I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

AV and I saw this movie last Friday at Monkeytown in Williamsburg.

If you’re not local or haven’t heard of it. Monkeytown is a restaurant/performance space/bar/screening room/lounge. It’s a restaurant/bar in the front with a kind of industrial-rustic look (dim light, knitted grapevine hanging from the ceiling, exposed steel and cement floors) and you travel along a super-fluoro, bright-white hallway with a series of primary colored doors (the toilets, I’d later discover) and into a massive (for NY, natch) dark square room with blank white walls. Around the perimeter of the room are neutral colored low futons, two to a wall, and a pair long TV-tray-style table set for four. On each wall the same looped pre-show animation is being projected simultanously. You can, and are expected to order as the movie plays, from the roaming waitress from the menus posted on each station, listing fusion-y, foodie odd combos of small plates and molecular-gastronomic cocktails (includingthe Umami Martini that featured “brine, parmesan, capers, clam broth, and pickle”).

I loved it as a sum of its parts. There’s definitely something appealing about doing something that’s an “experience” that’s totally removed from the everyday. I remember going to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in Chicago years and years ago and it was the same kind of thing. Every stage of getting to the show was a small strange experience… you waited in line, then you got a small plastic chit. Then you put your chits in a bag and they were scrambled, so the order you were in line didn’t matter. Then you were lead through a series of rooms in this brownstone-style house, each of which was filled with disturbing art or piles of furniture or actors doing something. I mostly remember the “Hall of Presidents” with abstract, garishly-colored portraits of all the presidents hung on the walls and a jumble of abused school desks you were ordered to sit in. Decommissioned old schoolbooks were heaped on the floor. There were other hoops you went through to get to the actual show, which I don’t remember nearly as well (a side from one particularly hoary awful monologue we mocked for the rest of the trip) as the process of getting there.

At Monkeytown, movies are free as long as you order $10 of drink and food. Usually their programming is unwatchable, plotless art film nonsense, though last month featured a Mickey Rourke retrospective (irony is alive in Billyburg). AV saw the listing for Funky Forest and immediately connected it to my love of Japanese weird bullshit and gave it a green light. I’ve been burned before, so I was a bit hesitant—the thing was over two and a half hours and of the many things the Japanese do well— plastic knick-knackery, street fashion, misogyny—comedy is not one of them. Intentional comedy anyway.

Funky Forest definitely has its high points and a lot of its successes are more as “art” than as “comedy.” Comedy divorced from context and culture is a really hard sell—most jokes don’t travel outside your group of friends so asking it to work across international borders is asking a lot. In the 2h30, there’s probably a pretty funny or at least satisfying 60 minutes in it. More odd than hilarious, but the Eraserhead fetus-like alien shit scenes (never explained, of course) are pretty mesmerizing. There’s a through-line across segments about various lonely men who can’t seem to meet/are obsessed by women that’s more than one note. And lots of line dancing that is confusing, then irritating, and then, eventually winning you over, totally charming.

I’ve just ruined the movie by posting the most interesting moments in this entry (that I could find on youtube… sans subtitles), but if it comes to DVD check it out (with your finger on FF). “Heightening” to the Japanese comedy mind reads as “stalling” in the American one, which is terrifically frustrating. In the mean time, I actually thing Tampopo is a better package of Japanese sketch… not nearly as self-consciously weird and mercifully shorter. It also has a “main plot” about a mysterious truck-driving “cowboy” who teaches a woman about ramen which pulls you through. As an academic nerd exercise as much as anything, I love watching outdated and international sketch comedy, just to see the mechanics at work and to get a sense of their sense of rules.

P.S. If you’re a Japanese cinema nerd (or just “nerd”), you’ll probably want to see Funky Forest just for the in-jokey cameos by actors from Beat Takeshi films, anime director Hideaki Anno and Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 7:57 pm and is filed under I Watch Movies, J*Stuff.