Cinephiliac :: NYAFF REVIEWS: The Great Yokai War (2005, d. Takashi Miike); A Stranger of Mine (2004, d. Kenji Uchida); The Magicians (2005, d. Song Il-gon)

Tokyo Drifter in a Season of Tokyo Drift

Funky Forest / Hair / Beetle, the Horn King

If the summer days in NYC remain on the breezy side overall, it'll be harder to trap the locals in an artificially cooled movie theater, especially with a release slate all junked up with supermen, x-men and dead men's chests. Alternatively, Subway Cinema has a different kind of Tokyo drift in mind with the New York Asian Film Festival 2006 (now through July 1st), which cooks up an eclectic, often rare batch of pop-cinema treats from Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, India, and even Malaysia. Like its outspoken co-founder Grady Hendrix, the NYAFF's tastes tend to cater to the fanboys, oldboys, and insatiable cinephiles unafraid to admit when genre filmmaking transcends its dorky demographics; it's no Antonioni retrospective, but the invention and sensory carousal on display here are practically doing parkour around Hollywood's stale popcorn. (C'mon, wouldn't you'd rather get wasted on a Sunday night for Beetle, the Horn King -- a Japanese masked-wrestling comedy with insect aliens -- than taste Jack Black's greasy, PG-rated slab of Nacho cheese?) Of the 30-or-so titles on this year's roster, all playing at either downtown's Anthology Archives or the Upper Least Side's ImaginAsian, here are three standouts that carry the Cinephiliac stamp of approval:

[Buy your NYAFF tickets here!]

The Great Yokai War

So hyper-prolific that I'm forever doomed to repeat my joke about how lazy he makes Fassbinder look, Japanase gonzo auteur Takashi Miike (Audition, Visitor Q, Gozu) and his disturbing blend of homicidal fantasticism are undeniably visionary; his skills as a bard, however, too often get distracted by said artifice and forget that thing called narrative coherence (Is it me, or did Izo need Cliff's Notes?). Thankfully, the stars have excitingly aligned in Miike's The Great Yokai War (2005), a mildly subversive, nearly family-friendly epic fantasy that must be his most approachable and entertaining film since 2001's The Happiness of the Katakuris.

As its title so succinctly spells out, the hilarious adventure on tap concerns a good-versus-evil battle of the yokai, or "bizarre-looking monsters and supernatural beings from Japanese folklore who like to play tricks on unsuspecting humans." From turtle-men to hamster-like sprites who rub shins, tongue-wagging umbrellas, women who can elongate their necks with reptilian grace across the room, anthropomorphized stone walls, and even scarecrows who becomes aquatic vixens with seductively ever-moist thighs, these vividly whacked-out beasts have been repurposed by Miike's pomo flair from Shigeru Mizuki's manga art of the '60s and a popular series of movies from that era through the '70s. Even Kwaidan, the fine 1965 Japanese ghost story available from Criterion, features a tale of the kimono'd snow-woman yokai Yuki-onna, seen in the far background of the photo above.

In this chapter of the never-ending story (reference intended), a bullied kid with family problems (Ryuunosuke Kamiki) discovers he is prophesied to be the Kirin Rider ("Guardian of Peace, Friend of Justice"), an unforseen warrior who must defeat a villainous devil before he transmutates all the yokai into motorized monsters by dipping them in a pink vat of "the accumulated wrath of resentful things." It's a chewy mouthful and better seen than explained, but don't think for a moment it's too culturally insular to translate well (though Godzilla fans will appreciate the Gamera throwaway).

The Great Yokai War is Narnia by way of Miyazaki and the Brothers Quay; not a CGI-infested lump of empty-souled product, but a wildly singular universe where human hearts beat with the blood of stop-motion animation, seamless puppetry, and a live-action need to believe; and where a traditional three-act structure is just enough limitation to subdue Miike's indulgences into an everlasting gobstopper of a good time for (almost) all ages. Not to worry the Miike diehards either: when the heated climax stops so a middle-aged journo can enjoy a Kirin Beer like some self-poradic product placement, there shouldn't be doubt to whether this Ichii the Kids' Flick was made without compromise.

