Tag: y

You Have Been Judged, by Craig Martelle and Michael Anderle

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Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

This is another entry in the sprawling Kurtherian Gambit universe, which must have well over a hundred books in it, by a slew of different authors. I’m gradually coming to a couple of conclusions: a) it’s a very loosely-tied series, and b) the quality varies. When you give your book a title like this, evoking the spirit of Judge Dredd, you are setting certain expectations. Unfortunately, this is a book which fails to meet them, with a heroine who never achieves the level of intensity necessary to live up to the series title: Judge, Jury, Executioner. It has reached 16 volumes, which suggests either there’s a market for it, or the author has too much time on their hands. No prizes for guessing my opinion.

I guess this is loosely “legal space opera,” with the heroine being Rivka Anoa, a barrister who has the talent to read people’s memories and feelings through simple physical contact. When a criminal she knows is guilty gets released, she can’t control herself and kills him. Arrested, she’s given the Nikita choice. Work for the government as an all-in-one justice system, or pay the price for her homicide. Not exactly a difficult choice, and she is quickly pumped full of nanomachines to enhance her physical abilities, trained in lethal arts by her mentor, Grainger, and sent off across the universe with a bodyguard, Red… to troubleshoot a family squabble.

Yeah, my disappointment was palpable. I get it’s a governor’s family squabble: still, it felt like James Bond being assigned to direct traffic. The other mission in this book, brokering a treaty between two squabbling planets, wasn’t particularly interesting, exciting or a good use of her newly-acquired talents either. Indeed, her original ability, being able to sense emotions and history by touch – something you’d think would make her unstoppable as a member of the legal profession – is hardly ever used. Speaking of which, in terms of law, this is so unconvincing, to the degree it can only be read as childish parody.

With the emphasis there firmly on “childish”. Rivka doesn’t sound at all like a barrister, and even less like a judge. You get absolutely no sense about the moral weightiness of having to hand down capital punishment, and the attempts at witty banter between her and Grainger are flat-out cringe inducing. Do not even get me started on an alien species being vulnerable to being kicked in the crotch. Yeah, we are literally at the “Ow! My Balls!” level of entertainment here, folks. I was quite glad the last 12% of the book was unnecessary filler like the author’s outline, which I could skip entirely. I don’t know how much input Anderle had into this, but I would strongly recommend he exercise a greater degree of quality control over the material which goes out under his imprint. This kind of rubbish leaves me very cautious about buying other Kurtherian Gambit books.

Author: Craig Martelle and Michael Anderle
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 16 in the Judge, Jury, Executioner Book series.

Yakuza Princess

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★★½
“Anyone for Brazillian sushi?”

The above odd combination is actually a fairly accurate assessment of what you have here. It’s a Yakuza action-thriller… but rather than being set in Tokyo or Osaka, is relocated to the Brazillian city of Sao Paolo. As an introductory credit helpfully informs us, this has the largest Japanese population of any city outside Japan. The story concerns two separate people’s quests for their pasts, which (to absolutely no-one’s surprise) turn out to be intertwined. One of these is Akemi (MASUMI), who as a young child was the sole survivor of a 1999 massacre of her Yakuza family back in Japan, was subsequently spirited away by allies and is now living in Brazil. The other is Shiro (Rhys-Meyers), an amnesiac who wakes up in hospital with no clue as to how he got there or his identity, except for a Japanese sword.

Also in the mix is Takeshi (Ihara), a Japanese mobster, who discovers Akemi’s location and heads to Sao Paolo to track her down. But what are his intentions? What are Shiro’s intentions? Indeed, what are anyone’s intentions? For this is a film which plays its cards very close to its chest, in a murky world where loyalty is hard to establish, and may not be what it initially seems. This makes for a rather frustrating viewing experience, since we are largely in the dark – along with the heroine, in all fairness. Still, Akemi and Shiro don’t even meet up until after 40 minutes have passed; up to which point, this has felt like two separate movies, taking place in the same location.

There’s also some stuff about the sword Akemi wields eating souls, though this can largely be ignored without impact. It all adds up to a rather excessive 111 minute running-time, and would likely have been helped by some choice editing. The action is occasionally not bad, but is definitely hampered by an editing style, which refuses to have the camera pointed in the same direction for longer than half a second. What the film does mostly have going for it, is solid cinematography, which makes Sao Paolo look like a side-street in Blade Runner. But outside of scraps of Portuguese dialogue, I didn’t get much Brazillian flavour, rendering the setting somewhat pointless.

