The Viper Brothers (1971)

directed by Sadao Nakajima

Japan

87 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

____

Does anybody else remember the joke where somebody hears a sinister-sounding guy outside his door saying "I am the viper! I am the viper!" and he's all scared until finally the guy says "I come to vipe your vindows"? That isn't relevant here, just thought I'd mention it.

I don't believe I've ever reviewed a yakuza movie before, mostly because the vast majority of them tend to blend together in my brain. I always have fun watching them, but afterward I sometimes have trouble remembering exactly what went on in which one; exceptions made for the really really good ones, the classics of the genre like Violent Streets and Cops vs. Thugs. While The Viper Brothers isn't the single greatest yakuza movie of all time, the strength of its two leads and the solid direction by possibly my favorite yakuza director Sadao Nakajima make this one more memorable than your average outing.

The film follows two sworn brothers, Masa (Bunta Sugawara) and Katsuji (Tamio Kawachi), who are more enthusiastic about the idea of being yakuza than they are about actually being yakuza. The first shot of the film shows Masa getting out of his 12th stint in jail, and we can tell right away from how the shot is framed that this is a movie with style: Masa stands dwarfed by the massive wall outside the jail, looming over him almost like it's threatening to swallow him back up - which it will, eventually, and probably for the rest of his life. His brother Katsuji on the outside quickly gets him up to speed on all the latest fashions among the modern punks and they have a bad time trying to eat at a fancy French restaurant. All of this is to introduce us to them as characters but also, more subtly, to introduce one of two female characters, Sayako (Tomomi Satō), who Katsuji tries to pay to get her to have sex with Masa. (The movie is not as bad about women as a lot of yakuza flicks, but it's still gross-ish.)

While The Viper Brothers isn't an out-and-out comedy, it does have some humorous elements. But that humor is used in service of what is actually a fairly devastating bigger picture. Masa and Katsuji's antics as they try as hard as possible to perform the duties involved in being Bad Dudes are funny, but ultimately this is a story about two guys who were cast aside by the world and are spending their lives self-destructively trying to figure out how to fit into whatever parts of society are left to them after growing up in orphanages and juvie leaves them with no practical skills other than dirty tricks and violence. They aren't "bad people" - Masa almost instantly has concern for the film's secondary female character, a 15-year-old girl named Yuki (Keiko Yamada) who has dropped out of school to care for her siblings, and Katsuji eventually feels bad for stealing some fruit.

There's a thing about masculinity here that I thought was really interesting too - Masa begging practically on his hands and knees to be given a tattoo because he's so certain that that's the key to finally Being A Man, finally making something of himself, as if the role he so desires is something he can just put on and wear, externally, superficially. It would be easier if it was.

Essentially the entire reason why I wanted to review this is because there are two moments that made me think "okay, this is not your typical yakuza movie". The first was when Masa and Katsuji are driving to the final raid and all the background noise drops out and is replaced with a woman's voice singing. We the viewers can hear it but so do the characters, somehow, and Katsuji tries to remember why he knows it - maybe it was his mother who sang it for him, he says, and both seem to relive, for a moment, life before they were forced to fend for themselves. The second moment is the very last shot of the film, the two of them walking together in the rain as we see their elaborate back tattoos washing off. I thought that was just one of the most brilliant shots I've ever seen in a yakuza movie. It's not how you expect that sort of thing to end; usually the main characters end up dying in a blaze of glory or getting sent to jail, or returning to fight again in the sequel. But Masa and Katsuji just kind of... decide to call it quits. We see the remnants of their old life of violence literally washing away. It was a beautiful way to end a movie that, while it had a slightly uneven second act, is one of the better yakuza films I've watched recently.

Murder on D Street (1998)

directed by Akio Jissōji

Japan

95 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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The murder in Murder on D Street doesn't occur until well over halfway through the film. As with most murder mysteries, following the murder there is an investigation (here conducted by Edogawa Ranpo's detective character Kogoro Akechi, played by erstwhile Yasunori Katō Kyūsaku Shimada, nearly unrecognizable with a goatee), but even this is decentralized from the plot. The murder and subsequent investigation, in fact, feels like it derails the plot; it interrupts what had been a perfectly good sequence of voyeuristic glimpses into the weird little private lives of some somewhat well-off business owners ca. 1927.

