Takashi Miike's Yatterman

The latest addition to my Takashi Miike collection arrived quite by accident, given to me by my great friend Dave who initially received it as a freebie from the British distributor Eureka, and Dave who's far too sensible for this kind of stuff, flung it in my direction. So by random chance, I sat down with Yatterman, a juvenile sci-fi fantasy from 2009 based on a colourful anime series from the late 70's. If a frame of reference is required think of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series spliced with Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids. From what I can gauge from browsing through the 60-odd unsubbed, undubbed Yatterman episodes currently on youtube, Miike and his team have produced a remarkably faithful live action version of the original series. In the film a teenage boyfriend/girlfriend crime fighting duo are charged with locating some powerful stone fragments before they fall into the hands of the Dorombo gang, headed up by the sexy Doronjo and her two bumbling henchmen. Hardly my thing, but the idea of Miike doing a children's film was weirdly fascinating - after all this is a director who filmed a woman drowning in a paddling pool of her own shit in Dead or Alive. Happily, the pre-pubescent young person in your life is in safe hands here and should go gaga for the relentless action, wide scale destruction, slapstick comedy, and eccentric retro-robots, augmented by some excellent CGI animation and design work. Fans of the director's usual stock and trade should find much to enjoy as well with some very sly touches of humour - at one point, one of the bad guys blissfully imagines himself lying on top of a mountain of schoolgirls, or the environmentally friendly weapons that fire squid ink, and the film turns surprisingly dark for the second half when the Yatterman team are spirited away to a metallic wilderness of cogs and clock parts to confront Dokurobei, the film's sinister demonic villain.

The reaction to the film in the West has been mostly positive but it's interesting to see how the film has been marketed, a tricky prospect considering Miike's fan base developed on the back of taboo-baiting films like Audition and Ichi the Killer. The notes on the sleeve of the Eureka Blu-Ray describe the film as "candy-coloured camp" as if it was some sort of eye-winking Barbarella style romp. Or perhaps it's a sign of the cultural shift between Japanese and Western attitudes. I suspect a scene where a female robot fires a volley of gunfire from its breasts would be completely inoffensive to young Japanese audiences but the British censors felt differently and slapped the film with a ludicrous 15 rating ("Contains infrequent strong sex references", my italics). Unfortunately the film seems destined to be seen only by adults, or at least young adults as the current home video editions of the film - the Eureka Blu and the Australian Madman DVD include only the original (subtitled) Japanese audio track. For the Takashi Miike fan who must see everything, the film is warmly recommended, but for the casual watcher, I'd recommend catching a taster of the film first.

Re-Agitator - A Decade of Writing on Takashi Miike

FAB Press' second book about Takashi Miike which arrived in April this year seems to have come and gone with little comment from the fan community. This may be due to the book's title, a clever riff on author Tom Mes' previous Miike book, Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike but I suspect the similar titles will lead to some confusion. A shame considering Re-Agitator makes for a fine introduction to the work of the Japanese maverick, and in this respect is superior book to its 2003 predecessor. Re-Agitator collects together in one useful volume a wide range of Mes' writing on Miike, from DVD liner notes, magazine and web articles, foreign language publications (Italian and Croatian no less), and some previously unseen writing. In contrast to Agitator which tended to plod along with scholarly dissections of Miike's films (which at the time were hard to see), the writing in this new volume is compact, enthusiastic, and spoiler-free for new comers, the majority of the films covered in the book readily available on DVD on both sides of the Atlantic. My favourite chapter in the book, entitled Generation V: Takashi Miike and the Wild World of V-Cinema (which originally appeared in an Italian anthology) is a fascinating account of Japan's once thriving direct-to-video industry which in part shaped Miike's avant-garde approach to otherwise conventional scripts. Miike shot the majority of his early films on 16mm which were then transferred to VHS, which accounts for the bland visual quality of these early films, but as Mes explains, these films which exist solely on videotape are becoming increasingly hard to find, such is the lack of conservation for these DTV productions in Japan.

At 160-pages, Re-Agitator is a slim book and can easily be read in two or three sessions, but this being a FAB Press production, it is of course a handsome looking, beautifully laid out and filled with high-quality color stills. The book is limited to just 1000 hardback copies (the first 200 were signed by Miike and Mes, my copy is #80) so if you're anyway curious about the cinema of Takashi Miike, this is an excellent entry point. Order the book direct from FAB Press, impeccable customer service and delivery is guaranteed.