There are some interesting or appealing moments, such as where Shiro sits down with a couple of veteran Yakuza to watch an old samurai flick, or Akemi’s escape with him over the roof-tops. However, there’s a lot of walking about and chit-chat, before we eventually get to the meat of the matter, and it’s not enough to sustain broad interest. I suspect it may have been better if the film had concentrated on either Akemi or Shiro, both in terms of providing greater focus, and in slimming down the running time. For what results here is something which seems a bit bloated, yet despite that, doesn’t imbue its characters with enough depth.

Dir: Vicente Amorim
Star: MASUMI, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Toshiji Takeshima

The Yard: seasons 1 + 2

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★★★½
“Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”

I really must get round to reviewing Wentworth. The Australian women-in-prison drama certainly deserves coverage here, and has provided some of the best television we’ve enjoyed in the 2010’s. I keep intending to do so, but suspect that will now likely have to wait until after the show comes to a conclusion, following its ninth and final season in 2021. In the meantime, however, I do get to review the Turkish remake of the show. If you’ve seen Wentworth, this version is perhaps as unnecessary as any Hollywood remake of a familiar foreign film. Yet there are enough differences – both in story and culture – that I didn’t mind too much.

The central character is Deniz Demir, a married woman whose husband is shot in murky circumstances, and is sent to prison while the investigation proceeds. There, she falls in with one of the jail’s two “queen bees”, long-term inmate Azra Kaya (Moray). Azra is engaged in a power struggle with her rival, Kudret Ozturk (Kose), the matriarch of a criminal family on the outside. Initially, Deniz is simply trying to keep her nose clean and her head down, while waiting for resolution to her case. However, it’s never as simple as that, and she soon finds herself in deep trouble, especially after being found standing over the corpse of the facility’s warden, holding the apparent murder weapon. Meanwhile, things on the outside are equally troublesome, as Deniz’s teenage daughter, Ecem (Akar) has started a relationship with Alp – who just happens to be the son of Kudret.

When compared to Wentworth, there are some interesting differences, both in content and style. The melodrama here is definitely cranked up several notches: after one tragic moment, it feels like Deniz spends the next six episodes weeping in her cell. However, what you won’t see here is any lesbian canoodling, or even insinuations of such things, I imagine in deference to the still fairly religious nature of Turkey. What this version does, and particularly well, is use music as background to the drama as it plays out. This begins with the domestic clash which opens proceedings, and draws out of a broad tonal range, from 17th-century classical (Henry Purcell’s Dido’s Lament gets used to great effect in the final episode) through to Turkish contemporary pop songs.

I read that, apparently, it aired in Turkey in 2½ hour chunks. Netflix has, wisely, cut these up into 45-minute episodes. It also managed to ruffle the feathers of some authorities, who proclaimed – before it was shown, naturally – that the show would “Feed into public perceptions that prisons impose torture [on inmates]… The promotion of such perceptions of prisons serve the purposes of some terror organizations.” I wouldn’t say it was as good as that… But it’s certainly not bad at all, and if I weren’t aware of its inspiration, this could well be looking at a seal of approval. As is, I do have to ding it slightly for familiarity, and would still point you in the direction of the original instead.

Dir: Yüksel Aksu, Hülya Gezer and Safak Bal 
Star: Demet Evgar, Ceren Moray, Nursel Kose, Eslem Akar
a.k.a. Avlu

Yoga and the Kungfu Girl

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★★½
“Your flexible friend.”

I’m trying to figure out if the “the” in the IMDb title used here is superfluous. “Yoga and Kung-fu Girl,” as on the DVD sleeve would make more sense, given the heroine’s martial arts are a combination of traditional skills with extreme flexibility. In some ways, it’s a slightly less exploitative version of things like The Crippled Masters, with its amputee-fu. The heroine here, Phoenix, could similarly make a living as a carnival exhibit, given her contortionist abilities, which are here shoe-horned into use to provide a style of fighting. To say this works with variable success would be an understatement. There are moments when her talents and flexibility are genuinely impressive. However, there are others where her limitations and lack of training are painfully apparent.

The story has Phoenix (Chan) as an orphan, taken in by the formidable Madame Kao, who brings Phoenix up as part of her troupe of martial artists, while providing herbal remedies to the local people [I must say, the transition that had her foster kids flipping across the meadow, to become adults at the far side, was kinda neat] Phoenix’s best friend is Ho Fei (Chi), but he has a bit of a gambling problem, stealing from Madame Kao to fund his habit. Trouble ensues, not helped by a jealous rival trying to frame Kao for bad medicine, and additionally, Ho ends up accused of a murder he didn’t commit. It’s up to Phoenix to lead the charge against the villains responsible.

