Shinji Somai

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Shinji Somai

#76 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sat May 29, 2021 9:30 am

Never ever heard of Lost Chapter of Snow....

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Re: Shinji Somai

#77 Post by Calvin » Sat May 29, 2021 9:55 am

I've seen Lost Chapter of Snow and I don't remember much about it other than its ambitious opening - a 14-minute long take (that I think is actually 3 edited together Rope-style), which moves through different times and locations to effectively summarise the main character's childhood before we jump 10 years into the main action of the film.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#78 Post by feihong » Sat May 29, 2021 4:19 pm

Lost Chapter is a romantic melodrama which slowly develops into a murder mystery. It's about a girl who gets adopted by a cool, handsome guy, and then finds her romantic attentions divided between the guy and his best friend. Then the mean girl in her class gets murdered, and the girl has to figure out who did it.

It's a very low-key film for Somai, filled with various kind of stage-bound effects––snow and falling cherry blossoms abound. It has that enormous shot at the beginning, and nothing after that is as technically challenging or ostentatious. It's written by Yozo Tanaka, a key screenwriter for indie Japan cinema in the 80s, and someone I think has been largely overlooked. Tanaka's wrote Sailor Suit Schoolgirl and The Friends for Somai, in addition to Lost Chapter, but he is the credited screenwriter on Seijun Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy (Suzuki says in an interview that the whole Guru Hachiro team wrote Zigeunerweisen, but Tanaka gets the on-screen credit), on Hideo Gosha's remake of Gate of Flesh, on one of the Maison Ikkoku movies, and on a host of famous pink films, including Wife to be Sacrificed and Flower and Snake, Trapped in Lust, The Hell-Fated Courtesan, and The General and his Empire of Joy. He also wrote Tatsumi Kumashiro's remake of Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku. He's an interesting writer, and I think the puppet in the ending credits of Lost Chapter is a Tanaka touch, as a similar device is used in both Mirage Theater and Yumeji.

As far as where this falls, quality-wise on Somai's filmography, I think some people will find it slow or unambitious. It doesn't have the energy of a film like Typhoon Club or P.P. Rider. It has a more meditative edge to it, like Ohikkoshi, but it doesn't have that film's broader appeal. It's not a film that utilizes the charm of a charismatic star. Characters are very far back in the frame pretty much the whole movie. The melodrama moves a bit slowly. However, I think the situation of the film can be felt very palpably, and the characters are really well handled. There is a smallness to the movie which I find appealing. It is not as surreal as P.P. Rider, Typhoon Club, Luminous Woman, or Tokyo Heaven. It's pleasant, with a muted sense of growing emotions behind a somewhat melancholy, placid-seeming drama.

Looking forward to these blu-rays. Any somai released is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#79 Post by feihong » Wed Jul 14, 2021 6:58 am

"...Then I want to be that girl on the billboard!"

Since I managed to buy a quite expensive used DVD of Tokyo Heaven a few months ago, things have started moving very fast for this movie. There was the blu-ray announcement, and then a version of the film appeared on Youtube with English subtitles. After that, the HD streaming version of the film which has been out in Japan for a number of years surfaced as well. Long story short, I was suddenly able to see the film in a kind of soft high-definition, and also to see it with English subtitles. So now I have a much clearer perception of the film and how it works. To my thinking it is the last really surreal film in Somai's filmography; certainly it feels like an ending point, a kind of terminus for Somai's more fantastical way of seeing the world. In the films after this, the surrealism will emerge mostly as dream sequences, often representing the dream logic of children. But Tokyo Heaven seems still to be a product of the Somai who marries experimental surrealism to pop-idol entertainment in that way very unique to him. It's a small, even a shabby movie. But I think it's a great one, offering a unique approach to some goony filmmaking cliches. It's also one of those films you never see any more, where characters start singing songs to each other, and the like. That behavior seems to have passed out of film all across the world, as our cultures have become more and more like each other. It's interesting that Somai, who is such a facile frontline agent of popstar cinema, is so attached to that relic of an older world. I suppose by the time Somai died, the transition away from this behavior wasn't wholly complete. Nonetheless, this film climaxes with a trombone and singing sequence that is transcendent, which bridges the gap between the living and the dead and which allows love to pass through that channel. That isn't all the film is about, however. It's kind of fascinating.

