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Overview
We start of season 02 with a bang – just like season 01. This is not a light movie, but it is interesting. We discuss the multi-layered story that happens here. While this movie isn’t for everyone, for those that can see the art of it – it’s definitely one to sit and discuss.
The film is Japanese, so it has a different flavor than most western movies. Would love to hear from anyone on what they think is happening in some of the sequences – let us know.
If you like disturbing and psychological, you’ll like this. There are moments of laughter and moments or sweet romance – or is there? That’s the thing- this movie will creep you out when you realize the stuff you thought was romantic or funny – ISN’T!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235198/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audition_(1999_film)
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Transcript
Okay. We ready? All right. So exciting first movie for season two, visitation. Yes, visitations today’s movie visitation theme is a surprise visit. Oh yes. And like we like to do, we start off light with some humor Joe, just like we did with the first one the last time. Exactly. This will be the heaviest film of the season, in my opinion.
So let’s see what it’s all about the audition. Yes. We watched audition. It is a movie from 1999 that Japanese film based on a 1997 novel by Ryo Murakami. He’s an award-winning Japanese author. Wow. Wow. Okay. This is a movie that’s hard to classify because it hits this cusp. There’s this is a first Asian film.
We’re going to be talking. We’ve had on the series a it’s Japanese directed by Takashi Miki to say saying that enough. I don’t think so. Cause it’s Mika, but that’s fine. He’s pretty famous. He did 13 assassins EO he did one of the movies in three extremes, one missed call ichi. The killer goes through, he has 111 different films to his name.
Prolific. He is a member of the Nikkei w who was born in Osaka. The Nikkei are Japanese citizens who lived in foreign countries. Now soccer is not a foreign country, but his father. His grandfather was in China and Korea. He was a Japanese citizen in China and Korea, and his father was born in Korea.
The only reason that I bring this up is from my experience, Korean films Korean horror films have a very specific flavor to them and that’s that they wander and that’s not a bad thing, but you’ll be watching it. And suddenly you’re in a horror movie. And then all of a sudden you’re in a comedy.
And then all of a sudden you’re in a romance. And then all of a sudden, you’re back to a horror movie. Again, you can see this in the host or a hashtag alive or parasite, right? The big Oscar award winner. It was hard to shoehorn that into something and audition very much has that flavor. I can see that.
Definitely. It also has Japanese film elements, which makes sense because me Kay was born in Japan, lived in Japan. So some of the things that you’ll see in Japanese movies, especially the big one that shows up here is they’ll play with time and Japanese horror movies. So you will have things that are not necessarily happening in the correct order, or you’ll have things that are happening in the correct order.
And then all of a sudden they’ll interject something from someone else’s point of view that happened in the past right there. And you’ll be like, what just happened? It gets to the extreme that I recall watching one of the Juwan films. Where you had a girl interacting with another girl who appeared earlier in the film, but whose story didn’t come until later.
And they were interacting across timelines at one specific point in time in the house. And you’re like, wait a second. It’s not uncommon in Japanese film. Okay. If nothing else one of my comments was this definitely doesn’t feel like an American film. It definitely has a different feel to it.
If you’re going to the new Halloween movie, you like Friday the 13th in Texas chainsaw if you’re going for that type of stuff, this has elements of that, but it’s really not like those at all. Absolutely. It’s two hours long for starters. And I have a note on here, we’d like to think about who would like to see this movie patient people would like to watch this movie.
You have to be very patient it’s one I’m on the other things I said, it’s one of the slowest burns I’ve ever seen in a movie. Even when some of that time stuff starts happening, you wonder what’s going on. It has those psychological elements. Is this real life or is he dreaming it, imagining it? And they give all those little buildups that you could say he just had a nightmare based on everything they were talking about or is it real?
So it’s definitely that type of thing. Yeah, it really is for probably three quarters of the movie. It’s like a romcom. It’s a romance. Yeah. But it’s not even that funny. That’s the problem, right? And I think that’s one of the reasons why I appreciate it so much is because it has this like whole kind of sappy, romantic feeling.
And so when the horror comes in, it’s like getting hit in the face with a 90 pound Marlin. Just bam, all of a sudden you’re like, what’s she doing? I would say not necessarily a comedy, but definitely a romance again for an hour and a half of the movie. It’s a romance, a Japanese flavored romance.
So it’s a little different than you see American movies. But then you start getting that weird twisted, psychological stuff. Is it really happening or is it not? And then it goes off the rails at the ends. Yep. Just wait. It’s coming folks. It’s not Mika has directed everything from musicals and kids’ shows to like mainstream horror.
As long as he doesn’t confuse this with the kid shows, when he’s editing those off, that it can be a problem. Like one missed call is a very standard horror film. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch, but it just feels like your standard. I’m going to take my date out to see a horror movie kind of film, but he also directed ichi the killer, which is outright banned in three countries.
