Thursday, November 11, 2010

See The Japanese Hit Move Tetsuo Ironman

By Tara Coffey

Tetsuo Ironman was the debut film by the legendary Japanese film director Shinya Tsukamoto. The film is of course in another language, but you should consider putting it on your downloads queue next time you sign into your movie download service because it's not THAT kind of foreign movie. It's a horror action film, so there's always something happening on screen. The dialog isn't what's important. You can follow the story with the subtitles off and still understand it about as well as anyone else... Which isn't saying much, considering how strange the film is.

The movie focuses on a Japanese salary man who suddenly starts sprouting pieces of scrap metal from his body one day. It's very much in the same category as Japanese surrealist authors like Kobo Abe, where weird things just suddenly start happening for no real reason in particular. It kind of drives home the point that... Life is weird and unpredictable, and there's really no inherent meaning to it all so... Just enjoy the long strange trip for what it is.

The movie was based on the idea of making a monster movie like Godzilla, but with a human sized beast. So the Salary Man, as he transforms more and more into a heaping hunk of metal, has to do battle with Tetsuo, who, also, has grown into a heap of metal. They have a showdown in a junkyard where both have developed the ability to absorb all of the metal around them through... Magnetism, or chemistry or something. Your guess is as good as anyone else's.

The movie really helped to define Japanese cyberpunk. There had been earlier efforts in the genre such as Burst City, but this one was the one that really defined the genre as being about industrialism and the Frankenstein-esque relations between man and machine. Where American cyberpunk tends to focus on the computer age, Japanese cyberpunk is more about antiquated machinery and post WWII fear.

The style of the movie is what really makes it special. It's fast, it's confusing, it looks like a nightmare with a stark black and white look. It really does feel more like a bad dream than it does like anything that could ever happen in real life.

The film draws a lot of influence from two sources: Eraserhead, and David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Both of these films greatly contributed to its look, with Shinya Tsukamoto being a particularly big fan of Cronenberg's entire library of work. A warning, though, if those movies made you squeamish, this one will make you twice as squeamish. As surreal as the imagery is, it still might gross you out just a bit.

Tsukamoto went on to create some of the greatest films ever to come from Japan, including Tokyo Fist, which is one of the greatest films ever made on the subject of the male ego. It's about what happens when two men who are at odds with one another absolutely refuse to back down no matter what, and how far conflict can go when it's not put in check.

Tsukamoto is also an interesting actor, doing some bit parts for various Takashi Miike films. He also has another Tetsuo movie coming out, Tetsuo: Bulletman. It's clear that, while he's already been making movies for twenty years, he is nevertheless just now warming up. - 42574

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