Mohanthropy

Film Review: 20th Century Boys

  I got a new shipment from Red Sun, my favorite Asian DVD importers, the other day, containing three films:  “20^th Century Boys,” “Shaolin Girl” (complete with CD soundtrack!), and “Ichi,” a female take on the Zatoichi saga.  Finally got around to watching the first of them, the domestic box-office smash “20^th Century Boys,” and it’s an enjoyably silly, increasingly preposterous cross between “Stand by Me,” the first season of “Heroes,” and the Book of Revelations.

  After a puzzling framing scene set in 2015, the movie bounces back and forth between 1969, when a group of adolescent friends formed a secret club and wrote a Book of Prophecies, and 1997, when those apocalyptic prophecies seem, bizarrely, to be coming true, potentially culminating with the end of the world on December 31, 2000.

  The opening, future-set scene introduces Prisoner 1498, a onetime comic artist now imprisoned in a hellish dungeon, apparently for something he published on the Web.  It’s the unseen, clawed monster in the neighboring cell, though, who narrates the story of the film, which begins as a teenaged Kenji Endo blasts T. Rex and proclaims the power of rock’n’roll to change lives.

  That, of course, was in 1969; the adult Kenji has abandoned his guitar-hero dreams and works in a KingMart convenience store alongside his mother, while caring for the baby girl his sister abandoned into his care.  After the police come by to inquire about a frequent customer, a professor named Shikishima who has gone missing, Kenji visits his home to collect an outstanding delivery bill.  On an outside wall he glimpses a symbol composed of a hand with its index finger extended, over an eye.    Kenji’s mother has been reading in the newspaper of a viral epidemic in Africa which drains its victims’ blood, so when he learns that a student of Shikishima’s has been found dead and bloodless, things start to look suspicious.

  When Kenji attends his high school reunion, he reconnects with most of his old gang, and they wax nostalgic about the hours spent in their secret hideout, living in fear of local bullies The Terrible Twins.  It got so bad that the boys hired the toughest kid they knew, a tomboy named Yukiji, as their bodyguard.  The reunion is dominated by talk of an enigmatic cult, led by someone known only as Friend, who pushes a prophecy identical to that invented by Kenji and company thirty years earlier, and incorporates the same hand-eye symbol the kids invented.

  Convinced that Friend must be someone from their childhood circle, the reconnected friends are further unnerved by vague hints that Kenji’s infant niece, Kanna, is somehow important, and by the unexpected death-by-falling of Donkey, a member of the circle who wasn’t at the reunion.  They also recall, through flashback, a creepy masked kid named Sadakiyo who always used to spy on their group.  It all ties into the moon landing from that summer of ’69 as well; when Friend finally appears and speaks, his first words to an adoring crowd are “I am Collins,” a reference to Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who didn’t get to set foot on the lunar surface.

  Yukiji, it turns out, is an all-grown-up woman now, working customs enforcement at Narita Airport.  When she sees the gang’s logo in cult-related news, she seeks out Kenji and reminds him that it was their friend Otcho who designed it.  Otcho, unfortunately, vanished in Thailand years ago.  As Kenji learns more about the cult of Friend, it becomes clear that everything he wrote in his childhood Book of Prophecies is coming true (including the laser gun he designed back then!).  London is struck by the blood-draining plague, then Osaka.  When a massive terrorist attack strikes a Tokyo airport, things seem clearly to be getting out of control.

  After the cult tries to kidnap the baby Kanna, and burns down the KingMart in the process, Kenji has had enough.  He uses the laser gun to hijack the stage at a Friend concert from the terrible glam band opening act, standing up for himself and reclaiming his rock’n’roll mojo in one fell swoop.  He discovers the all-important juvenilia under the charred remains of the convenience store.  From there the final act of “20^th Century Boys” ramps up the intensity, revealing the unlikely fate of Otcho, the emergence of Friend’s cult as a national political force, a life-size bunny costume, and, in the last half-hour or so, some truly apocalyptic shit.

