I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Thanks to Subway Cinema’s Asian Film Festival, I have been able to do the impossible—see Sakigake! Cromartie High School on the big screen (fans of this journal will remember by delight at finding the trailer online last year). Basically, the movie is Rock and Roll High School if you took the Ramones out and replaced them with awkward pauses and references/parodies to Japanese shit you’ve never heard of*. The Cromartie anime was basically an “Adult Swim” show—stilted “no-mation” cartoons speaking non-sequitirs, 1/20 which is the most hilarious thing ever, the other 19 shrugged off. I think for American audiences , it’s trapped on the mobius moving sidewalk of a comedy catch 22—to enjoy it, you have to be really fucking stoned, but if you’re stoned, you can’t read the subtitles and follow the plot. So, target audience is Japanese-fluent potheads. Have at it.

typical Cromartie anime episode. Key points: robot juvenile deliquent, excessive swearing, idiocy, Freddie Mercury

If this at all sounds appealing to you, there’s an encore showing on June 23rd.

I’m going to make a point to catch Takeshi Miike’s Yokai War and possibly the girl rock band story Linda Linda Linda before the festival’s out. It fills in the time before the latest Billy Wilder festival at Film Forum (their third in so many years… is there a discount in bulk on these films?).

The festival seems pretty cool, though. They gave away prizes (and made fun of them) before the show started (t-shirts and “girls in bikini with guns poster”) The enthusiastic host (who might be an organizer, I’d wager to guess) enthusiastically listed all of the wrestling-themed shows in the program (3), thanked the many liquor brands sponsoring the fest, and then cheerfully described the sponsoring McDonald’s ad replacing the short film that was supposed to preceed the movie (until somebody locked the DVD in their office) as “racist.”

The biggest downside to the showings of the festival are the unsubtitled trailers before the movies for the other in the fest… most of which seem to feature Old Boystyle torture and gore in lingering closeups. I was surpressing the gag reflex for Art of the Devil 2... I can only imagine what’s going on in the heads of the sick fucks who wanted to see a full 2 hours of skin being peeled off, lizards errupting bloodily from inside the body, iron hooks ripping through hands. Thanks a lot, Thailand. I expect this shit from Korea, but I’m really disappointed in you acting out like this.
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*I was horrified to “get” a 2-line reference to the 1981 pilot episode of Urusei Yatsura. I think this is the information taking up space in my brain that makes it difficult for me to do simple mathematics anymore.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 18th, 2006 at 9:23 pm and is filed under I Watch Movies, J*Stuff.