JFL

Though it seems that Kitano is pulling his own leg, he is primarily taking shots at viewers. Because when the cinematic Kitano finishes considering which genre path to take next, he leaves viewers to watch a phantasmagorical sequence of absurdly wacky gags for over an hour. Furthermore, he directly labels it as the best he could do and as the clear result of careful consideration of current trends and viewer demands.

Nightmare Detective 2 presents empathy and love, i.e. the values set forth at the end of the first Nightmare Detective, as the antithesis of the fear of others. Rather than being a traditional two-part series, the Nightmare Detective diptych is a pair of similar, thematically connected works such as Tsukamoto’s films about suicide, where the bleak and heavily physical Haze is balanced by the meditatively uplifting and emotionally ecstatic Vital.

Nightmare Detective is a precise fusion of genre and creative approach, and not only because Tsukamoto’s formalistic style is absolutely ideal for horror. The film ignores the formulas of Asian horror movies and, thanks to the director’s distinctive grasp of the genre’s general principles (e.g. rationality and irrationality are joined through the investigation in dreams, whereas other horror movies stand in opposition to such approaches), a film has been made that is both an extraordinary contribution to its category and an integral part of Tsukamoto’s filmography.

Annoyingly self-centred emo bullshit that passes off bratty sloppiness as a grand rebellion.

By making the cameras present, End of Watch made the central pair of cops heroes of their own genre movie. Thanks to the characters addressing the camera and showing off in front of its lens, the film shifts from the invasive-documentary aesthetic of reality TV to the exhibitionist first-person style of YouTube videos, whose makers stylise themselves into their own surreal mirror ideal. Furthermore, the chosen form tellingly corresponds to the motif of both protagonists’ unhealthy machismo. The central characters’ disturbing immaturity shows that they see their badges only as tickets into the delightful realm of genre gangsters and their pistols as a guarantee of power and a promise of adventure.

A brilliant metaphor for the theme of childhood and adolescence.

The return of diaspora filmmakers to Vietnam in the new millennium offers a precise mix of historical epic and fight movie with a national-awakening level, as popularised and perfected by Bruce Lee. The Rebel thematises national identity not only by making the Vietnamese martial art vovinam a spectacular attraction for the first time ever, but also through its overall narrative and its constituent motifs.

Wheat brings the baseness of the body into the realm of narrative epics, which are traditionally inhabited by ethereal characters holding lofty ideals. However, it does this in a way that is intimate rather than carnivalesque. The characters are presented through their desires, which make up the image of a life cut in two by war. The narrative strikes a balance between humorously wise satire and a tensely tragic drama suffused with the death and devastation that creeps into the characters’ world as their dreamt-of idyll begins to buckle. In this respect, Wheat differs not only from narrative spectacles such as Red Cliff, which shows adoration of an idealised war, but also from tragic epics like Curse of the Golden Flower. Thanks to the physical style, it doesn’t offer a metaphorical drama about surreal characters representing universal human virtues and vices, but instead presents a brutally close-up look at lives destroyed by war, despite the predominantly superficial historical context.

Despite the unusual nature of its form, Tale of Cinema is a typical work of its creator, as it is based on the same motifs of his previous films, but it offers an original variation on their deployment and a new structure and function of the overall work. The film again deals with the relationship between one woman and two men, but this time it presents a much more complex relationship between the characters forming the central triangle. The film also works with division into two symmetrical halves, but unlike Hong’s previous works, the two halves are more loosely connected in terms of form and dramaturgy (this does not involve repeating or varying the same scenes). However, it thus much more compactly connects the characters and the variation of the motifs is conditioned by the story. Also in this case, the title of the film is the key to understanding it. Tale of Cinema refers to the plot, the structure of the narrative, the characters’ motivations and their interconnections, while also opening up the theme of self-reflexivity, which is richly represented in the film.

Just as the contrasts between acts of violence and the gentle psyches of real youths were incomprehensible to many at the end of the millennium, Toyoda’s switch from (anti-)genre film to emotional visual collage is often met with incomprehension and confusion. As a means of conveying the mood of the time and of the characters to the viewer, it is a noteworthy method, but the insufficient dramaturgy does not allow the concept to resonate. Though Toyoda primarily wanted to film a testimony to the time of his adolescence, PornoStar comes across as a genre film most of the time and it will thus remain as such in the memories of many viewers.