| TAMING THE TIGER? : Rotterdam 2006 report for 'Impact' magazine |
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| Wednesday, 22 March 2006 | |
 The following article appeared in the March edition of Impact magazine. This online version was posted on Wednesday 22nd March, 2006, the day on which the April edition of the magazine became available. Click HERE for subscription information. Say Rotterdam' and what thoughts enter your mind? Go on, try it. That lilting chart hit for The Beautiful South (pointedly not about the Dutch port-city, on closer inspection?) Feyenoord football club? Wacky modern architecture? The cataclysmic WW2 bombing raid that indirectly led to all that wacky modern architecture? The crazed brand of hardcore techno music known as 'Gabber'? All or none of the above? In the film world, however, Holland's only 'proper' (i.e. non-touristy) city stands for only one thing: the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which since 1972 has grown into European cinema's most cutting-edge major cinema event. Over ten days spanning the end of January and the start of February, literally hundreds of features and thousands of shorts unspool on the festival's dozens of screens - and very few could ever be called 'safe', 'mainstream' or 'conventional'. This year's renewal - the 36th - maintained the IFFR's reputation for avant-garde unpredictability, but regulars noted that there was rather  less of what might be called 'genre' fare (action/thrillers/crime), many fewer horror films (despite J-Horror having formed a staple of the program for a decade or more) and a shortage of full-tilt 'Asian Extreme' lunacy such as last year's Survive Style 5+, Late Bloomer, The Neighbor in 13 or Ab-Normal Beauty (dig out my report in March 2005's Impact and you'll know what I mean). Indeed, the whole 'Rotterdammerung' section, which had yielded so many semi-forbidden fruits last year, had been unceremoniously dumped to the dismay of many fest-goers.Of course, to experienced Rotterdam die-hard such as myself, there was plenty of extreme/horrific/uberweird stuff scattered through the weighty 487-page catalogue: gems from big names like Shinya Tsukamoto and perennial Rotterdam favourite Takashi Miike, promising newcomers like the deeply disturbing Kenji Goda; and any festival offering Joe Dante's sublime, inspired, zombie-tastic Masters of Horror episode Homecoming on the big screen can only be applauded. Indeed, out of the 40 films I saw at Rotterdam '06 only one topped Homecoming in my personal top ten. This was Liang Ying's Tiger award candidate Taking Father Home in which a young lad from a country village heads off to the big city to bring back his father, who abandoned his family six years before. Not exactly a thriller, but the violent bloodshed of the climax allows me to sneak it into Impact's pages: anyone interested in where "world cinema" is going should keep this unassuming 28-year-old Shanghaier's name in mind.  Many a decent tune has been produced from an old fiddle, of course, and with Homecoming Joe Dante has delivered his most raucously fullblooded battlecry since his Piranha/Gremlins/Howling heyday. Made for the US cable series Masters of Horror, Homecoming is a grisly horror satire on the current American government's handling of their Iraq exploits. A casual remark on national TV from the (unnamed, unseen) US prez causes America's dead soldiers to rise up from their bodybags and make their croaky "voices" heard. Galvanised by what seems like a genuine, break-down-the-walls righteous fury, Dante - picking up the flaming political torch from George Romero's Land of the Dead - gives the Republican administration and their spin-doctors both barrels with this 56-minute mini-epic: easily the most audacious, thought-provoking and consistently hilarious hour you'll experience all year. The 14 Masters of Horror will be shown in full (or part) at various British film-festivals this year, may pop up on terrestrial television at some stage (subscription channel Bravo started showing them in January), and will be available to buy from Anchor Bay (six two-disc sets, one a month, starting March). Word is that John Carpenter's and Don Coscarelli's sections are well up to the Dante standard, while Tobe Hooper and Dario Argento fans should also take note.  Takashi Miike predictably ran into trouble with his episode Imprint, which, with its ultra-shocking elements (involving foetuses, apparently) was deemed "too shocking" even for America's relatively liberal cable networks. For now we'll just have to content ourselves with The Great Yokai War, a $10m blockbuster which represents a welcome bounce-back for Miike after the disappointing Izo (a pseudo-epic that only seems to be pleasing the most highbrow of critics) and the ropey, pretentious Box section he contributed to the trilogy-compilation Three Extremes. Though billed as Miike's first "children's film", The Great Yokai War - a remake of the 1968 film Yokai Daisenso - might struggle to get past the censors with anything lower than a 15 certificate over here. Several aspects would probably give the BBFC sleepless nights: a hideous, mutant horse-like creature at the beginning; the ludicrously rough treatment endured by our hero's furry, mewing, doe-eyed "pet"l the way an Obi Wan Kenobi-like character casually smokes a cigarette during a lull in the action; and the climactic, in-your-face product-placement for a famous brand of Japanese beer. The