Hiroyuki Sanada plays Fukiya, an art forger, who is possibly the closest thing we have to a "protagonist". Fukiya is hired to produce sophisticated forgeries of classic pornographic art prints for Tokiko Sunaga, the wife of a ramen shop owner (Yumi Yoshiyuki) - herself later revealed to have been the model for the original artist. Fukiya, somewhat abruptly, murders his client after she discovers that Fukiya had been sneaking a little too much of himself into the forgeries he was giving her: painting a small mole - his own - onto the faces of the women in the prints. What exactly his motive was, though, I can only assume; we don't, if I'm remembering the film correctly, ever see that Fukiya has discovered that Sunaga has discovered what he's done with the prints (although she has). He simply decides that she has to die.

We're introduced to Akechi, again, well over halfway through, and this is not the smooth, confident Detective Akechi of later adaptations but a disheveled recluse living alone surrounded by stacks of novels in a room he doesn't pay the rent for. The reason for Akechi's seemingly having fallen into a deep depression is not explained by the plot, nor is his springing into action with no trace of his temporary ennui after the murder is committed. It's almost like - and this is about to bring me to my main point about this film - the murder activates him. He becomes a detective again because the plot needs him. Because the viewers need him. The Akechi we see in his dirty rented room is the offscreen, off-page Akechi; he only becomes Akechi when he has something to investigate.

What I took away from this movie was that it was a study of art and literature and how the act of reading something that someone else has written or viewing something that someone else has drawn carries with it an inherent perversion, an inherent voyeurism. The characters in Murder on D Street encounter the fantasies of others within novels and paintings and then replicate them in their own lives: Fukiya becomes the subject of the paintings he's faking, paintings in which Sunaga became the subject of torture scenes from a play that the artist Shundei painted her into. We can read a weird book or watch a weird movie and become aware of the internal lives of others in ways that are not acceptable to demonstrate openly in polite society. So much of Ranpo's work seems to reflect this: intellectual characters with secrets, violating societal norms with each other.

When you watch a Jissōji movie, you kind of know what you're going to get: disorienting camera angles framing nearly every shot, a pervasive and discordant soundtrack even during innocuous scenes, a stance on eroticism where it's almost impossible to tell if the director is condemning or celebrating it, and characters who feel as if they're completely unaware they're fictional. Murder on D Street features an interesting framing device where we occasionally see the set as a paper diorama assembled and moved by someone clearly from contemporary times, rather than the early Showa era where the film is set. Using this device Jissōji reminds us that everything we're seeing is a façade, but he also invites us to be participants. The murder feels unimportant, but everything else is.

Sanshō the Bailiff (1954)

directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Japan

124 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

Now we come to the second Mizoguchi film on the "summer of classic Japanese cinema" watchlist that I created for myself. Much like Ugetsu, Sanshō the Bailiff is concerned with the human condition, but where Ugetsu has its characters unable to escape the prison of bodily existence except in their fleeting, ephemeral dreams, the main character in Sanshō quite literally rolls up his sleeves and does something about it. (A feel-good movie this is not, however.)

The first forty minutes of the film follow the family of a former nobleman who was cast into exile after getting into arguments with too many influential military men. Although he was in a position of power, this was a truly good man; he impressed upon his son the importance of always having mercy, no matter what. After his exile, his wife Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka) and two children (Masahiko Tsugawa and Keiko Enami as young Zushio and Anju respectively, Yoshiaki Hanagi and Kyōko Kagawa as their adult versions) begin journeying to find him, but they are taken advantage of on the road by an old woman who shelters them to earn their trust and then tricks Tamaki into being separated from Zushio and Anju while the children are forced into slavery.

Something that I feel the need to note here is that the film is titled after a character who is barely a part of it. One could argue (probably correctly) that Sanshō the Bailiff actually is the driving force of the film, being the man who ruled the enslaved workers on his estate with an iron fist and therefore compelling Zushio to rise up against him and tear down the institution of slavery that he benefited from. But we hardly ever see Sanshō, really. The main character is Zushio. However, naming a film after the driving antagonistic force - whether human or monster - is not at all unusual. Count Dracula is not technically the main character in Bram Stoker's book, but it is still titled Dracula, because the story is inherently about him. It's the same with Sanshō the Bailiff: Sanshō may feel like a relatively unimportant character, but he represents the whole rotten system that Zushio rebels against. As I've seen pointed out, Sanshō is vile because he is not unique - he's just one of many.

