One day, Japanese pulp cinema auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa was watching TV.  A killer had been apprehended, and the TV newscasters mobbed the perp’s neighbors to ask all the familiar questions: what was he like?  Did he act unusual?  Did you ever suspect you were living next door to a monster?  And the answers to these inevitable questions are inevitably frustrating: he was just a nice, quiet man who never aroused any suspicions.  He must have been a monster disguised as a man.

People want to be able to explain away crime as something aberrant.  The press tries to meet this need, to package the reporting of crime in ways that pit us versus them.  But Kurosawa, a cynical man who studied sociology before becoming a moviemaker, recognized these impulses as delusional.  The killer, his neighbors, his victims, the detectives who caught him, and the reporters who covered the tale are all made of the same stuff.  Kurosawa saw the disquieting truth: anyone can be a monster.  Even you.

This was in the mid 1990s, a period when the world’s cinemas were clogged with serial killer dramas all hoping to be the next Silence of the Lambs, or Se7en.  That, or at least hitch a short ride on their coattails.  Most remained just that—wanna bes, never weres, nots.  This is the story of the film that did become the Next Big Thing, and along with Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Ring invented J-Horror.

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For those of you who missed last week’s post, a quick recap:  I recorded audio commentaries to both the Japanese and American cuts of Ishiro Honda’s GODZILLA for Criterion, but some of the material was cut from the tracks as the discs were sent to the factory.  I am using this forum as a venue by which to publish some of the deleted material.

The most controversial sections addressed the European distribution of the original Godzilla.  Last week we saw what happened in Germany–this week we explore the nuttiness of COZZILLA!

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My professional association with Godzilla began in 1995, when I wrote an essay called The Importance of Being Godzilla for an obscure arts journal I had a grudge against.  That essay won me a literary agent, an aborted book contract, and eventually an actual published book from a different publisher.

It also won me enduring decades of tension and conflict with the entities that own Godzilla.

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The cat is out of the bag–I had been under orders not to tell anyone until now that I provided the Vin Scully style play-by-play for both versions of Godzilla (1954/1956) on Criterion’s new Blu-Ray edition. I guess some Godzilla fans sensed something in the air, the way animals perceive a coming tornado, because I’ve gotten quite a few email inquiries about whether I was doing a commentary for the Godzilla vs Megalon Blu-Ray. Close, but not quite, fellas.

Over at the Criterion Forums, speculation about the Godzilla Blu-Ray led to this exchange:

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 7:43 pm 

What value does this have besides kitsch? This is an honest question; I’m not trying to troll anyone who likes this. I’ve never seen anything Godzilla-related, and I’m curious as to what the appeal is.

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 7:53 pm 

You have to look at the first Godzilla movie quite differently. It was a lot more serious in tone, a reaction to the bombings in WWII, the destruction of Japan, the hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific that killed some fishermen (a newsreel on the BFI disc shows it).

Fair enough, but it does rankle me a tad how respect for the austere horror parable of Honda’s original Godzilla tends to come at the expense of the later, sillier films. The 1954 ‘Zilla is a masterpiece, a work of apocalyptic art. But the crazy sequels are fun, too, and I hate to see them thrown under the bus.

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I recently signed up for a temporary “Plus” account with Hulu.com so I could sample some of the rare Japanese films that Criterion has made available there. Earlier this year Criterion signed an exclusive deal with Hulu much to the dismay of many Netflix users. Netflix still carries some Criterion films but at Hulu you can now stream many Criterion titles that have never been released on DVD. According to Criterion’s initial statement on Facebook their partnership with Hulu, “gives viewers a chance to explore our library, sample films they might want to buy, discover films they never knew they would want, and see films so rare that they would never see the light of day in disc editions.” Naturally this intrigued me and when I learned that Seijun Suzuki’s hard-to-see film EVERYTHING GOES WRONG (also known as Subete ga kurutteru; 1960) was available to watch at Hulu I decided to take advantage of their 7-day trial membership offer.

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A few weeks ago the Consulate-General of Japan at Denver sent me a stack of titles by Yasuzo Masumura (1924 – 1986), a director largely unknown to American audiences despite a prodigious body of work and plaudits by film critics who have placed him within the same pantheon as Kenji Mizoguchi (with whom Masumura worked with as an assistant director), Yasujiro Ozu, and Akira Kurosawa. Masumura also had an influence on Nagisa Ôshima and the Japanese New Wave. Despite Masumura having about 60 films to his credit, only a half-dozen of those can readily be found on Region 1 DVD’s here in the U.S.  READ MORE

If you’re suffering from the summer blockbuster blues, there’s no greater pick-me-up than the New York Asian Film Festival, an invigorating potpourri of the finest in creative Eastern bloodletting. It marks its tenth decadent year with 45 features from nine different countries, unspooling at the Film Society of Lincoln Center from July 1st – 14th. 11 of those films are co-presented with Japan Cuts, the NYAFF’s more studious (if no less ambitious) five-year-old sister festival, held at Japan Society from July 7th – 22nd. Including the 21 other titles in Japan Cuts, there are 66 Asian movies hitting screens in July, most of which will never receive distribution in the United States (although many will be obtainable at Asian DVD retailers).

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We start here: Seven passengers on a yacht.  There’s the millionaire who owns it, his hired skipper, and the weirdo first mate.  Their passengers include a sexy starlet, a virginal country girl, and a professor.  The ship encounters a terrible storm, and the travelers are soon shipwrecked on a Pacific island with no hope of rescue.  And that’s when things start to get interesting.

I could be talking about GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, the amiably stupid CBS sitcom (1964-1967).  But as it happens I’m talking about the 1963 Japanese horror flick MATANGO.

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“Tokyo… After three long years. It makes my head spin. Just look at it. Why so many people crammed into tiny cage-like boxes? People… Such strange animals. What keeps them all going? They look like they’re half dead. Making a frantic pretense of being alive. What was so wrong about killing one of these stupid animals? I served three years… This is my territory… With no second thoughts, I’m back again.” – Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) in PALE FLOWER.

Masahiro Shinoda’s PALE FLOWER (1964) opens with this telling monologue recited by the handsome Japanese actor Ryo Ikebe. In the film Ikebe plays an aging Yakuza mobster called Muraki who has just been released from prison after serving a three-year sentence for killing another gang member. Instead of being overjoyed by his newfound freedom, Muraki expresses his despair as well as the disappointment that many of his fellow countrymen were feeling at the same time. Post-war Japan was in constant upheaval and the country was undergoing major changes under American occupation. There was a lot of confusion, anger and resentment towards the powers that be at home and abroad. People’s uneasiness and aggravation often found an outlet in many of the Japanese films made during the 1960s. Although the Japanese New Wave isn’t as familiar to western audiences as its French counterpart, PALE FLOWER is one of the finest examples of this extraordinary period in Japan’s cinematic history.

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