Wow. So he spreads the gamut about, what he shows in his films and Yeah, the film stars Rio ECU Bashi and I just want to apologize up front to any Japanese individuals who might be watching this slaughtering your language and you have my sincerest apologies about that.
You’ve been to France, not Japan. That’s true. Riley Shibachi plays Shiga, Haru, Aoyama. He has been in several films 79 titles including suicide club, the grudge to a war, mostly Japanese films, some television But the grudge, those were, that was the American remake of the Japanese version.
So all three, four versions reboots or whatever they’ve done. Yeah. plays, Asami Yamazaki. She’s been in 19 other films, mostly filmed some television. She this was like her thing. She was a model before this show. And so this is like her big debut film. Wow. So what was your first film?
Like? Let me tell you, yeah. And guess what she’s been playing ever since flasher killer Texas Milwaukee plays he’s been in 13 other credits. This is a Shiga Hiroos son. Eh, mostly films, some TV he actually stars with Sheena in a movie called harmful insects, which is actually not a horror film.
The name like harmful insects. Do you? Yeah it’s I’m trying to, it seemed like a psychological kind of thing. There’s a psychological study into, we’re not here to talk about that, but I haven’t seen it. That’s a bonus episode. Yes. Audition was nominated for nine awards and at 1 49. It’s just under two hours long.
It had a budget of $250,000 gross, 131,000 in the U S and Canada, and 360,000 worldwide. So the success, yeah, not a big success as far as money goes critically though. The movie is seen as a masterpiece by Quentin Tarantino, Rob zombie calls it genuinely creepy. It was an influence on Eli Roth with his movie hostel.
And Mika actually has a cameo in hostel as one of the super rich people who pays to torture somebody. So he’s got to walk on, which is cool. Nice. There’s a group out there called timeout. They conducted a poll of people who write, produce and act in horror movies for the best horror films and audition was 18 out of a hundred on that list.
It is also on your list of 1,001 movies. You must see before you die. That was compiled by Steven Schneider. Not really my list. Somebody just stole my name. This was a huge influencer on the torture porn industry. When you had the saw and hostel and all of those movies, they came out on the heels of this film.
So this was like the groundbreaking edge of that. This was bringing the end to the the seven legacy of the nineties ushering in the torture porn of the early two thousands. Got it. Okay. That makes sense. The movie was sponsored by a group called the omega project. They did Rinku, which is the Japanese version of the ring, and they wanted to follow up with his success.
So they hired me EK and bought the rights to the novel. And Mika had used people he had worked with before. So almost all these actors he knew from before earlier things, except for he who had been a Maya model before she did the movie, it’s played at Rotterdam film festival and he holds the record for the number of walkouts in the film when it played there.
In fact, one of the ladies who left costed him on her way out the door, telling him he was disgusting and he was just thrilled by that.
And at the Swiss premier, somebody actually passed out from watching the film. Wow. I haven’t heard about that since the early days of movies. Yeah. It’s really, it’s also very funny and this is a big thing we’re going to run into with this film. It’s a Japanese movie. And so there’s two ways you can look at any piece of art.
There’s what the creator wanted it to be. And then there’s what you’re going to get out of it. And unless you’re talking to the creator, we don’t know what van Gogh thought about while he was painting sunflowers. But you can look at it and you can interpret sunflowers for what it means to you.
This film has been hailed as a misogynistic piece of trash. And it has also been hailed as a powerful feminist statement. Wow. Ooh, that’s disturbing. It hits both sides of the line. And the thing is though, in Japan, in the late nineties, the concept of feminism was nothing at all. Like it is like what people think of today.
So the chances are that if you’re picking out a feminist thread out of this, it’s something that you’re putting into the film and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it might not be what he intended when he made the original film. And but that’s the argument with art once you’ve released it to the wild and no longer belongs to you includes almost any creative endeavor, whether it be movies or sculptures or writing or whatever.
Yeah. This movie also not unlike Byzantium has a. It has two stories that are going, that can be confusing, but it’s not as bad as Byzantium, which had like modern day. And then the past, this just basically has Shiga Hearos story as told as he remembers it. And then at the end, they go through and show you what actually was being said.
And so the story that you get is in conflict with the story that you’ve seen level narrative, because again, is it really happening to him or just in his head because he’s going crazy. Correct. He’s so overcome with grief, you could say. Yeah. I’m not going to lump them together like we did by the Santiam.
Cause it’s not that confusing kind of thing. So if you’re ready then we’ll just go ahead and jump in. Hey, you know me, I’m ready. The movie begins with Shikha. Hico walking down a hallway, carrying an art project. He wants to show his mom who’s in a hospital. His, this started right off. My first thing was, huh, this is very Japanese.
Cause that boy looks like the one from the grudge. Yeah. Yeah, you can definitely see some costuming similarities that happened throughout the way his hair was cut. A little boy, little kids look quite often alike. But just his face structure, even his dark eyes, I was like, oh, we’re getting a grudge vibe right here.
