Beyond Godzilla: School in the Crosshairs

Millions of Japanese students have suspected cram schools are evil, but it took a maverick like Nobuhiko Obayashi to conclusively prove it. In this case, the elite Eiko tutorial school is secretly coopting brainy but pliable students to become the brown-shorted advance team for the impending alien invasion. Fortunately, a teen idol with telekinetic powers will defend her high school and planet Earth in Obayashi’s School in the Crosshairs (trailer here), which screens during the Japan Society’s new film series, Beyond Godzilla: Alternative Futures & Fantasies in Japanese Cinema.

Yuka Mitamura is at the top of her class (no cram school for her), but she is still popular with the rest of the slackers. This definitely includes her ambiguously platonic guy pal, Koji Seki. Studying really isn’t his thing. He is the star of the school’s kendo team, but he still isn’t very good. However, a little help from Mitamura will make him a hero at an important meet.

Obviously, if the tightly wound new transfer student Michiru Takamizawa wants to win the hall monitor election as the first step towards global domination, she will have to go through Mitamura. In terms of psychic power, they are rather evenly matched, but Takamizawa has more back-up, including Kyogoku, the evil overlord from Venus, who has been trying to lure Mitamura to the dark side of the Force for several weeks.

It probably goes without saying when it comes to Obayashi making high school movies, but School in the Crosshairs is really and truly nuts. Like his mind-melting House, Crosshairs features Obayashi’s hand-crafted analog special effects, but this time around they are even more defiantly cheesy looking. On the other hand, the student morality patrols Takamizawa organizes and decks out fascist uniforms are maybe even creepier today than when Crosshairs was originally released in 1981, thanks to rise in campus speech codes and thought policing.

Yet, Crosshairs is really just amazingly sweet, thanks to the appealing almost but not quite ready to be boyfriend-girlfriend chemistry shared by Mitamura and Seki. Teen idol Hiroko Yakushimaru (a Japan Society favorite from Sailor Suit and Machine Gun) is unflaggingly plucky and charming, but also disarmingly self-effacing, while Ryôichi Takayanagi plays Seki as a big old likable lug of a guy. However, it is strange Masami Hasegawa did not go on to greater teen stardom, because she is terrific as the uptight, glowing-eyed Takamizawa.

There is so much random weirdness in Crosshairs Obayashi practically creates a trippy new standard for normalcy. Regardless, it is all good, virtuous fun. There is a real story in there too. In fact, it is based on a YA novel by Taku Mayumura that has also been adapted for television and anime. It is easy to see why viewers would enjoy weekly visits with characters like Mitamura and Seki, as well as even their boneheaded but free-thinking gym teacher. Honestly, this film is the reason Edison and the Lumières invented moving pictures (they just didn’t realize it at the time). Very highly recommended, School in the Crosshairs screens this Friday (3/31) at the Japan Society, as part of Beyond Godzilla.

Kadokawa at Japan Society: W’s Tragedy

As early as the Elizabethan era, the play within the play has been a postmodern device for meta-truth-telling. Such is particularly the case for the ingénue actress toiling in a thankless supporting role in a stage adaptation of the Shizuko Natsuki mystery novel published in America as Murder at Mt. Fuji. The events on-stage add ironic resonance to the backstage intrigue of Shinichirō Sawai’s W’s Tragedy (trailer here), which screens as part of the Japan Society retrospective: Pop! Goes Cinema: Kadokawa Films and 1980s Japan.

“I’ve stabbed Grandpa to death” is the familiar opening line of the many television adaptations of Natsuki’s Daburyū no Higeki. Unfortunately, Shizuka Mita will not be reciting them—at least not yet. She auditioned for the role of apparent murderess Mako Watsuji (the “W” of the tragedy), but the company cast her as the maid, while also assigning her prompter and wardrobe duties. The early out-of-town try-out performances are often demeaning, but her former actor suitor tries to buoy her spirits—even while encouraging her to withdraw from show business.

However, Mita gets the kind of big break that could easily ruin her when Sho Hatori, the production’s grand dame leading lady asks the innocent girl to cover for her. Hatori’s rich married patron dies in the saddle so to speak, so she convinces Mita to dress the body and pretend he had been her caller. The resulting publicity will be a double-edged sword, but Hatori will keep up her end of the bargain, elevating Mita to the prime featured role of Mako.

