Smash Cut

I guess this is almost like an artist going full circle.

Back in 1992, techno virtuoso Moby sampled a cue from the score for weirdmeister David Lynch’s cult smash TV series “Twin Peaks” in a hit club track entitled “Go”.

Now Lynch himself has collaborated with Moby by directing an animated music video for “Shot in the Back of the Head,” a song that appears on the latter’s forthcoming album Wait for Me.

The video might not immediately strike you as “Lynchian,” but stick with it: it’s still pretty cool. I mean, not many people make love stories about a man and a disembodied head.

Check it out below.

It was really only a couple of weeks ago when I first posted about the forthcoming live-action interpretation of the 2000 anime vampire/action classic, Blood: The Last Vampire.

Well, it now seems as if people are salivating for more, because the hype machine is still chugging along at full steam, with a brand-new trailer popping up online courtesy of Yahoo! Japan. It’s not subtitled, but a good amount of it is actually in English so you shouldn’t have any problems following along.

The thing is, now that I’ve actually heard the delivery of the English dialogue (particularly that of lead actress Gianna Jun), I’m toning down my expectations a bit. Some of the performances seem a bit…uh…stiff, which can (and should) be expected given the fact that English isn’t exactly the native tongue of many of the performers. But I can’t deny that the not-so-fluent passages are more than a little distracting. Nevertheless, director Chris Nahon obviously has an eye for flashy style, and the extended footage shows off the movie’s exciting sheen.

Check out the trailer here. (Click on the highlighted blue characters above the paragraph of Japanese text in order to access the preview.)

Boy oh boy, anime/manga/filmmaking visionary Mamoru Oshii is one busy dude. How he finds time to direct multiple projects (he had three works in 2008 alone) and produce and/or write additional ones is one of Life’s Great Mysteries. But, for fans like me, his unstoppable workflow is also one of its Great Pleasures.

And sure to be one of those Great Pleasures is Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai (a.k.a. Miyamoto Musashi: Sôken ni haseru yume), an anime retelling of the life of Miyamoto Musashi, a man who’s considered by many to be the greatest swordsman and strategist in Japanese history. Oshii isn’t directing this film — that task goes to vet animator Mizuho Nishikubo — but he did write the screenplay and is one of its producers. Oshii is promising that this will be an unusual portrayal of Musashi, so we just have to wait and see what novel touches will fuel the movie.

At any rate, I’ve tagged the unsubtitled but dialogue-free trailer below. Take a look. You won’t be disappointed.

So, are you sick of reading all my continuous hype over master fantasist Kazuaki Kiriya’s latest mindblower, Goemon?

Well, too bad, ’cause I’m still jonesing over this upcoming movie, and now there’s an even newer trailer that’s gonna knock your socks off (as if the first trailer didn’t already take care of that business).

Goemon, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, is a Japanese sci-fi/fantasy/quasi-historical riff on the old Robin Hood legend: a daring hero takes on an oppressive ruler to bring the riches of the wealthy to the poor. But, clearly, he does it with a lot of style.

You can witness the glory of the new trailer over at the film’s official website. It’s set for a May 1 unveiling in Japan.

Japanese filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura isn’t all that well-known outside of cult circles, though it’s not like the guy hasn’t tried to go mainstream. He directed the recent Clive Barker adaptation Midnight Meat Train, which was supposed to be his breakthrough in the Hollywood genre marketplace. But that effort ended up leaving him high and dry when distributor Lionsgate pulled the plug on it after some exec shake-ups and Midnight Meat Train was dumped onto a couple of screens in the hinterlands with nary a blip on the box-office radar.

The entire experience must’ve been frustrating for Kitamura, who helmed the fan-fave zombie swordplay flick Versus (2000), and sent him back to his native Japan to lick his wounds. I guess that homecoming got some new creative blood flowing, because Kitamura teamed up with acclaimed arthouse director Shunji Iwai, and the two — with Kitamura as director and Iwai as producer — collaborated on an animated feature.

Baton will be, like most Kitamura films, a sci-fi actioner, but the trailer seems to promise an interesting mix of rotoscoped visuals along with traditional 2D cel & computer-assisted work. Kitamura’s weaknesses as a live-action filmmaker — an over-reliance on flamboyant camerawork, a push for excess style over narrative substance (ironically, the stuff that makes him popular to some) — might actually work in his favor in this format, and the mash-up of animation techniques on display in Baton seems promising.

You can see the unsubtitled trailer via the film’s official website, which also offers Japanese-text story info and character designs.

Yeah, I know. Vampires, shmampires, right?

Well, as a lot of us found out this past year via Let The Right One In, those hoary old creatures of the night can still have some new life pumped into them, and I’ve got my fingers crossed that this year’s Blood: The Last Vampire can continue that trend.

The film is a live-action version of a highly-popular (and rightfully so) 2000 anime of the same name, and it seems to be faithful to the plot of the original: Saya (Korean actress Gianna Jun), the titular last vampire in the world, is part of a covert government agency that destroys blood-sucking demons in post-World War II Japan. When she’s sent undercover to scope out a military school for the baddies, she finds that one of her classmates is a demon in disguise.

