Category: Uncategorized

By Brian Darr
Press Play Contributor

How was your weekend? Here’s hoping it wasn’t a hundredth as disastrous as Labor Day weekend was for Roscoe Arbuckle or Virginia Rappe exactly ninety years ago.

It was on Labor Day weekend in 1921, in the midst of Prohibition, that screen comedian Arbuckle found himself at a party on the 12th floor of the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco. By the end of the weekend, much alcohol had been consumed, a 30-year-old actress (Rappe) had died, and the rotund 34-year-old star (known to his fans as “Fatty,” a nickname he abhorred in his private life) was charged with manslaughter. His career was instantly in ruins.

Roscoe Arbuckle was a singer, dancer, acrobat and clown who had landed in Hollywood in 1913 and joined Mack Sennet’s Keystone troupe, where he soon rose to great fame playing opposite comedienne Mabel Normand in a very successful string of two-reel short films. Legend has it that fellow Keystoner Charlie Chaplin developed the baggy-clothed attire of his “Little Tramp” character after trying on one of Arbuckle’s plus-sized outfits. Later, working for Joe Schenck, Arbuckle gave the great Buster Keaton his start in pictures, casting and directing him as co-conspirator in a set of comedies beginning with The Butcher Boy (1917).

By the early 1920s, Arbuckle was, with Charlie Chaplin, one of the top two comedy stars in motion pictures. He made the jump to feature-length films with 1920’s The Round-Up, and made several more features for Paramount before his career was cut short. In the wake of scandal, Arbuckle’s films were withdrawn from circulation. Few of the films he made in the first 8 months of 1921 are even known to survive today, some of which never screened commercially in the United States. This is what made a recent screening of Leap Year at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum such a notable event.

Niles nestles against the hills of Fremont, California, 30 miles east of San Francisco and 350 miles north of Los Angeles. Filled with antique shops and humble residences, it’s a town steeped in motion picture history. The first cowboy movie star, G.A. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, and Charlie Chaplin were among those who encamped there to shoot pictures in the mid-1910s, before Hollywood became the go-to site for filmmaking in California.

Now, nearly a hundred years later, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum keeps the past alive with weekly Saturday evening screenings of silent movies backed by live musical accompaniments. It’s one of the few public venues where one can regularly see 16 mm and 35 mm prints of all kinds of American and occasionally European silents. Well-known classics (Theda Bara’s star-making A Fool There Was plays in late October, as well as The Man Who Laughs starring Conrad Veidt, whose character inspired Bob Kane’s design for The Joker) rub elbows with little-seen films with fewer than five IMDB votes (1923’s Let’s Go, featuring legendary stuntman Richard Talmadge, screens October 8th). Special attention is given to short subjects, which precede every feature shown (Arbuckle’s own brilliant two-reeler Fatty and Mabel Adrift plays before a Mary Pickford film on September 24th) and get a monthly showcase of their own. Niles is a grand place to see the silent-era examples of film artistry that continue to influence moviemaking to this day and to discover all-but-forgotten gems.

Leap Year, however, is neither an established classic nor a forgotten film. Rarely screened, it’s remembered as one of the ultimately shelved features Arbuckle completed before his fateful Labor Day. The industry was worried about how seeing their favorite star in a romantic comedy, filled with screwball twists and turns, might affect audiences while details of his scandal, as reported by newspapers, were fresh in mind.

The details reported were damning. Arbuckle was accused of raping Rappe and consequently killing her with his girth. No evidence of rape was found, the charge was reduced from murder to manslaughter, and after two hung juries a third wrote a letter of apology to Arbuckle above and beyond their acquittal. Nonetheless, the daily headlines of the case had already sold huge quantities of newspapers. (Buster Keaton later recalled William Randolph Hearst claiming that the Arbuckle scandal was more lucrative to his newspaper empire than the sinking of the RMS Lusitania.) Arbuckle’s public profile was now entirely entwined in this sordid tragedy, and with Hollywood scrambling to repair its own image by distancing itself from him, Arbuckle’s only subsequent work would be done behind the camera under the pseudonym William Goodrich. It would be decades until books by David Yallop and Andy Edmonds would promote a counter-myth, attempting to rehabilitate Arbuckle’s image by impugning Virginia Rappe’s. I eagerly await the publication of a new book being written by Joan Myers, who has researched Rappe’s own biography and gone back to original court documents that neither Yallop nor Edmonds accessed. Myers promises to get us closer to understanding the Arbuckle scandal than ever before, but even she says that what exactly happened on the 12th floor of the St. Francis Hotel is “something I don’t know and never will.”