 A page from Re-Agitator chronicling Miike's Masters of Horror episode, Imprint

Images of Brian Eno's On Land

Brian Eno's 1982 collection On Land, the 4th and final of his Ambient series features four tracks named after specific places on the British map - three of the places are located in and around Eno's childhood home in East Anglia, as well as the nearby Suffolk area towards the south east coast of England. Lantern Marsh, is a fresh water marshland popular with gun clubs and once home to Cobra Mist, a long-range Anglo-American surveillance radar station. Leeks Hills is a small wooded affluent area of Suffolk. Dunwich Beach on the Suffolk coast is a quiet pebble strewn beach steadily disappearing due to coastal erosion. Lizard Point by contrast is located in Cornwall and is the southernmost tip of mainland Britain, its rocky stretch of coastline has been responsible for many shipping disasters. Lizard Point is also said to be where the invading Spanish Armada was first spotted on the afternoon of July 19th 1588.

In his liner notes for On Land Eno explained that the tracks composed for these landscapes were not intended as faithful sonic representations of these particular places, rather the music reflected impressions of what a place might be like after seeing it on a map. Eno would probably loathe the idea of revealing these locations to listeners, but I've enjoyed the experience of listening to On Land whilst gazing at the photographs, and the transformative effect the album's dark and unsettling music has on these otherwise benign landscapes is particularly interesting.

Lizard Point

Lantern Marsh

Leeks Hill

Dunwich Beach

Photograph credits:

Lizard Point ("Looking towards Lizard Point" © Nick MacNeill) details

Lantern Marsh ("Lantern Marsh behind Orford Ness" © Richard Law) details
Leeks Hill ("Footpath to Turnpike Lane on Leeks Hill" © Adrian Cable) details
Dunwich Beach ("Dunwich Beach, Looking South" © Stuart Shepherd) details

Additional Reading:

On Land liner notes

Lizard Point - Wiki entry

Cobra Mist radar station, Lantern Marsh - Wiki entry

A page about Dunwich Beach (incl. images)

Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams

Just a quick plug for BBC4's recently screened Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams, a spellbinding 1-hour documentary on the history of automata - self-operating machines powered by intricate clockwork parts. Presenter Simon Schaffer picks up the story in the 18th century, the golden age of automata when highly skilled watchmakers and inventors used their engineering genius to construct life-like biomechanical devices which could mimic the actions of their human or animal counterparts. Featured in the program are some of the most celebrated and astonishing automata that survive today. In the 1770's Swiss clockmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz's constructed The Writer, a mechanical boy who writes a short elegant handwritten note using a quill and an inkwell. A shot of The Writer's inner recesses reveals the extraordinary amount of work that Jaquet-Droz invested in his creation, the device contains a veritable microcosmic metropolis of almost 6000 miniaturized screws, springs, coils, cogs and cams.

Not content for The Writer to simply reproduce the same note time and again Pierre Jaquet-Droz designed the letter-parts to be interchangeable so the device could write whatever its owner fancied. The Writer and other Jaquet-Droz designed automata - the Draughtsman, a mechanical boy which draws a very artful picture of a dog, and The Musician, a young woman who plays a dulcimer-like instrument - are in effect early prototype computers, devices which are programmable, following a prescribed set of well-defined instructions. What's more fascinating are the philosophical questions posed - how Jaquet-Droz's automata or John Joseph Merlin beautiful Silver Swan (1773) transcend their collection of moving parts and assume a strange lifelike, even soulful presence like so many robotic dreamers that followed them - The Wizard of Oz Tin Man, the replicants of Blade Runner (a film which features a character who designs 21st century toy automata) and the child android from Artificial Intelligence.

If you're interested in medieval curios, and indeed the surrealist films of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers, I highly recommend you catch Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams.  Better still, Pierre Jaquet-Droz's three surviving automata, which still function are on permanent display at the Museum of Art and History Neuchâtel, in Switzerland while John Joseph Merlin beautiful Silver Swan can be seen a little closer to home at the Bowes Museum Durham, England.

