reelcitizen - freelance entertainment journalist

Originally from Wales, director John Williams has lived in Japan for 20 years. His 2006 film Starfish Hotel, which has just been released on DVD, was an East meets West atmospheric fairy tale that played with cultural borders as well as those between dream, fantasy and reality. In an email interview, he told Richard Badley about in-between-ness, unravelling stories, Haruki Murakami and being like a Minotaur.

Richard Badley: Western audiences are used to seeing Tokyo as all neon lights and futuristic skyscrapers but in Starfish Hotel it seems almost bland. Could you tell us about your approach to the city in the film and what you wanted to say, if anything, about its culture?

John Williams: I wanted to deliberately avoid all the clichéd shots of Tokyo, such as the blazing lights of Kabukicho from Lost in Translation and the Shibuya crossing from every commercial shoot. These two areas seem to dominate in Western images of the city, and they are the places a lot of people go to have fun, but Tokyo is a huge, sprawling city, and can be very grey and ugly. This was as much as anything about the psychology of the central character, who is trapped in a cold, geometrical maze. The present day in the film is all washed-out and cold and we chose locations to reflect his depressed state, whereas the past, represented more by Taisho period architecture, is warm and full of reds and woody browns. This was not political nostalgia, but the nostalgia of the character, but I also wanted to suggest that all the concrete, glass and sprawl represent a kind of death of the soul. This is a motif in much recent Japanese cinema too.

RB: What led you to make the film in Japan?

JW: I’ve lived and worked in Japan for 20 years and am now a Permanent Resident, though I still have a UK passport. The question always comes up, but the easy answer is ‘because it’s where I am’. A year before the shoot a UK producer tried to persuade me to reset the film in the UK. It could be done, and I did tinker with a script, but I always felt the story made more sense in Japan and the locations and the references felt very Japanese to me at least. (Strangely, many people in the audience outside Japan found the film very ‘Western’ and some people in Japan talked about the strange ‘in-between-ness’ of the film. They felt they were seeing a slightly wonked version of reality, which was the intention. In the end, the film is very personal and very much about my own first few years in Tokyo. I had lived in Nagoya for 12 years and moved to Tokyo after my first film (Firefly Dreams). Tokyo was a real shock, because Tokyo is not really representative of Japan in so many ways and I felt very isolated and alienated. The darkness of the city scared me. When you’ve got all that artificial light, you also have a lot of shadows too.

RB: After Firefly Dreams, what drew you to doing a much darker/noir story? American noir seems to be a central influence in Starfish Hotel so was it a risk doing such a film in Japan?

JW: It was a big risk to do this film. I didn’t know that at the time. A sensible choice would have been to do another Firefly Dreams with a slightly bigger budget. It was just that I had moved to Tokyo and this led to an obsession with noir and Japanese ghost stories. I really felt I wanted to blend the noirish elements in Kwaidan (traditional Japanese stories of the supernatural) with a detective fiction. Of course I was reading Murakami avidly and the strange limbo he describes seemed so accurate about my own experience and the city of Tokyo.

RB: The central plot about finding Chisato seems linear enough but it’s surrounded by many ambiguous elements. How difficult was it writing the script? Did you rearrange things in post-production?

JW: The plot is very simple. A man’s wife disappears. He goes to look for her, goes through the usual tropes of the detective quest and finds her, whilst thinking all the time about another woman. What I wanted to do though was open up big puzzling holes in the story, so that all the time you’re really wondering whether you’re putting the puzzle together or not. This ambiguity is where we live now and perhaps it’s really where we’ve always lived. We make up these stories to explain our world and our experience, and they constantly unravel. I like…

Continued on Electric Sheep

Western fairy tale meets Eastern repression in John Williams’s compelling, albeit derivative, noir-ish exploration of the human soul’s murky depths. Taking its cue from Alice in Wonderland means that some of the journey might be familiar but the non-linear approach leads down some intriguing rabbit holes. Yes, it rips off Donnie Darko’s macabre bunny Frank amongst other things, but it effectively uses film conventions to blur the boundary between the real world and the fantasy of fiction.