A Stranger of Mine

Heartbroken young Maki (Yasuhi Nakamura) finalizes her break-up by dropping the adulterous fiancee's apartment key down his mail slot. Now wandering alone with her existentially angsty voiceover through the streets of Tokyo, she stumbles into a restaurant where she's fatefully asked over to the next table by A Stranger of Mine (2004). A three-time winner at Cannes last year (including the Young Critics Award, an honor shared with Me and You and Everyone We Know), director Kenji Uchida's endearing and modestly savvy theatrical debut is a pulp-fictional exercise in deviating viewpoints, unusally split between an overlapping gaggle of protagonists over a single Friday night.

When hapless office worker Miyata (Yasuhi Nakamura) is frantically called out to dinner by his ol' private-eye buddy Kanda (Sô Yamanaka), he's oblivious to a world of serendipitous events under his nose. An all-around milquetoast (and therefore, the perfect comic underdog), Miyata can't fathom his pal wanting him to go "pick up chicks" when he only recently suffered a bad divorce. But cool-guy Kanda shows him just how easy it is to start dating again by calling over a random woman from the next table over... suddenly, a scene that once read as Maki's melodrama is now Miyata's rom-com -- and depending on whose angle we're privy to throughout -- there's a detective noir, and even more surprises abound. Accomplishing in one film what it took Lucas Belvaux's genre-melding experiment The Trilogy to do in three, A Stranger of Mine almost effortlessly juggles its reveals thanks to its charismatic ensemble and a modular time design not unlike the stand-alone sequences that Memento comprises (just not necessarily told backwards). The script accidentally jumps the shark once late in the game, but the overall mood is so light on its feet that you'll either forgive or pretend it never happened.

For maximum enjoyment, please don't make the mistake I did the first time through: even if your Japanese is a little rusty, staying through the closing credits bares a more satisfying ending than the weirdly unexpected bummer preceding.

The Magicians

Originally commissioned as a short by the Jeonju International Film Festival, South Korean auteur Song Il-gon's The Magicians (2005) screened as one-third of a digital omnibus feature, alongside works by Thai architect-cum-filmmaker Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady) and Japanese techno-horror magnet Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: The Iron Man). Just as Tsukamoto extended his contribution into a nearly hour-long freakout, Song waved his directorial wand and more than doubled The Magicians' length to this incarnation, a bittersweet 95-minute drama shot in one continuous Steadicam take. You might say it's the East Asian version of Sokurov's Russian Ark, minus the, uh, centuries' worth of revolutionary history in the Hermitage stuff.

Hidden in the snowy mountain woodlands, far outside of Seoul, lies a peculiar bar named for a broken-up band of garage-pop rockers, The Magicians. It has been three years since lead guitarist Ja-eun (Kang Kyeong-heon, Spider Forest) tragically killed herself, and her ex-boyfriend drummer Jae-sung (Jeong Woong-in, The Foul King) has been living here in solitude, still mourning her death. All dressed like futuristic gypsies with matching glam-swooshes of makeup, bass player Myung-soo (Jang Hyun-sung, Feather in the Wind) and female vocalist Ha-young (Lee Seung-bi, A Tale of Two Sisters) have come from afar this New Year's Eve to get drunk, recollect, confess and commiserate, plus maybe... just maybe... they'll finally get the band back together. And what's with their new acquaintance, the Guinness-swilling monk who snowboards?

Grainily lo-fi and yet genuinely effervescent under its sidewalk-café soundtrack of kitschy pianos and plucky guitars, The Magicians is sensitive to its own detached theatricality (think Manderlay with an eye-grabbing set instead of chalk-outlined minimalism). The sudden zooms and flagrant focus changes serve to ready and steady us for its crumbling fourth wall of perception, allowing characters to comfortably walk out of a room and into a flashback without viewer confusion. Clever lighting and dimensional movement cues are fresh possibilities gliding in and out of frame like the wonderful Kang Kyeong-heon herself. Easily the film's best sleight-of-hand, the deceased Ja-eun appears as a self-destructive junkie dervish in her past life, then materializes in present-day scenes as a literally free spirit, puckishly pantomiming and invisible to all from the afterlife. She's the only one to acknowledge (and wink at!) the camera, further reminding us of the affectations at play, but her timing frequently adds an elegant emphasis to certain lines of dialogue and her bandmates' forlorn nostalgia.

(All photos in this post come courtesy of Subway Cinema & the New York Asian Film Festival.)