Odishon (Audition)
dir. Takeshi Miike


The best horror and suspense movies know that to really get under our skin, you have to tap the positive as well as the negative emotions.

Love is far more terrifying for its power over us than fear.

If Buffalo Bill is holding you captive in his basement, all you're thinking about is how to get out. Offer him money, put the fucking lotion in the basket, try to get his dog, whatever. He's just a monster. A thing. A force.

But imagine if you're DATING Buffallo Bill and you find him "doing things" with the skin of a transient. Well, that throws you. I mean, you thought you could have a future with this guy and now here he is "doing things" with skin. What does that say about you? And what about your skin?

What terrifies us is not what Buffalo Bill might take from US, but what we might find ourselves needing from HIM (besides a phone and a cheeseburger.)

Shigeharu-san is a lonely guy. His wife's been dead for the better part of a decade. His son is growing up and showing an interest in dinosaurs and (secondarily) girls. He's getting old. He's tired of banging is secretary. He feels Japan is slipping into decadence. He doesn't relate to the younger generation. He drinks too much.

His friend, Yasuhisa-san, a talent agent suggests that they arrange a talent search and audition a number of women for Shigeharu-san to choose from.

What, as they say, could go wrong?

One "Fabulous Baker Boys"-esque comic montage later, we have our girl: Asami.

Asami is tall, thin, demure and beautiful. Shigeharu doesn't stand a chance.

After an enjoyable weekend retreat, Asami disappears and Shigeharu sets off on an Oedipal quest to uncover her secret past, which (without giving anything away) ends about as well for him as things ended for Oedipus.

Let's just say that some things are in a burlap sack for a REASON and they should just, you know, stay there.

Unlike Miike's other over-the-top comic hero gorefests, this film is soft, quiet, affecting. It gets under skin. You sympathize with the hero. You're drawn to the heroine. When the violence comes, it truly feels like something good being twisted and torn.

It's not Asami's lunacy that terrifies. It's her sweetness. She does what she does not out of cruelty, but out of love. From her point of view, it's not what she's doing TO you...it's what she's doing FOR you.

And she has a lovely sack just waiting. Now, stick out your tongue...

Four stars, Jason Bob sez check it out before you cruise Craigslist

We're Goin' To The Roadhouse, Gonna Have A Re-al...a Good Time!

Who didn't love Mystery Science Theater 3000? Joel, the Bots, Mike, the Mads...and the movies!

Where did they dig some of this stuff up?

And sure, they lingered a little too long on Sci Fi and wore the premise a little thin, but the basic idea of riffing on flms, well, that never gets old.

And now, Mike Nelson has brought it all back with Riff Trax.

The idea is:

1) Mike watches a movie and cuts an audio-only MST-style riff track
2) You buy or rent the same movie, download the riff track and sync the audio to the picture


That's it: instant MST. And this new system has some advantages over the old system.

1) Being on the interweb, Riff Trax don't have to fit into network time slots, don't have to get ratings an don't have to be PG. It just has to be worth Mike Nelson's time and I mean, come on, how much could THAT possibly be worth?

2) The original MST suffered from copyright cock-block. So many great bad movies that people KNOW, so may of them starring Patrick Swayze, so little chance of getting Paramount to sign a release saying you can make extended fun of their prized ouevre.

But Riff Traks don't have this problem because Mike is not giving you the movie! He's just cutting a 100% original sound track meant to accompany the film.

Which means that Mike finally has the chance to MSTify the celebrated "Road House" in all it's full-length glory!

Sure, we miss out on the host segments and invention exchanges, but isn't it more fun to just do those parts yourself?

So, let's get out there and support MST on the web!

Prince of Persia v. God of War
(game review)

On the surface, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (third in the recent Prince of Persia trilogy) and God of War appear to have much in common.

Both take place in the ancient world (Persia and Greece, respectively) and feature a hero running through the burning remnants of a city under siege by hostile supernatural forces. Both involve a great deal of running, fighting, jumping, swinging and puzzle solving.

But there are some diferences.

Okay, first off, this is what the Prince of Persia looks like:

And this is what Kratos, the hero of God of War looks like:


If these were movies, and they practically are, Kratos would be played by someone like The Rock and The Prince would be played by, well, maybe Prince or perhaps an especially pensive and brooding Adrien Brody.

It's The End of the World as We Know It

Kratos and the Prince also differ in their reaction to the apocalpytic destruction of major ancient cities.

Returning home to find Babylon in flames and his girlfriend abducted by some sort of Lovecraftian supervillain, the Prince spryly springs about the city, reminicing bittersweetly about the old woman who used to sell candied almonds in the now-demon-infested streets of the market.

Kratos, assigned by Athena to drive her brother Ares out of the streets of Athens (Ares, by the way, being a ginormous "Shadow of the Colossus"-inspired boss monster), Kratos commandeers a ship by killing the dragon that ate the captain and climbing down the dead dragon's slime-covered esophagus to find the still-living captain cowering and thanking the gods for his salvation. After taking the key and kicking the screaming captain into the gullet of the giant lizard, Kratos retires to the captain's quarters where he beds not one but two improbably-endowed harem girls (to, you know, improve his health rating.)