Tokyo Heaven introduces us to Yu Kamiya, an advertising model on the way up. Yu is a classic, even exemplary character for a Somai film; hugely disruptive, she is taciturn about fame, quick to petulant anger, and sometimes possessed of an almost malevolent spirit of impish rebellion. Sadly, she dies in the first reel, stepping from a car into the road to avoid the sleazy advances of Shirayuki, a celebrity promoter who wants "special favors" from Yu in exchange for his help with her career. After waking up in a kind of blatantly theatrical, heaven-bound waystation, Yu meets Jiminy Cricket, essentially. The character is named Cricket, and has a cricket sound effect to match. But he's played by the same actor who plays the odious Shirayuki, and Yu is repulsed. We learn that Cricket looks this way because he is an image of the last thing Yu saw before she died. Cricket wants to take Yu on to her next life, but Yu doesn't want to leave. She haggles with Cricket feistily, and gets him to allow her to return to earth briefly to wind up unfinished business, as another person, not herself. Yu doesn't want things this way, and comes up with a fantastic double-cross. "I want to be that girl on the billboard," she says to Cricket, and he makes it so...only to find out afterwards that it was Yu herself pictured on the billboard. Yu has fooled him, and as she traipses through life again, herself but not herself, Cricket follows after her, grumpily admonishing her cheekiness and giving her rules to follow. She can't be recognized (this rule starts getting broken right away, but it is the ultimate rule that sticks amongst all that Cricket tries to weigh her down with), or it's back to heaven for Yu. Cricket indicates that really this should be a visit about unfinished business, not some sort of extension of her admittedly short life, but Yu is already subverting him before the words fly out of his mouth.

This vivid opening really gives us to understand exactly what kind of person Yu is. She is that uncanny mixture of child and adult that is fairly realistic for a person in their late teens––and yet it is a character so routinely streamlined in most movies so that the friction inherent in that age and time of life is stripped away from the character. Riho Makise plays the character, in her first film role. She is a spring wound taut, constantly ready to explode. Having a second chance at life, she finds herself in the position of so many ghostly figures in the movies, from Rock Hudson in Seconds to Patrick Swayze in Ghost. Unlike in most of those movies, however, Yu has no precise "unfinished business" as a ghost. She simply insists on living longer, and she is willing to swindle and badger and bully and steamroll her way to getting what she wants. What follows is a film which arrives at some similar ideas to Wings of Desire, but with a far more wretchedly earthy tone. Unlike the poetic angels of the Wenders film, Yu is impetuous and grounded. There are a few moments where she is more circumspect, and immediately a soulfulness fills her––the scene where she says goodbye under her breath to her sleeping parents (she has snuck into her old room to get her clothes) is quite moving, and the film builds to a conclusion where a more soulful (though no less mischevious) side of Yu sobers her enough to accept her fate.

