13 Assassins

13 Assassins (2010)

Dir. Takashi Miike

Starring Koji Yakusho, Takayuki Yamada, Goro Inagaki, Masachika Ichimura 

Takashi Miike is one of the most daring and controversial modern directors to come out of Japan in a long time, and has produced some crazy films which are already acknowledged as genre classics (from ICHI THE KILLER to GOZU to SUKIYAKI WESTERN: DJANGO). He's made shocking horror films and family films, and in the period between 2001 and 2002 alone, Miike is credited for directing 15 films (so says Wikipedia). Problem is I, ah, haven't seen any of them. I've seen enough of AUDITION to get the picture, but somehow managed to completely absorb the hype without ever actually watching one of his films all the way through. So whatever his latest --13 ASSASSINS-- has to do with his work as a whole I honestly couldn't say. So to paraphrase Mitch Hedberg, 'when you meet a legend but you don't know his body of work, you have to divert from that fact. Hey Takashi Miike, do you like SEVEN SAMURAI too?"

I'm guessing he does, since 13 ASSASSINS is basically a remake of Kurosawa's seminal 1954 action drama (actually, Wikipedia says it’s a direct remake of a 1963 Japanese film of the same name, but I'm guessing that one borrows pretty heavily from SAMURAI too, even though its supposedly based on real history). But that's OK, if you're gonna remake SEVEN SAMURAI with an extra six characters, you might as well have somewhere interesting to go with the concept, and Miike does nicely giving this thing a reason to exist.

It's a surprisingly straightforward, classic Samurai picture, which surprised me a little given Miike's reputation for shocking and boundary-pushing horror. There are a few little hints of the kind of craziness that seems to have endeared him to my more cinematically educated peers, but mostly they're just flavor in what is otherwise a classy, superficially normal period action piece. Sure, Kurosawa would probably not have showed us the naked quadruple-amputee lady bleeding from her eyes, but a few little touches like that just make the rest of the film seem more conventional. Not that that's a bad thing, but it’s not exactly what I was expecting given Miike's reputation. Seriously, you could show this alongside any number of Samurai films from the last 40 years and only find a few clues that it's a modern film made by this crazy auteur.

The action is quite good, and some of the set pieces are awesome and respectably crazy. There’s a couple oddball touches like these giant walls of heavy tree trunks (never explained) which leap out of nowhere to block escape, or a bunch of flaming bulls released to run down the enemy Spaniard-style. But mostly, the battle sequence is just watching our guys fight against approximately 200+ attackers by any means necessary. They get creative a couple times but I’d say a good 170 die by being slashed by swords. Since all our 13 Assassins wear the same color of dark purple and sport identical haircuts and no facial hair, it can be hard to tell them apart, especially since the camera tends to shake around a little. Not so much as to become incomprehensible, but enough that it’s hard to tell if that’s Hioki, Horii, Higuchi, Balin, Dwalin, Sleepy, Grumpy, or whoever fighting that particular group of faceless opponents with a sword (everyone except one guy uses a sword, so that’s not much help).

Miike compensates for this by having someone yell out the guy’s name every time something major happens to him, which makes it easier to figure out but also gets funny after the seventh time or so. Every once in awhile they’d show this guy with a little heavier build and I’d get excited because he’s easy to recognize, but then I’d see he was using a spear instead of a sword and I’d remember that no wait, there was another heavyset guy and I guess this is the other one.

Pretty much any given frame from the second half of the film looks like this.

What I’m saying is that with 13 instead of 7, you don’t get a whole lot of characterization of anyone except the Yul Brenner of these assassins. Most of the 13 get at most a line or two of personality exposition before they’re off to meet their deaths. Kurosawa probably got it right by paring the number down to a more memorable seven, although to be fair each one has enough flavor that you can pretty much keep them straight (‘right’, you’ll says, ‘it’s that guy who was supposed to train on explosives’, or ‘oh yeah, it’s that guy who was sitting to the left in that one scene and he seemed like he was in charge, I think his name begins with an M’). It still hurts when they start to go down, but it might hurt more if we knew a little more about them and had a few more human moments here and there.