And he’s carrying this giant art project. It looks like, I think it was like an ocean scene or something like that. It’s an immense. He’s coming down the hall to see his mom who’s in a hospital bed and his father is at her side. She’s dying of some disease. They don’t tell you what it is. And just before she Hiko arrives, the doctors tell his father, she could Haru that his wife has died.
The boy comes in and he has little understanding what’s actually going on. And he says, I brought this for mom and his dad just ends up collapsing on the floor. He doesn’t know what to say. And there’s this telling scene of the two of them walking alone, down the street. And she hardly looks back like this is the moment when the two of them alone are looking back at the past and moving on into the future.
The musics. Oh, I’m sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say the music here is simplistic. It’s vaguely cute. And somehow slightly unnerving. If it’s a horror movie. True. And I was going to argue, and once I watched the whole movie, that beginning part probably wasn’t even really necessary because I think we get all the information about her death and his feelings for it more so later.
I’m just, we always laugh about the American remakes, but I could see that not even being a part of an American remake is just 15 minutes, 10 minutes that I didn’t feel added to the overall feel of the movie took away almost in a way. My, it felt like it just an introduction to the characters and a explanation for the closeness of their relationship.
Between the two of them, I can see that, but I think they did enough of that throughout the rest of the movie and probably could and conveyed the same information and feelings might’ve even made it stronger. Because he was only a 10 year old boy for those 10 minutes. And it jumped ahead and nothing else really referred to it.
Other than the mother’s dad, just my, that’s a nitpicky thing from my viewpoint, yeah. It cuts, like you said, right to the ocean seven years later and the two of them are shore fishing and the dad says there, there are so many times where they just layer in little threads about their personality and things throughout this movie.
The dad says the C’s too rough and the sun catches the fish as the dad looks on proudly. And he’s proud of what his son has become. The son teases him lightly about him not catching any fish. And the dad points out. He’s only interested in catching big fish. She’s not interested in little ones.
The son says he prefers real girls to big fish. And the father says someday, you’ll understand about love, which when you jump to the end of the movie is ironic to say the least. Yeah. And I would also say this scene was a really good example of why I like watching it with subtitles because you got to hear the motion in their voices, even if you didn’t understand what they were saying.
And it comes out a lot more flattened doll, if it’s an overdub. Yeah. The dad gets a phone call in the middle of this phone call from work. He catches a fish, manages to land the fo land, the fish, and politely get off the phone, showing you that here’s a guy who can juggle everything. He can be a great dad.
He can catch fish and do work all at the same time. He is the model, Japanese businessman
that evening they’re eating the fish and the subject of the gender insects. The fish comes up in conversation, which is not something I ever give two thoughts two while I’m eating my dinner, but
the son throws out some pretty anatomically accurate stuff while the father claims ignorance about the whole thing. And then the sun mentions that he’s concerned about how worn out his father’s looking lately. And right here, we’re introduced into their beagle puppy. The two of them have a beagle puppy named gang Ganga.
The son asks Shiga Haru why he doesn’t get married again. He replies that, that seems like that’s a random question and she finishes eating and gets up and reminds us dad that it’s his turn to do the dishes and takes off. And like you said, this is a weird little scene and this is one of the things that made me say this is definitely not American.
It’s, some foreign thing. But I also wonder if the translation came out a little poorly in a few places, because just because because it’s ovaries change or whatever, I’m like who the hell says that. It’s either really bad dialogue or bad translation in my opinion, but Sheikh HARO ends up alone at the time.
Then he’s standing alone, washing dishes. It’s the whole scene at the end. It’s very lonely looking. We take Shiga, Hico out of the picture.
Then we find out what she Howard does for a living. There’s a video of people dancing, and there’s an editor working on the video and she could hire is giving him input. So obviously he’s the one driving it, driving this the creative decisions here. And he points out that the video looks like a cult gathering.
And then the editor says, everybody in Japan is lonely. She asks him if he’s lonely. And he says, aren’t you, which ties in back to the scene of him washing the dishes that very lonely. And he leaves the editing booth grabs his stuff and he’s getting ready to leave. And he’s talking to a secretary and he’s going over a schedule for the rest of the day.
And there’s this weird, awkward pause where she’s just looking at him and as he’s leaving, she follows him to the elevator and tells him that she’s getting married. And he says, oh, congratulations. And she still just looking at him and it’s really awkward. And he’s just looking back and the elevator doors close and she just stares at the elevator doors.
And you’re like, that was weird. Yeah. So I took that from my first thing was like, wait a second. If they work together. And he might seems maybe like her boss, or at least a superior, he wouldn’t know anything about her dating or whatever, but it comes up later. How about an arranged marriage?
Which seems like a thing that could be very quick. So I wasn’t sure, but I also took it as maybe she has a bit of a crush on him and has been wanting him to ask her out. That feminist thing she can’t be the one to approach him and she was hoping he would stop. You must not do this.
I demand that this is where the cultural differences start to raise their head. Yeah, definitely. In Japan, in the late nineties, that’s not a thing that would happen where she would just like suddenly ask him out, if that was the case, he ends up meeting up with his friend.