Was a comedy masterpiece lost to cinema history when Leap Year was buried in 1921? No, but the film is well worth watching, especially with an audience primed by a masterfully improvised live score by pianist Judith Rosenberg. Directed by James Cruze (who later made The Covered Wagon and the long-lost satire Hollywood for Paramount) and photographed by Karl Brown (whose memoir Adventures with D.W. Griffith is one of the canonical books about the director), Leap Year is well-produced entertainment that begins rather calmly only to turn frantically funny in its final reels. Arbuckle plays Stanley Piper, a wealthy layabout with a nagging stutter who is constantly getting into girl trouble in defiance of his “grouchy, gouty & girl hating” uncle Jeremiah (Lucien Littlefield). At a Catalina Island resort, he tries to stay out of trouble by offering friendly advice to three women he encounters, but it backfires, as each one believes Stanley’s actually proposing to her. Though the laughs in this section of the film are sparse, the Niles audience reacted uproariously to one particular gag dependent on the position of the camera relative to a golf bag.

The three women follow Stanley to his uncle’s mansion, where the old man is being cared for by a nurse (Mary Thurman) with a bobbed haircut that makes her a dead ringer for Colleen Moore or Louise Brooks circa 1928. Stanley’s heart lies with this nurse, and together they devise a scheme for him to scare off his would-be wives, pancaking his face with sickly makeup as he feigns a series of fits. They fail to foresee that these women’s nurturing (or perhaps gold-digging?) instincts might make a stricken heir an even more attractive husband than a well one. By this point in the film, the audience was laughing almost continuously. Arbuckle’s graceful control of his own body is displayed all the better when his character is forced to give a performance layered atop the actor’s own. Stanley’s self-inflicted pratfalls intended to narrow his suitresses prove that Arbuckle was no less agile than Keaton, Chaplin or Harold Lloyd. He may never have found a feature-length film showcase to match the “big three” silent comics at their best, but we can assume this was only because his opportunities ended the same moment Virginia Rappe’s life did.

Brian Darr is a San Francisco native who works at a library but spends much of his free time watching, researching and writing about film. Since 2005 he has published a blog on local repertory and festival screenings, called Hell On Frisco Bay. He has contributed articles to Senses Of Cinema, GreenCine, and Keyframe, and is a regular writer for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and the film editor for First Person Magazine. He’s even dabbled in programming 16mm film and video.

Remembering the years after the attacks, when everything felt filtered through one September morning

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

The second entry in our slide show series about pop culture after 9/11 covers three years, 2002-2004. It was a dense and lively period that saw movies, TV, music, literature and comics shifting out of a numb, somewhat disconnected state and becoming more reactive, then provocative, and by 2004 — an election year — combative.

The first installment of this series covered work that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the attacks; because so much of it was in production before the catastrophe, any associations between the work and recent events were likely to be coincidental, maybe more in the eye of the beholder than in the work itself. Starting in mid- to late 2002, though, we started to see more books, TV series, films and music that were meant as a response to the attacks: Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising, for instance, and Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour. By the time 2004 rolled around, pop culture seemed to have moved past the “can’t we all just get along and grieve together?” stage. There was more work, and more statements, of an overtly political nature — work that was explicitly designed to provoke discussions, maybe even start fights. We’ve collected a few memorable examples here; we hope you’ll add your own picks to the Letters section.

The final installment of this series, covering 2005-2010, will run next Friday.

You can view Matt’s slide show here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Press Play is proud to welcome critic and historian James Clarke to our lineup of contributors. His work has been published in The Guardian, Resurgence, Empire, and Splice. He is the author of Movie Movements, Studying Brokeback Mountain and Animated Films.

By James Clarke
Press Play Contributor

Here’s a question: do performance capture artists dream of abstracted, painterly sheep? Or are photorealistic ones the order of the day now and for the foreseeable future?

It feels like a bit of a lost world to us in 2011, but in the early 1980s, a number of American-produced films hoping to carry the baton of the classically styled animated features synonymous with the work of the Disney animation studio, particularly between the 1930s and 1960s.