Meanwhile, there is this other character, Fumio, played by Kiichi Nakai. Fumio is in the film from the beginning. He works as a lowly publicity agent assigned to shadow Yu around. At times he is to meet her needs, at other times he is meant to cajole and prod her into doing what the company wants her to do. He is the one tasked with getting a highly resistant Yu into the sleazy producer's car, which in turn leads to her death. Then the dead Yu magically appears in his apartment, and becomes his 24/7 problem to deal with. Yu is even less manageable as a ghost than she was as a living being, and Fumio is up to his neck trying to figure out what to do with her. Initially he doesn't think Yu is actually dead, but eventually he comes to see the truth of it––whereupon the guilt of his role in her death descends upon him, sobering him completely. Fumio is another unusual character, a reluctant salaryman, who wants nothing more than to play jazz trombone (which he moonlights doing at various clubs and restaurants). Just as there are two Yus––a living woman who he worked with and a dead one who is, if anything, simply more of the same troubling, frustrating woman (to him, at least) she was when she was alive––there are also two Fumios. At work he is bored and depressed by his work; we can see his soul sluicing right out of his body, and the key element of his job appears to be to constantly be apologizing to one person or another. With a trombone in hand, and later, when he begins to recognize feelings for Yu, he gets much, much cooler, more laid-back and subtly swinging to his own beat. As his feelings for Yu grow, he becomes increasingly detached from the henpecked working stiff version of himself, and he seems at once a cooler character and a more passionate man. The change within him is brought about by his encounter with Yu, and the way it trespasses between the two very compartmentalized aspects of his life. And yet, at work he is part of a team led by her essential murderer, who is now scheming to profit from her death in the loathsome way he did from her life. So Fumio remains a very conflicted character. Even so, it becomes increasingly clear that if Yu is going to make some mark on the world now that she is dead, Fumio will play some part in whatever mark she is able to leave.

This seems to be Somai's lowest–budget movie since The Terrible Couple, boasting 3 or 4 location scenes, with the majority of the film shot on soundstages. The action of the movie focuses on about 4 actors, with only a few scenes involving anyone more. There are wonderful Somai visuals, the kind of Antonioni-esque open visual metaphors Somai loves to use. When Yu arrives on earth again, she approaches a train, then jumps off the platform onto the railroad tracks. She then skips sideways across 4 or 5 different sets of tracks, aiming for a destination of her own not prescribed by any train or schedule. Frequently Yu is confronted with her own image on billboards and in store posters. She is constantly visually "trespassing," using public space in the "wrong" way. There is a very moody scene after she sees her parents where she runs distractedly around a children's park while the sun sets in the background, climbing jungle gyms and whirling on merry-go-rounds alone in a hauntingly deserted environment. There's also a lot of his surrealist whimsy. At one point Yu confronts Shirayuki, who has sort of "captured" Fumio. She's been told not to reveal herself to anyone she knows besides Fumio, so she emerges to face Shirayuki in a full-body robot costume she gets from a nearby soundstage––a robot brandishing a samurai sword, cutting bamboo shoots in Shirayuki's office to show him she means business. The sense of play cutting against the strictures of codified public locations, of goofy non-sequitur and of characters "acting out" within a restrictive society are Somai subjects which move through so many of his best films, from The Terrible Couple to Sailor Suit Schoolgirl with a Machine Gun, to P.P. Rider (one of the most playful and best movies ever made, filled with mirthful transgression), to Typhoon Club, to this film, and though the film is so much more modest than the previous Luminous Woman, the intimacy of this movie ends up creating a much more expansive feeling within this material. What could happen? What can Yu and Fumio do when they liberate themselves? The film seems open to so many possibilities.