So there’s just more people, more attackers. The geography is generally pretty clear but in the chaos of battle it’s hard to tell where everyone is or how close to their goal they are. Miike gets the most out of having so many attackers by filling up frame after frame to bursting with bodies in motion. It gets a little funny because every time one of our guys catches a moment to breath and it seems like Jesus Fucking Christ, look at those piles of corpses, surely that must be all of them… suddenly in rush what seems like 100 more opponents. I do not exaggerate when I say this happens six or seven times. It’s kind of funny but also helps you see what an exhausting slog it is to mindlessly chop your way through hundreds of opponents to find that one guy you actually want to kill. On the other hand, I’d almost have to say that SEVEN SAMURAI’S final battles feels even more like an exhausting ordeal, and there’s way less cannon fodder. It hardly needs to be said, but the SEVEN SAMURAI comparisons are inevitable and are obviously going to favor Kurosawa.

So what's the different here? Not much. The structure is virtually identical to SEVEN SAMURAI, with an hour of setup and recruiting the 13, and then the entire second half consisting of the final battle. Half setup, half payoff. Although these folks are assassins out to kill the Shogun's brother instead of protect a village, they set up their ambush in an abandoned village so it still has a kind of siege element in a single location. They’re trying to keep people from leaving rather than keep them from entering, so that’s a nice twist, but the similarities are really too overwhelming to ignore. If there's a difference here which I haven't seen in a samurai picture before, it's in the subtext.

This is a film about suicide. It starts with a man committing hara-kiri in lieu of making a direct complaint, and he’s not gonna be the last. All 13 assassins are working with the explicit knowledge that they’re going to their deaths, and they’re just going to have to find a way to be OK with that. Hell, it beats dying peacefully after a long and uneventful retirement.

Allow me to explain: The stage is set in the waning days of feudal Japan, and life is pretty peaceful in its rigidly ordered way. That seems great unless you’re a samurai, whose only purpose in life is to fight to defend the Shogunate. These peaceful times are killing the trade, and most of the Samurai haven’t seen any real combat in a long time, making their lives kind of pointless and empty. We meet our protagonist, Shinzaemon (frequent Kiyoshi Kurosawa player Koji Yakusho, CURE, SEANCE), sitting alone fishing and –with no wife, children, or work—pretty much just waiting out the clock. He’s thrilled when he hears that he’s going to get to die in the service of his profession. He’s been called out of semi-retirement because of the one person who does still seem to be enjoying his job, the Shogun’s half-brother Naritsugu (played to the hilt with bored malevolence by Goro Inagaki). Naritsugu is the one who de-limbed that poor gal I mentioned above, and he’s a hateful sociopath of breathtaking proportions, raping and murdering with impunity due to his high social status. Everyone but everyone knows this guy has to go, but due to their rigid social hierarchy, not only can no one do anything about it, no one can even bring themselves to say it. When he finally makes the mistake of killing people with connections, Shinzaemon is called in and told using a series of artful euphemisms that Naritsugu needs to no longer be in his position of power. They leave it at that, and so does everyone else. The very concept of conspiring against their hierarchy is virtually unthinkable, and the Samurai are just happy that someone gave them something to die for that they can secretly know is actually the right thing to do.

And that’s the genius of this film. It’s about this awful open secret that everyone is party to, and yet no one can acknowledge aloud. Everyone --probably even Naritsugu-- knows that he’d be better off dead, but instead of just killing him and calling it a day, everyone’s going to have to die so that they can claim the system is working. That’s where the film’s most interesting conflict comes in, in the form of Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), Naritsugu’s head Samurai. He knows better than anyone what a stunning piece of shit Naritsugu is, and it’s written on his face the whole film. He has the trapped horror of a man being gradually eaten alive from the inside. But this system has given him only one purpose in life, which is to defend his lord. If he does his job, he has to spend his life and others’ lives to protect someone actively engaged in making the word an exponentially worse place… but if he casts aside that system, his life has been completely meaningless. The horror of that conflict is constantly dancing in his eyes, but the most he can ever do to admit it is to halfheartedly say that his circumstance is unfortunate for reasons which he doesn’t elaborate on.