The Unmade Films of Donald Cammell

Rebecca and Sam Umland's 2006 book Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side is one of the strangest director biographies I've read in quite some time. This is not a criticism of the writing - the book is excellent throughout but what makes it unique among other director biographies is the sheer amount of films discussed within the text which didn't get made. Cammell made just four films between 1968 and 1995 but left behind twice as many screenplays which for various reasons outlined in the Umlands' book failed to catch fire. Jean-Luc Godard famously said that all one needed to make a film was a girl and a gun but time and again Cammell's perennial obsessions with sexuality and violence failed to make the transition from page to screen. I've scribbled down some brief notes from the book on a few of the more significant film projects that slipped through Cammell's hands. I should point out that my attempt to make tidy synopses of the screenplays discussed below does Cammell a disservice given the characteristic complexity the director invested in each project, and I would encourage anyone interested to seek out Rebecca and Sam's book for a detailed commentary.

Ishtar... The Beard...

Ishtar written soon after Performance, is set in Morocco and concerns a chance meeting between a film maker struggling to make a movie about the ancient Goddess Aisha, and a political revolutionary who has kidnapped a prominent American judge (a role William Burroughs was considered for). Ultimately the film foundered due to budgetary reasons (the film was to employ some innovative optical effects) but Ishtar refused to lie still - in 1972 Cammell shot some footage in Arches National Park in Utah loosely based on Ishtar, later posthumously edited and released as The Argument. In the mid-80's the screenplay was revived and retitled The Last Video, a project David Puttnam's Goldcrest wanted to make but withdrew from after the expensive disaster of Revolution (1985)

In 1972 Cammell wrote a screenplay based on Michael McClure's bizarre play, The Beard in which Billy the Kid and actress Jean Harlow meet up in an eternal afterlife and battle it out. Cammell declared he would not change a word of McClure's dialogue and hoped Mick Jagger would play the Kid but nothing came of the proposed film. In 1973 Cammell set to work on another uncompromising project, writing a dense and visually arresting screenplay of Nabokov's labyrinthine 1962 novel Pale Fire, typically considered unfilmable. Unsurprisingly Cammell failed to secure financing.

Aisha the witch in a expressionist shot from The Argument

The Lady Hamilton... Hot!... Fan-Tan...

Cammell next wrote a screenplay entitled The Lady Hamilton, (later known as Faro) a historical biopic of Emma Lyon, a free spirited and sexually adventureous women whose lovers included Lord Nelson. Lyon's story had been filmed in 1941 as That Hamilton Woman! starring Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier but Cammell was unable to stir up any interest for his version.

Following Demon Seed, Cammell worked on a Jack The Ripper screenplay with English theatre critic and writer Kenneth Tynan but was fired by the producer, which Tynan recorded in his diary - "Bill Tennant tells me over lunch that he wants me to continue with the script of the Ripper but that he proposes to ditch Donald C. as director replacing him with John Schlesinger or Nic Roeg." In any event the proposed the film eventually collapsed. (Warners had their own Ripper film Time After Time, in production around the same time). In 1978 Cammell worked on a screenplay originally developed by Zalman King entitled Hot! which was centred around a community of radioactive mutants living in the desert. King sought out Cammell to direct the screenplay on the strength of Performance. Cammell's vision of the film was steeped in mythological and Biblical references and might have resembled The Hills Have Eyes had it been directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

In 1978 Marlon Brando commissioned Cammell to work on a screenplay known as Fan-Tan, a hugely convoluted sea-adventure set around Hong Kong and French Polynesia just before the second World War. Brando was to play the film's swaggering anti-hero, but his enthusiasm for the project eventually dried up and the project ran around. Cammell however salvaged the screenplay and turned it into a novelization which finally surfaced in 2006 co-authored by Brando and Cammell

Jericho... The Cull...

Cammell entered into another ill-fated collaboration with Marlon Brando who contacted Cammell after seeing White of the Eye and impressed by the film asked Cammell to work on a project he was developing. Jericho was a story about an unhinged CIA agent who is offered One Last Job to assassinate a Columbian drug baron. Of the crop of unmade projects Cammell collected over the years Jericho came close to being realized - finance for the projected 14million dollar production had been secured but Brando and Cammell proved too volatile a mix and the film was ultimately abandoned.

