux is "really" happening or just hallucinations of a deranged mind, and that's before we even get into the revelation that one of the cops has a twin.

It's not like David Cronenberg's movies either; he and Fujiwara both relish in documenting fleshly mutation, but Organ never shows any catharsis or ecstacy in the change. The corruption is just the visible sign of the characters' spiritual decay; even the people who are outwardly unblemished are rotting on the inside. The thesis is that everyone is an oozing, greasy pile of meat stumbling through an immoral cosmos until we finally rot completely.

I wouldn't recommend this movie, or even say I really enjoyed it, but I can't seem to get it off my mind, and that definitely counts for something.

Maijo Otaro cubes meta

When 九十九十九 (Tsukumo Juku) came out in bunko, the covers happily described it as meta squared.
Tsukumo Juku himself is a character from Seiryoin Ryusui's meta/deconstructionist mystery novels (which are fascinating in theory but rather boring to actually read, sadly) and Maijo Otaro took the character and sprawled him into a horrifically long series of contradicting slices of his life, at one point declaring him so beautiful all who saw him fell in love, while also informing us that he has two heads and is disgusting. The character is regularly killed off throughout the stories, and at one point escapes into the real world and murders the editor working on the novel.
Maijo has been quiet for a few years; his last big project, The Disco Detective, has yet to come out in bunko (along with his second novel) but everything else kinda has. He did a thing on his website where he pitched a movie idea every week for a year, and each was more bizarre than the last. He seemed to be making a serious effort to move into film.
Apparently, he has. There's a movie out this summer called Neck (trailers appear to not be online yet), and he has a story credit. Plot appears to be standard boy meets girl, girl turns out to have a terrifying disembodied head in a tank in her laboratory. Never one to be satisfied with simplicity, he has also written a stage play on a similar theme.
Both productions feature a character who is a popular novelist name Echizen Mataro.
Echizen Mataro is launching a new series of books from BOTH Dengeki Bunko AND Kodansha Novels this April. One Pluto 0 novel from each in April, two each in June, and there's already one more scheduled for after that.
Echizen Mataro is giving interviews vehemently denying that he is from Fukui (Maijo Otaro is -- the fact that Maijo notoriously refuses to make public appearances is a small part of this whole stunt), declaring that Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is the greatest manga ever, that he is also an actor appearing in the movie Neck, and that he has the mysterious supernatural ability to divide himself into two people and write two novels simultaneously in his sleep.
Words fail me.
Edit: Apparently this awful thing is the Dengeki Bunko cover. I remember seeing that and thinking it was unspeakable. I trust Maijo enough to think he could make the wheelchair girl not the pandering moe cliche I assumed it was, but anyone wearing one pant leg pulled up like that is begging to have it chopped off.
Edit 2: Movie website. How could it not have Kuriyama Chiaki in it? Joe said much the same thing about Nicolas Cage when I sent around the trailer for Kick Ass, so I guess I've just proven that Kuriyama Chiaki is the Nicolas Cage of Japan.

Dulalala 10

This was definitely Mikado's big episode. A lot can be hinted at with a well drawn expression, like this one when someone else explains why they joined the Dollars:

And his transformation at the end was totally bad ass. I want a mouse that shoots sparks.

Fantagraphics throws their hat in the ring

From ANN.

Aside from the excellent news of Takako Shimura's Hourou Musuko/Wandering Son and more of Moto Hagio's work -- I recall someone (Ed Chavez of Vertical?) mentioning that her titles were difficult to acquire -- the most interesting bit is that Matt Thorn will be overseeing the line of manga which comes straight from Shogakukan.

Maybe seeing Hideki Arai's The World is Mine or Kiichi!! isn't a hopeless dream...

I'm a sucker for an Evangelion reference

Think I saw a quick Bayonetta one in there too.

After thinking about it, I'm no longer bothered by how much I enjoy BakaTest; what does bother me is that I'm enjoying it more than anything else airing. Katanagatari is sadly inert, Vampire Bund is neither good nor bad enough to enjoy genuinely or bathetically, and almost nothing else even interests me enough to try it. I'm about six episodes behind on Dulalala, mainly because the first two episodes were too busy laying groundwork to hook me. I'll probably end up waiting and marathoning it like I did Baccano. So, time to clear out the DVD backlog a bit.


