Shinjuku Triad Society, Rainy Dog, Ley Lines, Lila Says, & Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress

Shinjuku Triad Society, Rainy Dog, and Ley Lines are the three films in Takashi Miike's Black Society Trilogy. They're about the difficulty of Chinese immigrants in Japan. Well, that's mainly the first and last in the trilogy, the second one was mainly about a triad assassin who finds out he has a kid. And lots of violence and pissing and sex. The first one is pretty much junk, the second one is far better, and the last one is quite good. The last one is about a group of three suburban kids who end up selling drugs on the streets of Tokyo, get robbed by a prostitute, and rob a triad boss to get money to stow away on a boat to Brazil. It's quite a touching film of trying to fit in in a society that doesn't particularly want you. Along with a fey Ghanian named Barbie, scratchy censoring of the naughty bits (actually a constant in all three films), and a fairly depressing ending. The three films aren't particularly happy, but you really see that in the few years between the first and the third, Miike learned a hell of a lot.

Lila Says was a short good French film about a brief flirtation between a Polish girl and an Arab boy. I enjoyed it, although it did make me wish I had an attractive French girl who wanted to discuss her strange sexual fantasies. Who enjoyed riding around on her motorized bike with no underwear on and then inspired me to write a great book. I would hope that the ending weren't quite the same, but it was very well made, and who can hate on a girl mooning the guy to the strains of Air? Ziad Doueiri, the writer/director, worked on quite a few films with Quentin Tarantino, and clearly learned how to use a great pop song. And Run is a great pop song. And whoever the hell decided that the original theatrical release would be unedited, but the DVD would be an edited version with Manara's porno Eden-ish comic blurred out, should be punched once, in the thigh, very hard. And then punched there again and again until they apologize. Edited DVDs are crap, Sony.

Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress is just another reason why my prodigious movie watching is probably not good for my mental health. Not for anything about the film itself, just what it causes me to think about. So many bits of pop culture are just pathways into my past that it's amazing I'm still willing to watch things I know are just going to hurt. Although I don't listen to The Green Album nearly as much as I used to... It's a film about two teenagers who are sent to the Three Gorges area for reeducation during the Cultural Revolution and they fall in love with the titular Little Chinese Seamstress while reading Balzac. It's based on the director's autobiographical novel, and it's very depressing to think of how many people went through far worse times in the Down to the Countryside Movement. Well, far worse than transporting human waste in backpacks, working in a coal mine, having your cookbooks burnt because they would allow you to create bourgeois chicken, and then reading an attractive girl banned literature and falling in love with her. At least they were able to leave eventually. And become useful members of society, from a non-Communist standpoint.