Yoshikawa at this upscale bar with the best bartender in the world. They don’t even have to ask for drinks. He just prepares them and sets them down in front of him. And they’re talking about business. There’s a group of ladies laughing at a table nearby and they refer to them as awful common, stupid girls, not a whole
ladies having a good time. Then they limit that all the good girls are gone. She hardly says he might get married again. He doesn’t know who to. And that’s when you Chicago was like, is going to be an arranged marriage. She’s no, unlike a beautiful mature career woman with accomplishment.
Hey buddy, who wouldn’t like for us talking to arranged marriage sounds odd. Even though that was practiced in our country years and years ago when the settlers and stuff, but it just sounds odd nowadays. It does, to be fair though, I went to school with people from India, a good friend of ours from India whose parents were like, when are you going to come home?
We can pick a bright out for you any time. And he’s no, I’m going to marry who I want to here in the states, because that kind of thing still happens. Yeah. And they, big bang theory joked about it with Raj all the time to, oh, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s odd to us, but other places, so YOKA.
Yosha Calla, I’m sorry. Yes. Your Calla proposes that they do an audition, which is on the one hand, it’s almost humorous on the other hand, it’s crazy sexist. And on the third hand, it’s really a creepy abuse of power.
What he’s going to do is Yesha Calla is as a television producer and he shows them a script for a romance about a dancer, and that they’ll held an audition for the female lead and she hardly won’t actually marry the actual lead of the thing. Cause you wouldn’t, she wouldn’t have him and she wouldn’t be the marrying type, but he can pick from the rest of the women who are.
That was even more sexist, true, but very sexist. Yeah. And he makes it seem like it would be picking the perfect woman. They’re like pick out 10 out of the thousand who come to apply for this, but he’s, Yasha, Cal was guaranteeing him. This is going to work. And she, it might be another cultural thing, but it’s kinda you pick out who you want, it’s a done deal.
They have to do it. Yeah. And. She hired us on his way, home on the radio, on his car ride is the ad, the calling the cattle call for these women to come in to the audition. And here’s where the first of the bizarre disjointed scenes happens because he’s sitting in traffic, listening to this ad, and then it cuts to this very sparse room with a phone and a radio.
And this little girl who’s listening to the exact same ad. And then it cuts right back to she go her route again. And you’re like, wow, that seemed a little odd to be just interjected right there. Shiga Haru comes home and his housekeeper is on her way out. His dinner just needs heating up. She needs to get groceries which is fine with him.
Cause he wants to be alone with this giant dossier of headshots and applications for girls for this audition that he can just pick his next wife out of apparently and maybe a lead for the show. If if they could, yeah. The show is completely, almost made up anyways. He’s leaving through the stacks.
He looks over at the photo of his wife. His deceased wife is sitting on the desk and he turns it. So he knows what he’s doing is wrong. He’s just choosing to continue. Anyways. He calls Yoshikawa and compares it to picking out his first car. Yoshikawa tells him to pick 30 and the auditions. He says, don’t go by the picture alone, read their applications.
His son interrupts him to announce that there’s a girl that he has. He’s brought a girl home and she got Hearos oh, you can give her my dinner. The two of you can eat my dinner. And then he spills tea on this one application. And he pulls the application out that he spilled the tea on his, wiping it off, and it happens to be Assamese application.
And he stares at her photo and it’s bam hit with a ton of bricks. This is the one she’s a classically trained actress. It says she was a dancer. She has this essay about when she was a ballet dancer. Life was great, but then she had some injury and she couldn’t dance anymore. And losing the ability to dance is like dying.
And the acceptance of the loss of dance is like learning to accept death. And he loves that essay and the picture doesn’t hurt.
So then he walks out and introduces himself to his son’s friend. She hears that she’s eating his dinner and like automatic. She’s oh, let me make you some food. I don’t know that I’ve ever been visiting someone’s house and been like, oh wait, let me go into your kitchen and cook you something. But again, we were talking to the cultural stuff and see, he was like no, don’t do that.
It’s fine. It was like almost expected a common thing. And you know that I can see, those little things every now and then that the feminist comment you know how this could be enlightening in a very oppressive type culture. He says, no, don’t bother. I’m going to take the dog out for a walk.
And as he’s leaving, he gives his son, the OT ed, a boy, they get her she’s cute. I’m leaving you guys alone for awhile. And I just you shouldn’t be, awkwardness throughout this movie. And a few things like that. They seemed a little more forced than anything else. So here’s one of the things that I found specifically with Japanese horror films is there are some films that you get like just right away and you’ll watch it and you’ll be like, okay, this is good.
And the names of all of them escape Ringo and Suicide club even a little bit. You’ll watch them. And you’re like, yeah. Okay. I get it. This horror movie. And then there are some that have these cultural things, like big man, Japan and house a and you’re watching it and you’re going, I really am not getting this because the culture difference is like really highlighted.