Office drone Arisu (Sato) trudges through the rat race in Tokyo with his marriage to Chisato (Kimura) merely part of the routine. His only distractions are the horror novels by Jo Kuroda that give him nightmares but tell of a tempting other-world known as Darkland. As Kuroda is about to release a new book, Arisu’s wife disappears and so a mystery begins. Clues from a creepy man in a rabbit costume (Emoto) lead him to seedy brothels and puzzling private detectives, as well as back through his own memories of an affair with the sensual Kayoko (Kiki) at the remote Starfish Hotel.

The story seems simple but Williams frequently jumbles things up, throwing in Kuroda almost as a narrator and often questioning whether certain events are real or just part of Arisu’s imagination. As Arisu is a Kuroda fan, is he fantasising about cheating on his wife or merely constructing his own story to fulfil his dream of being a writer? While the plot strand about the missing Chisato is neatly concluded – though one criticism is…

Continued on Electric Sheep

Notoriously off-the-wall Hong Kong directors Johnnie To and Ka-Fai Wai reteam for a surreal swipe at police procedural movies. After tackling a number of genres, most recently with the comic adventure Running on Karma in 2003, the pair delve into the world of mental illness and schizophrenia – but in a fun way. Though Mad Detective could be considered gimmicky, To and Wai’s matter-of-fact approach means the perspective of the title character feels like cold, hard reality and Ching Wan Lau’s troubled performance makes it believable.

Lau plays the eccentric Inspector Bun, an instinctive policeman who is able to re-enact murders to learn the killer’s identity. His record is exemplary but he finds himself shunned when he cuts off his own ear in front of his retiring Chief. Five years later, an old colleague, Inspector Ho (On), needs Bun’s help in solving a series of bloody robberies possibly perpetrated by an officer who went missing along with his gun. If Bun’s special abilities weren’t weird enough, he can also see an individual’s ‘inner personalities’ and suspects the AWOL officer’s former partner, Chi Wai (Lam), who is represented by seven very different characters.

It all has the potential to be extremely confusing, but the directors keep things coherent, mostly through some simple camera work but also by concentrating on the central plot rather than getting carried away with Bun’s unique skills. The film’s early scenes are deliciously strange – witness Bun carrying out…

Continued on Electric Sheep

Smells Like Girl Power

Promoted as the female Tony Jaa, martial arts newcomer JeeJa Yanin has a lot of pressure on her slight shoulders but is both engaging and dazzling in her showcase debut. Ong-Bak director Prachya Pinkaew certainly knows how to make her look good in various showdowns - though he often tries to cover a myriad of moves and tones instead of keeping things consistent - and the story is a hell of an improvement over the wayward Warrior King. Pretenders to Yanin’s title should beware.

With Tony Jaa off directing and starring in Ong-Bak 2 – a production dogged by problems, including Jaa disappearing into the jungle - Prachya Pinkaew has decided to move-on and discover his next protégé. He found it in JeeJa Yanin, a delicate looking Thai actress standing at just 162cm. Not your typical action hero you might think but after seeing her flitting about the various sets – Yanin floats like a butterfly and stings like an express train – you’ll soon be convinced of her star potential.

Despite being 24, Yanin is cast as the young teen Zen; the autistic daughter of Zin (Siripong) who was once involved with a Thai gang until she had an affair with a Japanese Yakuza named Masashi (Abe). With Zin diagnosed with cancer, Zen and her enterprising sidekick Moom go about collecting some old debts to pay for the treatment. Inevitably, the crooks aren’t willing to handover their ill-gotten cash to a couple of kids, well, not until Zen makes use of all those hours she spent watching Bruce Lee movies.

Though Yanin is a Taekwondo expert she spent two years perfecting Thai boxing to deliver some effective and fluid fighting. She doesn’t have the raw power of Jaa so…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

Smells Like South Korea’s Own Funny Games

Writer/director Shin-yeon Won’s dark psychological horror is an intense study of how violent abuse is passed down from generation to generation, as well as from those in power to those who are powerless. Like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games it’s a grueling but captivating watch, shot through with a grim humour that momentarily gives the viewer respite from the increasingly brutal events.

With a plot that sounds like your everyday teen slasher, you’d be forgiven for thinking A Bloody Aria was just another Wrong Turn or The Hills Have Eyes - what with the central protagonists indeed taking a fateful ‘wrong turn’ and ending up at the mercy of an assorted bunch of menacing country folk. But Shin-yeon Won has already demonstrated in his debut, 2005’s The Wig – which could have been a very ordinary rehash of The Eye but is in fact deeply emotional, that he’s a director who subverts expectation and here studies cycles of violence that exist within hierarchical society, cycles that extend beyond Won’s microcosm of characters and therefore endemic in society, unbreakable. Basically, don’t expect the girl to be picking up a chainsaw and saving the day by hacking everyone to death.

