tattoo Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Shinya Tsukamoto – 1995 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 87m

*****

Shinya Tsukamoto ventures outside his Tetsuo trappings to deliver further explorations of the ‘New Flesh’ in boxing movie garb.

On Arrow Channel from Friday, September 22nd.

This review is an amalgam of my reviews for What’s On In London and Manga Mania.

Right from its opening angled camera of gym sparring partners, everything about apparent boxing movie Tokyo Fist is relentless. Apparent because this is the latest highly idiosyncratic offering from Japanese filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto, the crazed genius behind the brilliant if unhinged Tetsuo films. Don’t be fooled by the boxing gloves – this is another round in the director’s ongoing engagement with the ‘New Flesh’, minus the science-fictional surface trappings.

Underpinned by another memorable Chu Ishikawa score, it opens in typically bravura fashion with slanted tracking camera shots of sparring partners in a gym, morphing moments later into a visual wipe in the manner of a knockout punch as a fist hurtles towards the viewer and the images disintegrates via a stop-motion iris constructed of offal.

The plot has an insurance salesman whose career is foundering run into an old school friend who is now a professional boxer.… Read the rest

Master Gardener

Director – Paul Schrader – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 107m

****

Order and chaos. A man works bringing horticultural order to his employer’s garden estate, but the disorder of his past threatens to catch up with him and wreak havoc upon it

Or. A man engaged in sexual relations with his female employer becomes involved with her grandniece, to whom his employer may one day leave her inheritance

Or. A man orders his employer’s garden estate until she ejects him for sleeping with her grandniece, leaving the pair to survive in the tough world beyond – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 26th

This appears to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it concerns a man (the central character, the eponymous master gardener) imposing order, but he is a man coming from chaos and at some point that chaos may undo what he has achieved there. On the other, it concerns two women – one his monied, controlling, matriarchal employer, the other her grandniece, from the wrong side of the tracks, who the employer wants to learn the business. The man is initially the lover of the first and, later, becomes the lover of the second, for which the first fires him.… Read the rest