This movie walks the line between those two. So yeah. Yeah. Agreed. If it went a little bit more to the left, I don’t think it would play as well among Western cultures because it would be too Eastern in its cultural references, it walks that fine line. So the auditions the next day, and it feels like you’re watching like a game show or a comedy or something.
Yeah. Yeah, we’re sitting at a desk and they’re just running through these girls. She says at the start, it feels like a criminal. And during the entire process, Yosha, Calla runs it and she Haru says nothing. He just sits there and watches. These girls get up. And this is where I tried my first suicide attempt.
And this is my second. And this scene, I really liked because we were talking about the stereotypes and Japanese culture and how it’s different this, see. Was not what I would have expected from a Japanese movie. It was loose. It was humorous. They were being silly. The one girl, I came back a second time, they’re like, didn’t you come in a race?
She’s but I wasn’t done talking. And a lot of it just seemed very and Japanese to me not that I’m super familiar with the culture. I’ve never been there. I don’t know the feel, but based on the movies I’ve watched and the scenes in those movies, this scene, I wouldn’t have expected. And it was totally if I didn’t know it was Japanese, I would have had a hard time guessing it was Japanese from this is this hearkens back to my whole thing about Korean films where they’ll shift gears hard in the middle of a film.
And that’s what this. It w this is one of those scenes that hearkens back to that kind of Korean tradition of you’re watching this now you’re watching something completely different. And so you had this father son thing that leads up to bam, here’s this quintessential humorous kind of thing that’s going on.
It doesn’t feel anything else. Like the rest of the movie that you’ve seen so far. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. They decided to take 10 minute break and she HARO goes out to use the bathroom. And on his way back, he sees a Saami across the room. She’s not looking at him. Her back is to him wearing white. Her hair is immaculate.
Reading a book or maybe it’s the script or something, but, he knows it’s her just from looking at her back and goes in and sits down. And he’s only seen a picture from the front before. Yes. But it’s this mystical draw between the two of them. And then you’re back to the game show, you’ve got this girl, twirling batons, and one girl just comes in, instantly, starts taking her clothes off.
And so you have that whole thing. And then all of a sudden in the midst of all of this, comedy thing, he slams on the brakes and the door opens and incomes Assami and the movie just takes a second to pause, to breathe. She comes in and she bows four times in this. She bounced. When she first walks in the door, she gives them a bow.
She walks to her T to the chair, she bows again, and then she sits down. When the interview is done, she stands up, she bows walks back to the door, stops, bounce again, and walks back out. She is supposed to represent the quintessential ethically, classically trained etiquette Japanese woman you could possibly have.
And so change later, even more dynamically, but also to make her that much more appealing to she Haru because that’s exactly what he’s looking for. He wants this. Nope. Knowing she had that little scene, they listening to the radio, knowing she’s at this interview, knowing that he likes her and later, whatever, at the end of the movie, You almost wonder, did she set this up somehow?
Is there a supernatural force directing this and she’s controlling it there, there’s kind of those questions that start cropping up throughout this too. They don’t show any of that, but you got to wonder it. It’s very reminiscent of a spider. If you think of it that way, like she has cast this web out and he’s just there, like the fly he’s twitching, the threads.
And there’s a scene coming up in a bit that really like reinforces that kind of, this whole thing has been a trap that’s been laid for him. She sits down and
Shoot, sorry. She sits down and they start asking our questions. She says she’s never been on TV, but she’s been asked several times. She claims she’s represented by Mr. Shibata at ACE records. And she works three times a week for a friend who owns a bar in Ginza. She doesn’t want to be rich or poor.
She just wants enough money to buy some books and some CDs. And then she Haru says he has a question. And then he just goes on and on about how much he loved her essay on her resume. It’s not a question. There’s nothing for her to respond to when he’s done. She just looks at him awkwardly.
And she’s thank you. And then he’s like looking all proud of himself. And he like nods his head and she thanks him again. And the interview is over and Yasha Kaoloa. Is nervous about her, but she is over the moon. She leaves, he gets up and walks over to her chair and sits in it. And he’s just that’s it call the audition off.
I’m done. He doesn’t actually say that, but that’s basically what he’s saying. The only time he talked all day. Yeah. Yasha, Cal was just like, I dunno, man, I’m getting bad mojo vibes from this. And that’s pretty much his standard line. The rest of the movie. Yes. Yeah. That’s it? She Hearos back home.
He’s eating Michigan. Hico, he’s drinking scotch. The guy likes him some scotch. He drinks a lot of it. She, he go finishes his dinner and runs off to study something about some dinosaur thing. So she got hired. It takes a scotch, it goes back to Sammy’s resume. And then he just calls her up and asked her out and she’s okay.
And as he’s talking to her on the phone, the camera actually zooms in and has this one shot where you can see a photograph of his wife as he’s talking to her to a, saw me on the phone, you’re sure Cal will calls him up and says, he tried to get ahold of Shababa at ACE records, but he’s been missing for 18 months and he still just doesn’t trust her.
