NERVUN
02-12-2005, 01:37
I just wanted it noted that the Japanese, no matter how you think they have no humor, are actually very, very strange.
Hanai Sachiko no Karei na Shogai
Japanese film people will often tell you that Japanese directors don't do comedy very well. If they are talking about the box office, they have a point -- the masses are often reluctant to pay for big-screen laughs when they can get them for free on the tube.
But if they are implying an inability to make funny movies in original or outlandish ways, they are flat wrong. Recent case in point: Mitsuru Meike's "Hanai Sachiko no Karei na Shogai (The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai)," which is now playing, with English subtitles, as the late show at the Pole Pole theater in Higashi Nakano. Originally intended for the flea pits that show "pink" (i.e., soft-core) films to elderly heavy breathers, it has been picked up by the international festival circuit and praised by eminent critics and scholars.
No wonder -- the 36-year-old Meike, who has long been laboring in the pink netherworld, has produced a weird, hilarious wet dream for intellectuals. As the film begins, the eponymous heroine (Emi Kuroda) is working as a "teacher" in an "image club" (a sex establishment where the whores role-play in costume). Blessed with a curvy figure, but otherwise entirely ordinary, Sachiko becomes an unwilling witness to a shooting in a coffee shop -- and takes a round from the killer (Takeshi Ito) that lodges in her noggin.
Instead of silencing her forever, however, the bullet sends her IQ soaring. She devours books by Kant, Sartre, Sontag and Chomsky and starts spouting brainy babble, like the Tin Man after getting his diploma from the Wizard of Oz. She visits seedy professor Saeki (Yukijro Hotaru), who authored one of her favorite tomes, and soon has his glasses steaming. Having found his ultimate erotic playmate, who can quote from "The Critique of Pure Reason" as she climaxes, Saeki installs her in his home as a tutor to his nerdy son (Tetsuaki Matsue), while his skeptical wife (Kyoko Hayami) wonders what is really going on behind closed doors. Meanwhile, Sachiko's would-be killer -- a North Korean spy -- is on her trail to not only finish what he started, but to retrieve the cloned finger of George W. Bush that Sachiko picked up on her dazed way out the coffee shop door.
While following the pink formula -- one scene of simulated sex every 10 minutes or so -- the film offers hope to all the guys in the seats who look more like Sachiko's schlumpy sex partners than Brad Pitt. It also rudely satirizes everything from academic pretension to the foreign policy of Bush, whose wiggly finger conducts its own "invasion" between Sachiko's thighs, while an actor wearing a mask of the president smirks from a nearby TV monitor.
Boosted by Emi Kuroda's skilled erotic contortions (as well as by her ability to rattle off her pseudo-intellectual dialogue as though she understands it) and Takao Nakano's deeply wacky script, "Hanai Sachiko" rises above the smutty genre run to minor classic status, sex-comedy division. Coming soon to a film-study curriculum near you.
http://www.japantimes.com/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?ff20051202a2.htm
I'll have to see if I can't find a copy of this somewhere.
Hanai Sachiko no Karei na Shogai
Japanese film people will often tell you that Japanese directors don't do comedy very well. If they are talking about the box office, they have a point -- the masses are often reluctant to pay for big-screen laughs when they can get them for free on the tube.
But if they are implying an inability to make funny movies in original or outlandish ways, they are flat wrong. Recent case in point: Mitsuru Meike's "Hanai Sachiko no Karei na Shogai (The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai)," which is now playing, with English subtitles, as the late show at the Pole Pole theater in Higashi Nakano. Originally intended for the flea pits that show "pink" (i.e., soft-core) films to elderly heavy breathers, it has been picked up by the international festival circuit and praised by eminent critics and scholars.
No wonder -- the 36-year-old Meike, who has long been laboring in the pink netherworld, has produced a weird, hilarious wet dream for intellectuals. As the film begins, the eponymous heroine (Emi Kuroda) is working as a "teacher" in an "image club" (a sex establishment where the whores role-play in costume). Blessed with a curvy figure, but otherwise entirely ordinary, Sachiko becomes an unwilling witness to a shooting in a coffee shop -- and takes a round from the killer (Takeshi Ito) that lodges in her noggin.
Instead of silencing her forever, however, the bullet sends her IQ soaring. She devours books by Kant, Sartre, Sontag and Chomsky and starts spouting brainy babble, like the Tin Man after getting his diploma from the Wizard of Oz. She visits seedy professor Saeki (Yukijro Hotaru), who authored one of her favorite tomes, and soon has his glasses steaming. Having found his ultimate erotic playmate, who can quote from "The Critique of Pure Reason" as she climaxes, Saeki installs her in his home as a tutor to his nerdy son (Tetsuaki Matsue), while his skeptical wife (Kyoko Hayami) wonders what is really going on behind closed doors. Meanwhile, Sachiko's would-be killer -- a North Korean spy -- is on her trail to not only finish what he started, but to retrieve the cloned finger of George W. Bush that Sachiko picked up on her dazed way out the coffee shop door.
While following the pink formula -- one scene of simulated sex every 10 minutes or so -- the film offers hope to all the guys in the seats who look more like Sachiko's schlumpy sex partners than Brad Pitt. It also rudely satirizes everything from academic pretension to the foreign policy of Bush, whose wiggly finger conducts its own "invasion" between Sachiko's thighs, while an actor wearing a mask of the president smirks from a nearby TV monitor.
Boosted by Emi Kuroda's skilled erotic contortions (as well as by her ability to rattle off her pseudo-intellectual dialogue as though she understands it) and Takao Nakano's deeply wacky script, "Hanai Sachiko" rises above the smutty genre run to minor classic status, sex-comedy division. Coming soon to a film-study curriculum near you.
http://www.japantimes.com/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?ff20051202a2.htm
I'll have to see if I can't find a copy of this somewhere.