story is an anything-goes, baggy-as-Bilbo cross between Hayao Miyazaki (Howl's Moving Castle etc) and Peter Jackson's recent Tolkein triptych, as an unassuming young lad discovers he must prevent an evil genius from converting all friendly-ish 'Yokai' (spirit/goblin/creature thingies) into giant killer robots (with their multi-use appendages and glowing red eyes, these creations might be called "Transform-inators") as part of his evil plan to "bury the world in darkness." Wild, demented, inspired shenanigans ensue (sample dialogue: "It's shaking the burdock right out of the fish-cake!") and Miike deserves major credit for keeping audiences old and young (the Dutch had no qualms about bringing their kids) entertained for a full 124-minute running-time. "Isn't this a bit much?" somebody remarks at a crucial stage: in a Miike film, of course too much is never enough, and it's great to see the genius back on something approaching top form: Yokai stands (disembodied) head and shoulders above the festival's other two-hour Japanese extravaganza-romp wannabes, Seijun Suzuki's rickety pantomine Princess Raccoon (showcasing the charms of Ziyi Zhang) and Kankuro Kudo's intermittently dazzling, ultimately overlong Yaji & Kita, the Midnight Pilgrims.  At the other end of the length scale, Shinya Tsukamoto - Miike's rival for the title of J-Horror's ruling master - sneaked his 28-minute Haze into a trio of East-Asian shorts commissioned by the Korean Film Festival in Jeonju. Though it loses its way a bit at the end, Haze is - at least for the first half - one of the most intense and gruelling things ever committed to digital video. A man wakes up in a narrow, coffin-like space, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He finds he can crawl, painfully, in several directions - but this just leads him into a series of cruel, confining traps. The extended sequence in which the man wakes up (again) to find his teeth tightly clamped around a large, horizontal, wall-mounted pipe that allows only molar-scraping sideways movement, will test the nerves of even the most hardened horror-hound: the makers of the Cube and Saw movies will surely be preparing their "hommages" to this near-unwatchable nightmare episode. Tsukamoto and Miike both turn 46 this year - and while neither shows much sign of losing their creative spark, it's encouraging to note the emergence of a new Japanese talent who seems to have learned much from their trailblazing example. Kyoto's Kenji Goda is a full decade younger, and Analife is his first movie. Judging by the steady stream of disgusted, head-shaking, tut-tutting "walkouts" throughout the Rotterdam public screening I attended, Goda looks set for a long career as boundary-pushing provocateur.  Analife is structured as three monologues from the inner thoughts of three (unnamed) young Japanese citydwellers, spoken in English so that (as Goda told the remaining viewers at the post-movie Q+A) the screen wouldn't be cluttered up with subtitles. There's already loads of stuff to take in, as Goda's visuals are a riot of digitalised and enhanced images: split-screen, multi-screen, brighter-than-life colours, head-spinning editing. The monologues themselves don't so much "push the envelope" as fill it with vile bodily fluids then shove it down the audience's throat: serial rape; the delights of decomposing bodies; the darkest corners of sexual obsession; graphically violent murder: if you found the narrator of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho unpleasant company, just wait till you encounter this trio. The (unholy) three come together at the hour point (in an 83-minute film) when each of them develops a painful problem 'down below' requiring a visit to the local proctologist - though not afraid to flirt with pretentiousness, Goda shows enough self-awareness and humour to just get away with it. And once we reach the proctologist's clinic, Analife starts getting really odd: Miike himself would surely applaud the moment when two wisecracking gangsters suddenly transform into space-alien robot bears. Needless to say, by no means suitable for those of a sensitive disposition, but on balance and reflection this is exactly the kind of stuff Rotterdam used to be about, and which is becoming increasingly hard to find. We know that a leopard can't change its spots - but can the Tiger (Rotterdam's leaping symbol, and name of its main-competition awards) transform its stripes? Should it even try? Perhaps this year was just a blip, and next year festival director Sandra den Hamer may unleash a torrent of gore-soaked Japanese and Korean slice-and-dicers to the delight of the assembled masses. If she carries on at this rate, however, the tiger will be a sadly defanged, declawed beastie, and many of us will be to postpone our Dutch trip until April, when Amsterdam's Festival of Fantastic Films is whole-heartedly committed to the most horrific and disreputable stuff imaginable. This year Roger Corman is guest of honour - and Impact will move heaven and earth to bring you the great man's pronouncements, hot off the press, in a future interview. Neil Young Official websites: International Film Festival Rotterdam : www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com Fantastic Film Festival (Amsterdam) : www.afff.nl Analife : www.analife.com Masters of Horror : www.mastersofhorror.net The Great Yokai War : www.filmhorizon.com/Yokai.asp
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