Definitely watch Dead or Alive 2: Birds, it’s one of the best Miike films. It’s not mad exploitation like the first one, tonally it reminded me more of a Beat Takeshi film like Kikujiro where there’s long scenes where the action stops and all the characters put on a play for the local kids or muck about on the beach etc.
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i watched bone tomahawk and dragged across concrete ama. I’ve decided zahler doesnt care about women besides them being a plot device for mens stories, but like, as far as women in peril goes HES REALLY FUCKING GOOD
i used to think about that part in land of the dead where they just show a hand against a black foggy background and then tear it in half by the fingers a lot, but it will now be replaced by upside down man getting chopped/ripped in half by the seam of his balls
i also rewatched mishima bc SETS and i realized the guy in kyokos house is the lead from man who stole the sun and its because paul schraders weeaboo brother co wrote it. SO I REWATCHED THAT TOO
it makes the part in the beginning where the imperalist wants to see the emperor even more interesting to me
i wish i could find a better subbed version than the two part dvd rip i always find… there’s a lot of dialogue that i can tell is super simplified and none of the incidental stuff was subbed
what an all star cast though! like i remember gorgeous being the radio host outrun girl but OH WOW KIRYU FROM BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY is the helicopter hanging detective who can fall 300 feet and eat twelve gunshots and still keep fighting
sometimes i wish that movie leaned harder into nuclear poisoning but there are youtube medical videos for that
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Gary Hustwit’s (Helvetica, Urbanized) Dieter Rams documentary free to watch until tomorrow.
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watching new rose hotel again. i’ve felt this is probably the truest to his style a film can ever get to william gibson, all anonymous vaguely japanese cityscapes, dominated by hazy atmospheric lighting and conspiratorial glances and aggressively '90s energy - the intro is incredible btw. way more interested in exploring desire and longing and seductive power and despair in a completely transactional world than the boring cyber tech nerd shit but that’s what makes it good imo. it’s amazing that people thought this was just some shitty direct to video erotic thriller or something in 1998 when it was directed by fucking abel ferrara and obviously has A Lot going on. just watch the way willem dafoe looks at asia argento near the beginning of the film as they roleplay seducing hiroshi, every moment he breaks his code and falls in love with her just a little bit more, sliding irreparably towards disaster. probably one of the few films that’s more interesting when you know what’s happening from the start.
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oh yeah and fucking yoshitaka amano plays the guy they’re trying to flip and ryuichi sakamoto shows up as a corporate executive, as if the movie wasnt dope enough as it is
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Dead or Alive 2 Birds feels like a companion piece to Miike’s Rainy Dog and The Bird People in China, the latter of which had the same screenwriter as DoA2
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Learned a lot thanks to the New Rose Hotel wikipedia entry
Such as:
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schoolly d did work on several other abel ferrara films too
wow i’ve never heard of this movie it sounds rad
there are way more gibson adaptations out there than i realized!
it’s annoyingly hard to find but if anybody wants to watch it it’s on amazon prime video or i can give you the copy i ripped off amazon lol cuz this movie has never gotten an hd release before afaik!!
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wow yeah can you share?
ohhh shit i never realized bringing out the dead never got a bluray release!! my copy of it is in 720p so i guess i didn’t notice, yeah that’s prolly my favorite scorcese movie too tbh! also its such a shame so much of this stuff is languishing on tape or out-of-print DVD runs, so many of abel ferrara’s movies desperately need a re-release cuz of this. good luck finding anything from asian cinema thats the least bit obscure and isnt in the criterion collection half the time either too. even directors like john woo cant get a fucking good blu-ray transfer of their films without having the audio tracks butchered lol
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DOA 2 Birds is on you tub, not sure about quality or subs but theres a couple of uploads there
Edit: There’s a decent one with subs
it elevates the base material by transforming it into a space/world/universe where human beings are horny for other human beings in the flesh, and not just certain cuts of jacket, so you actually feel the mechanisms of alienation acting on them
I hope before he dies Gibson writes his perfect novel, in which a sexless, genderless, ambiguously sense-organed orb–extruded into life by an obscure, fictionalized subsidiary of a near-future PepsiCo–floats in the center of a perfectly square, doorless & windowless, particle free, perfectly beige room with gently luminescent walls. For 321 (tpb) pages Orb considers the geometry and provenance of a slow march of Physical Objects beamed into its brain.
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William Gibson’s ideal woman being a formless being with mirrors for eyes in a black MA-5 flight jacket and black jeans whose outfit seemingly absorbs all light around her is why I adore him
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but really he’s so obsessed with Things and the material, the physical that i’ve always felt like the humanity in his work comes a lot from your emotional connection to it and how you interpret that (it’s also possible i’m a huge dweeb who relates to molly from neuromancer because she’s broken or whatever jerk off motion etc) so it’s actually really interesting to see how other people form connections with his stories, what human elements they see in the sea of capitalist alienation that drowns his work. that’s what it feels like new rose hotel is for abel ferrara; a dream constructed entirely out of feelings and scattered images. i don’t know if this makes any sense.
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Pig in the City is so fucking good
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If only the uncut version still existed.
I feel like the best adaptations are always the ones that pick up on stuff that is barely present in the original and then run with it, like how Stephen King hates Kubricks The Shining because of the way it expansds on the theme of “Stephen King is an asshole”
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