In 1993 Cammell began working on a screenplay called The Cull in which a traumatized Gulf War soldier wanted by American and British authorities goes into hiding in the wilderness of the Scottish highlands. On the face of it, the screenplay mines similar territory as First Blood, but The Cull has a complex time-shifting narrative and explores themes of man's propensity for violence, and illegal military warfare. Apparently Sean Connery expressed an interest in making the film. It's interesting to note that the climax of The Cull has the film's hero survive being shot in the head which may have helped propagate the myth that Cammell survived for some time after he turned a gun on himself, a myth the Umlands in their book strenuously debunk - Cammell's death was almost certainly instantaneous, ending a remarkable life and career.

A shot of Cammell's collection of unfilmed screenplays

(from The Ultimate Performance documentary)

Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance

I'm currently reading Rebecca and Sam Umland's excellent 2006 biography of Donald Cammell, and as a taster for things to come I caught a screening over the weekend of Chris Rodley and Kevin Macdonald's 1999 documentary Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, the first important study of this criminally neglected film maker who took his own life in 1996 with a gunshot to the head. Cammell might have made just four films over the course of nearly four decades but he lived a rich and strange life. Before he made film making his life's work, Cammell was a portrait painter of some renown, he was a sexual adventurer among the glitterati of 60's Paris and London, extremely well read (Borges was a lifelong favorite) and was fascinated by esoterica and ritualism. Incredibly Cammell met Aleister Crowley when he was a young boy - Cammell's father wrote one of the first biographies of Crowley (The Man, the Mage, the Poet).

Donald Cammell interviewed in 1992

The core of the documentary is the incredible history of Cammell's signature film Performance admittedly much to the detriment of Cammell's other films - Demon Seed (1977) is passed over in one short clip, while the lost classic White of the Eye (1987) is discussed all too briefly. Cammell's final film Wild Side (1995) is barely mentioned perhaps due to the shoddy treatment the film received by the studio who financed it. That aside, the discussion on Performance is quite extraordinary. Almost everyone from the film is interviewed - Anita Pallenberg remembers acting the awkward love scenes with Mick Jagger and the aggravation it caused with her then boyfriend Keith Richards; James Fox recalls his sojourn among the faces of South London in research for the film ("Jimmy Fox was regarded as one of their own" confirms Johnny Shannon who played mob boss Harry Flowers in the film); Jagger himself reads out an impassioned letter he and Cammell wrote to Warners who were appalled by the film's violence, while Nicholas Roeg who forged a symbiotic co-directing partnership with Cammell for the film is visibly upset over his split with Cammell during the fallout from the film.

Johnny Shannon and James Fox

Elsewhere sharing their thoughts and memories of Cammell are his brother David (who was associate producer on Performance), Cammell's wife China (pronounced Cheena), Cathy Moriarty (who starred in White of the Eye), Barbara Steele who knew Cammell from the Swinging London days and Kenneth Anger who cast Cammell as Osiris, Lord of Death in his 1972 film Lucifer Rising. Cammell himself appears in the documentary interviewed in 1992 and is engaging, intelligent, charming and in good form. But in his private life Cammell was given to fits of black depression, frustrated no doubt by the amount of film projects he was force to abandon. Friends admit that Cammell was perhaps his own worst enemy, he simply couldn't work within a studio system of film making. One close friend speculates that Cammell's inability to get films off the ground ultimately freed him to commit suicide at his Los Angeles home in April 1996, with a bullet to the brain, eerily echoing a scene in Performance.

A quick glimpse of Donald Cammell under the covers with Jagger and Pallenberg, from an outtake from Performance

Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance remains unavailable in any official edition at the time of writing, but the complete film can be seen over at YouTube. All four of Donald Cammell's film are currently available on DVD. Performance and Demon Seed are on Warner DVD. Dutch label Mælström put out a barebones but English-friendly White of the Eye (DVD reviewed here). The director's cut of Wild Side is available courtesy of Tartan, and includes Cammell's 14min short film The Argument, which was originally shot in 1971 but remained unedited until the film was reconstructed and mixed by Frank Mazzola in 1999.

