The Eel (Unagi, 1997)

One of my favorite actors is Koji Yakusho. He has a way of melting into his characters and becoming them in a very basic, natural manner. I hadn't realized he was in Unagi, (or had forgotten), so I was pleasantly surprised to witness another brilliant yet subdued performance on his part. Brilliant in 1997's Cure, acclaimed for his role in 1999's Charisma, 2000's Korei, his brief appearance in 2001's horror masterpiece Kairo, a Jeremy Irons-like duplicitous role in 2003's Doppelganger, his resume is one of the best. This was the first non-horror film I've seen of his. In Unagi, he plays Takuro, a white-collar salaryman who works in the city and resides in a small countryside village with his beautiful wife named Emiko. He has a long commute to and from his job and a seemingly dull or uneventful job (although we only get a minimal glimpse of it at the very beginning of the film). On a regular basis, he joins friends, acquaintances and perhaps colleagues to fish the sea on a pier outside of the close-knit village.

Takuro squeezes onto the same train everyday, probably in the same car... well, you get the idea of a regimented lifestyle, but one Takuro seems to willingly get by with. One particular day on the trip home, he pulls an anonymous note from his pocket and reads that his wife has been having an affair, usually whilst he is fishing. I wondered why the movie didn't set the affair to coincide with him being at work, but it makes more sense when you see it. He makes his walk down the narrow road to his home and greets his smiling wife. He ditches his suit , accepts a prepared, boxed dinner (lovingly wrapped) and leaves per usual for much fishing. It's eerie to hear Emiko ask "How long will you be gone?" as a viewer because we obviously know what's happening. Takuro doesn't miss a beat and responds that he'll 'be gone as long as usual'. Takuro spends a shorter time at the pier tan usual and bids the others farewell. On the way, he reminisces about the anonymous note; it also mentions what type and color the man arrived in. When he arrives to his home, he does find a white sedan parked and half-covered with brush next to the house. He sneaks around the house to a window and peeks through the window. What follows is the reason he's sent to prison, where (at another unknown point) he catches and begins to confide in an eel (he's lost all trust in people) which he keeps in a prison fountain with help from a few guards. The guards allow him to keep the eel when his parole officer assumes custody of Takuro upon his release. Takuro begins to reestablish himself by purchasing a rundown barber shop in a tiny coastal town full of interesting characters and soon a mysterious woman enters the town. She brings a mix of disruption, controversy and maybe hope to the residents of the small coastal town and Takuro himself.

To Unagi's benefit (or not), the story is told with an array of styles. It doesn't stray form it's intention to take Takuros plight seriously, but at times, it seemed to go off on a tangent concerning other characters. I believe this was detrimental to bringing Takuro's redemption to fruition. I'm not saying that developing the other characters is a mistake, I'm just saying that in this case it worked against a complete resolution. Hell, for all I know, that could of been the objective all along; for the ending to remain open-ended and unresolved fully. With characters like Akira Emoto's character Tamotsu (Maborosi, Doppelganger) as Takuro's level-headed, wise, father figure-type new friend, could conceivably live on past the ending. The film as a whole has that sort of natural feel to it and an uncanny sense of taking place in two different eras. Add a touch of hilarity now and then to ease the dramatic air and this turns out to be a surprisingly great movie.

Piano Man (1996)

Boy, how do you say "train wreck" in Korean? What began with the makings of a good detective thriller, turned sour on a dime within the first half-hour of the movie. Piano Man begins with detectives ducking in & out of the inky folds of a rain-soaked night. They gather, under a canopy of umbrellas, beside a makeshift grave in a vacant gravel pit to study a horribly disfigured corpse. The detectives argue about who will take the lead in the case and whether or not they should wait for the forensics team, shouting at one another for their general incompetence or for ignoring the benefits a parallel investigation with the other departments will have for the case in hand. (Chaos during an investigation being a reoccurring theme in Korean Detective Thrillers.) When the body arrives at the morgue, the detectives discover that the killer left very little in the way of clues by scalding the face, yanking any dental work, skinning the fingertips and last but not least, stitching the victim's eyelids to it's forehead so they could watch! The investigation seemingly abandons any effort to I.D. the body and turns to a small, elegant, toy player-piano shoved into the chest cavity, where the heart had been ripped out. The killer initiates contact with one Detective Mi-ran (Seung-yeon Lee; eight years before starring in 3-Iron) to, for whatever reason, give her clues to help catch him. She receives that victim's heart wrapped as a gift, with a short note simply signed "PM". Yep, you guessed it; Piano Man. The lead on the case, Detective Yang, joins forces with Mi-ran on the case. But he has to battle his wanna-be detective son Jin-woo's interest, nay fascination with the case, his own alcoholism and a younger crop of detectives that balk at Yang's "old world" techniques.

