Casshern (2004)

  
An epic, festering mess of a movie that barely manages to meander through its own convoluted plot. It is so very bad, that it is in fact quite good. Kind of. Deserves to be seen, whatever the case.

Say what you will about Hollywood's regimented three act script structure, but without it we'd be lost in an abyss of self indulgence and personal whimsy. And if there are two terms to sum up Casshern, then those would be it.
But there is something that I really really really must get off my chest right now: this is not sci-fi. It has nothing to do with sci-fi and the people who are calling it sci-fi are unequivocally wrong. Casshern is fantasy, albeit instead of wizards and dragons there are robots and robots. Still fantasy though. Not sci-fi.

So yeah, that script. Dear lord. Not only does it shit on the most common and widely accepted of writing conventions, but it positively lifts its middle finger and laughs in their face, even when judged by the considerably looser rules of Asian cinema. Problem is, I'm convinced that this is entirely unintentional. This is further exacerbated by the editing. The editing itself has a lot of issues, but in this particular instance I'm referring to the narrative progression. I was 40 minutes into the movie before I finally picked up the main plot thread, and things started falling into place. Sometimes that is OK. Here it is not.

There isn't any character development, we're just introduced to someone if we're lucky; usually people just show up out of nowhere, and then they remain completely unchanged, and then they'll likely die at some point. There is zero sense of distance, or journey - the characters sort of miraculously appear at wherever the plot demands them to be. Time is also completely at the mercy of the film's non-logic. The villains basically mobilize a massive robot army and attempt to take over the world after what was probably less than 3 minutes of screen time from making a desperate and last resort run to what eventually turns out to be their homeland.

I can imagine the movie as a little kid, and the filmmakers as terrible parents. Need to create a massive robot army to take over the world? Sure buddy, let's just make a few quick cuts and we're done. Hey, hey, can we keep the hero's girlfriend alive throughout a gigantic nuclear blast? No problem. Ooh, ooh, and then can we shoot her in the head, and then bring her back to life?? Why, that's a fantastic idea! Ok, ok, how about this: a giant lightning bolt structure appears out of nowhere, remains unexplained, but like, but like, like, it'll be the source of life and Frankensteinize a bunch of random body parts floating around in a research lab? Can we do that? Sure, I don't see why not!!!11

Visually, the film is just as all over the place, if not more so. High contrast, grainy black and white one second, two-tone animation the next. Even stop motion a couple of times. From hyper stylized faux-film all the way to super digital amateur handheld in the blink of an eye. The only consistency is the weak CGI, which to be fair didn't bother me in the slightest, as it kinda fits. Some of the art direction is lovely and it just works. Funny that. What I absolutely was not cool with is all the millions upon billions of bells and shiny whistles flying at your face nonstop. Yes, the art direction is great, if only I could stop for a second to really appreciate it. The film seems quite determined to never let that happen, as it just keeps going and going and going and throwing everything it has at your eyeballs. I actually enjoyed this, at first. It was refreshing and wonderful. However, by the time the film ended somewhere at the 2 hour 20 minute mark, I was fucking tired of it.

Hmm.... However. However, however, however... There's something about it. There are obviously a gazillion and one things wrong with Casshern, I could have quite easily made this twice as long as it is now and still not be finished ripping it apart. But. Irregardless of how very misformed it might be, the people behind this clearly had a strong vision. Call me a sap, but I don't like hating on that. Most movies are shitty because the people that make them didn't have the talent or the resources or the passion, but the people that made this clearly did have those things. That much is easy to see. This movie didn't suck because it didn't have a big enough budget, I'm quite certain that it would have sucked about the same amount had it three times the funding. This movie sucked in a very unique way; it sucked in a way that still deserves to be seen, and might even be appreciated. So go ahead and give it a whirl anyway; as far as shitty movies go, you could still do a lot shitter than this.

The Bothersome Man (2006)

  
You gotta love a good little dystopian movie. This one has some bonus metaphysical stuff going on too.

And from beginning to end, all of it is delivered in wonderful deadpan that simultaneously allows for dark humour, awkward humour and some serious dramatic impact as well; and it does it effortlessly, without ever feeling contrived or arbitrary. Or annoying. Deadpan can easily become annoying, but here it is used masterfully. Not only that, but it is also fully justified by the subject matter, and that probably goes a long way to making it feel acceptable, as opposed to 'LOOK AT HOW QUIRKY EVERYTHING IS, NOW POINT AND LAUGH AT IT.'