 

The Disney studio continued to produce animated features after its founder’s death in 1966. But by the late ’70s and early ’80s, the market for the family audience had shifted to the vanguard that was led by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and followed by Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron and Tim Burton. There was the sense amongst studio executives, the industry and audiences that Disney might need to reboot its approach to live-action and animation production. In 1989, The Little Mermaid resuscitated the studio’s animation soul (and commercial viability). But prior to that, other studios and filmmakers ran the animated feature film gauntlet, producing the likes of The Last Unicorn (1983) and An American Tail (1986).

 
One such filmmaker was Ralph Bakshi, who started directing animated features with Fritz the Cat (1972) and continued on until the early 1990s.

 
Perhaps best known now for his partial adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (you can read an interview with Bakshi recounting the experience here) Bakshi also directed Wizards (1979), American Pop (1981), and the sword and sorcery film Fire and Ice (1983), made in collaboration with illustrator and painter Frank Frazetta.

 
As of this writing, Bakshi is retired from the film industry and lives in New Mexico, where he works on his collage-based fine art. In a number of interviews since his retirement, Bakshi has second-guessed his decision to use rotoscoping, the practice of filming a live action performance and using it, frame by frame, as reference footage to paint over with animated cels. Bakshi used rotoscoping in The Lord of the Rings, American Pop and Fire and Ice. He has conceded that he applied the technique as a solution to a practical problem and, we might infer, a budgetary constraint.

That said, when money and time were in short supply over at Disney during the production of Snow White (1937), rotoscoping was employed there as well, to more efficiently create the action of the Prince in motion during the film’s ending.
 
E (cinema) volution

Too often people talk dramatically about game changers and revolutions; rather than functioning as “mode jerks” (to borrow a useful phrase coined by Stanley Kubrick), with a cooler view, we might better think about the concept of forms evolving. I think this term typifies the process more appropriately. It applies to the evolving sophistication that takes us from tracing to Rotoscoping to performance capture. It’s worth making the point, too, that rotoscoping also exists in animation’s parallel universe of visual effects; both media eternally bound together in exciting ways.
 
In effect, rotoscoping is a process of tracing and mimicking rather than interpreting and transforming human movement. But animation “proper” is an act of transformation.
 
Evolution has taken its course and we now find ourselves at a moment in time where rotoscoping manifests itself in performance capture, an adapted technique of which I am an enthusiast, and keen to see evolve further. To date, it’s been most commercially popular in James Cameron’s Avatar, but let’s not overlook the major, trailblazing work in this realm of director Robert Zemeckis, his elegant compositions and camera movements well suited to the long take possibilities of this form. Writing about Robert Zemeckis, Press Play publisher Matt Zoller Seitz observed in 2009:

“Cinema, like every art form, has always had an aspect of omnipotence. Art lets man play God — or at the very least return to a childlike state of openness that lets the imagination run free. And many of the technological changes that marked this decade in film were all about building a bigger and better train set. From the use of CGI to create fairy tale landscapes and grotesque monsters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Star Wars prequels, to David Fincher adding and subtracting years from Brad Pitt’s face in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, flights of fancy don’t seem so fanciful anymore.

“I’ve just given myself a natural segue to start bashing Zemeckis as a soulless high-tech noodler — a label hung on him by hostile critics who miss the 1980s showman who directed Used Cars and Back to the Future and think he’s lost touch with his artistry, and maybe his soul. I can understand their dissatisfaction — I loved the old Zemeckis, too. But I’m impressed with what Zemeckis has become. The three films he shot in the 3-D motion-capture process — The Polar Express, Beowulf (2007) and this year’s A Christmas Carol — strike me as the most technologically, stylistically and tonally radical blockbusters to appear on U.S. screens since the heyday of Stanley Kubrick.”

Rose-Tintin Spectacles

Just two months from now Europe will see the release of Steven Spielberg’s next feature film, The Adventures of Tintin (2011), the latest in his line of adaptations of existing books. How long have I been waiting for this one? Only thirty years or so.
 
Spielberg has described performance capture as being “digital makeup” and I think that’s a useful place to start. We also might look to Waking Life (2001) as a useful antithesis to the likes of Avatar and Beowulf. Indeed, in the book Hollywood Flatlands we read, “Technologies of camera and film…are the new human gestures. The contents of the psyche are externalized in technological effects.”
 