This appears to have been made as a vehicle for Chen, but it doesn’t seem she ever appeared in anything else after this – whether due to commercial failure or a lack of personal interest. Perhaps wisely, the script makes her character mute, limiting the need for actual acting: she communicates in sign language instead. Her skill-set provides the movie with its sole gimmick, and apart from that, this is largely indistinguishable from any other genre entries of the time. The only area where it makes an impression is the final fight, where Phoenix, Ho Fei and another of Madame Kao’s orphans face off against the big boss.

That it requires three of them to take him down is quite understandable, and it’s about the only moment where Phoenix’s unusual and acrobatic style of kung-fu works, because it’s one ingredient in the recipe for the resulting fight, not the entire dish. When it (or she) tries to stand on its own merits, there just isn’t enough to sustain the interest for more than a few minutes of “Ooh: I didn’t realize spines could bend to such a shape”. It’s possible, had she persevered, that the rather homely leading lady might have eventually managed to go on to develop into someone capable of carrying a feature. However, you would be hard pushed to feel that the world of martial arts movies is a poorer place, because the sub-genre of contortionist-fu never apparently managed to establish a foothold past this singular entry.

Dir: Sun Yung
Star: Phoenix Chen, Chi Kuan Chun, Pai Ying

The Young Boss

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★★★
“Singing samurai swings sword.”

youngboss18 years ago, the maid to a Japanese lord had twins by him. This was, apparently, a disgrace to the family – not the affair, so much as it being twins. So it was pretended she had only given birth to one daughter, Chiyo, who was brought up as the heiress. The mother and other daughter, Yuki, were sent away and after the former died, the daughter was brought up as a sword-wielding boy, Kichisaburo, by her mother’s brother, Edoya Kichibei. However, she still has a certificate proving her birth-right, and various factions are now stirring to establish her as the “rightful” heir to the title. Or, if she’s unwilling to go along with this, the plotters will simply steal the certificate from Edoya, and use an impostor to make their claim.

Misora has a double role here, playing both princesses. Though this dates from 1958, and any interaction uses stand-ins rather than more sophisticated techniques. Not that it matters much. She was a cultural icon, best known as a singer, selling over 80 million records during and after her lifetime. This explains the several occasions on which she bursts into song here. I was quite surprised, since I do not typically expect warbling in my samurai flicks. But she was also an actress, with over 150 films to her credit, and her performance is fine here. As usual, the “woman pretending to be a man” plotline is unconvincing, though at least the haircut and costumes help sell things in this case.

It’s certainly tame by subsequent Japanese swordplay movies, no surprise given the kinder, gentler era from which this comes. In contrast to their arterial spray, no-one here dies with more than a smudge of blood on their robes. I’d rather have seen the heroine remain as Kichisaburo throughout, rather than reverting to a “princessy” look after her sister’s betrothed shows up to bring Yuki back to her ancestral home. It’s certainly a more interesting character, complete with a minion whose purpose appears to be to rabble-rouse on her behalf, like a personal ring-announce. Witness lines such as, “If you don’t know him, you must be country bumpkins! Listen up. He helps the weak, and crushes the strong. Known as a man’s man, he’s the second generation of Edoya Kichibei.” Meanwhile, in the blue corner…

The other subsidiary characters aren’t very interesting, unfortunately, and get more screen-time than they warrant. The romantic angle – Yuki falls for her sister’s betrothed – doesn’t work, and the political shenanigans of a lot of people with similar top-knots, bog proceedings down more than they enlighten or entertain. It does better when in motion, Misora proving effective with the sword. They wisely give her a style that relies much more on speed than strength, dispatching her victims in two or three swift strokes. It also ends satisfactorily, with a surprisingly poignant ending that sees the heroine step aside and return to her former life so Chiyo can be happy. And just time for one last song, naturally!

Dir: Kiyoshi Sakei
Star: Hibari Misora, Hashizo Okawa, Denjiro Okochi, Shunji Sakai

You’re Next

  By

★★★½
“Home not-so Alone”

yourenextErin (Vinson) goes with her boyfriend Crispian (Bowen) to meet his parents and the rest of his relatives at the family home, where the parents are celebrating their anniversary. There’s some friction between Crispian and his brother, but proceedings are even more rudely interrupted when a group of three masked psychopaths, who have already killed the two residents at the house next-door, turn their attentions to this residence. Armed with crossbows and machetes, and having blocked cellphone service, there seems little or nothing anyone can do, but wait to get picked off by the assailants. However, it turns out that Erin’s upbringing in Australia was an unusual one: her father was part of a survivalist group. As a result, what she does have, are a very particular set of skills, skills she has acquired over a very long career. Skills that make her a nightmare for people like the home invaders. Hang on: why am I suddenly typing with an Irish accent?

