Review of SWEET RAIN (2008) a.k.a. Is a Movie Star's Goofy Smile Enough to Sustain a Picture?

SWEET RAIN (2008) is a Japanese film directed by Masaya Kakei that was released about a month ago in Hong Kong. It is is about a grim reaper whose job it is to spend a few days leading human subjects to their death. In the course of the movie, he meets three such subjects and the people around them.

Edmund Lee's review in TIME OUT HK is much too generous to this little nothing of a film that plays more like 3 episodes of a dull TV series taped together and passed off as a feature film. In fact, the scenes of Chiba (the protagonist, a Grim Reaper who appears in human form, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) inadvertently touching mortals with his ungloved hands and seeing them freeze and die temporarily is straight from the short-lived American TV series PUSHING DAISIES.

There is very little story here. And granted Kaneshiro is easy on the eyes, charming, and a movie star, one has to be a super fan of his to find this film enjoyable. Basically, the movie follows his character around as he meets a half dozen people. There's no story purpose and no conflict. Hence, no forward momentum.

Kaneshiro just mugs for the camera and tries to carry the film on what's left of his boyish charm. That may work to a certain extent, but given how overexposed the guy is--(I think China's Film Board recently passed a law that requires that Kaneshiro must appear in every so-called Chinese epic filmed on Chinese soil)--it's a flimsy excuse to justify a feature film.

The TIME OUT HK review also conveniently leaves out the presence of the main character's sidekick, a black lab, with whom Kaneshiro converses telepathically (dog gets subtitles) to provide a lot of exposition. The three separate stories are connected by the thinnest contrivance, but are spaced out over the course of a quarter century.

Basically, this film seems to have been made solely because Kaneshiro agreed to be in it. It is one of the dullest movies that is currently screening in Hong Kong. Why this film was made or distributed is a mystery to me.

By the way, the literal Japanese title is ACCURACY OF DEATH. Neither that nor SWEET RAIN is apt. A far more fitting title is WATCH TAKESHI KANESHIRO SPORT DIFFERENT HAIRSTYLES AS HE SMILES GOOFILY FOR THE Nth TIME.

Two Films That Are Way Way Out There

This comes in the wake of Barak Obama's victory in the U.S. presidential election yesterday.

I'm still feeling high from that victory. I've seen two films since. Both are films that I've been trying to see for quite a while now.

The first is Nagisa Oshima's DEATH BY HANGING(1968), which has been written up in so many books as epitomizing Japan's New Wave but is a really hard film to get to see. It's virtually impossible to find in the U.S., here in Hong Kong, and even in Japan. I looked for it at various video stores in Tokyo a few months ago to no avail.

I won't get into the logistics of how I finally got to see this film, which I first read about more than 10 years ago, but it was a treat. That said, I can't believe it was ever produced. It's one of the strangest most experimental films I've ever seen. It's divided into 7 sections. For me 2 were gripping and ridiculously intense. The others were too disjointed and anti-cinema for me. These sections were like watching Godard from the 80s and 90s where there's no effort whatsoever to accomodate the viewer.

The film is almost unclassifiable. It starts out like a documentary, then quickly turns into an absurd play. Overall, it is a treatise or interactive inspired dissertation on capital punishment and Japan's historical role and treatment of its underclass. I cannot imagine the film finding any sort of audience in Japan. I don't know the facts, but I'd be willing to bet that it made no money. It is just too intense a film, too experimental, too out-there. Indeed, it's an indictment on Japan and simultaneously a call for real soul-searching but made by a film genius.

It is definitely one of those super obscure intellectual films that you have to be a ridiculous film snob to have seen.

The second film was Kim Ki Duk's debut feature CROCODILE (1996), which was trademark Kim Ki Duk. It was bizarre but strangely compelling and original. Even though it was the first feature film the guy made, there were moments of complete originality. In fact, the film contained two things I've never seen before in my life. One, the main character dives into the river, and while underwater blows and inflates a balloon. I've never seen this before in real life or in a movie. Two, the main character picks up a turtle at the river's edge and paints its shell blue before releasing it back into the river. Again, original.

The film was clunky at times and had big gaps in narrative. Still, it had enough elements and signs of promise. The film was strong visually and told the story with pictures, which to me, is always a sign of a filmmaker using the medium. Most films are well-made and do indeed tell the story with the sound off. Try it sometimes. Park Chan Wook's OLD BOY is great to watch with the sound on mute.

Watching a movie with the sound off is also a good way to focus on the picture and see just how interesting or mundane a film truly is. I tried watching FAILURE TO LAUNCH with the sound off. The director truly took no risks in making that film. There isn't a single original or inspired shot in the picture. Instead, just the usual 'coverage' of conventional shots. They might as well have made that film on auto-pilot. Maybe they did. That film quickly dies without the sound.

The point is, CROCODILE was a treat despite its inadequacies and despite the fact that the copy I managed to get my hands on didn't have the best picture or sound quality. I can't believe anyone produced it. It was a truly bizarre film. It was clearly meant to be a low-budget quickie cheap entertainment, but Kim Ki Duk subverted it and turned it into a surreal and at-times visually stunning personal picture complete with his obsesssions and neuroses.