And I can't really go on without plugging in Wristcutters here. It seems that lately there's some sort of cosmic magnetism, I can't seem to watch a movie without another popping up in a matter of days that is related. And oh boy, do these make for one brilliant double feature. I recommend it.

So then, The Bothersome Man. This dude, Andreas, arrives at this place. At first, it seems more or less like a generic but modern European city, but soon it becomes apparent that something is not quite right. They don't really do anything special, or fancy, something is just a little bit off... Sterile. Great things are done with the costume design and cinematography to create an alien world, using simple means to achieve very impressive results.

Andreas is the perfect outsider in a world that is completely oblivious to its own predicament. Everything is all superficial interactions and blank consumerism, the food tasteless and the sex mechanical and Andreas is more or less the only person who seems to be bothered by it. He tries to make friends, a girlfriend, then a girlfriend on the side, but the only thing that seems to break through this sensory deprivation is a smell coming from a hole in a wall that, unfortunately for him, is terribly out of bounds.

What I found quite quaint about this one is that the movie is really not a cynical commentary on our artificial little society, but it so is. Sure there's all that life and death crap in the middle of it, but in a way The Bothersome Man has more in common with Fight Club than it does with The Sixth Sense, and when I stopped for a second to consider how a large part of my own life mirrored the film's cruel caricatures I realized that this one is not quite as far out there as it first seems.

Unfortunately when Andreas takes some drastic actions to change the status quo, these just blow up in his face. In an effort to go back to the greener pastures of the past, he just keeps going further and further in the opposite direction which makes the message here a bit of a downer. But hey, it is what it is.

I prefer to think of it in terms of a bit of a wake up call, if you will. For example I've never before used the term 'quite quaint' with a straight face. But I just did, and it felt pretty good - we're lucky. We have a wealth of experiences available to us, new things that we've never tried before.

Well why the fuck not?

The American Astronaut (2001)

  
A low-fi western science fiction musical comedy, inspired in no little part by German expressionism. Yeah, that got my attention too.

This is a fun filled, somewhat absurd movie. The interior of the space ship is kinda like a dingy motel room. Most of the outer space sequences are shown with the use of still images. There are gruff looking men performing what are perhaps the stupidest dances ever committed to celluloid. The music is quite brilliant.

Every once in a while it is nice to be reminded that not every movie in this beloved genre of ours needs to be grimdark serious business. Of course, I could easily turn that around and talk about some pretty fucking disturbing themes and undertones; this one has that in spades - but that is not the impression you walk away with.

The impression is that you've just visited a very strange vision of the future, one that despite being horribly unfuturistic, still works beautifully. This is culminated pretty early on with an inspired sequence involving a stand up comic plying his trade. Himself and his audience misunderstand the joke because they're looking at it through an entirely different perspective, and it doesn't really make sense to us, the actual audience, from theirs. It actually goes two layers deeper that I'm not going to ruin by outlining here, but I thought that was a touch of absolute genius. Well, at least I think that's what's going on, you can never be too sure with these things.
The film showed its sly cunning dressed as nonsense, which I almost would have drawn up to a fluke had it not been for another taking place in an interstellar barn. While the sum of this movie's parts is one thing, when you consider the actual parts, you find something else entirely.

You know, I really really wish there were more absurd movies around. Hell, I'll take movies that just use some absurd elements. Maybe I'm just getting jaded and cynical in my old age, but to me, taking something completely out of context and turning it on its head, and then saying something about it is infinitely more interesting than artsy fartsy symbolism along the lines of '...and the fragmented lighting in this scene is a visual representation of the character's inner turmoil...' snoooooooooooozzzzze. Absurdity on film can be powerful, and it really is too bad that it's so criminally underused - I can't think of more than a couple of others, and then those are more just weird for weirdness' sake.

Despite all this talk, the movie is oozing rustic charm and an obvious and deep love of early sci-fi cinema by the filmmakers. On the one hand, scenarios are presented simply and with a complete disregard for logic, which contributes to the film's overall sense of offcentre humour and yet on the other they contain such perverse ideas that they can make your blood curdle if stop to consider them. This incredibly strong duality married with all the other weird shit you'll encounter makes for an interesting cinematic experience that is quite unlike anything else.