As you said, this is Yosha. Cow was broken record line. I don’t trust this lady.
The next scene though, she can Hearos with her at lunch. She’s dressed in white. She wears white in every scene in this movie, except at the end. So she’s wearing white. She’s this is she’s like, all I have to do is. Sit here and enjoy some nice food. That’s the best offer I’ve ever had. So he asks her about Mr.
Shibata and and she admits, oh, I lied about it. Cause everybody said, you should have an agent. And every time we see she’s wearing white and white, I have in my notes, like some kind of angel, but in Japanese culture, white is the color of the gods in Buddhist culture. And Buddhism has a decent sway in Japan.
It’s the color of death. And so if you combine the two of them, Assami has become the goddess of death in every scene. She city. The food comes. She thinks it’s amazing. Could they do this again? Sometime she could. HARO is just absolutely thrilled. He goes to tell you, she coul about it. And Chicago is practicing his golf on the roof of his Japanese high rise, where they work and she got Hiroo symbolically, he’s got these golf balls and he’s throwing them at the basket and he’s missing every time she says, she’s the one she’s absolutely the one.
And you should, Cal was like, eh, I dunno, she doesn’t have a background. I can’t even find anyone who likes her or who knows her. And she get cars. I don’t care if she causes trouble, I can handle it. And so Yoshikawa tells him to wait a bit before he calls her back, just let it cool down a bit. And he agrees to that.
We have reached 43 minutes into the film at this point. And we get to the first indication that something’s off because the next scene is the Saami sitting in that very sparse apartment that we saw earlier on the floor staring at a phone that’s what’s that is sitting next to what looks like a giant full laundry bag.
And she’s just sitting there full on, Juwan grudge thing, straight hair, just hanging in her face, just sitting there. It cuts back to the scene of Shiga harvest, sleeping in a dream. He sees his wife looking at him from a distance behind the tree on a beach. Then it cuts back to that room.
Assamese still, hasn’t moved the next day. He takes the day off work and his housekeeper’s wow, that’s rare. You must have a lady friend. And he almost calls her, but he resists. Then the next day he’s at work and his secretary is leaving the office. And there’s this awkward moment with the secretary again, she’s eh, looking at him, he’s ignoring her.
He looks at his phone. We cut back Assami is still sitting in the exact same place. It even looks like she might be asleep, just sitting there on the,
I mean she just crunched over and I, again, it’s one of those little things that taken by itself. It’s not too weird, but when you do it over a day, Yeah, start getting that creep factor. And this is where the spider thing comes in. Like the spider sitting in the middle of the web, just waiting and just waiting.
He eventually caves and calls. And when the phone starts to ring it zooms in on her and she smiles and you’re like, the spider is the scariest creepiest smile. Then the laundry bag moves and there’s this growing noise. And you’re like, what the hell? Yes. And then they cut. Yep. So in this horror movie, you’re 43 minutes in and probably 50 minutes.
And then all of a sudden, whoa, there’s this really weird horror element that happens. And then we’re back to them. She meets him for dinner and says she was waiting for his call. She really was waiting for your call. Did. And it it’s definitely, she wasn’t waiting for the audition call back.
It was like you said, the spider, she was waiting for his call and that, again, it, how did she set all this up somehow? Did she were him, whatever means to be a part of the audition so she could go there and Lord him, it really has that vibe, which makes it on a level creepier than just what’s going on.
It’s really funny because I had never actually given her any causation to the whole thing until you just brought it up. And now I keep thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about it. There’s no real way she could have done that. But maybe there is some sort of mystical force that’s behind this whole movie that, I never noticed until just now it’s a, it’s one of our movies that if you just take it on the surface and watch it, I can see a lot of people going well, that was stupid.
But then you dig down into it a little more and you think about it and there’s just parts of it that it’s some of the best movies I’ve seen, where you can discuss it with somebody and catch things and a viewpoint and say things. It just layers like an onion that you don’t necessarily see the first time.
I, I would almost never do this for a two hour long movie, but this is a movie that if you watch it through, once it really behooves you to watch it through a second time, because there’s so many things, so many of these elements that just are tucked away in there. That’s why the director is probably very revered, popular director.
Even though this movie didn’t make tons of money. And, but it got a lot of acclaim and this is why when you delve into a movie like this, we should pass some of these off to Bob. He’d probably love watching a few of these if he has it. And he was just out this weekend, actually, I didn’t see him, but I heard he was out this weekend.
So she meets him for dinner. So she was waiting for his call. Here’s one of the biggest ones where you can see the difference between what he hears during the dinner. And what was actually said that comes in the comes later. He asks her about her family and she says, they’re fine. They recently moved because their father wanted to be near a golf course.
She says they aren’t close, but they don’t fight. And she says, she’s still working at this bar. It’s called the stone fish. He asks if he can go sometime. And she says, I’d rather you don’t because the owner’s always up in her business. She informed him. She would never lie to him. Yeah. Yeah. But right there, I won’t ever lie to you every time that said what’s a lie in that.
