Wednesday 30 December 2015

1000 Anime Crossover: Catching Up With 2015 Reviews

With 2015 nearing its end, this will be the last post for the year for the blog, covering everything I've reviewed so far on my other blog 1000 Anime which hasn't been linked to or rated by the system on this site already. From now on, these 1000 Anime review tie-ins will be monthly and will combine all the anime reviews from that month into one tidy block.

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/
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#12: Lensman (1984)
Directors: Kazuyuki Hirokawa and Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Screenplay: Soji Yoshikawa
Voice Cast: Toshio Furukawa/Kerrigan Mahan (as Kimball Kinnison); Chikao Ohtsuka/Michael McConnohie (as Peter vanBuskirk); Katsuya Kobayashi/Gregory Snegoff (as DJ Bill); Mami Koyama/Edie Mirman (as Clarissa MacDougal); Nachi Nozawa/Steve Kramer (as Worsel); Seizo Katou/Tom Wyner (as Lord Helmuth)

Abstract Spectrum: None
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

An incredibly weird debut in hindsight for Yoshiaki Kawajiri. Known for his realistic character designs, dark and moody atmosphere, and lashings of violence and sex in his cinematic work, this drastically contradicts with the perceived viewpoint of him, an adaptation of a popular Western sci-fi novel series turned into a Star Wars rip-off. Even if he's made anime that goes against his public image, this is very alien and belongs to a period before Akira (1988) burst internationally that'll be disarming for some anime fans, lengthy and sometimes expansive animated blockbusters from a period in the early and mid-eighties that is different from anything made after Akira. Barring some trippy three dimensional animation from early eighties computers, Lensman is very un-abstract. It's certainly not the LSD dream that the theatrical Space Adventure Cobra film made two years earlier was.

Personal Opinion:
For my full viewing, follow the link HERE.

From https://asianflixs.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/roujin-z-screenshot.png
#13: Roujin Z (1991)
Director: Hiroyuki Kitakubo
Screenplay: Katsuhiro Otomo
Voice Cast: Chisa Yokoyama (as Haruko Mitsuhashi); Shinji Ogawa (as Takashi Terada); Chie Satō (as Nobuko Ohe); Kōji Tsujitani (as Mitsuru Maeda); Hikojiro Matsumura (as Kijuro Takazawa)

Abstract Spectrum: None
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Growing into a personal favourite of mine, Roujin Z is also a very underrated nineties anime. It's not however abstract in the slightest despite its unconventional narrative, about an elderly man being a guinea pig for a nuclear powered care bed that goes amuck. Wacky with a heart to it is an appropriate description of the feature film instead.

Personal Opinion:
For my full viewing, follow the link HERE.

From https://avvesione.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/gatchaman_crowds-01-
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#14: Gatchaman Crowds (2013)
Director: Kenji Nakamura
Screenplay: Kenji Sugihara, Shinsuke Onishi and Toshiya Ono
Voice Cast: Maaya Uchida (as Hajime Ichinose); Daisuke Namikawa (as Jō Hibiki); Ryota Ohsaka (as Sugune Tachibana); Aya Hirano (as Paiman); Ayumu Murase (as Rui Ninomiya); Daisuke Hosomi (as O.D); Kotori Koiwai (as Utsu-tsu); Mamoru Miyano (as Berg Katze)

Abstract Spectrum: Pulp/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

A drastic reinterpretation of the famous Gatchaman franchise, this urban set series which is as obsessed with the effect the interweb has on people as it is heroes fighting bad guys has a very deliberate, bright tone that's different for other anime, a fun series with some very intelligent ideas casually thrown at the viewer with greater subtlety that other works. It's a pretty straightforward story for its twelve episodes however. The really interesting prospect is if I see  director Kenji Nakamura's previous 2007 series Mononoke, a period set occult and horror themed work that has been described as having very unconventional (and beautiful) animation and at least one story within its various ones that's incredibly weird. A further tantalising prospect is that the anime and live action screenwriter Chiaki J. Konaka, an auteurist voice known for very unconventional gems like Serial Experiments Lain (1998) and Malice@Doll (2001), wrote some of the scripts, which gives the series a huge chance of getting on the Abstract List knowing of his writing trademarks.