For a cheerfully cheap (the budget was only a million dollars) little feature, disguised behind a generic title – I confused it with No-one Lives, and a hat-tip to Dieter for straightening this out! – what we have here is actually effective and brisk. Though I’m not sure it merits the “black comedy” designation I’ve seen attached to it in various places: it’s straightforward home invasion stuff for the most part, even if we do discover a specific motivation for the attack. I’m not sure if that weakens or strengthens the movie. In terms of generating fear, a more effective approach is probably taken by The Strangers where, when asked why they were doing this, the response is simply, “Because you were home.” What does stand out, and why it qualifies here, is that Erin is, far and away, the only genuinely competent character in the film, and becomes increasingly impressive as the film develops. Initially, she’s as shocked as everyone else; once that has worn off, she first begins to take defensive measures, then gradually moves into offensive mode. By the end, the tables have been turned, and she’s the one doing the hunting.

The main problem is the attackers who, to be honest, are a bit crap, staggering around and falling for every trap like the burglars in Home Alone. Their complete lack of guns is also a bit odd: despite Erin’s background, this is set in America, not Australia, where such weapons would be a lot harder to come by. If you can get past these elements, and it’s not too hard to do so, there is plenty here to appreciate, especially for horror fans: genre icon Barbara Crampton plays the mom, director Ti West has a cameo as a resolutely non-commercial film-maker, and there is also one large tip of the cap to Night of the Living Dead, about which I can’t say any more. While the movie may not aspire to great art, not every work has to. Sometimes, knowing your limitations is the key to working within them, and that’s so here.

Dir: Adam Wingard
Star: Sharni Vinson, ‎Wendy Glenn, ‎Adam Wingard, ‎AJ Bowen

Yakuza Hunters: Revenge Duel In Hell

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★★½
“The Good, The Bad And The Hardly Ugly.”

If its predecessor (reviewed here as Sukeban Hunters) echoed the tropes of pinky violence, this one seems to have much more in common with Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. A mysterious stranger with a dark past rides into town, only to find that the violence they sought to escape has no intention of leaving them alone, and they must once again put on their weapons to fight for…something or other. Here, it’s returning Yakuza hunter Asami (as before, conveniently played by…Asami), who comes back to visit her old master, now a bar-owner, Inokuma (Kato), who arranges for her to stay with Miki (Yoshiyuki), who used to be a bit of a Yakuza hunter in her younger days. But all is not well, for the evil Shoryu clan are intent on turfing everyone out so they can build a casino. When that turns out to include both Inokuma and Miki, with extreme prejudice, Asami must take on both their minions and the hired uber-killer Akira (Miwa), who proves she is more than a match for most.

It certainly hits the ground running, the Shoryu members wielding a chainsaw in a deeply brutal fashion on both male and female victims, but overall, it’s just a tad less worthy than the original – there were times, particularly with regard to the audio, when the cheapness just seemed too much to handle. On the plus side, most of the gore effects are practical, rather than CGI, which was a welcome surprise after watching several genre entries from the Sushi Typhoon stable, and the action sequences are occasionally surprisingly impressive, most notably when Asami battles two Shoryu henchmen, in what’s effective a single take for each fight. However, the final battle – which, it’s no spoiler to say, is between Asami and Akira – is a disappointment, with flaky CGI and a really dubious conclusion.

Supposedly set three years after part one, I’d guess it was more or less filmed back-to-back, though there’s enough continuity issues to make me steer clear of calling this a “sequel” – not least, Asami possessing several more fingers than she should. I can see what the makers were aiming for [not least the soundtrack, which shamelessly adopts the spirit of Ennio Morricone], but they’ve picked a much harder target this time. They don’t have the necessary ability to pull it off, and the results don’t make up for the shortfall in skill with adequate energy.

Dir: Shinichi Okuda
Star: Asami, Yumi Yoshiyuki, Sakichi Kato, Hitomi Miwa

The Yakuza Wives

  By

★★★½
“Could comfortably kick the asses of The Mob Wives.”