Okay, so the plot ain’t exactly a whole lot to go ga-ga over, but the original anime had style, and tons of it. And the sleekness of its visuals was able to keep it pumping for its 48 min. run-time. The feature adaptation will have a longer length to deal with, so hopefully it’ll find ways to sustain itself just as well as the original. If the trailer is any indication, it’ll have tons of CGI, but also perhaps enough visual razzle-dazzle to make it fun.

Check out the trailer here, and the official website (in Japanese) here. Blood: The Last Vampire will be invading the Western market later this year, with a June 12 debut in the United Kingdom being its first, uh, stake in this part of the world.

I’ve blogged before about my excitement over the upcoming new visual feast from Japanese wunderkind Kazuaki Kiriya, and now there’s more footage from it to whet my (and your) appetite.

Goemon is his highly anticipated follow-up to the stunning 2004 sci-fi anime come-to-life called Casshern. The latter, in my opinion, had set standards for FX-style filmmaking that have yet to be topped. Granted, it was narratively bloated, but let’s face it: movie sported a lot of eye-popping imagination and more creativity in five minutes than two hours of your usual Hollywood product can provide.

His forthcoming work is an alternate-universe ninja fantasy, and it just got a new unsubtitled trailer which offers more jaw-dropping spectacle than you can shake a stick at.

The official Goemon website is over here.

Click below for the preview, and prepare to be blown away.

Dependably looney-tunes Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, who’s always worth watching whether he’s in front of the camera or behind it, is going to offer us gaijin a super-rare opportunity to see him in person. His wonky live-action adaptation of the anime hit Yatterman, which I’ve blogged about before, is coming out soon, and the New York Comic Con and Subway Cinema are putting together a very special Big Apple event for all of us, including a Yatterman world premiere!

Here’s the official scoop:

New York Comic Con, Subway Cinema and Nikkatsu Studios are proud to say:

TAKASHI MIIKE IS LOOSE IN NYC!!!

Director Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) and Japanese superstar Sho Sakurai will be a Guest of Honor and a Special Guest (respectively) of the New York Comic Con (Feb. 6 - 8, 2009) where they will present the world premiere of their new movie, Yatterman.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6 @ 4pm - Takashi Miike & Sho Sakurai will present a special panel on Yatterman and the mysteries of universe at the IGN Theater in the Jacob Javits Convention Center during ComiCon. They will answer questions, show an exclusive clip from the movie and blow your minds. Free for all ComicCon attendees.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6 @ 8pm - Takashi Miike & Sho Sakurai will present the World Premiere of Yatterman at the Director’s Guild Theater. First they will walk the red carpet, then they will screen the film, then there will be an onstage discussion with Miike and Sakurai about their careers.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7 @ 8:30pm - Takashi Miike will present an encore presentation of Yatterman at the IGN Theater in the Jacob Javits Convention Center that is free for all Comic Con attendees. We’ve got lots of room, Miike will be in fine form, so come on down!

Passes to the DGA event on Friday night will be distributed at the Nikkatsu Booth (#1315) at Comic Con. Tickets to the DGA event will be available to Comic Con attendees, special guests, and invited public via the Subway Cinema newsletter.

Yatterman is Nikkatsu’s massive special effects blockbuster set to be released in Japan in March, 2009, it’s the biggest and most expensive movie Miike has ever made and it’s full of giant robots and bizarre mecha and it will rock your socks.

And don’t forget to visit the official Yatterman website!

Okay, like most everyone, I was more than a little underwhelmed by rocker/filmmaker Rob Zombie’s totally unnecessary 2007 reboot of the horror classic Halloween. But I’ve always liked the guy’s spirit, and his unabashed love for exploitation cinema.

So I’ve been wondering if his sleazy, long-gestating, masked-wrestler + zombies + mad doctor + strippers animated feature The Haunted World of El Superbeasto was ever going to see the light of day. Seems like I’d been hearing about it for a couple of years, and was forever seeing its listing on IMDB, without ever finding any updates.

Well, lo and behold, I guess my wait has been rewarded, because according to Zombie’s site Zombie World, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is “coming soon” and there are five brand new stills (including one of a stitched-up Frankenstripper-type gal) to whet our appetites. Let’s see if this wonky genre mash-up actually gets a theatrical. I, for one, would pay good money to see a film where critically-acclaimed thesp Paul Giamatti voices a character named Dr. Satan!

The official El Superbeasto website is here. I’m sure when a trailer becomes available, it’ll get posted there first.

Last week I blogged about the upcoming screening in New York of Japanese visionary Mamoru Oshii’s latest animated mindblower, The Sky Crawlers.

Well, in the few days that have passed since then, the news has gotten even more exciting: director Oshii will actually provide a special video introduction before the screening. I know, it’s not as exciting or illuminating as an actual, in-the-flesh Q&A or appearance might be (then again, sometime those post-screening Q&As can truly suck, depending on the quality of questioning), but I think it’ll be great to have words from the man himself that will allow us to check out what was going on in that ultra-creative noggin of his when he came up with and made The Sky Crawlers.

Check out a longer (5 min. 44 sec.) trailer for the movie over here.