The classic, one of these two people is lying. I am not he is, it’s one of those puzzle things. And so after the bag and the smile and her saying, I won’t lie to you. And knowing that some sort of horror movie, I didn’t know what type yet, but I said I feel like I’m watching the evolution of my first marriage right here.
So that’s the feeling I got. If anybody wants to do a movie, it’d be like, this
Miki does this brilliant thing though. Cause they’re at dinner and you don’t even notice it until she says she would never lie to him. Then he pulls back and it’s a wide shot of the cafe and you can see it’s empty. So they have been sitting there for a long time. He tells her that the film projects fall fallen through.
It’s not going to get made. And then she talks about how, when she’s with him, she feels connected to something beautiful and they see that they’re in. And now all of a sudden you can see they’re in a different restaurant eating dinner. So I don’t think it’s a second date. I think it was let’s meet here for drinks and then let’s go here for dinner.
But the way he threads it to through it’s this kind of like seamless thing. I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those amazing days where you had lots of things happen. You miss a lot of the details. You just remember the highlights from all the different things. And the whole thing just runs together.
That’s what this is to him. I know listening to her talk by now, everything she says is like a double meaning and I’m getting like PTSD flashbacks here. So it’s very horrific for me on a different personal level. Yes. She talks about losing the ability to dance and he tells her she’ll get over it.
She says she’s never had anyone she could talk to. He listens to her and then they’re in the car and he says, he’ll call her again. And she thanks him and gets out of the car. And as they drive away, he’s just looking at her. And then that’s that whole section ends with a shot of the phone and the giant tied up laundry bag.
Just to remind you that seemed like a nice date, but we don’t want to get too far away from our goal here. Yeah. He goes home and informs Shikha Hico that he’s seeing somebody and she could. It starts to tease them a little bit about it. And then he says, we’re spending the weekend together and then it cuts right to a car and going through the Japanese countryside and they arrive at this stunning remote looking resort.
And he’s kinda like sitting in a chair and he’s all nervous and he’s going over things they could do. There’s this coffee shop and there’s this gallery. And she just like walks over and turn it. This seems again, is it a cultural thing or what? Because the progression just seems odd that he met with her and only him hasn’t met the sign.
They haven’t been out of the house. It just, maybe the culture thing and thinking, arrange a marriage even. I picked you, so you’re marrying me. That’s the end of the story. There’s no dating needed. It just seemed very. Quick and odd to me. But again, if she’s controlling him, then he’s doing actions beyond his control.
He’s forced to do these without realizing that yeah. Faded to do it, whether he wants to or not. And you really see that because he’s sitting there like talking about having basically like a date, it’s wow, we’re here, there’s this gallery and all this stuff. And she turns out the light takes off her clothes.
She still manages to somehow maintain some modesty. She climbs underneath the sheets and she tells him to come over to the bed and you can see from looking at it, he’s hesitant about it. And then she says, please, so then he gets up and he walks over there and he begins to start to take his clothes off.
And she says, no, just stop. Just look. And she like pulls the sheets up and you’re like, wow. Okay. But she stops. And she has this pair of scars, like two lines on the inside of her right thigh. She tells him she burned herself when she was young. And she wants him to know everything about her, which again is one of those loaded statements.
That’s you gotta watch that. Yeah. Plus I don’t know. And maybe a lot of women would be like this, but those two little bird marks on a thigh and she considers herself. Unworthily ugly, and I know that’s a common thing that comes up in some of the Japanese movies and stories. That some little thing like that is considered a, oh my God, I can’t ever even look at you.
You’re so ugly type feeling. And I’m sure other cultures, even American women are like that. But I was like waiting for like her legs to be these mangled messages and stuff. Nope. It’s just two lines, but it reminds me of that. Japanese ceramic tradition of, you have a master ceramicist who’s makes something, any purposely puts a fly just to prove that it’s not divine kind of thing.
So it makes me think, and arguably. What she’s teasing him at is looking inside or looking at her actual soul, testing him in a way. Can you actually see what I, who I am? And he doesn’t so GST flashbacks going on, Sharon with the sheep entirely. And she tells him, love me and nobody else.
And he said, He will then she, Ryan,
she reinforces it by saying, love me alone. Promise, love no one else. But me out of context, this is a very sweet scene. But especially if you’ve seen the whole movie, you come back to this scene and you’re like, no, dude, listen to what she’s saying.
And we’ve had very different marriages. So there’s a different viewpoint to watching. That’s true. There’s this cut scene, it’s, he’s just about to get it on there’s this cut scene that resolves in the sheets being all balled up and it’s vaguely reminiscent of a certain giant laundry bag that sits next to a black phone.
And then he suddenly wakes up and he’s. And the phone’s ringing and it’s the front desk and they need to know if he’s staying because his date just left. He’s very groggy and like what happened? And they didn’t show him getting drugged. And I was thinking about this afterwards. I’m like, he wasn’t drugged, threw his drink or something.
