"I Could Feel This Cool..."
If you're gonna kill 'em onscreen, make if colorful...

Now, don't get me wrong, Takashi Miike is colorful. He is. It's just that it strays into garish. Well, garish, bloody, and nightmarish. Nonetheless, you can't say that he isn't colorful. The locations. The costumes. The language. All of it quite colorful...just more in grime and blood tones.

For a purer vision of color with a similar sense of over-the-topness and a similar spread of violence, you can stay in the same country. You only have to turn the hands of time back a few years. In the 1960's, Japan was no stranger to splashing the screen with high doses of colorful wackiness. When you look back, it's hard to figure out how all these other movies got by, and visionaries like Seijun Suzuki kept getting fired....well, ok, he took it too far too fast, but he warmed an auidience for one of his protegés.

Oh, what the hell am I talking about...let's move along to:

The Black Tight Killers (1966, d. Yasuharu Hasebe)

The Story: When a photojournalist chases after his kidnapped girlfriend, he finds himself in a web of intrigue between corrupt military officers, gangsters, the police, and a group of go-go dancing female ninjas.

The Review: There's a reason these days that I almost have to watch movies like this. It isn't that I'm all into nostalgia or kitsch or just plain being retro. I'm not. Let's face it though, I saw most of the major movies that I grew up with in the 80's. Those movies represent, to me, the end of movies for fun, movies merely for entertainment, movies for movies' sake. In isn't to ignore their important social functions, but once upon a time telling a story was all it was about. Now it's all about having realism and themes and "art", but all mixed up in a corporate/advertising profit-driven franchise star system. Movies are expensive. Movies do have to make money. But, frankly, they've gotten way too big for their britches and forgotten what they were meant for in the first place.

At least that's what I think.

Slowly I've worked my way back through the 70's, and covered a healthy dose of that ground. (The funniest part being that the last generation to make great movies for movies' sake were also the one's responsible for the art meets franchise blockbuster market of today.) The 70's are of course largely covered in darkness and decadence. That's not all bad, but sit through enough and you almost have to welcome the loud and colorful 60's. At least I did.

That's not to say there's not a grim side to The Black Tight Killers, just that it isn't mired in it. Anyone film-savvy person watching could instantly place the film as following the James Bond craze. It's by no means a knock-off of any sort, but it's got all the adventure, chases, wacky weapons, and beautiful girls of those films.

Hasebe directs with flair, and keeps the movie moving along at a quick clip. Showing an abilitity rarely seen these days, Hasebe keeps the movie moving hand-in-hand delivering story and action as needed without totally tired predictability. Too many movies today get mired in the too much story before too much action followed by too much story formula. Another bizarre facet of modern movies is their ever apparent need to absolutely attempt to flesh out every character onscreen to the nth degree. The funny is that modern movies don't spend enough time with any character to make them interesting, and they've forgotten that a distinctive face and good acting goes a long way to livening up a lesser character more than a pretty face does.

Yes, half the movie's allure belongs to the title heroines/villainesses. These movies truck in a sensuality that keeps the movie engaging far more than the modern Andy Sidaris straight-to-video Playmate filled movie does because you're watching and enjoying the movie and not just waiting for the girls to get naked. Five girls in black leather and tights has promise all by itself, but when they weild blinding chewing gum, tape measure swords, and razor sharp 45 vinyl records, they're just awesome. I mentioned the part about Go-Go dancing too right. There's somethign crazy about Go-Go, and I've been fascinated since Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. (R.I.P. Russ, I loved your work.)

Anyhow, the point is this is the pretty lean and mean movieworld cinema that I love. It's the fantasy. It's the kind of world you wish you could jump into. It's the kind of world that doesn't exist, but that does in a way only because it's onscreen. It's that idea of bigger-than-life. I may love Clerks, but that doesn't mean that I want all my movies to be about working class schmoes...after all, I am one, I know that life already. I want the movie about the guy who uses the ancient wooden (!?!) canon to shoot down an attacking helicopter. That was this movie.

At the same time, you can never walk into these movies expecting the greatest cinematic experience ever...just be open to having a good time.

Cheers.