This guy is a true creative force. In his prolific output and sheer originality, the only person who even comes close in the history of cinema was Rainer Warner Fassbinder. And of course, both were complete originals. Not every film of both filmmakers was impressive. They each had some duds, but overall, they made more interesting and original films in a short period of manic productivity than some studios do in a lifetime.

By the way, tonight we will go see QUANTUM OF SOLACE. I can't say I'm a huge James Bond fan though I've seen my share of 007 films, but I thoroughly enjoyed the last one. So Jene loved that film. Hope this one is just as much fun.

Most Infuriating 'How I Became a Film Director' Story in History

I, like most other people, fell in love with movies as a child by watching movies simply as a consumer enjoying entertainment. I cherished the whole popcorn and soda experience and watched anything and everything. It wasn't until I was about 19 or 20 that I was exposed to truly great movies and became more serious about this magnificent medium.

Since then, I've been fascinated with how people get their foot in the door and the circumstances under which they got to make their first feature film. I made a terrible first feature film when I was 24 called FREE COUNTRY that was lackluster on all fronts. I wrote the screenplay myself and financed it by scrounging money from my student loans. Maybe not a great move if you're a sensible person with more practical concerns, but that's a different can of beans...

Whatever the case, I must have read hundreds of books over the years about different filmmakers from the most revered to the most crass to glean how they got their first films made.

In most cases, filmmakers have had to use their own money. This was the case for Godard, who used an inheritance to make his first film. In a few cases, they are able to supplement their own money with other people's money, which was the case for the Coen Brothers and Sam Raimi.

Of course, in those places where there is less emphasis on entrepreneurship and where the state controls the film industry, a small number of filmmakers catch a break while at the national film school and the state finances their first film. This was the case for Roman Polanski, Zhang Yi Mou, and Andrei Tarkovsky...

The point it, no matter who paid for the first film, most aspiring filmmakers find it incredibly difficult to get a break and it is through extreme struggle and luck that they get a chance to helm their first picture after having desperately wanted to make a feature film for a long long time.

Given this state of affairs, I learned something so very infuriating this week in a book on IM Kwon-taek. For those of you who may not know 'IM (sorry, couldn't resist), he is an old-school film director who has also come to be regarded in some circles as the elder statesman and face of Korean cinema. His most well-known films outside South Korea are SOPYONJAE, a period film about a family of itinerant beggar singers; THE GENERAL'S SON series, about a patriotic Korean gangster who fights Japanese gangsters during the 1930s when Korea was colonized by Japan; and CHIHWASEON, a period film about an extremely talented painter who was also a maverick, a drunk, and a womanizer.

Through these films he has won critical acclaim both in South Korea and in Europe. And it is through these films, which are quite impressive, that I first learned about this director, who is in his 70s now and still working in South Korea. But it turns out this is just the tip of the iceburg. The guy has directed 100 feature films since making his feature debut in 1962. During the first half of his career, he was considered something of a hack, who robotically and rather haphazardly cranked out genre pictures as was the industry practice then. He only gained his current reputation in the past 20 years.

Be that as it may, the guy's place as the representative figure of a national cinema--whether such a thing even exists or whether the reputation is deserved is a separate issue-- is similar to AKIRA KUROSAWA's in Japan.

Here is a link to the wikipedia entry on IM Kwon-taek:


Now, here is the zinger. It turns out that the guy's becoming a film director was a complete accident. The guy didn't love movies. He didn't even watch many movies. He didn't try for years to become a film director.

So how did it happen?

During the Korean War (1950-53), he found himself an 18-year-old refugee separated from his family in the southern port city of Busan. To survive, he worked for a time as a day laborer, but quickly found out the work was just too strenuous. So, he got a job working at a shoe store, which some enterprising person had set up to sell U.S. Army issued boots in the blackmarket.

Near the end of the war, the owners of the shoe store went to Seoul, the capital, and left him in charge of the Busan store. He managed that business for another 6 months on his own. At that point, the owners told him to close up shop and come to Seoul. They wanted him to help out in their new business venture, a fledgling movie production company.

Thus began his entry into the film industry. He started out in the props department and began doing all sorts of tasks to help the fledgling movie production company, until he eventually became a film director with his first feature FAREWELL TO TUMAN RIVER (1962 B&W), whose print has since been lost.

To put it simply, IM Kwon-taek became a film director because he worked at a shoe store.

The closest to this story that I can think of is AKIRA KUROSAWA's, who as a floundering high-school graduate who had failed to get into a Japanese university, became an assistant director by answering a newspaper ad and then somehow passing the Japanese film studio's (I think it was TOHO) lengthy interview and examination process.

But even in that case, Kurosawa had already been enamored with films from having seen numerous Russian and European classics under the influence of his older brother and had harbored an ambition to make films.

With IM Kwon-taek, there was no such exposure or ambition. Initially, his working in films was akin to his working on an assembly line at some factory.

Maybe his example is what some people might call FATE or DESTINY?

Whatever the case, it must be so strange for him to see the current brouhaha about filmmaking and just how competitive and popular the film industry has become and that there are even film schools where people pay large sums of money to go to study the craft.

Amazing!!!