fuckedUp.yakuza.western

i'm watching miike takashi's justafiably infamous [city_of_lost_souls]. i've actually seen it before, although i had no idea i did.

here's what confuses me. ... no, wait. here's what strikes me right now as confusing.

the story starts in [riodejaneiro]: a crazy brazilian creole kills his old pals, then removes his clothing & wanders off, crazed. cut to a year later, in [saitamacity]. that's in japan, in case you were unclear. crazy creole hijacks a plane & liberates a random cantonese chick from the bus taking her to be deported.

i know: you are saying to yourself, "this homicidal lesbian terrorist: she's lost it. the border?"

yes. complete with southwestern-style desert and the like. i'm not an idiot: there is a very large billboard the bus passes that is only in japanese. this is indeed supposed to be [saitamacity], and beyond the border is where the undesirables live. brazilians, in this case.

also, the [ninedragons] region of china (koorong, also called kowloon) is in its traditional place: "on the opposite side of the world from here", here being the border region, either japan or brazil. (it's unclear.)

so now that you have rearranged your mental globe to put japan so that it has a land border with brazil, let's think about this.

first, the cityscapes shot in japan manage to fit together nicely. the film was made outside los �ngeles & as well as in japan; there are bits in the [easterncapital]; there are public transit systems and roads that are unmistakable and lovely views of [shinjuku]

i love it. i really fucking love it. the whole borderland issue is a hotbutton one for japan: as one character says early in the story, "in brazil we are japanese and in japan we are brazilians." there is a real disconnect between culturally latin returnees from south america and the stay-at-homes; while invisible to the untrained eye, it is apparently an insurmountable gulf.

i cannot neglect adding the matrix-mimicking fight, complete with freeze-frame spinning action, between two computer-generated cocks. that's right: a cock-fight. i believe that it is illegal to fight cocks, so that probably led to the decision to make them animated.

this is one fucking trippy film. i should check to see if i wrote about it in the past.