Guyver TV actually has a pretty decent story, but unfortunately the show as a whole is terribly bland. It's missing any kind of directorial style, distinctive shot composition, or special attention to detail so it comes off as fairly boring overall. "Sedate" is pretty much the last word you want to use to describe a laser-spewing monster fight, but that's just how this show rolls. The monsters are the highlight of the show, particularly the occasional glimpse of EvilCorp office politics; they're like glimpses into some much more entertaining series marrying Power Rangers and the Office, with various rubber monsters undermining each other's authority and criticizing project overruns. In fact, that kind of takes over the last three episodes entirely, sadly underlining the Guyver's own lack of screen presence, and then it has one of those "time to go read the rest of the manga" non-endings. OK at best.


Fortunately, the Skull Man turned out to be a much better (and slightly gothier) version of Guyver than Guyver was. It's actually surprisingly demanding of the viewer; the plot is quite twisty and treats the title character's own identity and motivations as one of the major mysteries, and there's kind of a Man in the High Castle alternate history happening in the background too (with some very retro touches like all the right-to-left script on the signs). I watched this all in one sitting, and that really helped keep everything straight, especially since many of the male characters look pretty similar. Another mild knock against it is that the sequel hook at the end will probably seem abrupt if you don't know the origins of other Ishinomori heroes like Kikaider and Kamen Rider. I enjoyed this quite a bit, and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes moody pulp action and doesn't mind the occasional missile-shooting cyborg clown showing up.


Watched X-Cross the other day too. I think I mainly want to write about it because hardly anyone else has, but I don't have all that much to say about it either... mainly because I don't want to spoil what fun there is in the surprises. Overall it's OK, maybe even a little above average but I was still left wanting something a little more audacious. Perhaps my barometer has been permanently warped by true loonies like Takashi Miike and Nishimura's posse but X-Cross seems neither fish nor fowl-- it's zany but not campy, tense but not scary, and definitely not splattery despite one or two onscreen amputations. It's a popcorn movie, which is OK if you're expecting that, but I was hoping for better. I note that the notorious cat-eating Shokotan is in this, but she's in Tokyo Gore Police too and I know which movie I enjoyed more.


I also finally checked out Michiko & Hatchin, which at least early on seems to be relying entirely on charm and atmosphere-- so it's a good thing it does both of those really well. I've never been to Brazil, but I've spent a fair bit of time in the Caribbean and it's definitely bringing back memories.

Zebra Miniskirt Police manages to look not at all fun

The news that Aikawa Sho personally cast the girls means we now know exactly what his type is, I guess. Sadly, the rest of it looks more dull than gleefully trashy, serious when it should be over the top.

