Change Your Image
Mindset-2
Reviews
Quando le donne avevano la coda (1970)
Apparently not a figment of my imagination
There were 150 women at the end of the movie? Honestly, I never made it that far. The product of a really boring graveyard shift at Jumbo Video, my shift partner grabbed this one off the rack because he wanted to watch something with jugs and thought it'd be weird enough for me to give it a try (he was right). I'm sure our copy had the title "The Time Before Women Had Lost Their Tails" (I remember thinking how that didn't make any sense as Filli doesn't have a tail). Painfully juvenile, the cast makes the Teletubbies look like the Marx Bros. In all these years, its never occurred to me that it was Italian. I remember that they were speaking gibberish, but I'm pretty sure it was Caveman gibberish and not a foreign language. Either way, there were no subtitles or dubbing, which didn't make it any easier. Just a lot of gibberish and over-exaggerated mime. Long, boring stretches of attempted situation comedy of the lobotomy-kind, the movie never even rises to its sexploitation ambitions, keeping Filli (Feely) to a bikini minimum (to they dismay of my shift partner who was so perplexed by the movie he watched it like a deer caught in headlights)and hammering its "Johnson" punchline home with such dead horse-brutality that they obviously thought it'd only get funnier with each replay.
I've often heard film critics cry over losing 90 min of their lives to some dreadful movie they've had to watch. They have no idea.
Bullet Ballet (1998)
A stunning visual depiction of depression. Very Original.
A much more articulate Shinya has used his extremely visceral palette to produce a deeper film that passes over the gorehound's head and explores the scars of depression and self-destruction in ways that other film-makers have overlooked. From the beginning where Goda confronts his fiancee's death in a mirror while a cricket twitches under a dripping tap beneath him, to a deathwish game that the hoodlum girl Chisato plays later on in the subways, hooking her heels over the edge and delighting as the passing train throttle passes her, the imagery is amazing. Shot in intimate black and white, the graphic impact of its intense releases (There is a bit of animation on guns that's like a KMFDM video) hit you to hold you and keep you with the story until the end. At the screening I attended there were those who were disappointed that the violence lacked the kind of escapist punch that make other Hong Kong films so fun to watch, but I think Shinya was aiming for something different, and he succeeded. This is my favorite film of his and I definitely look forward to his next. For those trying to get an idea of what to expect, well it's the kind of surrealistic dreams that are often thought of by David Cronenberg and David Lynch. If you follow that path and walk with such minds than you should take a walk with Shinya Tsukamoto and see Bullet Ballet.