That pretty much sets the tone.

In Prince of Persia, the main game mechanic is mincing about the streets of Babylon, jumping and swinging from one convenient "Gymkata-eque" spring-loaded wall-mounted launcing platform to the next (why would someone put a spring-loaded launching platform between two windows, two storeys up the side of a builing in ANCIENT BABYLON?!? Oh, I don't know, why would someone put a pommel horse in the middle of an alley way in Yugoslavia?)

The cool power in Prince of Persia is the "sands of time" which allow you to take do-overs. And you'll need them, since the tougher levels consist of puzzles like running along a wall, jumping at the right moment to grab a rope and swing to a crossbar which lets you jump to a collapsing platform which you have to run along before it OH DAMN! okay, backup to the crossbar and FUCK! fall to the ground and rewind again and oh hell, just put God of War in already.

In God of War the main game mechanic can best be described with two words: smashy smashy. Run into a room and...smashy smashy. Climb a ladder and then...smashy smashy. Along the way, you encounter gods who give you more and better smashy smashy powers. Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you keep on smashy smashying and the enemies don't seem to be going away or dying, so you have puzzle out which way you need to smashy smashy things to make them go away or die. That's using your noodle, Kratos.

Prince of Persia: 3 stars, Jason Bob sez it's worth a rental
God of War: 4 stars, Jason Bob sez SMASHY SMASHY!

A Scanner Darkly

There's some question as to why people keep making Phillip K. Dick movies.

They're never faithful to the plot because, well, to be fair it's hard to be. Dick was notoriously abusive to his protagonists. Am I a robot from the future? Or just a schizophrenic lab rat that has been programmed by the government to THINK I'm a robot from the future?

It just seems cruel to make Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves think at that level. It's much better to go with something like "the guy in the sunglasses wants to stop you from walking through this door...so punch him...a lot."

With "A Scanner Darkly" (aka "My Brain Hurts featuring Keanu Reeves"), Richard Linklater succeeds where others have, well, not even tried really. This is without a doubt the most faithful Dick story committed to film, which is to say that in addition to using the basic premise and the name of the main character, we actually get to see several of the events and even much of the dialog from the book on screen.

Die hard Dickheads will complain that much of the book is missing, and it's true. Linklater made some choices. But let's be frank: at the time Dick wrote this piece he was a hardcore tweaker. Once you establish that someone is tweaking hard, does it really matter if you boil their multi-hundred page paranoid manifestos down just a tad to economize on screen time? Is it all the Word of God?

And we do get most of the A material. The "18-speed bike" and "broken down car" vignettes are worth the price of admission alone. Watching Keanu, Woody and Robert try to work their way through a hedgemaze of paranoid delusions is, well, quite a dark vision.

And speaking of visions, this film is a culmination of several threads for Richard Linklater. Linklater has always been a borderline experimental filmmaker. He's done some mainstream fair, like "School of Rock" and "Before Sunrise," but some of his other efforts seem like incomplete studies, experiments or parts of movies.

In "Tape" he explored clausterphobia, paranoia and rationalization. In "Slacker" he worked with open, plotless dialog-driven character vignettes. In "Waking Life," he first used interpolated rotoscoping.

Each of these films seems to be reaching for something it misses. "Tape" is tight and tense, but ultimately closed off. "Slacker" is fun for a while, but ultimately doesn't connect. "Waking Life" has some interesting moments, but feels unstructured and the rotoscoping becomes less than pointful.

In "A Scanner Darkly," all these elements come together. The tension and paranoia of "Tape" keep your mind on the action even though very little of subtance actually happens for the first hour or so. The rotoscoping that seemed like a cute gimmick in "Waking Life" gives "A Scanner Darkly" the genuine sense of oversaturation and ideal vision that comes from amphetamine abuse. The open-ended rambling of "Slacker" also adds a "genuine tweaker" energy to the dialog, especially in the early parts of the film.

And that's what makes it all work. This feels like real drug users saying and thinking the kinds of things that drug users say and think. The ironic difference (which is part of Dick's genius) is that the paranoid delusions of the main characters are NOT true, but something far more bizarre and sinister IS.

Three stars. Jason Bob sez check it out before it checks you out...unless...THAT'S PART OF THE PLAN!!!

Full Metal Yakuza

This simple tale about a low-level yakuza who is revived by a latex-clad mad scientist shortly after he and his boss are killed by rival gansters and turned into a 'full metal' robo-man accessorized with his dead boss' yakuza tattoo and prominent man-member who subsequently escapes to seek revenge on the killers who took his life and raped his girlfriend is actually one of Miike's milder, more accessible pieces.

Full Metal Yakuza is basically RoboCop with more fetish rape and jazz hands.

And you've never seen a mad scientist flourish a latex raincoat until you've seen Full Metal Yakuza.

That said, this is no Ichi The Killer. But if you liked Ichi, it won't disappoint.

Two and a half-stars Jason Bob sez mince on in, if you dare!