The Wayward Cloud, Passing Fancy, & Exte: Hair Extensions

The Wayward Cloud is the final (?) film in Tsai Ming-liang's trilogy that includes What Time Is It There? and The Skywalk Is Gone. In this one, thet main male character is a porn star, and he meets up with the main female from the earlier films. There's a drought in Taiwan, so everyone is eating and drinking watermelons. It's extremely bizarre, slow-moving, there's not just a hint of necrophilia, and, oh yeah, it's a musical with very little dialogue. They sing old Taiwanese songs, almost all of which are terrible. Basically, there's a dude fingering a watermelon as a stand-in for a vagina, there's fake-looking sex (I mean, seriously, he wasn't even hard, how could he possibly have actual sex with a dead woman?), forced fellatio (at the climax of the film, pun intended), and man, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the earlier two films.

Passing Fancy is an early Ozu film, and it was released in a pack of 3 from Eclipse (the budget Criterion line). As such, it doesn't get the same treatment as Criterion from a visual standpoint, as it looks like crap. And there are far too many intertitles. Hitchcock would have objected to that. I just objected to the boringness. I don't know if there's anything else I could possibly get out of watching more Ozu, considering how many I've seen, so I actually just took the others out of my Netflix queue.

Exte: Hair Extensions is a Japanese Horror film. About murderous hair extensions. Somehow this is not the most ridiculous Japanese horror film I've ever seen. It stars Chiaki Kuriyama (Kill Bill and Battle Royale) as the hero, and Ren Osugi (The Twilight Samurai, Dolls, and a huge bunch of awesome Takeshi Miike films) as the insane morgue attendant who sells hair extensions that start taking over the brains of those who wear them and then having them kill people. Evidently, there's some story about a woman who is kidnapped and her body parts are sold for transplants, or something, but who really cares? Hair kills people! And grows out of wounds and around tongues and over eyeballs and through fax machines and you get the idea. Sion Sono (who did the earlier (and not nearly as deliriously funny) Suicide Club) shifts tones like a wild man, but it just feels like it is supposed to be like that. And I didn't even mention my favorite part (besides the abusive mother and her boyfriend getting their comeuppance and why people would ever want to grow up to wear stupid hair like that): the movie introduced Chiaki's character by having her bike in to work late but narrate everything like she's a film noir heroine. Except that instead of doing it in her head, she does it out loud, explaining she saw someone do it in a terrible TV show and found it funny so she started to do it herself. Which is strange, but then she meets up with her best friend, who also does it, and it becomes another layer of hilariousness.