Whilst Hergé’s Tintin books were very much a part of growing up and developing an enthusiasm for reading here in the U.K., the fact that the new film is Spielberg’s latest directorial project is what has me more intrigued and excited. It will be fascinating, I think, to see how this director explicitly applies the principles and dynamics of animation to the adventure genre. All the more pertinent is that, throughout Spielberg’s career, the “spirit” of animation has been significant to a number of his choices in staging elaborate action. Witness the balletic and joyful (in terms of delighting in genre filmmaking) scene in which Indy, Willie and Short Round escape from the mines that provide relatively light action-comedy relief from the Temple of Doom just down the corridor. Then, too, there is Spielberg’s tip of the hat to the pleasures of animation history and to the solace to be found in film in The Sugarland Express (1974), during a rare moment of quiet and repose as Clovis and Lou Jean watch a Road Runner short.
 
For those who might remember the second “generation” of Comics Scene magazine that ran during the early ’90s, there always seemed to be some bit of news and information about an adaptation of the comic Plastic Man that Spielberg was supposed to executive produce.  Perhaps now the performance capture tools exist to make such an adaptation possible. It’s heartening to hear Spielberg talking about how his experience of producing Tintin made him think like a painter.
 
Having found ourselves wandering, then, into the contested realm of discussions about computer animation and its relationship to the process of performance capture, we might also find ourselves in proximity to the well worn trail of discussion about the uncanny valley wherein performance capture tries to mimic photorealistic proportions and then falls short by being neither abstract nor realistic enough in its realization. The perils of the uncanny valley, then, should perhaps encourage producers and audiences to seek out opportunities for non-photorealistic interpretations of the human face. Whilst The Polar Express (2004) was generally criticized for its “dead eyes,” this element was countered by many other positives of narrative construction, shot composition and tone. The film also faithfully adapted for the moving image the illustrations in Chris Van Allsburg‘s same-named source book.

Another interesting aspect to consider is how performance capture’s possibility for a painterly aesthetic is making all the more acute the live action tradition of invoking the lighting effects of painting. As an arbitrary example we might refer to the work of John Toll and the influence of the Dutch masters on his work in Witness (1985), or we could cite the influence of Henri Rosseau’s paintings (such as Surprised!) on Vittorio Storaro‘s visual scheme of the jungle in Apocalypse Now (1979).
 
I’m playing around here a bit, but perhaps a more accurate name for performance capture is ‘performance painted’. Indeed, I have often wondered what a performance capture film could be like if it used digital makeup and costume to achieve the same look of a Édouard Manet painting. Or — can you imagine a story set during the medieval age wherein the performance captured forms resembled the graphic qualities of the medieval representation of the human figure?

Such an approach would immediately challenge the aesthetic of transparent realism, the kind that makes you forget you’re watching a movie, somehow placing you right there in the setting of the film and its attendant views of the world. This might be a not very savvy commercial move.
 
What this cluster of thoughts seems to lead to, particularly in relation to considerations of the uncanny valley, is that even now, popular cinema arguably remains far too shackled to the demands of photographic realism (matched by the realism of narrative logic and psychological realism). I’ll make reference here to the book Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Theory and the Avant-Garde:

“From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs onwards the laws of perspective and gravity are reinstituted, flatness is repelled and the films no longer explode the world with the surrealistic and analytic cinematic dynamite of the optical unconscious that had been developed in 1920s cartooning.”

So, whilst we can celebrate the achievements of this first American animated feature, Snow White. we might be mindful of how its commercial success quickly, widely and deeply established a template for animated feature aesthetics in mainstream cinema.
 
Animation historian Michael Barrier writes:

“…it is computer-generated animation, in its various forms and with its still-limited capacity for subtle movement and emotional shadings, that dominates theater screens and DVD sales.

“Computer animation has infiltrated live-action films to the point that ‘live action’ is frequently all but a misnomer. By the same token, an ‘animated’ film may rely so heavily on live actors, through motion capture or sophisticated new forms of Rotoscoping, that it can be called ‘animated’ only through an elastic use of the term. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with its usual perspicacity, has begun awarding a separate Oscar to the Best Animated Feature just when the line between animation and live action has become impossible to define.”

Then, perhaps, the fascinating and exciting question is this:  are we now teetering on an exciting moment where popular filmmaking finds a home for more abstract images that find a way to fuse the photographed and the painted? Are we about to see the cinema of spectacle become the place where non-photorealistic dreams can come true?
 
In broadening our understanding of the intersection of animation, photography and performance capture, there’s an unsurprisingly thoughtful and energizing discussion of the issue to be found here by Kristin Thompson, who has written extensively about the film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings novels.
 