Bloomsday

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce at Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company in 1922. Celebrating Bloomsday, 16th of June.

Dawn Of The Dead - Complete Motion Picture Soundtrack

"Attention all shoppers..."

Generally speaking I don’t listen to soundtrack albums, preferring to experience a piece of film music accompanied by the images. However, I will make an exception for this incredible album compiled by two Dawn of the Dead obsessives who managed to track down just about every bit of music heard in the theatrical cut of the film and crucially present it here sans dialogue. Quite an achievement considering the bulk of Dawn of the Dead’s soundtrack was made up of tracks culled from various hard to find library music albums on the De Wolfe label. The music Goblin composed for the film has always been available – a Goblin-only soundtrack LP was issued soon after the film’s original release in 1978, and later debuted on CD in 1987. In 2004 Trunk Records took on the challenge of rescuing Dawn of the Dead’s lost library soundtrack, gathering together an impressive 39mins of music heard in the film, and released it as Unreleased Soundtrack Music from George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. In his liner notes for the album, label head-honcho Jonny Trunk wrote “Fans of the film in America have spent years trying to track all these originals down. It will take you years possibly, so don't bother.” Sound advice considering most of the albums Romero sourced the music from had long faded into obscurity, never pressed for CD. Even the Trunk album was incomplete, missing out on two of my favorites pieces of music, the track with the African drumming and chanting, used for the gun shop sequence in the film, and the weird phased version of the polka number The Gonk, heard when Steven emerges from the lift as a zombie.

Thankfully, these tracks and other elusive numbers have been located, and included in the unofficial double-CD Dawn Of The Dead - Complete Motion Picture Soundtrack which includes the library music and the film's selection of Goblin tracks. Even more remarkable is how fresh the library cuts sound, expertly scrubbed of the snap, crackle and pop of the original LPs and sequenced in the order heard in the film. This is an absolute essential addition to your Dawn of the Dead collection so I’d recommend you grab this right away. Rather than claim this labor of love for my own, I’ll direct you to where I found it, at the excellent Inferno Music Vault which offers some incredible soundtracks for your listening pleasure. Well worth spending some time there combing through the archives.

Gunnar Hansen on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Continuing a series recalling little nuggets heard on film maker commentaries. In this instalment Gunnar Hansen remembers filming a scene with Marilyn Burns during the legendary 27 hour shooting day and the moment when the mild-mannered actor transformed into his character Leatherface...

This scene there's a tube...a bulb in my palm with the knife and there's a tube to feed the fake blood. We shot this over and over again because the tube kept clogging. There's a piece of scotch tape over the blade edge to keep it dull. We couldn't get the blood out of the tube onto the knife edge and so after the 4th or 5th take while they're all getting ready to shoot it I turned away from everybody and stripped the tape off the knife and the blood tube and actually just cut her. And the reason was at this point we were insane and now we're 18 hours into this 27 hour day and at this point I was so crazy I just wanted to get the film over with. And I didn't care about anything, I didn't care about hurting her, I just wanted to not do this again...

Gunnar Hansen, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Dark Sky DVD/Blu-Ray, commentary index point 71:01)

The Day Jobs of Philip Glass

I love this, and I wish I had a better scan... The Day Jobs of Philip Glass first appeared in the April 1992 issue of Pulse!, Tower Records in-store magazine. Illustrated by underground comic artist Justin Green as part of his Musical Legends series this very funny cartoon depicts a slightly surly mid-70's era Philip Glass driving a cab and plumbing apartments and lofts, just two of the jobs the struggling composer worked before his magnum opus Einstein On the Beach premiered at New York's Metropolitan Opera House and made Glass a household name. The 4th panel below, showing Time magazine critic Robert Hughes gasping in disbelief at the sight of Glass plumbing his new dishwasher really did happen. "But you are an artist" Hughes spluttered. Glass explained he was sometimes a plumber and he should be left alone to finish the job. In 1978 Glass finally handed in his cab license and ditched his overalls to became a full-time composer.

  

  

  

An anthology of Justin Green's musical legends which include Jim Morrison, Robert Johnson, Iggy Pop to name a few is available here (The lo-fi screenshots above are taken from the 2007 documentary Glass - A Portrait Of Philip In Twelve Parts)