This is what makes the film more than merely a slightly bloodier SEVEN SAMURAI. It becomes a commentary on living in a system which so inflexibly assigns value to lives and jobs. Shinrouko, Shinzaemon’s nephew and one of the 13, is first encountered in a brothel/gambling house type of situation where he’s spending cash, getting hammered, and presumably fucking absolutely everyone in sight, wasting his talents as a samurai on booze and games of chance. Shinzaemon’s quest convinces him to stop his fun and take up the sword again. That’s where most films would stop the character arc, but by the end of this one is becomes pretty clear that he had it right the first time. Everything here is a terrible waste of life and effort, and it’s all because the feudal system which gives them no options except to walk happily into suicide and thank the guy who sent them there.

Without needing to say anything explicit about it, Miike demonstrates how horribly trapped everyone is by this system which survives entirely on the strength of people refusing to acknowledge how flawed it is. No one complains, everyone acts honorably, everyone does exactly what good samurai are supposed to do, and most films like this would leave us to be impressed by their discipline and commitment. But Miike ends the film by focusing on the piles of bodies and silently daring us to argue that this was a good use of their lives. Without comment, he informs us that the system of feudalism fell about 20 years later (he doesn’t mention that their feudalism would eventually twist itself into fascism, which brought along most of the same problems to the same culture). It’s not an anti-war picture, it just wants you to think a little bit about what kinds of things are really worth dying for, and if you should trust a society where dying for a cause is more important than living for one.

On the other hand, this poster makes a pretty compelling argument for violence.

Hobo With a Shotgun

Hobo With a Shotgun (2011)

Dir. Jason Eisener

Starring Rutger Hauer and who the hell else do you need besides Rutger Hauer? Also Molly Dunsworth, Brian Downey, and Gregory Smith.

So I saw a bunch of fine movies recently, from the likes of Errol Morris, Warner Herzog, and Kim Ji-Woon. We'll get to those in a bit. But for some reason, the film I really want to talk about right now and can't stop telling people about is a sleazy, low-rent Canadian Z-grade exploitation feature called HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN. I saw it on Saturday and frankly have already put more thought into it than I've ever expended on a Terrence Malick film (no offense, Terrence. There's room in my heart for both you and a dirty, disheveled Rutger Hauer frantically blowing people away with a shotgun).

So you probably know the origins of this thing if you've made it this far into the review, but let's have a quick overview for the folks just joining us. HOBO is yet another inexplicable spin-off of the commercially unsuccessful and mildly amusing Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino exploitation homage GRINDHOUSE, which featured period-accurate fake trailers of ridiculous grindhouse films which for some reason keep getting made into real films which are actually better than the original real film which sported the fake trailers. In the case of HOBO, director Jason Eisener was the winner of a make-your-own-grindhouse-trailer contest, creating easily the most authentic-looking and focused of the many trailers (to my eye, only Edgar Wright's DON'T trailer, produced with his usual fastidious eye for detail, even approaches the legitimacy of the HOBO trailer). Well, they had to know after GRINDHOUSE, PLANET TERROR, DEATH-PROOF, and MACHETE that there was not really any money to be made with this concept, but for some reason somebody in Canada gave the kid some cash and HOBO made the jump from meta-joke to actual film.

And you know what? This Eisener kid runs fucking circles around Tarantino, Rodriguez, Eli Roth, and Rob Zombie. He made a better movie out of the concept than all of them, and, crucially, he did it honestly. Now, I enjoyed the GRINDHOUSE twins (the movies, not the babysitter twins) and MACHETE quite a bit. They're fun films packed with their respective directors' usual strengths (and weaknesses). PLANET TERROR has some respectably outrageous concepts, DEATH PROOF has some classic Tarantino dialogue and great stunts, MACHETE has Machete himself, which turns out to be worth more on its own than the three movies worth of plot they stuffed around him. And Jeff Fahey also.