Perhaps a better title, however, would be Yakuza Sister, since this is a tale of two siblings. Tamaki (Iwashita) is an actual mid-level Yakuza wife, who is running their branch of the gang in the jailed absence of her husband, and doing quite well at it, enhancing its size and reputation. She is largely estranged from both her sister Makoto (Kitase) and their father – she’s a bartender, he works in his machine shop, but it’s clear from the get-go that his time is limited [this isn’t much of a spoiler when you see him coughing his lungs out while simultaneously chain-smoking]. Two things upset their semi-orderly lives. The overall head of Tamaki’s clan dies, opening up a power vacuum which sets off a struggle between rival factions, and Tamaki attempts to arrange a ‘suitable’ marriage for her sister. Makoto rebels, taking up instead with Kiyoshi Sugita (Sera) – which is unfortunate, because he’s a loyal member of the faction now battling Tamaki’s group for control.

The first in a long-running series of films, both direct sequels and knock-offs of the basic concept, this is somewhere between The Godfather and a soap-opera. Among the things I apparently learned from this were, that in Japan, organized crime syndicates have press-conferences to detail leadership changes, and that the best way to get a Japanese women to marry you, is to rape her. Who knew? [Legal note: GirlsWithGuns.org does not make any claims regarding the reliability of this information, and accepts no responsibility for any damages, prosecutions or severed digits resulting from acting on it.] It’s a bit of an uncomfortable mix, but the steely-gaze of Iwashita and her character’s single-minded dedication to the cause is impeccable: she’s a better female character than anyone in Coppola’s trilogy.

Things head towards their expected tragic outcome, but there are a few twists along the way, as well as an interesting cat-fight between the two sisters, when Makoto opts for her husband over her family. About five minutes in duration, there’s only about three cuts as they brawl their way around the apartment, in and out of the closet, before collapsing, exhausted. If not exactly a martial-arts epic, it’s an interesting stylistic choice, quite unlike anything else I’ve seen, and is presented for your viewing below. If a little low on the action quotient outside of this, it’s a solid piece of drama that should keep the spectator interested.

The player will show in this paragraph

Yo-Yo Girl Cop

  By

★★★½

“Yo-yo. Girl. Cop,” said Chris, burdening those three words with sarcasm, as only she can, and giving me one of those sidelong glances, heavy with additional meaning. Hey, what can I say. This was an unexpected revival of the series, from 2006, with the lead played by pop singer Matsura. She is a wild-child coerced into undercover work by Kazutoshi Kira (Takeuchi, from Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive trilogy), to save her mother who is being held on espionage charges in the US [in a nice touch, Mom is played by Yuki Saito, who was the first live-action Sukeban Deka, in the original TV series]. Her mission – should she choose to accept it – is to go into a high-school and uncover those behind the threatening Enola Gay website, a neo-terrorist URL that now has a counter on it, with less than 72 hours remaining. She befriends Konno Tae (Okada), the meek victim of relentless bullying, and also encounters the school’s queen bee, Reika Akiyama (Rika Ishikawa – shown right, and another pop singer, like Okada part of the v-u-den group) and her clique. Can she work out what’s going down, and pull the plug on it?

The movie has a distinctly split-personality. Early and late, it has the straight-laced but extreme camp aspects you’d expect, with much meaningful staring, po-faced declarations and radical costuming decisions. However, for most of the middle, such angles are all but discarded for an earnest examination of contemporary social realities in Japanese educational establishments, with special focus on the problem of bullying. It isn’t bad, on its own terms – and handles the dehumanizing nature of the Internet particularly effectively – yet appears to have come from an entirely different film, and the two aspects fail abjectly to mesh, resulting in a startling unevenness of tone. Fortunately, Matsura is surprisingly good in the role, with a gutter-mouthed toughness quite at odds with her background in the entirely artificial world of J-pop idols.

Fukasaku’s father was the director of the infamous Battle Royale, a film still unreleased officialy in the US, but the son brings an entire bag of other influences to this work. There’s the ticking clock intertitle of 24, the Bond-inspired opening credits, Hannibal Lecter’s mask, used to restrain our heroine before her recruitment, and a good chunk of the central plot appears borrowed from Heathers – or, probably more likely, Suicide Circle [a.k.a. Suicide Club, a film most renowned for its opening scene]. When it moves onto its own territory, this is somewhat less effective: if Fukasaku had decided whether or not he was going for serious drama [and given the yoyo-esque aspects and its ancestry, I’d have recommended going with “not”], then the results would likely have been better. Instead, you get something that, while having its moments, won’t quite satisfy trash fans like ourselves [though it wasn’t as bad as Chris feared], and anyone else will likely give this a wide berth.

Dir: Kenta Fukasaku
Star: Aya Matsura, Riki Takeuchi, Yui Okada, Shunsuke Kubozuka