Earlier this summer at the 2011 Comic-Con, Robert Rodriguez gave a presentation about a proposed adaptation for our digital age of the Ralph Baskhi/Frank Frazetta collaboration Fire and Ice. Rodriguez explained how he wants this new rendition “to look like you just stepped into one of his paintings, where you get to see his world, and how he saw people, anatomy, and composition and color. It will feel like it’s real, but not real. It’ll be his reality. He saw things differently. He painted from his imagination. He didn’t take a photograph and just paint it.”

Rodriguez’s affinity for the possibility of film as a painterly, illustrative form, rather than an exclusively a photographic one, found dynamic expression in Sin City. His presentation of conceptual art for the proposed Fire and Ice film suggests a thoughtful interpretation of Frazetta’s melodramatic images (sort of Maxfield Parish via Conan); Rodriguez understands that it’s a process of adaptation and not of transliteration. It’s all about survival of the storytelling fittest.
 
It seems reasonable to say, then, that the potential of performance capture lies in the embracing of its distinctions from photorealism. Striving solely to make performance-captured imagery look photorealistic does seem a little meaningless. What excites me is that performance capture can function as digital makeup, costume and puppetry combined.
 
A little while back when I worked as a lecturer in film, I encouraged students to read even just a little of E.H. Gombrich’s work. Here’s E.H. with a line of thought we can draw from “traditional” art to the art of cinema, and the possibilities we might hope and wish for with performance capture as we witness its emergence:

“The paintings in our galleries are seen one day in bright sunshine and another day in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, yet they remain the same paintings, ever faithful, ever convincing. To a marvelous extent they carry their own light within. For their truth is not that of a perfect replica, it is the truth of art.”

James Clarks is a British writer — his most recent book being Movie Movements: Films That Changed The World of Cinema (Kamera Books). You can follow him on Twitter .

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor

We’re getting very close to the point where the phrase “Entertainment news” may have to be replaced by “Remake and Reboot News.”

How do you feel about that? I’ve got mixed feelings myself, but I’ve decided to keep an open mind, even though it isn’t always easy.

Martin Scorsese has announced that he’s going to direct a remake of the 1974 Karel Reisz drama The Gambler, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the gambling-addicted professor originally played by James Caan. And Scorsese’s friend and one-time acolyte Spike Lee is directing a remake of South Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s ultraviolent 2003 parable Oldboy, about a man seeking revenge on the people who imprisoned him for years for no clear reason; Josh Brolin, star of No Country for Old Men and W, will play the role first played by Choi Min-Sik. (Although Oldboy appears to be proceeding without a hiccup, The Gambler remake has awakened the ire of filmmaker James Toback, who wrote the original screenplay based on Fyodor Doestoevsky’s short story and on Toback’s own life.)

Meanwhile, The Smurfs and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (which is hugely indebted to 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) are raking in the bucks at your local multiplex. There was also a recent remake of 1982’s Conan the Barbarian that tanked. On Sept. 16, writer-director Rod Lurie (The Contender) will release his remake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 revenge thriller Straw Dogs. Director Tony Scott (Unstoppable) is working on a remake of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. And there’s going to be a new version of The Thin Man with Johnny Depp in the William Powell role, written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park) and directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago). There are new Spider-Man and Superman films coming out, just a few scant years after those properties were already totally remade for the big screen. A long-delayed remake of “Red Dawn” will pit plucky American youth against North Koreans instead of Russians and Cubans. Remakes of Footloose (directed by Craig Brewer of Hustle and Flow) and John Carpenter’s The Thing are scheduled for October. Will the upcoming remake of Dirty Dancing put Baby in a corner?

You can read the rest of Matt’s piece here.

A critic, journalist and filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for Salon.com and the founder of Press Play.

By Simon Abrams
Press Play Contributor

I’m torn, really and truly, I am. Though I fell in love all over again with the Criterion Collection after they announced their plans to release several films by unsung Japanese New Wave director Koreyoshi Kurahara, I’m currently unconvinced that we need all of the titles from that group not named The Warped Ones. It’s a rather silly hesitation, I know, one that I wouldn’t even be able to ponder had it not been for the Criterion Collection’s generosity. After all, Kurahara is a name that deserves greater prominence, and The Warped Worlds of Koreyoshi Kuarahara, a new Eclipse DVD box set showcasing five of the director’s films from the early ’60s, is a very good primer. But only two of the films in this set are must-see viewing.