  It’s an absurdly over-plotted story (which betrays its manga origins) that, like so many Hollywood action films, feels as if it could have been written by children.  In a meta-sense, of course, it was, and if there’s any deeper meaning to the film, it lies there.  Otherwise, its main virtue is how earnestly its many characters take the absurd situations in which they find themselves.  After all, this conspiracy makes “The Da Vinci Code” look eminently plausible.  But if anything seems confusing after the end credits, it’ll surely be cleared up in one of the two remaining films in the planned trilogy, which I must say I’ll anticipate, just to see how they deal with the rather drastic end of this one.

  2008 release, 142 minutes, in Japanese with English subtitles

  Grade: B

Film Review: Two Lovers

  James Gray’s “Two Lovers” has gained notoriety as the purportedly last film to star Joaquin Phoenix, who as we all know is absolutely for sure giving up his acting career in order to concentrate on facial hair, hip-hop stardom, and bizarre talk show appearances.  Really.  He’s serious.  Anyhow, even if the unthinkable happens and Joaquin signs up for “Gladiator 2: Christians’ Revenge,” it’s still a good thing that this modest romantic drama has garnered the extra attention.  “Two Lovers” is the sort of film that could easily slip through the cracks, as have some of Gray’s previous movies (“Little Odessa,” “The Yards”).

  As the title implies, this is your typical love triangle scenario.  Leonard (Phoenix) is living with his Jewish parents in Brooklyn following a hospitalization brought on by the breakup with his fiancé.  Almost simultaneously, he meets two women.  There’s Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of Leonard’s father’s business partner, and the safe, familiar choice.  And then there’s Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who’s everything Sandra’s not—blonde, a shiksa, and just a little bit crazy.

  Leonard is torn between them, and yes, he does end up feelin’ like a fool.  Michelle has another lover of her own, an older, rich lawyer (Elias Koteas) who refuses to leave his wife and family.  She’s also, as mentioned, somewhat unhinged, which endears her to the equally damaged Leonard.  But while he’s awkwardly introspective and occasionally suicidal, she’s volatile, narcissistic, and demanding.  She also thinks of him as more of a brother, and even says so, apparently unaware that that’s the worst possible thing a woman can say to a man who has just professed his love.  A match made in heaven, no?

  Phoenix, despite his off-screen Andy Kaufman-esque antics, is a heck of an actor when he wants to be, and he gives a perfectly pitched performance here as someone on the verge of mental illness but still functional on a day-to-day basis.  He avoids the all-too-common pitfall of letting the illness define and dominate the character.  There’s a scene where Leonard is waiting in a fancy restaurant for Michelle, trying to drink his Brandy Alexander through the stir stick, that’s a masterpiece of fish-out-of-water anxiety—familiar, funny, and sad.  He also, during a rare light-hearted scene out on the town, shows off the rapping chops and breakdance moves which have become a siren song to the actor.

  Paltrow, on the other hand, has a tendency when playing ‘ordinary folks,’ to condescend in her performance, and that shows a bit here.  Michelle lives in the same building as Leonard, with her unseen but apparently disturbed father.  It’s odd that the film never returns to this father after his first mention, except to provide a rationale for Michelle and Leonard to meet clandestinely on the building’s roof for, among, other things, a quickie against a rough brick wall.  (“That was beautiful” Michelle says afterward, more proof that she’s a bit off.)

  For this intimate drama set largely in cramped indoor spaces, Gray uses a widescreen ratio, cutting the horizontal frame up with vertical lines from doorways, walls, and rooftop chimneys.  It’s a classic but effective way of demonstrating the potential freedom available to the characters, as well as their (often self-imposed) confinement.

  A couple more random notes:  The DVD has a trailer for “Surveillance,” the long-awaited new film from Jennifer Lynch, who last graced the big screen with “Boxing Helena” in 1993, a film I’m perversely proud of having seen during its first screening on opening day (I was bored and I didn’t know Art Garfunkel was in it…).  Now 16 years later, this “Rashomon”-style thriller looks creepy and intriguing, despite a middling cast (Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond).  Also, I used the Shazam app on my iPhone for the first time while watching “Two Lovers.”  It successfully identified the tune playing in the nightclub scene as Moby’s “I Love to Move in Here.”  And finally, I forgot to mention above that Isabella Rossellini plays Leonard’s mom, and one should never neglect to mention anything that she does.

  2008 release; 110 minutes; viewed on DVD

  Grade: B+