But as much as they got the details right on the trailers and intertitles and whatnot, none of those are real sub-B-grade exploitation cinema. They're big expensive movies made by successful Hollywood directors who grew up on that cinema and think it's cute to go on talk shows and gratuitously throw around the word "grindhouse." Digitally scratching up the "film" to make it look old doesn't automatically make your multi-million dollar big studio-funded massively advertised genre joke a grindhouse film. All those films are consummately professional, big-budget (comparatively), tongue-in-cheek homages to exploitation films, not the real deal. No one at all familiar with that category of films would confuse the two; they're too self-conscious about how clever they are at recreating the minutiae of a now pretty-much dead type of movie.*

HOBO is having none of that ironic meta shit. It is not a homage. It is not a satire. It genuinely is the most imaginatively twisted ill-tempered perverse borderline psychopathic film of 1985. It absolutely never feels like its trying to mimic a sleazy 80s exploitation feature -- it just IS one. You could show this film next to Albert Pyun's RADIOACTIVE DREAMS and you'd be completely unable to tell which was genuinely made in a cocaine-fueled haze in 1985. If anything, DREAMS might look more like the cheeky parody of 80s schlock clichés (it wasn't). HOBO has everything you'd want out of a cheap Reagan-era exploitation thriller: apocalyptic fears of a collapsing society, roving gangs of randomly violent outrageously garbed street punks, shameless mega-acting** bolstered by equally extreme photography, intense abstract color schemes, sleazy sexual violence, nauseating 80s new wave pop, and lots and lots of bloody squibs. All these things are exaggerated to the point of distortion, but the key is that they're never exaggerated for the sake of parody. They're outrageous because this is a genuinely outrageous movie, not because some punk kid wanted to poke fun at a kind of movie which hasn't been made for 20+ years that were made under punishing practical constraints and yet still managed to be more original and memorable than most of the crap that they try to pass off as exploitation today and now stuff is more expensive and teenagers swear all the time and you kids get off my lawn.

Anyway, I’ll admit I was a little scared going into this one. The trailer looked sleazy and depraved in an awesome way, but some of the feedback I started to hear had me worried that this was actually going to be too much for me. Specifically, I was horrified by this comment by “Charles” on http://www.outlawvern.com/:

I would agree that both HOBO and WANTED are both cruel films, but as mean spirited and cruel as WANTED is it is no where near as cruel or sadistic as HOBO.

Well, WANTED was a film which, despite being one of the sharpest and best-made action films in a long time, was actually so morally bankrupt that it lost me and stopped being fun. Its not that it was too violent or sadistic; it’s that it was so fetishistically committed to its worship of killing, and so openly contemptuous of anything resembling human decency. Its idea of morals is to never disobey the magic loom that tells you to kill people. I’m not claiming to be the world’s greatest humanitarian, but to me there’s a huge difference in using ultra-violence to help people you care about and using ultra-violence to further the agenda of a magic loom. One is way easier for me to get behind. And fortunately HOBO understands that.

In fact, that’s what makes it work. It’s a work stunning depravity, bound and determined to push some buttons most movies won’t dare touch – but that’s what being exploitation cinema is all about. Its saving grace is that – just like its protagonist-- underneath the layers of filth and crazy there’s a center of basic human kindness. Our nameless Hobo comes to town not to get vengeance against anyone who wronged him, but to buy a lawnmower and start his own business. He’s trying to start his life again in the humblest possible way, and willing to do some degrading things just for the chance. WANTED would have found him pathetic, but I’ll be damned if the makers of this film aren’t genuinely sad that it doesn’t work out for him (SPOILER: He buys a shotgun instead. But the lawnmower ingeniously returns later in the film!). The central tension in the film is not if he will kill his enemies, but if he’ll be able to get out of the vigilante game alive and maybe get a chance at redemption. WANTED and HOBO trade in the same love of imaginatively violent film, but to me their different perspectives on what’s valuable makes all the difference.

I think this about sums it up.

