http://www.baader-meinhof.com/index.html

This is such a great film. Imagine a Fassbinder story fed through a technicolor Japanese pop-cultural filter and then turned into a musical. Ostensibly it’s the story of a woman called Matsuko found murdered in a park, whose filthy apartment is cleaned out by her slacker nephew. This sets the scene for a number of episodic moments in both characters’ lives. Matsuko’s life had been branded “meaningless” by her family but it turns out the life contained Yakuza gangsters, murder, prison, mental illness, porn stars, high school teachers, petty larceny, teen boyband pop idols and a whole heap of cartoony loveliness. However, despite the director’s dazzling technical flashes of primary colours and sparkling, filter drenched scenery, this is a work of sadness and seriousness that ponders the pointlessness of life and our capacity to keep going despite this, and the possible existence of God as a clumsy, inelegant bag lady. It’s also very funny in places. This is well worth a couple of hours of your time – if you saw Nakashima’s last film “Kamikaze Girls” and loved it, as I did, you are gonna flip for this one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_Matsuko

Noooooooooo! They’ve turned bond into a psychopathic killing machine with no interior life. A terminator in a natty Italian suit. Incoherent plot, over-fussy editing, crappy theme tune. A waste of time.

I’ve seen this film a number of times now, and it just gets better with each viewing. It’s a subtle film which you can lose sight of if you get caught up in the technical chicanery: wacky animations, kitschy documentary inserts and willfully strange characters.

However, as an essay in grief, bereavement, disappointment and sadness, “The Life Aquatic” just hits the spot every time. The closing two scenes always make me cry – especially the sighting of the Jaguar Shark – Bill Murray is just awesome in the main role but the supporting cast add colour, tone and depth to what is after all a very complex piece of writing. There are lots of things going on in this film, it’s not just the “kooky” comedy it presents itself as initially, and it playfully invites the viewer to untangle and decode the subtexts.

Perhaps most importantly here, is the quality of gentleness that Wes Anderson allows his characters to possess, even when they are acting horribly to one another. An air of melancholy and regret permeates everything, but this never degenerates into mawkishness or viciousness.

It’s a beautifully designed film that works on an aesthetic, emotional and intellectual level. In two words: it’s fantastic!

“You watchin’ a DVD, yeah? Looks like it in’all. You laughing at the jokes yeah? Like some kind of laughing sherbert dab yeah? A sherbert dab on nitrous oxide yeah? You don’t look good like that, in fact you look bloody terrible. Like a squashed, incontinent, rasberry. That’s it I’m off. See you around yeah?”

- The stink of excellence in a world gone tits up

http://shop.moderntoss.com/

I am loving this album at the moment: it’s a kind of broken folk record filled with bitter lyrics and lachrymose voice-tones. It feels like a lot of heartsickness went into its creation. Yum!

Hilariously bad hoofer musical. Worth watching for the 80s graphics and clothes in all their ghastly glory. Oh, and the “heartfelt” interludes where each dancer bares their soul. They just wanna be loved you know, in the cold, cold business of show. Meanwhile Michael Douglas fulfills all the required musical cliches as the “temperamental” choreographer with a troubled love life. Doors are slammed, big hair is ruffled and there are more legwarmers, microshorts and leotards than you can shake a stick at. Think bitter Kids From Fame after graduation and years of schlepping around auditions and getting nowhere ..Is that ham I smell????

It’s hard to rate a film as bleak as this one as either (Not)/Worth Consuming/Wishy Washy. It’s about the sheer awfulness of life at the sharp end of capitalism. It’s a landscape of McJobs, flexible, precarious labour, mental and physical exploitation and a sense of disintegration and apathy that brutally victimises everybody.

There are no endearing characters in the film, it’s about how people survive in environments that deny humanity. We follow the day to day lives of two characters one, a male security guard and then a bubble gum machine mover, and the other a female nurse and then a cleaner after a brief period as a sex worker. Endless shots of horrible Ukrainian housing estates and Viennese institutions, create a world that is continually cold, windswept and grey.