But as with any play date, evening comes, we gather up our toys, and go home, and Tokyo Heaven gives us an unusual feeling of finality in Somai's work. It definitely feels at the end as if he is putting away the sort of surrealistic toys he has so frequently played with before now. In the next movie he tackles, Ohikkoshi, Somai seems to have stopped wondering whether he can transcend fate with fantasy––a preoccupation of many of the earlier movies (to be fair, many of these films pose this question and then answer it with a "no"––the embracing of fantasy at the end of P.P. Rider was, after all, preceded by the lovers of The Terrible Couple and their jealous, sabotaging friends all weeping at the intimacy they have all lost––and it was followed by Sailor Suit Schoolgirl, which ends with our hero going insane with grief, drifting into helpless, painful fantasy to escape an even bleaker reality). So the skirting of a grim future with transgressive play, which in a way sums up most of the action of Tokyo Heaven, gets this last hurrah. Following this film, Somai's approach seems to get more self-consciously "adult." To my mind, the interest in those later films is a little bit less. No doubt Somai remains a filmmaker of exceptional adroitness; but when the anarchy of fiction ceases to be a driving motivator within his story universe, my interest starts to wane, I'm afraid. Normally, all this "the dead get another chance to appreciate life" stuff would be something I would avoid. But I found the tone of this movie endlessly fascinating. It kept buoying the narrative up, keeping it from being maudlin, while retaining a remarkable morbidity for one of these kinds of pictures. In a sense, the film defies genre more thoroughly than I've communicated here. There is a love story, and one of revenge, but these are rivulets within a larger stream of the movie. There is a scene where Yu takes a walk through her old neighborhood. Very little happens in this sequence––she runs into a friend from high school. But what seized me about it was the time we spent watching Yu stride down the street before this encounter. He step was shockingly springy, and I realized this was a moment where she was breathing in air, feeling light and warmth upon her skin, taking in the familiar aroma of a place she thought she would never be again. All of a sudden, the moment seemed infused with a kind of painful nostalgia, along with the knowledge that Yu's dearly-purchased time couldn't possibly be permanent. So I ended up finding the film very resonant, moving, and unique, without ever feeling that my emotions were being manipulated with any excess of sentimentality. So it's a very, very striking picture, and I'm left really looking forward to the upcoming blu ray. The HD version I saw showed a good deal more information on the sides of the picture than the DVD, making all the film's compositions look more interesting, and the added depth of field and color separation made the shots appear more masterful and clear and confident. It really is a wonderful picture, which obscurity and neglect has absolutely hidden from us.
Last edited by feihong on Wed Jul 14, 2021 7:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#80 Post by barbarella satyricon » Wed Jul 14, 2021 8:30 am

Although I only scan quickly through, because I haven’t seen any of the films (not even Typhoon Club, which I’d known and read about for years), I live vicariously through these Somai posts, feihong. If I ever do undertake to tracking some of these down, your posts here will be my guidebook. Thanks for the enlightening read, as always.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#81 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Jul 14, 2021 8:39 am

I join barbarella s in thanking you, feihong, for this lovely appreciation of Tokyo Heaven....

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Re: Shinji Somai

#82 Post by Calvin » Wed Jul 14, 2021 9:04 am

I echo the above thanks. Hopefully, if Arrow's release of Sailor Suit and Machine Gun is successful, we can get more releases of Somai's work and the rest of us can join in the discussion proper!

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Re: Shinji Somai

#83 Post by feihong » Fri Sep 03, 2021 4:53 am

Blu rays arrived for two Somai films, Tokyo Heaven, which only grows in my estimation the more I see it, and Lost Chapter: Passion in the Snow. It's a tale to two very different blu-ray disc. Neither film has English subtitles ](*,) \:D/

Tokyo Heaven is put out by Bandai Visual. The disc is pretty barebones, with no subtitles, a single linear PCM Mono sound track, and two trailers for the film as extra features. I was deeply worried about how the quality of this disc would come out, but I couldn't be happier with this one. There is fine, elegant grain throughout the picture. The image looks crisp, bright, and very solid. I see no scratches or dirt at all. Scenes have fine depth of field. Seeing the movie this way makes it seem as if some sequences were shot on a different film stock. Sometimes some interior scenes look a little softer, though the grain is still apparent––almost like some of the film was shot in Super 16mm, and the rest in 35mm? Or perhaps this softening is a result of some of Somai's longer deep-focus shots. It doesn't come up very much. The picture looks beautiful––even the hokey special effects look a little smoother in this presentation. This is a miraculous disc for such a long-unavailable and neglected film. Riho Makise's firecracker performance bumps a couple notches up in full HD––in the love scenes she seems to quivver with passion. The two trailers on the disc are lightly speckled with dirt, and look a little softer in terms of picture quality than the feature proper. This will become relevant in a minute.