The best way to describe Piano Man is as a crashing bore. The momentum and intrigue those first few scenes built came crumbling down due to mind-numbingly long scenes of little importance. For example, a 25 minute scene concerning the killer's method of procuring black-market license plates. Whatever momentum it managed to recoup, dissolved away again by similar inane, superfluous story-lines. The most egregious error of the movie is the fact that we're given Piano Man's (Min-su Choi) identity within that first half-hour. We then sit through two long, painful lounge acts from a character that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, and to top it off, she's accompanied by the killer on piano, but, as I've already pointed out, by now we know he's the killer. I also can't not mention Piano Man's sudden, inexplicable obsession with Billie Holiday, or obvious plot/set similarities with the story of The Phantom Of The Opera. But in the end, the less we knew about his motivations, the better it would have been. Sadly, his all to hackneyed motivations come into play later on in the film, which is yet another lesson in tedium. But even then, as he continues to keep Detective Mi-ran informed of his "work", those motivations are completely abandoned for wildly inconsistent or at the very least, unconvincing ones. Called a "mildly entertaining time-waster" in another review, Piano Man I'll agree, is just that.

Besides the very opening scenes, there's quite honestly very little to be positive about here. Yu's message concerning police ineffectiveness is a competent, well worn one. He also takes a Freudian look at parent-child relationships early on in the film and comes back to it later, which does add a touch of credibility to the movie as a whole. I'd recommend skipping Piano Man altogether and tracking down infinitely better Korean crime-thrillers such as Tell Me Something and Memories Of Murder.

Noriko's Dinner Table (Noriko no Shokutaku, 2005)

Sion Sono's 2½ hour tour-de-force follow-up to Suicide Circle (Club), Noriko's Dinner Table, might be a touch overwrought at times but I think every ounce is completely necessary for what Sono intends to accomplish. Both bracketing and running concurrent the events in Suicide Circle, Dinner Table (a story that nearly defies a written portrayal), is about 17 year–old Noriko Shimabara finding solice from her tired, small town home/existence in Haikyo.com's community forums as poster "Mitsuko", culminating in her running away from home in the midst of an electrical blackout; opportunity arrives in many forms. Noriko meets with forum mod Ueno54, a.k.a Kumiko, and without a place to go, is adopted into her family. As her storyline progresses, Sono then turns to Noriko's sister Yuka Shimabara's attempts to rationalize and discover the whys of Noriko's departure, which leads her to Tokyo as well. Maybe for the same reasons. Sono then turns to their father, then Kumiko for two more facets.

I've been vague not only because it would require spoilers (although I could argue there are no spoilers) but the film is told from different perspectives and gets a bit meta, lending to lengthy connections and reasons/motivations for everything that happens to the girls and their parents. Midnight Eye's review doesn't even attempt to parse the film; Mandiapple gives it a go. I'm doing this over lunch, at work, so time is an issue for me. In the end, I'm thoroughly satisfied with both it's originality and the connections with Suicide Circle. Yet, this is more a film among itself; think Miike's Black Society Trilogy.

I had reservations about the amount of Noriko's (sometimes third-person; unreliable?) voice-over narration, there's a lot, but those were allayed as Sono carried the essential narration into the other characters' contributions. Sono packs a hell of a lot into this film, including a few, not false mind you, semi-conclusions that honestly deepen his story with each progression. I dare say this could be Sono's masterpiece. We'll see.