Refugee Detective

Madoi Shoko graduates from college without a job, and two years of fruitless frantic job hunting leave her penniless and evicted, her parents only willing to take her in if she agrees to an arranged marriage. A desperate appeal to her grandmother lands her a short term position as an assistant to her estranged uncle, a famous mystery novelist. When a homeless "net cafe refugee" friend of his discovers a dead body, Shoko gets wrapped up in a mystery. The refugee detective, it seems, is a police detective so valuable to the force they have kept him on the books for five years, despite his resignation and determined rejection of society.
Most of this was in the solicitation materials for Nisio Isin's first new non-sequel novel in two years. It sounded exactly like the sort of thing he did so well.
The opening thirty pages depicting Shoko's harrowing decline from honor student to eviction really hit a nerve with my own unemployment, echoing a lot of the feelings I have to wrestle with; the first time since the Zaregoto series that Nisio really managed to hone in on something emotionally close to home. I probably should have been worried that this was delivered in a thirty page block of exposition; his tendency to tell rather than show has been a distinct flaw in recent works. But I soldiered happily on through the most boring book he has ever written.
I eventually gave up in the epilogue. I simply could not force myself through the last fourteen pages of this dreary waste of time.
1. The main character has no personality, and plays no part in the story at all.
2. The two male characters' rather unique backgrounds have absolutely no bearing on the story whatsoever.
3. The story itself is a listless afterthought, a plot that could have been machine generated for all the interest he shows in making it dramatic.
Which leads to the question -- if the plot, characters, and thematically suggestive character backgrounds are all of no interest to Nisio Isin whatsofuckingever, then why in God's name did he write this fucking book?
4. It's an attempt to go mainstream. There are no light novel/manga inspired fantasy elements, no pop culture references, no obscure gags, no elaborate wordplay, no delving into quirky personal obsessions, no cunning bait and switch on reader's expectations...in other words, his idea of writing a book for an ordinary audience is to remove all of the things that make him worth reading, all of the things that anybody has ever liked about his novels, and he ends up with a fucking overpriced hardcover volume of utterly lifeless, boring, dead, useless words arranged into a shell of a story that nobody with a fucking pulse would want to read.
It's an apocalyptically bad book, and I can't help but take it as a sign that he has completely lost his path as a writer, and is hopelessly incapable of self-evaluating his own output. It genuinely pains me to write this, but Refugee Detective was so utterly worthless I don't believe I'll be able to buy any future novels by someone who used to be my favorite author without reading reviews first.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get drunk and cry myself to sleep.

Junko's Shamisen

I don't even know what the hell this is, but I want it.

Junko's Shamisen - Trailer from sol friedman on Vimeo.

Dulalala!! 08

Nice little visual homage here.

Quite a bit of anime original content this week, which really worked perfectly; some seriously intense stuff for an intentionally low key set up episode. The writing here continues to elevate the material.

Today's moment of Zen

It might be hard to believe, but Demon Lord Dante is not a very good show.

Yuasa's new thing

Really? We didn't have a tag for Yuasa yet?

Dulalala!! Ep 07

Heiwajima Shizuo versus...the Go Nagai villains!

It's also interesting that they spent this much time setting up Kasuka...obviously, entirely in service to Shizuo backstory, since Kasuka doesn't appear till the fourth novel, which I still don't think we're going to see.

Showdown in Little Tokyo

While I don't really write about it here very often, I'm a pretty big fan of trashy B-movies. I find it absolutely amazing that I'd never seen this one, and never had it recommended to me, and actually wound up watching it because I had mistaken it for something else that was recommended to me.
When you see Dolph Lungren and Brandon Lee together, you know the movie isn't going to be good. Fortunately, everyone involved appears to know the movie is crap, and just tries to have as much fun with it. The same director also did Commando, and he brings some of the same gloriously over the top sensibilities to it. The script also is just a bit better than it should be, mostly by making the white guy the Japanese expert, and the Asian guy hilariously Americanized. This is among the most accurate portrayals of Japanese crime culture on film, except when it gets everything hilariously wrong; it frequently manages both in the same scene, as if the prep was done by people who knew their stuff, but the finishing touches were done by an entirely different crew. For reasons beyond my capacity to understand, Dolph Lungren has the single best Japanese accent I've ever seen on a white guy in a movie. The subtitles also have absolutely nothing to do with most of the Japanese lines. Clearly written with the same improvisational what the fuck that produced the scene below, which you've probably heard quoted without knowing what it was from.

Ip Man

Donnie Yen and Wilson Yip appear to be hell bent on reviving the entire martial arts genre by their damn selves. If we just forget about the incoherent second half of Dragon Tiger Gate, they've done a pretty solid job.