Lost Chapter: Passion in the Snow is released by Toho. There are Japanese subtitles on the disc (no english), a single audio track boasting 2-channel DTS HD, a trailer, a picture gallery, an interview with star Yuki Saito and another member of the production I didn't recognize, and an extraordinary making-of promo shot on video. The film looks better than I have ever seen it before...amongst other things, it's clear to see now all the moments of deliberate theatrical artifice Somai injects into the movie. Frequently marionettes can be seen peeking in through the windows of houses, and ordinary scenes with characters talking as they walk in the park are staged with strange little theatrical performances going on in the background. These touches add a lot to the movie I didn't think was there on first viewing. I'm going to have to watch it again and reappraise it––I liked it on first viewing, but thought it was a little tame, low-key, and inert. Looking at it bigger, clearer and better all around will maybe change my view for good.

Buuuuuuttttt...Lost Chapter has some serious noise reduction going on. The first shot, tracking boots walking through the snow, is so drizzly with wandering pixels I thought my player was broken (not the case). For the rest of the film, Somai's still shots look a bit better, and anything with motion, or anything shot too far back from the players, looks soft and waxy. It wasn't disappointing at first, because I'd never seen the movie as anything more than a greyed-down morass of heavy compression. But then I watched the trailer on the disc.

The trailer has some small scratches and dirt, but nothing that would get in the way of enjoying it. But the big deal is this: the trailer has no visible noise reduction at all. It looks sharp as a m*therf*king tack. The shots on the trailer have enormous depth of field, great color separation, wonderful stability...they make the film look wonderful. This should have been the way they handled the feature. In fact, I would easily, gratefully have traded some scratches and dirt for the sharp picture I saw in the trailer. It literally changes the way one watches these movie to see these shots sharp, crisp, and oh-so visually clear. It made me so incredibly furious to see that they could have done this film right, and they instead chose to mess it up. What absolute venomous creeps brought about this mishap? This is such a cruel thing to do, and then to hang this evidence right in front of me for how the disc ought to look...wretched.

A little to say about the making-of promo video, however. Even without subtitles, this is an adorable little treasure. While we see a good deal of making-of shenanigans in the background––including some curmudgeonly shots of Somai himself, directing with some kind of stick or cane––mostly this document is intended for fans of Yuki Saito. This movie was her first film after the Sukeban Deka TV show, and the video is presented as Yuki traipsing through the Toho backlot. Yuki is so much livelier here than in the actual film (though that's appropriate to the subject matter of the movie). She trips over the Godzilla suit and looks mock-terrified. She leaps on a bike and gets superimposed riding all over the world (movie-magic!) She wanders through set and wardrobe departments. Sometimes she arrives at her own set and just starts straight into shooting a scene. Somai sometimes passes by the camera, and looks deeply resentful that the video is happening.

All in all, though, it's a triumphant win for Tokyo Heaven––a great little movie that needs more eyes on it––and a near miss for Lost Chapter, which, though it looks better than it ever has on home video before, doesn't really cut the mustard. Toho seems to me a company which could have done something about this. I hope if Arrow gets their hands on this film one day, they'll be able to correct this; otherwise, I can't see Toho remastering this new blu ray of theirs and getting it right.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#84 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Sep 03, 2021 9:20 am

I really look forward (albeit with not a great deal of hope) to seeing these some day. Thanks for your report!

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Re: Shinji Somai

#85 Post by Calvin » Fri Sep 03, 2021 6:36 pm

Thanks for that write-up, feihong. I've worked out how to use external subs with my Blu-Ray player so I'm planning on ordering some Somai (and Obayashi!) soon.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#86 Post by Calvin » Wed Dec 15, 2021 4:37 am

Where to begin with Shinji Somai

Moving screens at the BFI Southbank, London on December 18th and 29th

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Re: Shinji Somai

#87 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Dec 15, 2021 10:49 am

If I were to make a list of favorite films of the past 30 years, Moving would be very near the top (despite the fact I've never yet seen it with subtitles).