The story of Sanshō is personal, but the broader picture is political. It's one of those movies where you can identify messages that are still incredibly relevant to our own times; perhaps this is, like Ugetsu with its emphasis on the eternal misery of living in the flesh, a statement about the perennial nature of human cruelty. But - crucially - it also posits that we do have the power to change our circumstances and the circumstances of everyone around us. When the film is concerning itself with Zushio's attempts to seize power and wield it, not for his own gain, but to erase the damage done by evil men who had previously held it, it feels like nothing so much as a tendency film - those left-leaning pictures made in the earlier half of the 20th century that criticized a tendency that the author felt was present in (and detrimental to) society. I felt this every time one of the characters would remark on how the people in power reduce them to something less than human. It is true now as it mostly always has been that those in the highest positions lose sight of anything not directly relevant to them - even the minister who endows Zushio with the office that eventually enables him to ban slavery from his territories, a seemingly gentle man, only becomes involved with Zushio after he realizes that their families were connected in some way.

Zushio becomes the mythical "good" ruler: the very idealized philosopher-king who rises to power only long enough to utilize it to liberate as many people as he can from suffering, and then relinquishes it before it can begin to corrupt him. This is a perfect example of the kind of thing that critics like Donald Richie tend to see as overtly leftist propaganda - again, there are so many moments when this reads as a tendency film - and that may be so. But, my god, living in America in 2025, I just want to see someone do something good.

In the final shot, the camera pans up and up and up as Zushio and Tamaki embrace - our part in the story is over for now, but the final shot - the sea and the trees, a small human in the foreground going about his work of drying seaweed - feels like it's reminding us that Zushio's story is the story of human life, of the entire world. I think about that shot in parallel with the shot of Anju's death - the ripples on the surface of the water conveying the transience of life, and then the expansive final frame that situates us in the world as a whole, constituting a part of it but not all of it. As I said, although Zushio's journey is inherently political, at the end of the film, he is just a man, just a living creature, choosing mercy, defying cruelty, and that's the most important thing about him.

Ugetsu (1953)

directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Japan

97 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

____

At the beginning of this summer, I made a list of 10 films from across the history of Japanese cinema that I needed to see but hadn't yet - no specific criterion for inclusion, just ones that came to mind when I thought to myself "I can't believe I still haven't seen [x]". As happens often, ticking items off that list hasn't been going as quickly as I'd hoped, and Ugetsu is the first one I've actually managed to get to. But if you're going to pick one Japanese film to watch - for any reason, at any time, ever - you can absolutely, positively do a lot worse than picking Ugetsu.

I was vaguely familiar with the source material for this film because I had seen other versions of it, one of which is a favorite of mine (The Bride from Hades, with Kōjirō Hongō's excellent performance) and the other of which (Hellish Love) served to highlight how good the first one was in comparison. But when contrasted with Ugetsu, both of them feel extremely stripped-down. They both focus on only one story - of the man who becomes infatuated with a ghost woman and either explicitly has sex with and marries her or is implied to - whereas Ugetsu, despite itself clarifying that it is a "new refashioning" of the source in its own preamble, situates that story within a more broadly developed world and uses it to convey a much clearer message.

The first thing that stuck out to me while I was watching this and the thing that is sticking with me now, the morning after, is the way the movie is framed. Most of the scenes are shot so that we can see the actors head-to-toe, moving through their environment in a way that conveys on an instinctual level that they are part of the scenery, part of their world, not part of ours. There's also something about the way the actors live out their characters' lives that feels private and almost uncomfortably intimate. It feels like we are (or at least I felt like I was) not being shown a story, the way we're so used to movies feeling; it's more like we're in the space with these people, but they aren't aware of us. Like the viewer is the ghost in the room, or in the village, or wherever. I was really struck by this method of showing the entirety of a person whenever they were in the frame, restricting headshots or other more closely focused framing to a minimum, and how effective it is at drawing the viewer into the scene. It's kind of incredible.