Personal Opinion:
For my full viewing, follow the link HERE

Wednesday 23 December 2015

Music of the Abstract: Mr. Armageddon by Locomotive



It has been a while since I've completed a Music of the Abstract article, so to compensate for a lack of a main review during Christmas week, I offer a sample of lush psychedelic rock. Heavy use of orchestra, no lead guitar and very memorable lyrics throughout the album contribute to something that, going through it for the first time, manages to skirt the twee that I find in a few British albums from between the late sixties and early seventies without losing grit to it.

Unfortunately Locomotive only released the album Mr. Armageddon comes from, We Are Everything You See (1970), never to create anything beyond it. For every band that managed to do well in the seventies, even as a cult group, many are left with a sole shining gem of an LP only before they vanish. Thankfully these one-offs, including Locomotive's, can even be found on Spotify.

Sunday 13 December 2015

Death Powder (1986)

From https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/film-poster/7/6/4/0/9/76409-
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Director: Shigeru Izumiya
Screenplay: Shigeru Izumiya
Cast: Shigeru Izumiya; Takichi Inukai; Rikako Murakami; Mari Natsuki; Kiyoshirô Imawano

Synopsis: In an unknown time period in the future, three individuals preside over a female android called Guernica (Mari Natsuki). Two of them, a man (Takichi Inukai) and a woman (Rikako Murakami), must contend with the third, an older man played by the film's director Shigeru Izumiya, who has become protective of Guernica to the point that he will harm his compatriots immediately on sight. Mutants are after them as well, and when Guernica projects a white powder from her form over one of the central trio, it induces mutation and hallucinations culminating, once the body becomes too weak for the growing consciousness, to a horrifying transformation for the whole trio.

2022 Writer's Edit: This is not the only feature made by Shigeru Izumiya, contrary to the original review. There is at least one credited before Death Powder on IMDB, called The Harlem Valentine Day (1982), so this review has this correction.

Death Powder is the only feature made by Shigeru Izumiya, who is more well known as a political and very prolific folk singer who also acts a lot, including voice acting in the Studio Ghibli film Pom Poko (1994). You don't expect, say, Bob Dylan to create a cyberpunk predecessor sandwiched between the early films of Sogo Ishii or Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), but it wouldn't have been a surprise if Izumiya created a film entire for his own desires, the result of which should prove him proud in how confounding it is. There is a caveat however to this review which in its own way adds to the mysterious tone of Death Powder - the version I had access to, as for many, doesn't translate everything with English subtitles, confounded by the fact there's passages that were subtitled in Japanese either because the dialogue wasn't audibly clear or it was a directorial choice. Because of this I had to watch the film not fully grasping it all, thrown in fittingly into the deep end of a mood piece with material not in my grasp, where sperm are superimposed over cityscapes and later when the hallucinations kick in.

From https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e8/
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The issue for the viewer will be that the film jettisons its reliance on a plot very early into itself. Death Powder is only sixty minutes long, and while back-story and plot threads are constant, a large percentage of the film is consumed by rapidly interchanging sequences. Once one of the central trio is contaminated by the titular powder, the film is mainly a collage of actors being filmed in various positions and post production visual effects. For some viewers this'll be a terrible movie because it doesn't really gel into a narrative feature with a framework, at a cut-off point after the set-up turning into a series of segments and images. (Baring in mind the lack of subtitles for me in some places), one is left with many questions unasked even after viewing the film twice. The use of sperm imagery, or actors superimposed in front of numbers and mathematical equations. When the female protagonist is named Norris of all things, or the point of the powder existing in the first place. One is meant, especially in the version I saw, to detach oneself from a rational frame point and enter the film by its terms, for others Death Powder having the potential to be rewarding as it perfectly captures a fever dream in presentation.