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Re: Shinji Somai

#88 Post by artfilmfan » Wed Dec 15, 2021 8:20 pm

Moving lingered in my mind for weeks after I finished watching it. It is a very good film.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#89 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Dec 16, 2021 5:26 pm

It always delights me to see Tomoko Tabata show up in current films. I rank her performance in Moving as one of the best child performances I've ever seen. Very impressive to have a child carry the major load of a film the way she did.

Among the extras for Sailor Suit is a discussion with Hiroko Yakushimaru (who made her first film with Somai when she was also rather young -- though older than Tabata) -- and apparently he was harder to work with than I would have imagined. It would be interesting to know what Tabata thought of her experience working with him more than a decade later.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#90 Post by artfilmfan » Thu Dec 16, 2021 6:44 pm

I was mentally comparing Tomoko Tabata’ performance in Moving to that of Jean-Pierre Leaud in The 400 Blows. Both are great.

If I remember correctly, there is an interview with Tomoko Tabata on the first release of the Japanese DVD. Everything on that DVD is unsubbed, of course. So, I don’t know what’s being said in that interview.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#91 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Dec 16, 2021 7:14 pm

I'll have to see if I have that edition of the DVD (I probably do). I doubt that my listening skill are up to following some of that sort. But I'd love to get her retrospective recollections -- from the perspective of a successful grown-up actress.

Still disappointed at the lack of discussion of Sailor Suit once it finally made it to (translated) Blu...

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Re: Shinji Somai

#92 Post by feihong » Thu Dec 16, 2021 10:14 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:
Thu Dec 16, 2021 7:14 pm
Still disappointed at the lack of discussion of Sailor Suit once it finally made it to (translated) Blu...
Well, do you like Sailor Suit? It's not one of my favorite Somai pictures. I think that in the wake of the later 90s independent films in Japan, especially the Takeshi Kitano movies––which take a whole lot of inspiration from Sailor Suit––and the early Shinji Aoyama films, it's a lot harder to see what makes this movie special and unique. Also, the style Somai employs in later films is kind of embryonic in Sailor Suit––so, for instance, the long takes, which by his next movie, P.P. Rider, feature a dynamic, moving camera, are mostly fairly static in Sailor Suit. It's a lot harder to appreciate the 5-minute take where Izumi flounces around her apartment and the camera merely pans than it is in, say, Typhoon Club, where the 5-minute take starts in Rie's room, goes out the door, down several flights of stairs, and out onto the street as she runs to meet Mikami. My feeling is that Arrow ought to have led with a film like Typhoon Club or P.P. Rider, which show off some of the more outrageous and stylish choices Somai would make in later films. Establish why Somai is an adventurous filmmaker first, so that evidence of Somai's more innovative and expressive style is easier for audiences to track in his more allegedly mature dramas, or in a film like Sailor Suit, where he hasn't entirely figured out what these stylistic choices can mean. But Sailor Suit, to me, has always felt a little flat. I don't think Hiroko Yakushimaru gives an especially good performance in Sailor Suit compared to the child actors in almost any other Somai film. The movie looks great on blu ray, and there is some ambience that is visible in high definition that was hard to perceive when this was out on DVD, but I think there's a lot of stuff in the movie that doesn't come through very clearly. The drug smuggling that serves as a backbone for all the yakuza action is extremely convoluted; the ambiguity of Mayumi's role is severely underplayed, and the ending to the picture is to me considerably more obscure than enigmatic.