I'm the first to scoff at fools who give a shit about anything but the fight scenes in a kung fu movie, but occasionally a movie comes along that absolutely delivers the fu, and gives a shit about the story, and actually has the script and restraint to pull that story off. It's a bit hard not to compare this to Jet Li's Fearless, a movie that has more or less the same plot -- one kung fu master inspires China to kick out the Japanese -- and may have had more spectacular fight scenes, but was a dreadful, sappy, incoherent, embarrassing mess otherwise. An opinion only strengthened by seeing Ip Man do it so much better.
I used the word restraint for a good reason; histrionics are pretty much inevitable in Chinese movies, but Ip Man more or less avoids them, and when it does indulge, it makes damn sure it's earned them. Which is not to say Donnie Yen doesn't completely blow the one really emotional beat the script hands him, but you're willing to overlook that in the context of a performance that completely drops all traces of his usual ego-maniacal self-absorption and finds the cool in always being polite, cultured, and able to fights swords with a feather. I was particularly impressed with Ip Man's relationship with his wife, which manages to find a new angle on something I think everyone else pretty much gave up on finding new angles on.
Got to admit, I kinda wished I'd waited to see it in theaters, though. It better be coming.

Dammit Jog, you need to stop doing that

How'm I supposed to be motivated to post anything around here when you just effortlessly knock it out of the park like that?

Dulalala!! 06

The Dollars otaku gang hits the spotlight this week.

I pretty much have nothing to say, but was a bit sad they cut the Missing reference along with basically the entire torture scene.
Also, HA, they've switched to spelling her name Celty.

The return of Luc Besson?

I understand his post-hiatus projects have been underwhelming...but then, some people seem to have found his Joan of Arc movie underwhelming. Do not comprehend.
Either way, this certainly looks more interesting than crap looking kid flicks or self-indulgent black and white romances.

How much does De:Vadasy rip off Evangelion?

This much:

Actually, I'm being a little unkind. De:Vadasy is unmistakably part of the herd of shameless Eva clones that stampeded across Japan in the late '90s, but this hilarious shot aside, it isn't quite as obsessed with checking off every single element on the Eva plot outline and character chart as, say, RahXephon. Although people do explode into Tang, and they even share a voice actress, but here she voices "Rei" instead of Misato.

Once upon a time this show's plot would have needed even less summary than Tokyo Majin, but ripping off Eva has gone out of style so here goes: The world's under attack by mysterious aliens and/or robots, and humanity's only hope is an equally mysterious robot that's not entirely under their control, and only likes being piloted by teenagers. But this time, the psychological and religious technobabble is (mostly) replaced with weird sleaziness. De:Vadasy (both show and robot) runs on sexual tension, and to their credit, it's not played as random, pervasive fanservice like Gravion or Godannar. Instead of sublimating their sexual tension in creepy ways, the characters act on it... albeit also in creepy ways. The show has a strong "adapted-from-porn-game" vibe, far more than a lot of anime that actually ARE.

This also means that everything that could possibly be a metaphor or innuendo is made completely literal. Check out one pilot's response to his robot getting hacked:


Writing this up has made me realize that a lot of modern mecha shows have gotten really bizarrely sexualized, but I'm not sure even Aquarion got this freaky. If you do hunt this down, don't expect much closure; De:Vadasy's three episodes are basically a pilot that never got picked up (and it doesn't look like the staff went on to do anything else of note), so there are trailing sequel hooks all over the place, but they're at least classy enough not to end on a cliffhanger. The story doesn't go anywhere too new, although swapping Eva's pseudo-Judeo-Christian symbology for Hindu is sort of interesting... or would have been, if they had much time to do anything with it. I can't recommend this per se, but there are worse things out there. For seekers of the weird and obscure only.

Dulalala 05

Hell yeah, this was definitely the episode where everything started coming together big time. Which is odd, since this episode is primarily about introducing elements from the second and third novels! I guess we're doing all three books at once.

Kida's little thumbs up there was one of my favorite offhand moments. Saika, like Celty, tends to not screencap well, being mostly inky shadow. With red eyes. There's a decent amount of fan service; walking past dudes in yellow right as Kida is warning Mikado off color gangs...and I'm not sure how many people will connect the dots from the offhand reference to Haruna early on to the actual shot of her in bed at the end. I actually don't remember what role she actually played in the novels, so that one's a mystery even to me.
But yeah, everything really came together beautifully at the end there. Fantastic stuff.

...and more elephants

I still haven't seen any Tony Jaa movies except the original Ong Bak, a situation I should probably correct, but blame the lack of Netflix streaming.