At first, Sawai keeps the production of W’s Tragedy very much in the background, which must have baffled audiences already familiar with the novel and television adaptation just one year prior to the film’s release (at least four more TV miniseries would follow). In fact, the first act almost has a vibe like Fame, even including an ultra-1980s aerobics sequence.

References to Mita’s supposed plainness are a little baffling, given she is played by former idol and Sailor Suit and Machine Gun star Hiroko Yakushimaru, but she is terrific expressing all the aspiring actress’s insecurities and self-doubt. She is openly vulnerable, yet there is a dark edge to ambitious resolve. Yet, nobody upstages Yoshiko Mita, who commands the screen as Hatori, like Lauren Bacall in her Queen of Broadway days.

By today’s standards, Sawai is quite restrained with the self-referential business, obviously trusting in his mostly original screenplay and first-rate ensemble. W’s Tragedy has an ambiguous vibe that is sometimes reminiscent of Day for Night, which is high praise indeed. As dark as it gets, it is also reassuring that the show still must go on. Very highly recommended, W’s Tragedy screens this Saturday (12/17) at the Japan Society, concluding their edgy yet nostalgic Kadokawa retrospective.

Kadokawa at Japan Society: Sailor Suit and Machine Gun

American publishers are still trying to catch up with Kadokawa. In the late 1970s, media mogul Haruki Kadokawa started a film production division and began cranking out hit after hit, based on his publishing properties. So, how’s Random House Studio doing? Oh right, sold to Freemantle Media. For Hiroko Yakushimaru, they developed one of the first and arguably still most successful vehicles for a Japanese Idol. It would spawn two television series (decades apart) and a sequel re-boot this year. It doesn’t have the cult following in America of other violent pop culture phenomena, but it is hard to miss its lasting influence of Japanese cinema when Shinji Sōmai’s Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (trailer here) screens as the opener of the Japan Society retrospective: Pop! Goes Cinema: Kadokawa Films and 1980s Japan.

Izumi Hoshi looks fragile, but she is surprisingly tough. She was already somewhat delinquent, even before she inherited control of her great-uncle’s Yakuza gang. Technically, he had named his nephew as his successor, but before the surviving Medaka gang members can find him, the traveling salesman dies in an accident. Logically, leadership of the gang then falls to Hoshi, as his rightful heir. Rather bizarrely, Hoshi also inherits Mayumi Sandaiji, her father’s lover, whom she never met. You can bet she has a secret or two.

Understandably, Hoshi tries to beg off leading the Medaka gang, but when she learns the remaining core group will launch a suicide attack against their rivals if forced to disband, she accepts her new position. Of course, her new fellow clan leaders do not take her seriously. They assume they can finish off Medaka at their leisure, but there is a limit to the disrespect and condescension Hoshi will take.

Sailor Suit and Machine Gun takes its title and iconic poster image from the climatic shootout that is basically what it sounds like, but the film in toto is far moodier and more ambiguous than the Noboru Iguchi and Yoshihiro Nishimura movies it subsequently inspired. Hoshi is not a cartoon. She is a confused kid, who quite logically grabs onto the support system being offered after the death of her father, her only family and sole support.

Yakushimaru is terrific as Hoshi evolving from slightly jaded but largely naïve kid into full-fledged gangster and finally we’re not really sure what. She also plays some powerful scenes with Yuki Kazamatsuri as Sandaiji, the profoundly damaged femme fatale.

There is something appealingly grungy about SS and MG. This is not a slick video-game-style gore fest. It is street-wise and world-weary, but with a sugary pop idol soundtrack. Nor does it glamorize the violence it inexorably leads up to (despite spawning the catch-word “kaikan” with Hoshi’s big gun-down). Innocence is lost in Sōmai’s film—and it’s a darned shame, but life goes on. Highly recommended for students and connoisseurs of misunderstood cult cinema, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun screens this Tuesday (11/8) at Japan Society as the launch of their Kadokawa series—and it is guaranteed to make happier viewing than anything on television that depressing night.