Ultimately, I find I like The Catch less than Sailor Suit, but I would still rate a relative artistic failure like Luminous Woman higher than I would Sailor Suit. So I guess I'm saying I'm not especially surprised it hasn't had a positive reception. The new art for the disc makes it look like a Takashi Miike film, and once you start watching it's obvious that this is an early-80s Kadokawa aesthetic, like Sukeban Deka, but without the yo-yo action and the cyborgs. And I think in an era of Miike movies, it's hard to appreciate that Miike only feels free to do what he does on-screen because Somai paved the way for that kind of movie, both in subject matter and in production scheme. When Criterion released their first Seijun Suzuki pictures, they were Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter––some of Suzuki's most effective and stylish Nikkatsu movies. If they'd released Detective Bureau 23 first, or Fighting Delinquents as a first film, I don't think Suzuki would have made much impression on English-language film fans. Those are movies that were successful in their era, but haven't really retained the same sense of outrageousness as Branded to Kill did. So I think of Sailor Suit in a similar regard; it was a hit in Japan in the early 80s––one of the only films to do something artistic and ambitious with the Kadokawa movie formula––but nowadays it looks tame, at least on the surface. And there are other Somai films, including P.P. Rider, made right afterwards, that are still surprising today. I think something like that, or Typhoon Club, where Somai's style and subject matter are cohering in ways that still feel fresh, would have been a more striking introduction to the filmmaker.

That said, always happy to talk about Sailor Suit...but I don't know what part of the film to start with?

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Re: Shinji Somai

#93 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Dec 17, 2021 11:00 am

I was surprised at how much more I liked Sailor Suit (in its longer version) on the new Bluray than when I first saw it. I was also surprised at how sad it ultimately felt overall. The first time I saw it, it seemed far more frivolous. I thought that it helped me understand his later work better. Somehow it never dawned on me how deeply rooted his style was in that of Seijun Suzuki.

I've seen only a fraction of the Somai movies that you have, feihong, so I can't trace things from film to film -- too many gaps. I will agree that there is a lot of clunkiness in Sailor Suit, but somehow it did not bother me on this latest viewing. And, of course, Yakushimaru's performance is not anywhere on the same level as Tabata's. But it seems like that was largely due to Somai's stylistic choice. It seemed like he wanted more of a comic book style from the actors (overall -- including her).

The ending of the film reminded me a lot of the ending of Typhoon Club -- which frankly infuriated me (as well as baffled me) the first time I saw it. But at that point I had not yet encountered any vintage Suzuki films. At least for me, seeing Somai's Suzuki's link really helped pull together my notion of what might (prtobably) be going on. I agree that there are probably better films to try to woo more (posthumous) support for Somai -- but I wonder if this might not have been one of the easiest to get the rights to.

Bottom line is that I had previously seen this film as comparatively lightweight and trivial -- but it came across as much more substantial and worthwhile (even if far from perfect).

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Re: Shinji Somai

#94 Post by andyli » Wed Jul 20, 2022 1:02 am

A new Kadokawa blu-ray of Luminous Woman (光る女) is appearing on Amazon Japan, from a 4K scan / 2K restoration.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#95 Post by feihong » Wed Jul 20, 2022 1:51 am

andyli wrote:
Wed Jul 20, 2022 1:02 am
A new Kadokawa blu-ray of Luminous Woman (光る女) is appearing on Amazon Japan, from a 4K scan / 2K restoration.
Amazing. Looking forward to this.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#96 Post by Calvin » Wed Jul 20, 2022 4:32 am


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Re: Shinji Somai

#97 Post by feihong » Wed Jul 20, 2022 4:42 am

Didn't realize it came with the cool booklet and the slipcase cover. That's so cool. This is almost more quality in this presentation than the film maybe deserves. That said, visually the film is tremendous, and Monday Michiru is pretty great in the picture. It's almost like...Somai doing a Jean-Jacques Beineix movie. It will hopefully look great on blu-ray; the Kadokawa discs I have are all top-tier.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Shinji Somai

#98 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jul 24, 2022 6:43 pm

I just watched P. P. Rider and I'm at a loss for words- but I'll try anyways. There are times where it feels like The Goonies with the manic energy (and liberal space to play) of Zazie dans le Métro, but Somai has such a firm control over what he's trying to accomplish, that he continuously zooms out from a zany cocktail to imbue the action with a unique vulnerability. The film is very absurd but its surrealism can encompass gentle pathos or grave awareness, just as much as it explodes with hilarity. I love the distanced camera, which forces a conscientiousness to social dynamics that feels slightly ominous, but is really just disrupting a nosedive into subjective escapism. Somai is squeezing so many wonderful ideas and tones into his film that we need to pay attention to, and he doesn't allow us to miss them.