Oddly, something about the set-up for the film reminded me of The Hidden Fortress: we follow characters who are trying to live during wartime but are not themselves anybody special, and exist on the fringes of the action, only infrequently seeing it directly, but continually feeling its influence.

As has been pointed out, two worlds exist side-by-side in Ugetsu, the boundaries of which are often so thin as to be virtually nonexistent. When Genjuro slips out of his world of strife and hardship and into the perfumed, hallucinatory paradise of Lady Wakasa's mansion, there is a distinct line between where he had been previously and where he was now, but he's the only one who doesn't see it. The point of connection between the world of the living and the world Genjuro is briefly invited into is his own pottery - when he is served sake in his own wares, it feels like a very sudden and jarring reminder of who he is and where he comes from. There's nothing physically distinguishing the ghosts from living humans, but regardless, their entire presence gives off an almost "uncanny valley" effect in the middle of the sweaty, dirty world of trying to live and work and make money: they are too perfect, too beautiful; they don't belong here, which we know, because we're in on the secret, but Genjuro isn't. Machiko Kyo is really something else here; the way Lady Wakasa's every move feels so deliberately choreographed and practiced serves to add another layer of unreality to her physical presence.

I suppose the easiest takeaway here is that the film posits that we are inevitably doomed to suffer and any attempt to rise above this suffering will result in temporary pleasure at best and punishment at worst. By the end of the film, the only person who really seems to appreciate living is Miyagi, who has died, and can now only watch her husband and child from the same in-between space inhabited by the two ghost women. No one is happy, no one got what they wanted. The most they can hope for is that things would stay the same instead of actively getting worse. At least most of the character survive, but for what? It's a stunning, technically impressive, near-flawless film, but it is also, to use academic parlance, a huge bummer. Something I see a lot in reviews of this film is the claim that it carries a message about greed, but honestly, I didn't get that from it. What the characters experience doesn't even feel like the consequence of greed: it just feels like they're being punished for daring to imagine what it's like to live beyond a subsistence level.

There's not much I can say about this movie that hasn't already been said in a more incisive and intelligent way - to that end I really do want to read some actual essays about this film, it's that good - so I guess as a closing note I'll mention a specific scene that I loved. This movie has one of the creepiest scenes I've ever watched in anything that isn't traditionally considered a "horror movie": when Lady Wakasa is dancing as she and Genjuro are undertaking marriage ceremonies, we begin to hear a deeper voice accompanying her singing, a man's voice; at first, I assumed this was diegetic, since there is chanting elsewhere on the soundtrack - but then the camera slowly pans to the mask belonging to Lady Wakasa's deceased father, and we realize that we're hearing his ghost, and so are the characters.

Crab Goalkeeper (2006)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

____

Happy Marine Day.

I made a mistake by going into this film thinking I knew what it would be like. I would have watched it sooner, but I had a preconceived notion of it according to Kawasaki's other "animal with job" movies and, while I do like those, some of them get a little tiresome when the jokes fail to land. But Crab Goalkeeper is so much more than an "animal with a job" movie. It's an often fairly brutal assessment of the value society places on ability to work as a measure of personal worth, but at the same time it's also a testament to the power of being genuinely kind in the face of a world that is too quick to leave people behind. I am dead serious when I say that you could apply Marxist praxis to this movie if you tried hard enough.

We begin the movie with a giant crab washing up on a beach, being kicked and hit with sticks by several boys. Our main(-ish) human character Shinichi rescues the crab, takes it back to his home, and teaches it to speak - in secret at first, but you can only hide a big, beautiful crab for so long. Shinichi's parents are constantly squabbling about the kinds of issues adults have: money, usually; it seems to be all they talk about, and it prevents them from seeing each other as real people. All they are is bodies who either can or can't, will or won't, make money. After Shinichi's parents discover the crab, their immediate thought is to sell it. His father even recounts a story of how his own father cooked and ate a pet chicken he had while describing how he fully intends to do the same thing to Shinichi's crab for money. The crab is never - can never - simply be a crab. Humans are only capable of viewing the crab as a commodity, not as a friend, not as a living, feeling being. In this way the crab is not only an example of the way capitalism makes us all cogs in the machine but perhaps, specifically, a spotlight on the unfair treatment of immigrants: if you wash up on our shore, you'd better make yourself useful.

One of the most interesting and unexpected things about this movie is its treatment of women. The crab, being automatically marginalized due to its appearance, ends up in contact with a lot of people who are equally marginalized in society - mostly sex workers. The film never, ever objectifies these women or presents them as anything other than people doing a job - a job that, because of their gender, leaves them specifically open to violence and exploitation. This the crab also experiences: it has the ability to generate foam when it's thirsty, so it's forced to work in a bubble bath brothel. All it wants to do is make enough money that it can go home and see its family, but it's forced to use its body to the point of exhaustion because its body - its ability to produce foam, its rich crab miso - is its only value.

I would be remiss not to mention that the crab itself has agency in all of this. The crab's personality is extremely childlike, and as has been demonstrated time and again, often the best way to point out the cruelty of the world in fiction is by making a character who is totally innocent be forced to navigate a harsh reality that has no intention of being kind to them. The crab, no matter what happens to it, is completely earnest in its zeal for life and its love of the people around it. The crab is totally accepting: it understands that Etsuko, the woman it befriends as she's about to kill herself after getting scammed out of all her money multiple times, is not stupid, just naive - something like itself. The crab demonstrates that it is worth giving people the grace we wish we'd be given ourselves. And it's not that the crab does all of this on purpose: it's born with this kindness by virtue of not having been corrupted by the caprices of human society. When Etsuko gets scammed again after the crab gives her several million yen that it made to repay her debts, it doesn't think twice about whether or not to help her. It doesn't judge. The crab is a better person than most people.

I was expecting some kind of humor out of this, but honestly, aside from the situational comedy of watching a giant crab who can only walk sideways get itself into trouble, there's very little about this that I would call funny. Okay, one thing was funny: the way they didn't edit out the rubbery, squeaky noises the crab suit made every time it moved. Other than that, I really just loved this for what it says about the inherent worth of a being outside of their ability to participate in capitalism and for how pure and good the crab was. Hiroshi Fujioka is also there, I guess.

Cinema.

Battlefield Baseball (2003)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

87 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

____

Last week I took a look at Deadball, so this week I'm writing about its predecessor, Battlefield Baseball. Because this film came first and seems to be a bit more popular than the later one, I assumed it would be superior in most respects, but I was surprised to find that - at least to me, personally - this was not the case.

Tak Sakaguchi again plays walking bad pun Jubeh Yakyu, but this is a very different Jubeh from the one we saw in Deadball. While his backstory is pretty much the same minus the younger brother (grew up loving baseball but too good at it for his own good, accidentally kills own father with pitch, becomes a wandering semi-delinquent), this Jubeh is a much gentler soul. When he transfers to a new school, there are rumors about him, but no indications that any of it is true; where the later Jubeh turned his guilt and shame over his father's death outward by committing such crimes as Dropping Televisions On People, this Jubeh carries the burden of his past far more stoically. Sakaguchi again seems like he's having a good time with this role, but this Jubeh doesn't have the same self-awareness as the other one. His only really great moments are the ones where he's doing obviously ridiculous stuff like punching a guy's entire skeleton out of his body.

The rest of the cast is similarly lackluster when compared to Deadball. I said in my previous review that Deadball kind of worked because everybody felt like they were bringing something to the table that was individually funny, but in Battlefield Baseball too many of the actors come off like they were given instructions to be as over-the-top as possible.

In fact, Battlefield Baseball's problem is that most of the time it is just not very funny. It feels like watching a bad comedian, except the entire cast is bad comedians. There were a lot of "ugh" moments, like when someone would break into song for no reason, when the kid they call Megane would get made fun of just for his inherent wimpiness, or when there would be a piss or fart joke that came from nowhere. But at the same time I have to admit that there were other moments in the film that absolutely did land and landed in a way that was actually better than Deadball.