If anything, this new box set only confirms my opinion that the best DVD package released under the Eclipse label thus far has been their Nikkatsu Noir set, the only one of the Eclipse series not dedicated strictly to a single director. Nikkatsu Noir gave viewers a more comprehensive look at who was making what film at a certain period of time during Japan’s New Wave. To be fair, The Warped Worlds of Koreyoshi Kurahara also provides some great context for Kurahara neophytes (i.e., most everyone, including myself — I had only seen The Warped Ones before digging into this new box set). But after Kurahara’s two 1960 productions, the other featured titles are a little disappointing.

Kurahara’s movies are at their primal best when they’re most direct. In both Intimidation and The Warped Ones, his characters wear their disaffection with humanity on their sleeves. These two films are the best showcases of his talents because they are centered on characters with fundamentally basic motivations. For example, in Intimidation, sweat-drenched bank manager Takita (Nobuo Kaneko) is just trying to keep his head above water after Kumaki (Kôjirô Kusanagi), a young, sunglasses-clad pimp, blackmails him into robbing his own bank. The film’s plot is blisteringly simple, allowing for a few necessarily overheated plot twists along the way as Takita has to rob the bank and get rid of Kumaki.

This does not necessarily mean Intimidation is a crude thriller. On the contrary, Kurahara’s films are very sophisticated when it comes to establishing mood through dynamic mise-en-scène. The dialogue-free nightmare sequence where we, as Kurahara’s camera, follow Takita as he robs the bank is a fantastic, gripping set piece. Its atmospheric but meticulous lighting, especially as we’re looking through a door’s rectangular peephole, is worthy of Fritz Lang’s American film noir. The sinuous tracking shots give you the illusion of genuinely looking through the eyes of a frantic robber, even when the camera is poised behind Takita. Kurahara trains his camera on singular objects, like the dial of the safe as Takita opens it, or the “X”-marked handles of the screen door leading to an employee’s office. The scene ends with an extreme close-up of the robber in profile so that you only see his ear and his sweaty cheek. That close-up is astounding for its expressionistic detail, and it’s one of many times you’ll see Kurahara externalize his characters’ inexorable feelings of panic through sweat.

In fact, sweat is the biggest constant in Kurahara’s films. No other film best exemplifies the wonderful things Kurahara can do with perspiration than The Warped Ones. In it, Akira (Tamio Kawachi), a young, animalistic beatnik, runs amuck on an unsuspecting urban populace with several pounds of sweat on his face and a howl on his lips. He doesn’t want sympathy, understanding or analysis; he just wants to have his way all the time. He terrorizes art galleries and gulps down ice cream cones while shucking and jiving to “black music” (jazz, but nothing by any white guys or Japanese imitators). And he also can’t stop bumping into Yuki (Yuko Chishiro), a beautiful young artist whom he can’t help himself from coveting and subsequently raping on a remote beach. The shimmering reflective surfaces of The Warped Ones, especially the white-hot sand dunes during this rape scene, complement the inky shadows of Intimidation quite nicely.

Akira’s story is infinitely more satisfying in The Warped Ones than the way it’s reworked in Black Sun, a sequel/remake of sorts where Akira (still played by Kawachi) runs around with a black G.I. stationed in Japan. The vitality of The Warped Ones relies entirely on the combination of a savagely puerile sense of humor with Kurahara’s consummately refined aesthetic. Without the venom of The Warped Ones or Intimidation, you’re stuck with interesting but stodgy melodramas like the A Face in the Crowd-esque I Hate But Love and Thirst for Love, the latter of which is based on a novel by Yukio Mishima.

And yet — The Warped Ones! That film bubbles over with panache and bratty charm. Here you get a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the fundamentally barbarous nature of Japanese society at large, one that embraces Akira’s behavior with the strictly juvenile understanding that everybody gets a little regressive sometimes. Even Yuko, her high-brow intellectual friends and her oblivious boyfriend Kashiwagi (Hiroyuki Nagato) prove throughout Kurahara’s film that they too can lash out at their fellow men while turning their noses up at Akira’s delightfully obnoxious antics (look out, bicyclists!). The film’s misanthropy is presented in such a jubilantly buoyant way that one can’t help but fall in love with its Godard-inspired charms. With the exception of Intimidation, everything else in the new Eclipse set is optional.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut.