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I’m used to Takashi Miike working on multiple levels by now. He did this before with Great Yokai War, which was a kiddy movie in the guise of a satire of same … or maybe the other way around, depending on how old you are and how conscious you are of the wink-wink approach to such material.

Tatsunoko must have liked Yokai, ‘cos they put Miike in the driver’s seat for a live-action remake of their show Yatterman and gave him a budget that was probably the GNP of several small countries. What he gave them back was a mostly straight-up adaptation of the original, with physical gags galore and terrific set / costume / prop design — but with his trademark nudges-in-the-audience’s-ribs dialed down a bit. It’s just subversive enough to be funny, but not quite transcendent in the way the best of Miike’s movies seem to reach by not only poking fun at the goings-on but squeezing them until they popped.

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During the Sixties there surfaced in Japan a whole slew of films which expressed dismay for how that country’s newly-won material prosperity came at the expense of a great many other things the Japanese barely seemed aware they were losing. Some of those films were allegorical (the monster movie Matango), some were phantasmagorical (Jigoku), some political (The Bad Sleep Well). Pleasures of the Flesh combines all three, and then some.

When Nagisa Oshima created Flesh, as the first project for his independent production company Sozo-sha, it was nominally billed as a “pink film” — that peculiar Japanese subgenre which often contains as much hard-core emotional violence as it does soft-core sexual imagery. But it borrows just as much from Hitchcock’s psychological thrillers, film noir, and melodrama about doomed love; in the end it’s a movie that is the product of no one genre.

If I have to choose...

No, I don't like a false dichotomy any more than the rest of you. But if I have to choose, I'll choose.

Specifically, if I have to choose between a technically-meticulous piece of work without a shred of soul, and a flawed but ambitious / quirky production, I'll have what's behind Door #2 each and every time.

Some of that, I'm sure, is Underdog Syndrome. I empathize with the guys who tried to do it their own way. God love the bastards; they deserve it. I love it to death when there is a real risk, a real shoot-for-the-moon quality about something that tells you people were trying not just to repeat themselves, let alone anyone else.

I got to thinking about this when working on a piece about an almost-forgotten animated production, Twice Upon a Time, which was co-financed by George Lucas and has all but slipped down the memory hole. I rewatched Time recently, and was knocked out by it. It's not perfect — what is? — but it is distinctive. It's clearly the product of people who were happy to take risks and managed to get away with a good many of them.

Lucas's involvement in the film was minimal, which explains how he was able to drag director John Korty away from something that original and get him to work on the thunderingly awful Ewok Adventure movie for TV. And then when Lucas finally got back behind the camera, he gave us the prequels, which are the absolute last cynical word in Film As Managed Risk.

I have a hard time describing the level of disappointment, and later annoyance and outrage, that I felt in '99 when I saw Episode 1. What bugged me most was how dull it was, how prosaic; how despite having a whole farrago of things zipping past the camera, the camera itself never seemed to be all that interested to be there in the first place. It was the cinematic equivalent of a house decorated by a nouveau riche, someone who clutters the place up with tapestries and paintings and rugs, and yet has no personal attachment to any of it. He put those things there because he thought that's what a filmmaker does, not because there was any compelling argument from within himself to do it.

The other two films simply repeated the same mistake with different scenery and props. Not in a single moment did I feel like there was an artist, or even a showman, at work. It was all technique and technology in the service of a story that had never progressed beyond a template that needed its blanks filled in. There were no happy accidents, no lovable mistakes. It had all the charm of a form letter from a ex-lover.

The irony, as has been said before, is that this happened with films Lucas had total creative control over. It was not because someone else had come along and gutted his work. Time had been caught in a struggle between Korty and one of its other producers, who wanted a more adult-toned production, and which resulted in two different versions of the film circulating amongst bootleggers. The movie also suffered because of the bankruptcy of the Ladd Corporation. But despite all that, it still shines.

With Lucas, I felt that once all disciplinary pressure had been removed (in the form of his peers, like Marcia or Brian de Palma), he was free to do what he wanted — which was to create something that outwardly resembled the entertainments of his youth but was inwardly without spirit. He was in a position that almost every single one of the people who have followed in his wake would have killed to occupy, and he blew it. Who in this industry — who in any creative field — have the kind of total control that he did, and on the scope he could command? Not ten others; maybe not even five. He didn't realize his worst enemy was now his own limited vision and his atrophied imagination.

I worry that this may be interpreted as leading up to a truism: that adversary is the mother of creativity, or something along those lines. Too easy. I'm thinking more along the lines that anyone who sets out to remove the obstacles before him, without knowing what others are now in his way to replace them — because they are always there, even if you can't see them — is only pulling the wool over their own eyes. Probably their whole head, come to think of it.

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The difference between an “eccentric” and a poseur is, I think, a matter of empathy. An eccentric inspires fondness and even a little reverence, in part because the true eccentric isn’t putting on airs. He really is what he is. A poseur does it for the attention, and in such a way that you can tell they could just as easily be doing anything else.

Jazzman / bandleader / multimedia artist Sun Ra was as genuine an eccentric as could be, in much the same way that Wesley Willis or Jandek or Armand Schaubroeck were unfakeable. Any one of them could have taken shorter roads to drawing attention to themselves, but all of them, Ra included, wanted to express what they felt was themselves rather than simply wink at the audience. And when Ra did wink at the audience, it was in such a way that it didn’t blow his cover. His showmanship was not a pose in itself, but one of the genuine forms his eccentricity took — something, again, that can’t be faked.

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When I heard work had started on live-action film version of Osamu Tezuka’s MW — easily the bleakest, most nihilistic work ever produced by a man not conventionally known for his dark side — I was skeptical. How were they going to do justice to a story that features an antihero so repellent that discovering he engages in bestiality is one of the lesser shocks we get pummeled with?

They haven’t. The movie is a stripped-down rounding of the bases in Tezuka’s graphic novel, where a lot of details have been condensed or omitted entirely in favor of doing justice to the angry core of the story. This has not been a catastrophic decision, because the movie they made from those details isn’t a bad one. It looks great, it’s entertaining to watch, and it contains just enough of the troubling elements of the original to be worth it. It’s just that, as with all such adaptations, it’s impossible to not compare it detail-for-detail with the original.

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Before Bong Joon-Ho came to the attention of Western audiences with Memories of Murder, The Host and most recently Mother, he had made Barking Dogs Never Bite — although for years the only way you could see it was through the Korean DVD import circuit or a region-free rental service. It’s finally been released domestically thanks to the good graces of Magnolia, and it’s a raucous, bitterly funny movie that makes it clear Bong’s cynicism and social commentary were with him from the git-go.

Dogs takes place in a sprawling apartment complex somewhere in urban South Korea, a place where you wind up knowing your neighbors without trying. One of the tenants is a young graduate student, Yun-ju (Sung-jae Lee) up for a shot at a professor’s title. He’s hemmed in from all sides: his wife is pregnant (she has a craving for walnuts that drives him to distraction); his senior expects to be bribed well to give the young man even a chance at a position; and there’s this annoying dog somewhere in the building that just won’t shut up. In a fit of pique, he grabs what he thinks is the dog, pens it up in an old bureau in the building’s basement … and then discovers not only did he snag the wrong pup, but the building’s janitor has gleefully seized on this opportunity to boil up some dog stew.

More excerpts from the Kurtz interview (see yesterday's post):

No one’s been able to read the audience, ever, so you have to kind of rely on your own instincts. In the case of Star Wars, George and I had dinner one night, and we were looking through the paper while we were editing American Graffiti. We were looking through the newspaper, looking at the film listings to see if there was anything out there worth going to see. And, there wasn’t. Discussion came around to Flash Gordon, and wouldn’t it be great to have a Flash Gordon kind of science fiction movie – that would be great. We’d love to see that. That’s sort of the gestation of Star Wars – and that was based on something that we wanted to see, that we would pay to go see! And no one was making it.

Programmers call it "scratching your own itch". Creative types do it all the time: they ask themselves what they would want to see or read that isn't out there, and then they go make it. There's some irony in that by the time they're done, they're often too exhausted to savor the fruits of their own work. (Do you know of any writer who re-reads his own novels for pleasure? I can't think of a single one. I know I count myself out of that group.)

... a lot of films that have come out since the ’70s have been quite shallow. Good looking films, but not much to say. Maybe that’s part of the problem, the filmmakers haven’t lived enough. Their entire experience is based on old movies, rather than life. As such, they’re referential all the time – referential to old movies rather than to life experience. So I suppose the only answer to that is material that isn’t that way, material that’s written by novelists or screenwriters that have a substantial amount of real life experience and have interesting things to say about various topics.

... the key is that the original Star Wars, and to a great extent Empire, resonated with the audience because there seemed to be something there that appealed to them. Saying something to them that they may not have even noticed – it was subconscious and they wanted to see it, they wanted to be immersed in that experience ...

Kurtz talks elsewhere in the same piece about the pre-film-school Hollywood, where apprenticeship and bringing one's own native experiences to the table were the ways you proved your value. I always felt that one of the by-products of such an arrangement was to be exposed to precisely the kind of real-life experience that is needed to create something of lasting value.

Yoichi Sai had something similar to say in an interview with Midnight Eye:

Technique isn't very difficult to learn. I want each person to grow under the strength of their own imagination. What I want to teach them is that there are many steps to this methodology of finding your own way. Frankly speaking, technical instruction can all be taught in no more than three months. You don't need to go to film school for four years. Three months is plenty.

He leaves it to us to ponder how many prospective film students actually have much imagination to drawn on.

If the name "Gary Kurtz" doesn't ring any bells off the top of your head, it ought to. He was George Lucas's producer for American Graffiti and Star Wars; he got The Dark Crystal into production; and in this remarkable interview at A Site Called Fred, he talks in great detail about his experiences with all of the above and more.

The interview is loaded front-to-back with fascinating material, but I've chomped out a few of what I feel are the most trenchant quotes.

... the studios are now all owned by big conglomerates who are interested in making money to the exclusion of everything else. Now, the studios always wanted to make money – that was one of their reasons for being in existence – but the men who ran the studios, no matter how difficult they were, they had some sense of what being a showman was like. They were willing to take chances on oddball projects, and you don’t see that as much anymore.

... I think one of the reasons that there’re so few good movies is that that process has been truncated so much. Too many films go into production before they’re ready.

It's hard for that not to happen when the studio is booking a release date into theaters the day the project is greenlighted.

... the way [Star Wars] was in the beginning, in the first place, it was that way because that’s all we could afford and it worked fine. I’m just not a great believer in messing with what is done. It may not be perfect, and as I said a long time ago, there’s nothing that is. No movie is perfect, and every filmmaker is going to sit and watch a movie that he made 10 years ago, or 30 years ago, or 50 years ago, and say, “Oh, I wish I could have done that better.”

... Jean Renoir said in a documentary interview that we did with him when we were all film students, that something that he learned from his father was that, for an artist, the most important thing is to know when you’re done, and leave it. Of course for a painter, it’s absolutely crucial, because you put too much extra paint on and you’ve ruined the painting. With a filmmaker, you have a certain amount of recourse and you can change it again, but the principle is still the same – to know when you’re done, and when it’s over, and when it’s finished – and you walk away. It’s critical, because you can be like Kubrick, and you can work on it forever, and it’s still not going to get any better.

He goes easy on Lucas, on the whole, but I suspect that's because he's seen the man a lot more close-up than most of us have.

He does, however, insist that Han shot first.

The most depressing thing about Lucas's perfectionism — or maybe obsessive-compulsive behavior would be a better description — is how it has come at the detriment of being able to properly appreciate one of the few genuine cultural milestone in both film and popular culture in the last 30 to 40 years. It's as if Ted Turner had withdrawn and destroyed every non-colorized copy of Casablanca. To say that it's Lucas's film and he can do what he wants with is is factually correct, but spiritually vacant and utterly heartless to boot.

It's hard not to react skeptically to word of the death of a man whose work you love and respect. When word began circulating that Satoshi Kon's death had been reported on Twitter by a colleague, there was shock and dismay. It couldn't be right.

Then Otakon's own staff confirmed it, after talking directly to Masao Maruyama of Madhouse (one of Kon's own colleagues), and the gloom set in for real. The man had only just hit his stride, it seemed. His newest production hadn't even been released in English yet (let alone completed), and there was word circulating he'd been in the middle of yet another project.

There wasn't a production of his that I didn't admire in some way. Perfect Blue was the first time I'd seen someone take conceits from giallo horror productions and apply them to animation — not just the visuals but the pacing, the plot convolutions, the atmosphere of paranoia and dread. Paranoia Agent was episodic TV at its best, further evidence (along with shows like The Wire) that the format has evolved into a storytelling methodology on a par with the novel. Tokyo Godfathers wasn't quite as flat-out visionary as his other work, but I had an affection for it all the same; it showed he could do more with his direction and character designs than just bludgeon you with visual overload.

And then there was Paprika, which more than a few people (me included) believed to be Christopher Nolan's uncredited inspiration for Inception. (It's debatable at best, since the original novel wasn't even translated into English when Nolan started work on his project some eight years back.) Paprika deviated from its source material, but for some of the same reasons Mamoru Oshii broke from the original story for Ghost in the Shell to create his movie: to use it as a launchpad for his own ideas.

What I liked best about Kon was how even his most outré concepts were made accessible and engaging. I liked the way he populated Paprika with his own insights and imagery, far more so than the way Oshii did with Ghost. (You can only see so many basset hounds before you want to reach through the screen and shake Oshii by the shoulders.) Too many artists of substance are inward-looking, revisiting personal obsessions that can only mean so much to an audience. Kon strove to turn his inner mirror always outwards. Andrew Osmond's overview of his work dubbed him "the Illusionist", but like all magicians he understood the best magic trick is the one that lets you see reality all the more clearly. He dazzled you with brilliance, and not because he was also trying to baffle you with you-know-what.

It will be strange to see his last work in this light, and to ruminate on what else could have been. If nothing else, I hope his passing encourages that many more people — not just anime fans, but moviegoers, anyone interested in visionary art generally — to revisit his work, and to continue down the road he had been building.

Hey, Mom! Look what I found in the basement!

• Chaos (Kaosu) [2002/08/08]
• Cat Soup [2005/06/06]
• Burst City [2006/06/06]
• Bullet Ballet [2003/03/03]
• The Brotherhood of the Wolf [2002/10/10]
• Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia [2004/12/12]
• Breaking News [2006/02/02]
• Russian Ark [2003/09/15]