Examples? At the halfway point, there's a long-take shoot-out setpiece that remains objective to lay bare its comprehension of the seriousness of this kind of violent situation, and then there's a great bit about forcing a truck through a tunnel, adults devolving into childlike whining, to juxtapose real mature threats vis abrasions in film grammar with mocking antisocial humor. The oscillation between exuberant and emotional fantasy for these kids, and the terrors of mature, cold spaces of adulthood, is just one of the many elusive high concepts I took away from this masterpiece. The musical aspects, that remain rooted in the same reality as the rest of the action, can come off as silly or be mixed with genuinely heartfelt scoring, with corrosive diegetic sound and spectacular non-diegetic numbers bleeding into the segues or, by the very end, the central activity of a scenario. The staging can come off like Wes Anderson's reapplication of Tati's strategies decades before he arrived on the scene. There are western showdowns, police-procedural arcs, buddy comedy adventures, crime, vérité guerrilla neorealism, observational comedy, musical elements that venture to prisms of melodramatic and riotous volumes, zoomed-out staging reminiscent of Godard's Brechtian approach to capturing action outside of editing manipulation, and so on and so forth.

The ending is almost painfully anticlimactic in its long-gestated unraveling of frantic antics captured in a single exhausting -but most importantly, exhausted on behalf of the camera- take, reflexively expressing the characters' and film's empty gas tank as the vehicle peters out of fumes. One could probably write an essay arguing how this film is cinema. I checked it out after seeing feihong list it as his favorite film, which makes a lot of sense. In many ways, this is The Movie. I don't know, maybe someone who understands this filmmaker's wavelength better can weigh in with more concrete readings. All I know is that I need to see more of Somai's work, stat

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Re: Shinji Somai

#99 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Jul 24, 2022 7:14 pm

Alas, I have yet to see this Somai film...

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Shinji Somai

#100 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:49 pm

Typhoon Club is another diverse masterpiece, but one that essentially adopts an inverted approach from P. P. Rider, reversing the explosively eclectic genre and spacial elasticity of that film. Instead, Somai reduces the action into familiarly banal spaces to detail both the versatility and normality of action and experience permeating the institutions that struggle to contain the erratic inflammations of youth culture. P. P. Rider is a film that set out to accomplish many tasks, but one of them was thematically confronting our loss of bearings as we endure the aggressively uprooting propulsion into emerging adulthood, reflexively through relentless manipulations of narrative and film grammar. Typhoon Club hits on the same ideas, but as characters are interacting less with foreign vehicles and environments like they do in P. P. Rider, and more with the tangible yet isolating experiences of pubescent development, it makes sense that Somai would concentrate the action and layer tones claustrophobically to create an equally powerful but methodologically opposing reflection of the surrealism in universal realities pertaining to psychosocial evolution. Here he's attending to the heaviness of the feelings instead of P. P. Rider's absurdist disorientation of them.

The camera peers around sometimes anxiously, other times with fluid confidence, but always persistent even as it's voyeuristically peering from an invasive yet cautious distance. Somai is demonstrating that no one can escape these changes, nor the traumas that come from coexisting with our peers, whose agendas intrude on us without our consent simply by the nature of occupying the same space and living in a milieu. Whether the institutional constructs Somai is interested in exploring here are physical buildings, like the school, or metaphysical relationship strongholds, their durability is nervously questioned throughout the film as they attempt to withstand literal and metaphorical typhoons! And just like these youths' dynamics with these apparatuses, Somai acknowledges the rigidity and flexibility pulling and grounding us in arrhythmic (dis)order that makes his films necessarily messy in order to speak truth.

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