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Touches You

Thanks for the memories!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This is an extremely artsy film. There's a lot of bold color as well as some interesting costuming that make it visually striking. The story is a little bit out there and if you fail to invest your total attention, you'll probably miss a puzzle piece that will be necessary at the end. It was confusing at times but that might just be that I speak only english and there are times when translating can have strange sentence structure. I still had some questions at the end and parts seemed to drag along. If you do decide to watch it, just go into it aware that the style is unique and you really should be prepared to give it your full attention.

The movie is weird, insane, controversial, challenging and as the title itself says, strange. I was preparing my brain to watch this because after reading the reviews, I knew I'm up for a good psychological thriller. And yes, to anyone who hasn't seen this yet, you should set your mind that you'll be watching a masterpiece. This will set your bars higher for psychological thriller movies. You need to focus and go beyond the erotic scenes if only to find out that this movie is well-crafted, well-thought, and well-directed one. This branch of movie-making(what they refer to as ero-gro) has kinda grown on me. Perfected by a montage of scenes and a puzzle of events integrated for a quest to bind the movie to a whole, make sure you don't miss a scene. The movie features a play of scene-shifting..luring and confusing the viewers which is a plus for those who have short attention span. From a sex scene you are then transported to a circus ride, cut to a girl who becomes her mother, to a picture of a lifeless naked woman, to a bunch of circus performers, and I could go on and on. This movie is an extremist one. It will show the sex scenes leaving nothing to imagination, steeled by realistic moans and very accurate portrayal by the actors. If the story can't keep you up, the amount of sex will. It will also show extreme levels of no-holds-barred morbidity, goriness and insanity. It also depicts extreme levels of themes only a masterpiece could feature. Actually, I found the movie creepy. No there are no white ghosts or jump scares on this one, but creepy in a way that you would start questioning the sanity of the director. He's not human. Gathering the viewers' attention through a sequence of events that could possibly be the worst thing that could happen to a family, the movie caters to viewers of every genre, of any age. What I actually find appalling is having a minor(the girl who played young Mitsuko) play the part of having to witness and digest such morbid scenes. Isn't that disturbing to begin with? The premise of the film as a psycho-thriller is to bring out the inquisitive, theoretical selves of the watchers. You start questioning why did such scene happen? Why did such character say those lines? Which one was the dream? Which one was reality? What's the bigger picture? Who's who? Who's THE ultimate character? This movie is a challenge. And the ending steeled it. The movie possesses the basic protocols of good movie-making; that is, a good beginning to introduce the conflict and hold the viewers' attention, a climax which highlights the main conflict/s and leaving a handful of questions to our minds, and a surreal ending that will answer these questions(not to mention leave us dumbfounded). I can't even write a synopsis of the movie. Just thinking of writing it seems very exhaustive. I can't put into words the details of the movie. That's how complicated and well-developed the story is. Story-telling won't do. The themes of the movie are also as disturbing as the scenes itself. Incest is the most noticeable theme of the movie. But the inclusion of other minimal themes (but still disturbing as they are) such as dismemberment, revenge, self-denial and what appears to be schizophrenic characters all add to the complexity of the movie. Hell even the soundtrack was creepily weird. What brought this movie to its high level though was the acting. Its like everything just fell into place. A deep story and stellar acting from the cast(especially Masumi Miyazaki who perfectly played 3 personas), this movie is undeniably a masterpiece. 10/10.

Speaking of violence, Sion Sono(director of Suicide Club)'s latest film Strange Circus, is an erotic horror story, steeped in incest, pedophilia, trans-sexuality, and screaming. Sometimes were in a carnival, other times walking down a blood covered hallway that looks like the inside of a giant monster, other times within a cello case watching our parents do the deed, or gazing at a creaky carousel which never quite works. These images are hammered down over and over again, punctuated always by more crying and screaming, until like many modern Japanese horror films, the narrator is proved to be unreliable and then identity's of the characters go switching around. Its a lot more focused than Suicide Club, more visual texture and beauty, cleaner, crisper performances mostly. I've heard this mentioned as part of the "ero-goru"(erotic grotesque nonsense) a growing genre in Japan in porn, literature, and film; Giger, Lovecraft, and Sada Abe mixed in a wet dream. This film does attempt to delve not only into the genre, but the production of the genre itself(who writes it and why), however by the end, were given a revenge story that doesn't seem to fit well with the subdued nihilist realism of the rest of the movie, unlike Suicide Club it doesn't invoke laughter or a sense of the tragicomic or socially relevant satire, it's just grotesque, then kinda stupid, still pretty, but less erotic. It almost had me, but it's insistence on cliché in the end(chainsaws and chains and fake limbs), make it lose any redemptive value. Gozu and Visitor Q, are better samples of the genre, if better is the right word.

Being as there is only 1 current review (as of November 2006), and a bad one at that, I feel compelled to write something. If you like to have a director mess with you, don't pass this one up. I'm not sure that this tops 2002's Suicide Circle (or Suicide Club) from Sono, but it's up there. I won't go into the plot here, but if you're into psychological thrillers or even more specifically the recent Asian stuff with those lovable twists like Takashi Miike's Audition or Chanwook Park's Oldboy (which I thought was overrated, though still good), this here's for you. Definitely not for those who would be offended by an underage actress involved in explicit scenes. What else? The cinematography in the first half is good too, as there are some nice shots during the horrific atmosphere of the story of Michuko. The 2nd half is all about the *unfolding* so to speak. I definitely need to watch it again.