As a viewer you get dragged down with the characters – it’s a shocking film because nearly all transactions have been reduced to monetary value, including any sort of intimacy. (The use of nudity in the film is truly upsetting; which of course is the point). People are either trying to get or trying to spend money, everything has been reduced to the free market limit, which means nobody has responsibility for anything other then themselves. Consequently, everybody in this world is an object with no inner life.

The film ends on the word “Death” and it leaves you filled with a joylessness that takes some time to shake off. In this sense the film is worth seeing because it’s so rare (for a film that’s fictional allbeit shot in a documentary style) to feel so terrible afterwards. On the other hand, it could be argued that life is too short to subject yourself to a two and a quarter hour gloomfest. Either way, this is some film that’s been made and I wonder what drove the director to make it?

This is quite simply one of the best films I’ve seen for quite some time. A touching, hilarious hybrid of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Napoleon Dynamite, Jeunet and Carol at their best, Grease and lots of Japanese pop-culture.

Here’s what the website says about the story:

“Momoko (pop idol Kyoko Fukada,) yearns to live in 18-century Versailles than in her back-country hometown of Shimotsuma, heartland of the yakuza. To escape, she loses herself in the dreamy, doll-like fashions of the “Lolita” scene. Her idol is Akinori Isobe, chief designer of Baby, the Stars Shine Bright—her favorite Lolita design hose. She travels all the way to Tokyo to shop at their store.

One languid summer, to help fund her expensive hobby, Momoko runs a classified ad of brand-name knock-off clothes (produced by her dad) for sale. She encounters a buyer named Ichiko (the real name is Ichigo), who happens to live in her neighborhood.

Super-rebel Ichiko (model and J-rock icon Anna Tsuchiya, pictured below), is a “Yankee”-style member of the Ponytails motorbike gang, one of Ibaraki’s “Wild speed tribes,” whose teeth-rattling customized bikes are decked out with fiberglass shields and bannered backrests.

Somewhat against Momoko’s will, she and Ichigo slowly develop a strong friendship as they share their feelings on the odd goings-ons around them.”

This blurb doesn’t do justice firstly to the utterly surreal nature of the film, and secondly to the dazzling techniques used by the director to depict life in a neon drenched artificial environment. Ultimately, this is a film about friendship, and the two main characters are so endearing (and let’s face it who can resist ultra violent biker chicks and dreamy, frilly rococo fragility) and the script’s so funny, that it’ll make you wanna jack in your job and go join The Ponytails… Heartily recommended!

http://www.kamikazegirls.net/news.html

This is quite simply one of the best films I’ve seen for quite some time. A touching, hilarious hybrid of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Napoleon Dynamite, Jeunet and Carol at their best, Grease and lots of Japanese pop-culture.

Here’s what the website says about the story:

“Momoko (pop idol Kyoko Fukada,) yearns to live in 18-century Versailles than in her back-country hometown of Shimotsuma, heartland of the yakuza. To escape, she loses herself in the dreamy, doll-like fashions of the “Lolita” scene. Her idol is Akinori Isobe, chief designer of Baby, the Stars Shine Bright—her favorite Lolita design hose. She travels all the way to Tokyo to shop at their store.

One languid summer, to help fund her expensive hobby, Momoko runs a classified ad of brand-name knock-off clothes (produced by her dad) for sale. She encounters a buyer named Ichiko (the real name is Ichigo), who happens to live in her neighborhood.

Super-rebel Ichiko (model and J-rock icon Anna Tsuchiya, pictured below), is a “Yankee”-style member of the Ponytails motorbike gang, one of Ibaraki’s “Wild speed tribes,” whose teeth-rattling customized bikes are decked out with fiberglass shields and bannered backrests.

Somewhat against Momoko’s will, she and Ichigo slowly develop a strong friendship as they share their feelings on the odd goings-ons around them.”

This blurb doesn’t do justice firstly to the utterly surreal nature of the film, and secondly to the dazzling techniques used by the director to depict life in a neon drenched artificial environment. Ultimately, this is a film about friendship, and the two main characters are so endearing (and let’s face it who can resist ultra violent biker chicks and dreamy, frilly rococo fragility) and the script so funny, that it’ll make you wanna jack in your job and go join The Ponytails… Heartily recommended!

http://www.kamikazegirls.net/news.html