MPD Psycho, Straight to Hell, Caché, Late Spring, & Guys and Balls

MPD Psycho is a Takashi Miike TV miniseries. Because of the restrictions of Japanese television, most of the gory scenes have a square mosaic over the blood, and there's the normal mosaics over crotches, but they're sometimes there and sometimes not for the gore. Always there for the crotches. I don't entirely understand why the mosaic had to be there for some obviously extremely fake arm cutting, although reviews of the fourth disc (which I didn't watch) reference Miike's anti-censorship stance. If true, then I commend him. Because it covers up for some silly aspects, as you are sometimes not aware of what you're seeing. Especially during the snuff videos. Anyway, it was a six part miniseries, hour long episodes each, about a serial killer who is able to transfer bodies by touch, phone, and over the internet, and the multiple personality police officer who is the only one who can stop him. The six episodes each have a different method for the killer, ranging from planting women with the tops of their heads off (and planting a flower in their exposed brains) to school shootings to spontaneous combustion to a Boxing Helena reference to hypnotizing women into cutting out their own fetuses and then replacing it with a phone. Of course it's based on a manga, because really, if there's some crazy Japanese thing, it's fairly likely to be based on a manga. I'm not even going to get into the crazy backstory of the characters, with a hippie musician mass murderer and the otaku cop who makes dolls along with his supervisor who makes bad jokes when presenting the murders to his supervisors. It's really just extremely strange, and the fake rain and the green radioactive rain doesn't help either. Miike is clearly messing with everything, and he succeeds beautifully, as I was confused, but I had to know how it would finish. And it was strange recognizing actors, like seeing Chiaki Kuriyama (of Battle Royale and Kill Bill fame) show up as the leader of a school shooting, and Ren Osugi (who played the drunk in Densha otoku, along with an insane amount of Takeshi's Miike and Kitano films).

Straight to Hell is bizarre. Alex Cox rounded up a bunch of punk/new wave musicians after a tour fell through, and stuck Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Shane MacGowan, Cait O'Riordan, the rest of the Pogues, Elvis Costello, Xander Berkeley, Dennis Hopper, Jim Jarmusch, Grace Jones, Miguel Sandoval, and Sy Richardson in a bizarre western about four bankrobbers who bury their money near a tiny town full of crazy people. There's lots of violence, a couple of musical interludes, and craziness. Certainly, I hope the people making it were having more fun than I was watching it. Except for the spot that guy (or girl) I didn't get much out of it.

Caché reminded me a lot of Peeping Tom, in that it's more about the relationship of the viewer to the film rather than anything actually in the film. Of course, it really just told me to take any other Haneke films off my Netflix queue. I had no other ones there. Yeah, I got that it's about France and Algeria. I never would have noticed, considering the main characters were French or Algerian, and it was about the power struggle between them. Sorry Michael, I just don't like you. After The Piano Teacher, I should have learned, but I like to give directors a second chance. Or, in the case of Brian DePalma, I just hate myself.

Late Spring is another Ozu family drama, this one about a daughter who doesn't want to get married because she just wants to keep taking care of her father. I saw camera movement, so I'm a little disappointed in you Ozu. And I'm not even talking about the two establishing shots from trains. There was the bike scene. What the hell, Ozu? This is the first in the Noriko trilogy of Ozu, with three films starring Setsuko Hara as characters named Noriko, all in the same period of life, as slightly older (well, my age) unmarried women who are pressured to get married. Well, in Tokyo Story, she's a widow. She's basically playing the same character as the later Early Summer. So many of Ozu's films are titled something that has little to do with the plot, except obliquely, meaning that I get confused easily. Between the films, not within them, because he has the same actors playing similar parts all the time, making it easy to know exactly what relationships the characters have with each other. And the ending is a typically heartbreaking finish.

Guys and Balls is full of gay stereotypes and, short the fact that it was in German, really was a typical underdog sports team rises to the occasion plot. Except that this was a gay football (soccer) team and it included a reference to dyed-red heart-shaped pubescaping. And more topless women than I was expecting. Far more. It was competently made, just that I knew everything that was going to happen from the first scenes. Literally.