The girl being In-jeong (Cha), who is being driven back to Seoul after a singing audition by her renowned music Professor (Byeong-jun Lee). Taking a detour to a remote river, the Professor parks-up his flash Mercedes and tries to force himself on his student who fends off the attack, running into the woods. The Professor is soon being taunted by a couple of thugs who have also been tormenting a school kid in a sack, but it isn’t until In-jeong is picked-up by the seemingly…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

Basing his story on incidents that took place at Corcoran State Prison in the 90s, stuntman turned director Ric Roman Waugh has created a brutal exploration of the US prison system. Stephen Dorff impresses as the everyman sent down for involuntary manslaughter, his hope to return to his wife put through the wringer as uncontrollable events put him in a desensitizing secure wing. Sides must be picked and it isn’t long before he’s a hardened skinhead rucking with society’s worst.

Val Kilmer is engaging…

Continued on Combat Magazine

Mr Chris Regan recently tagged me in this procrastination meme and I’m always ready for a distraction (or any excuse not to be writing, sweet irony!) so my answers are below…

List the top five ways you distract yourself when you should be writing and then procrastinate some more by sending it to all those other writers who should really procrastinate more often (so we can all catch-up!).

1) The Internet. The thing that can never be avoided. The gateway to all sorts of useless information and distractions that seems to exist on every technical device I own and therefore number one with a bullet in this list. As well as checking Google Reader every two minutes to see which blogs have been updated to make sure everyone’s having a hard a time of screenwriting as I am, I’m constantly firing-up a web browser in the name of research. This can range from discovering every last detail about a film I watched the day before on IMDB or making sure everyone knows what film I just watched on Facebook. Completely deadly for any writer but if it wasn’t there then I probably would crack.

2) Rubbish TV. I don’t schedule in a lot of TV as there are only a few things I would go out of my way to see or manage to follow with any dedication so this entry is for the slew of rubbish I seem to end up watching when I could be doing something useful. This mainly involves reality shows that I let wash over me in a state of numbness and morbid fascination. American ones seem to excel at having little purpose or even basic human rights – from the cruel games of Beauty and the Geek to the inexplicable A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila (some sort of cross between a drinking game and a Roman orgy) – and seem to be shown on a constant loop, vying for attention whenever I turn on the TV.

3) Reading Scripts. This probably sounds quite noble but at the end of the day it can become a time-vacuuming hobby, especially given how long it takes to read one. While it’s important to read scripts of a similar genre to one you’re working on, I do find myself drawn to unproduced scripts just to see what went wrong. Like TV, it’s back to that fascination with things that just shouldn’t be seen in public – just check out some of the Indiana Jones drafts. On the plus side you do get to see that even established writers can churn out utter garbage and this can ease the pressure on your own work when you realise it doesn’t have to be Shakespeare on every page.

4) Gaming. This would be at number 1 if I was still playing World of Warcraft but luckily I’ve managed to cut back on the amount of time spent on a console or PC. I do think gaming is an incredibly rich medium and it’s a shame there’re not enough hours in the day to really get stuck into a good game but they just take so God damn long to play through. Nowadays some of them don’t even end! I’m still plodding through GTA IV (which may as well be called The Never-Ending Story parts IV to Infinity) which seems to be including every single plotline from The Sopranos into its mammoth arc. Is some developer constantly adding extra missions via Xbox Live every time I connect?! So I do try to restrict game playing to the more frivolous mini-games that the Wii or DS supplies, although Gears of War 2 is on the horizon…

5) Cup of Tea/Coffe/Whatever’s Yer Poison. You can’t beat getting away from the screen and re-energizing the brain with some much needed caffeine. If I still went to the gym I would have put running as that was a great way of getting ideas flowing but now I’m approaching 30 my frail body has to make do with going to the kettle and back.

I’d like to tag Elinor Perry-Smith…

Smells Like Taking No Risks

Life after the tragic loss of a loved one is, understandably, pretty shit. So writer/director Charles Oliver’s debut feature is inevitably a tough watch as he profiles two lives wrecked forever after a terrifying event, capturing the pain and regret each feels as both are haunted by the memories of that day. But although the film’s aesthetic is rightly cold and muted, and the performances are emotive, Oliver never really takes any risks, leaving the story feeling more like a case study than something cinematic trying to stand-out alongside the likes of 21 Grams.