The second half of Battlefield Baseball is where it feels like it finally hits its stride. The more far-out the humor is, the less hold the plot has on reality, the better. Death absolutely does not matter in this film. Quite literally the entire cast of characters dies at some point or another but it doesn't stick. I should mention that both of these movies are an adaptation of a manga; I've been leaving that out because I'm not familiar with it at all and so cannot judge the live-action films in comparison, but both of these definitely have that "this is a manga adaptation" vibe in how lax the rules are at all times. The final baseball game (which really is not baseball so much as all the players getting on the field and attempting to kill each other) is probably the best part of the film. The whole ensemble cast is together in one space and they play off of each other decently well instead of floundering about alone as they had previously done. The good guys assemble their team and it is a few high school students, two guys who died but got resurrected as mechas, a random cheerleader who up until then had basically not been in the movie at all, and someone's mom. Again, the times when this movie does manage to be funny outweigh even the best parts of Deadball - it just can't keep that pace up consistently. (But, to be fair, neither could Deadball.)

And there is nothing that will prepare you for the reveal at the end of who had been narrating the film the entire time.

Deadball (2011)

directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

Japan

99 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

----

Deadball offers us no explanation for the fact that our (anti)hero is possessed of preternatural baseball skills. It simply opens with the incident that decides his fate: him smoking Mickey Curtis in the nog with a baseball so hard he explodes. This happens when he is about 16, and next we see him he's a full-grown (well, sort of) juvenile delinquent - the worst in the country, wanted on "54 charges, including Dropping Televisions On People". He is finally arrested and brought to the harshest possible prison, where he's offered a deal: his freedom and the freedom of all the other inmates if they, banding together as a baseball team, can defeat the rival team from the all-girl Saint Black Dahlia high school. Of course, this was never a fair shake for the boys' side: the warden simply wants to get rid of them, and knows the opposing team will annihilate them.

The film's sense of humor is so offensive that it becomes almost banal. While I don't think Nazi imagery is something that should be trotted out simply for its aesthetic value, that is a relatively common practice in certain niches of Japanese cinema, and the pure aesthetic is so divorced from any actual ideological practices associated with it that it's hard to really feel anything after you've seen it a few times. Ditto everything else that happens here: so purely for shock value without any actual attempt at being mean about it that I almost don't care. Almost. The movie's weird homophobia is its only stance that feels like it has fangs, but again, when you know beforehand that the movie you're about to watch it as bizarre and offensive as Deadball, it's hard to feel surprised.

With a movie like this, a lot depends on the actors' individual skills. It won't work if every single person acts like they're in the world's most bugnuts film. There should, ideally, be a few people who take themselves just seriously enough that it highlights how outlandish everything else is. Tak Sakaguchi pulls off the Yakyu role really well, playing it not quite fully straight but with all the stoicism and bravado that a delinquent hero protagonist should have. (He also played a Xillien in Godzilla Final Wars.) Other people who felt like they brought exactly as much sauce to their roles as was necessary were Miho Ninagawa as the warden and Mari Hoshino as Shinosuke, Yakyu's 16-year-old cellmate and the only truly sympathetic character in the film.

There is also, I suppose, technically, in some way, a plot. It doesn't really develop until the second half to final quarter of the film, but we occasionally get nuggets of information that hint at the storied past of Yakyu and his brother Musashi (yeah, those are their names). After the accidental death of their father, Yakyu becomes a delinquent while Musashi is forced to turn to much more unpleasant means of making profit until he finally snaps and commits murder, and after that is never seen again, the mystery of his unknown fate being a thorn in the side of our hero. (He shows back up at the end in a truly spectacular way which I will not mention in detail due to it being a spoiler.) Like I said, Sakaguchi carries this off with enough seriousness that you can get invested in it - all insanity all the time would have made this thing unwatchable.

Did I like this? I don't know. It happened, that's all I can say about it. I really liked the running gag where Yakyu could reach out of frame and grab a lit cigarette to smoke for dramatic effect at any given time. Other characters react to this, which makes it even funnier. If you like splatterpunk films, there's some pretty good gore in this, and there's a scene where a character gets punched through a telephone, so if that kind of thing sounds like something you'd be willing to sit through a lot of visually offensive jokes about basically everybody and everything for, go for it.