From http://www.filmbizarro.com/screenshots/deathpowder/deathpowder2.jpg
One thing that is perfectly clear is that through the powder created from Guernica - who's name pointedly is the same as the famous Pablo Picasso painting representing a bombing during the Spanish Civil War (although whether the reference was intentional for any reason is unknown) - induces a higher form of consciousness on the person infected by it, causing them to have their faces shred their top layer like fruit and for a drastic mutation to take place. The end result is not necessary of a positive thing, but an evolution takes place, where people become one giant individual consciousness; imagine Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997) only taking place in an abandoned building with a mass of eyes and facial features being created, one including irregular shapes and a flicking tongue that is both comical and disgusting. The Japanese cyberpunk films made after this one including animation like Akira (1988) were just as likely to depict concepts like body horror and transcendentalism as they would the tropes of corrupt government or dystopian cityscapes; from a foreigner's view, Japan is half some of the most advanced metropolises in the world and half its history including mythology and spiritualism, both of which can still be found in films like this in how the mind is just as much a concern as the physical environment.

Plot points do appear. The mutants, consisting of a patchwork mask wearing man in a wheelchair, one near the beginning and two stretched rubber face goons, briefly appear at times to become a problem for the central trio. There's also the origins of Guernica, where her creator Dr. Loo (Kiyoshirô Imawano) has a music video for a flashback sequence and gets to tell another person to not try to make sense of the events around them, as pointed a choice of dialogue as you could get for the work's mindset. Baring these and some moments of sudden violence, including a rubber hand being cut off, Death Powder spends most of its length under a single, prolonged hallucination where creation and death intermingle through a series of images. This'll be drastically different for anyone who is a fan of other cyberpunk films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man as this feels more like an experimental film in its desire to not follow plot points.

From http://i45.tinypic.com/2d9cnpw.jpg
Technical Details:
A low budget work, Death Powder emphasises the run down urban environments that are important for Japanese dystopian films very well, even to the point of just filming an ordinary and well kept street outside in the day. Far from a deterrent, many of these films like this or Rubber's Lover (1996) are greatly helped by warehouse rooms, corridors and city streets being the only available locations, the claustrophobia of the former and the lack of fantasy of the later adding a grounded tangibility to the content. The film also includes the (almost) required scene for any Japanese cyberpunk film of having an outdoor scene shot with real bystanders nearby.

Makeup and prosthetic effects are sparingly used but are suitably unsettling. In most Japanese genre films, even kaiju movies like Godzilla (1954), there is a very unique and vastly wider sense of the manipulation and changing of the human body than from other countries, where mutation to the fantastical all have the potential to be depicted in truly imaginative ways which cause one to re-evaluate the original object (or limb or person etc.) in a new light. (Only Canadian cinema has such a consistency to match it). While the content is minimal, Death Powder shares an occasional moment of such unpredictability, the malformed consciousness of many people at the end the most extreme example. Less impressive are the eighties video effects, including actress Rikako Murakami punting a frame of the film shrunk down into a box across a room to represent another character being kicked the same direction. I'll admit its memorable but alongside the computer added text in the film, which evokes American shot-on-video films from this era, it does betray the movie in look.

The music is also strange. Whilst some of it does work, I do wonder about the juxtaposition of the grim ending with such jovial end theme music, whether it was intentional for irony or not.

From http://www.filmbizarro.com/screenshots/deathpowder/deathpowder5.jpg
Abstract Spectrum: Expressionistic/Psychotronic/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low
A unique issue with rating Death Powder is that I have viewed it twice without the ability to speak or read Japanese and making up for that which wasn't translated. The fact we even have access to the film with English translation is worth being grateful for, but I have to wonder if more knowledge of what takes place in the film would be available to me if I have access to what wasn't translated. Besides this there is a debate however, from what is there, whether it's the mood or the visual effects which are why Death Powder is an abstract film, this sort of cinema meant to take a viewer to unchartered waters rather than rely on surface appearances like the post production effects.