With Take, Charles Oliver has gone for the multi-stranded, flashback/flashforward, non-linear approach that seemed to be the vogue in Hollywood several years ago following Alejandro González Iñárritu’s effective 21 Grams and Paul Haggis’ Crash. So already it seems Oliver is playing catch-up and with his debut successfully emulates his predecessors in terms of using the format competently and detailing two lives that collide with tragic consequences.

In the present, grieving mother Ana (Driver) is making the journey across the desert to witness the lethal injection of Saul (Renner), the criminal who caused her son’s death and ruined her life years before. Before she arrives we get glimpses of what happened, how her troubled son was forced out of school and Ana struggling to make ends meet with multiple jobs. Meanwhile, gambling addict Saul is unable to pay off debts and after losing his job things just get worse, leading him into a bungled robbery that yields nothing but heartache and regret.

Both leads put in sorrowful, restrained performances and Driver especially carefully balances the hatred, anger and pain inherent…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

Smells Like Legends Live On

Though it could be seen as a simple adventurer’s tale in the vein of Jason and the Argonauts, Buud Yam is an ambitious and involving film that highlights just how far cinema has come in Burkina Faso. Legendary director Gaston Kaboré may have just a handful of credits to his name but he has also worked tirelessly at progressing the country’s filmmaking abilities and ambitions. Combining some stunning cinematography of harsh deserts and bustling markets with engaging characters that represent ancient values, this is Kaboré’s most accessible and entertaining work.

Released in 1997, Buud Yam is in fact a sequel to Kaboré’s first feature film Wend Kuuni that revitalised filmmaking in Africa’s Burkina Faso way back in 1982. The original film, set before colonisation and at the height of the Mossi Empire, follows an orphan boy rescued from the wilderness and brought up by kind villagers who name him Wend Kuuni, meaning God’s Gift. With its celebration of the Mossi’s way of life, it was a film that immediately demonstrated the power of cinema in Burkina with many of its people taking the story to heart. With such love and affection for the original, Kaboré was taking a brave step in creating a follow-up.

What Kaboré has captured best is a familiarity with his first film so that Buud Yam feels like natural progression. By keeping the same actors, including lead Serge Yanogo now all grown-up, and even the same central village, fans of Wend Kuuni will instantly feel at home – as if the characters have grown with them during the 15 years between each film. What sets Buud Yam apart is its central plot which is a classic hero’s adventure that benefits…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

The 45th Golden Orange and 4th International Eurasia Film Festivals in Antalya came to a star-studded end yesterday with honorary prizes going to Hollywood heavyweights Kevin Spacey, Adrien Brody, Marisa Tomei and Mickey Rourke. The International Jury lead by Paul Verhoeven announced their winners before the Golden Orange awards were introduced by the National Jury President Tuncel Kurtiz - a veteran actor of Turkish cinema recently seen in Fatih Akin’s EDGE OF HEAVEN. With the daring film NOKTA (DOT) and British writer/director of PAZAR (THE MARKET – A TALE OF TRADE), Ben Hopkins, winning some of the top awards it was an evening of deserved recognition for filmmakers continuing to revolutionise Turkish cinema.

The venue for the awards might not have been the original choice but the modern amphitheatre of Konyaalti was an impressive stand-in for Antalya’s ancient site of Aspendos. It meant that the Festival kept its unique style – handing out awards under the moon and stars – but guests could easily head round the corner to the after-party at the grand Hillside Hotel, a place jokingly described by Mickey Rourke as the “sanatorium” because of its stark white walls (imagine living in George Lucas’ THX-1138).

The ceremony got underway with a slew of stars receiving awards for their contribution to cinema. The first was Kevin Spacey and this was his first visit to Turkey, “I’ve had an extraordinary experience over the past couple of days and had a chance to meet with young filmmakers and emerging writers who are so encouraged by films they’ve seen around the world that they now want to make films about their own culture. I hope this country and this government will help them make the movies they want to make because it should not be that they want to crossover to Hollywood, Hollywood should discover your country, your culture.” With that he left the audience with a little bit of Keyser Söze (the Turkish…

Continued on Film & Festivals