Anger and aggression are worthwhile things to reflect upon, and even to create violent fantasies about --but to me, they’re worthwhile only to the extent to which the focus of the anger and aggression is worthwhile. Our Hobo is angry because he sees a young woman stuck in an unbearably awful situation which she can’t escape without his help. Weirdly enough in a film called HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN, I think this basic kindness is the thing that the filmmakers like most about the character. There’s a certain enjoyment to watching him blow away the appallingly deranged antagonists of the film, but if you watch closely after his initial rampage, he’s almost always on the defensive. The few times he’s not, he doesn’t look cool and sexy – he looks dirty and crazy, and the characters react to him with horror. He feels like he’s been given no choice but to resort to violence, and maybe he’s right – but the movie’s subtext is about wasted potential, and there’s a genuine regret that its come to shotgun violence instead of yard maintenance.

There’s even a fairly coherent religious allegory at the end, about a god that would create a world ugly enough that someone has to be sacrificed to put an end to it. It’s about as overt as you would want out of something like this, and yet, oddly, the more I think about it the more appropriate --and even thoughtful!-- it seems.

Casting Rugter Hauer in any movie is always a stroke of genius, and the filmmakers are wise enough to let him carry the film. He’s just as good as you might imagine, making his nameless character a complex mix of biblical wrath, awkward sweetness, and pitiable helplessness. There’s no backstory save for some very slight implications that he may have suffered a painful personal loss somewhere a long time ago that led him to this sorry state, but Hauer somehow ties his extreme traits together to make the character feel complete and tragic, while still reminding us that he’s a complete trainwreck and probably a little mentally ill. He’s pathetic, in a way, (listen to him awkwardly fail to make a metaphor about bears as he desperately tries to say something meaningful to someone he wants to help) but there’s a fierce dignity to Hauer’s steely blue eyes which ensure that he’s never a joke. Nobody else in the movie is anywhere near as good as Hauer is, but everyone seems gamely committed to the exaggerated reality of the film. The antagonists are colorful, myriad, and suitably despicable, and even the leading lady (while not the greatest actress in the world) gives it her all.

And really, that’s what makes this a special one. When you hear a title as brilliantly zen as ZOMBIE STRIPPERS or SNAKES ON A PLANE, you better start lowering your expectations because you know the filmmakers are just gonna coast on that title and not worry about making the great film that ZOMBIE STRIPPERS, by all rights, ought to be. Or worse still, they may confuse an elegantly simple exploitation concept with lowbrow entertainment, and are going to make some winking self-conscious bullshit falling all over itself to remind you that it’s in on the joke. Here, blessedly, there is no joke. The people making this thing cared about it enough to want to make it good. They cared enough to put some artistry into the camera framing, into the sets, into the costumes. They cared enough to write a script which has enough confidence in the concept not to overload it with a bunch of unnecessary crap but which is also unafraid to delve a little into what it represents and what it might symbolize in this old crazy world which has plenty of sick, sad, depraved things in it, but is sadly lacking in hobos with shotguns. 

Which reminds me, they really need to make that ENTER THE VOID sequel about post-apocalyptic supernatural motorcycle killers.

When exploitation films were really being produced in earnest, they catered to a market which wanted to see something it couldn't get in the mainstream media -- be it explicit sex, shocking violence, or just bizarre concepts which normal people would never take seriously. With the arrival of the internet, there's not much room left for that anymore, but HOBO reminds us that the ones worth remembering were products of more than cheap shocks. They were labors of twisted imagination and often herculean efforts under terrible conditions, borne out of a desire to create something truly memorable, if not exactly enlightening. Jason Eisner and his crew are a genuine testament to that spirit, and their film is a reflection of that continued tradition of dreaming weird.

*BLACK DYNAMITE --despite being a more direct satire-- is closer to the real deal. It looks cheap because it WAS cheap. It's much more committed to the look, feel, motifs, music, and even structure of 70s Blaxploitation than any GRINDHOUSE spin-off was. But still, although it recreates the details a little more honestly and consistently than the GRINDHOUSE boys, its obviously a parody and no one who watched it all the way through would be fooled.

**Mega-Acting is a trademark of Vern at http://www.outlawvern.com/