There's plenty of unconventional moments crammed into Death Powder to justify its rating, from the superimposed images of sperm to the constant transitions into various realities, delivery employees being absorbed into a mass conscious to its dreamlike tone, so this isn't an issue. I will admit that a film like Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Rubber's Lover however have a greater intensity to their tones which make them the more abstract of this sub genre. For the simple reason that more happens in them because of their longer length is a factor, as if the kind of content in those films. In Death Powder's favour, the effect of watching the entire sixty minutes if you can engage with the tone does effect you, a disorientating effect that works in lieu of the lack of a fully formed narrative.

From https://cinemasatori.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/deathpowder19.jpg
Personal Opinion:
Whatever my opinion on Death Powder, as one of the first Japanese cyberpunk films made its worth my hat to it. This subgenre is only small but it's been one of the most rewarding for me of Japanese cinema, with a distinction to it from that nation is contrast to sci-fi from other countries. Death Powder is amongst the grubbiest in tone, not just for having to watch a VHS rip, but for how it was clearly made for its own sake with what resources were at hand. Death Powder also opens the door to an even obscurer area of Japanese genre cinema to me, that of films even lower budget than underground films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man which didn't even last over an hour, usually splatter horror films from the eighties which grew out of the VHS boom. Most are unavailable, but the internet exists and I wouldn't be surprised if I explored any I could get my hands on.

As for Death Powder itself, it's far from perfect, having needed a bit more to its bare boned form to be better. Not necessarily more plot either, but an additional thing to have helped it stood out more. What is there however, was suitably disorientating and volatile, and those are virtues hard to accomplish in any film.

Monday 7 December 2015

Liquid Sky (1983)


From http://i.imgur.com/B1gLP5C.jpg
Director: Slava Tsukerman
Screenplay: Slava Tsukerman, Anne Carlisle and Nina V. Kerova
Cast: Anne Carlisle (as Margaret/Jimmy); Paula E. Sheppard (as Adrian); Susan Doukas (as Sylvia); Otto von Wernherr (as Johann); Bob Brady (as Owen)

Synopsis: A flying saucer perches itself on top of a New York apartment complex roof.  The size of a dinner plate, its occupant has found the perfect narcotic high in the chemicals found in the human brain at the height of sexual orgasm, the extraction process for it to claim these chemicals killing the victim instantly. A German scientist Johann Hoffman (Wernherr), in the apartment of an older woman Sylvia (Doukas) who tries to flirt with him, keeps an eye on the saucer with concern. Model Margaret (Carlisle) is victim to this alien, perched above her apartment, killing everyone she has sex with to the point she finally believes she is the one killing people herself. Amongst drug addicts, her abusive roommate/lover Adriane (Sheppard), a gay model who continually berates her (also played by Carlisle) and various night clubbers and photographers, she slowly becomes more and more disillusioned with her life in the city and becomes more curious about the alien.

After all these years building up an image of Liquid Sky, you find yourself as for others that a film can be drastically different from the picture you built in your mind. The eighties sci-fi movie I painted in my thoughts is actually a low-fi drama in the scope of Paul Morrissey's work with Andy Warhol like Trash (1970), sunk in the bottom of the gutter but with a lot more hairspray involved. The screenshots show how the early eighties aesthetics are fully entrenched in the film's personality, with lots of neon and unconventionally shaped costumes but beneath this style is a gritty drama involving heroin addiction, date rape and struggling socialites hiding their angst behind glow-in-the-dark face paint, cocaine and constant nightclub dancing. Despite a style that predates Lady Gaga, the perspective on life is pretty dank for the most part, almost all the characters more concerned about finding drugs or insulting each other than making the most of their lives. If the seventies marked the death of the hippie dream - of free love, art and peace - than Liquid Sky feels like the prolapsed dirge afterwards into the early eighties. The central character Margaret is an outsider in her own community; a girl who ran from her home town to New York, turning herself from the pretty small town lass into the peroxide blonde figure who hides herself in her exaggerated dress sense. Rather than a camp tone, Liquid Sky is a suitably grotty movie where a character tries to find herself under the context of an alien related story. It's not dissimilar to Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984), where the sci-fi narrative is a layer over a realistic depiction of a young adult trying to find them self in an urban city environment.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8_XAY1kNfiU/UizX1OTBNUI/AAAAAAAAeSk/xAbamoIp
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Like the Morrissey films and various underground movies from the USA, it breaks rules on the notion of how characters should act in films, where unlike mainstream films you can find them acting drastically different and with a greater realism and/or an exaggeration seen as too "raw" for commercial product. They tackle subjects like drug addiction and sexuality with an incredible bluntness that you don't find in most films. Then there are ideas like Liquid Sky casting Margaret and Jimmy with the same actress, the later with Anne Carlisle lowering her voice and looking like a New Romantic in a suit and slicked back hair, the trick of having the two being able to communicate with each other (and for one to perform oral sex on the other in one scene) pulled off with considerable success and simple ideas. The fact the director Slava Tsukerman - was a Russian emigrant who made films in his homeland, before the difficulties with making films in the Soviet Union forced him to leave, means that he would've had considerable experience with film production; for this to meld with the type of cinema that usually suggested improvisation and working with limited resources leads to fascinating results.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_DMT9SbnvRzo/TONs0FVALQI/AAAAAAAAFNw/
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His willingness to tackle taboos is also commendable as if he was finally unshackled from the restrictions he had before, particularly with how the film blurs sexuality and gender continually. Alongside Carlisle playing a male and female character, the film co-written by Tsukerman with Carlisle and Nina V. Kerova has the central character express displeasure at romance being dictated by gendered anatomy and various other characters have dialogue the plays with gender. Sexuality itself is as much a victim of the ennui the film has, scenes of sexual orgasm mostly depicted in infra-red from the alien's point-of-view before it kills the person involved, the human face and body distorted by the reds and rainbow colours of their body temperature before a giant circle swallows the image up.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8i6Cl2YNI6c/TIljJ9EX6vI/AAAAAAAADlM/
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Technical Detail:
Liquid Sky is a film held up by a series of character scenes where anecdotes and events rather than plot points take place, and a distinction this film has to other similar films of its ilk is how it intercuts up to three different scenes within the same time frame together. The result isn't dislocated at all, instead adding a pace that interweaves all the characters into each others' lives as most of them eventually meet each other.

The most well known aspect of the film is its score. Partly composed by the director himself with Brenda I. Hutchinson and Clive Smith, it's a crude yet evocative thing, its limitations in sound as much a part of its virtues. The music is a huge factor in the film's character. Especially when it gets to its central theme, its mix of almost guttery pipes and machinery fits the New York locations and avoids coming off as cheap synth because of the texture of its sound. Also worth mentioning is a musical number by Adriane with a machine that uses her heartbeat for percussion, her song about her musical box memorably blunt in the lyrics.

From http://static.wixstatic.com/media/91db61
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Abstract Spectrum: None
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
Barring the archness of some of the dialogue and the main plot thread, Liquid Sky is far from an unconventional work. The aesthetic of the sets, the cloths and the neon lights is a considerable part of the movie's personality but it drastically contrasts to the reality just around it. It's a gritty drama that feels grim and melancholic at the same time as it can be quirky, using practical visual effects to add to its charm, to the point that behind the costumes and music its very subdued.

Personal Opinion:
As long as you go into the film knowing that it's far from the cartoonish work that its aesthetic suggests it is, Liquid Sky is a very engaging cult film. 

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1pth4P1sifI/Us8JqVWdXaI/
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