That’s just her. She, I think she might have, they might not show it. Cause things coming up later, but it, to me, it was like, that’s her, she’s got him under her spell under her power. Now that’s what I took from this initially. Yeah. I think I’ll get to it later. It’s this is followed by a very tense scene between Shiga HARO.
And Yoshikawa where he’s trying to get more information on her. And your Chicago was like, you can’t find anything. Just forget about it. Then she got her, like they end up yelling at each other and she got her like storms off, but that whole scene is shot crazy. Frenetically the cuts are like that abrupt and there’s a thousand of them and she’s bam.
And so the whole thing feels sense. Like you can feel the tension in the room just from the way that it was shot. She got Haru notes on her resume is the name of the dance studio where she trains. So off he goes he’s gonna, this is his grail. He’s gonna find this girl again, on paper, it sounds like a romance.
I’m going to find her and when the music is going to play and it’s going to be beautiful he goes, and he finds the dance studio and it’s all boarded up and he’s thinking about leaving and then he hears a piano. So he basically just rips the boards off and goes inside. One of the things I noted and you want to talk about cultural differences.
He goes inside this boarded up dance studio, once he gets inside, he takes the shoes off. I didn’t even realize. Yeah, you’re right. Because in Japan you don’t wear your shoes indoors. Even if it’s a boarded up dance studio that looks like it’s abandoned. There’s an old guy in the wheelchair. I would’ve been baling.
I would’ve been out of there. Just come on. I’m done. Of course now that’s wisdom speaking. That’s what that is. There’s an old guy sitting there on a wheelchair playing the piano. And she asks him if he knows Assami and the guy tells him to go away and she heard is if you ever had any problems with the Saami, do you know how to get ahold of her?
And the guy starts to laugh and he’s have you seen her? Have you heard her voice? And the guy is just creepy and he’s asking these intrusive questions and there’s this flashback, this is the Japanese thing with the time. And the perspective you get this flashback, that he’s the one who burned her legs.
And then he reveals that he’s got these clunky wooden carved pathetic feet. Like his legs have been amputated and he tells Shiga Haru to go. And so she Haru take Steve’s advice and is out of there just to keep investigating. Yes, that’s true. So he heads to the stone fish. He gets her and turns out that it’s closed and he meets somebody who lives near there.
And it says it’s been closed for awhile because of the murders.
he’s like what nurturers? And he is oh the bar, the owner was like cut up into pieces. But here’s the weird thing. This guy’s got the details, there was an additional tongue, an ear, and three fingers found on the crime scene that were not part of the victim who was cut up. And then Shiga, Haru has this flash in his mind of three fingers and like the tongue and it’s still wiggling and he’s freaked out by the whole thing.
And that they showed, it was like really gruesome American audiences. I like that scene there, but you start wondering, wait a second, first he’s investigated or in every place is closed up, EV there’s murders around it, and then I’m going, and then you focus on the weight, extra fingers and tongue.
So she had these drop on the floor from elsewhere because I’m pretty sure it’s her at this point. There wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t make sense to be some random thug or anything, so she had these and drop them on the floor to add to the where’d those come from. And this is now I see what you’re saying about the time thing with Japanese films.
Yeah. And there’s, if that’s a detail you don’t ever get from any other murder thing you don’t ever hear, law and order SVU where they’re like, oh yeah, the pur the victims in there. And oh yeah, there happened to be an extra hand just laying around. We didn’t know where it came from, but there it is.
That’s just like a really odd detail for a murder scene, but we are now it was fingers in a tongue, the tongue. We now get the visitation, the surprise visitation. There’s a shot of the house. And this is a point of view camera. So you’re seeing through the eyes of somebody at the house, the housekeeper is leaving for the day she feeds Ganga.
And then she leaves and you can see the point of view heads to the back door. They go inside, they see a picture of Shiga Harvey’s wife, and then the eyes, the camera settles on his to cancer. Scott. Yeah. And again, we’re suspecting who this is at this point. If you’re not, then you haven’t really been watching, but it goes back again, the way it came into the house, it like just zipped through it and was like even moving around when they were there, but nobody heard or noticed anything.
So it made me think back to the what type of spiritual force is she? You know what, she’s not physically there. She’s like our body’s projected. That’s like when she’s in that state crouching and not moving, is she doing like an astral projection or something and controlling people from there? It’s just my possible interpretations, but it really hints at it a lot throughout the movie.
She’s a commie, the Japanese spirits kind of thing very much though. So if you’d like poor with slasher, horror was supernatural or horror was psychotic. You got all of that in here, throw it into romcom for the date. And it’s a perfect date. I think that’s one of the beautiful things about this movie is you can make it what you want it to be.
You know what I mean? Oh, this is the most misogynistic piece of crap. No, it’s a great feminist manifesto and it’s yes. To both, right? Yeah. Is she some kind of crazy spirit or just psychotic? Yes.
He gets home and he pours himself a scotch and he said, sir, and he’s drinking it and he’s reflecting on his day and there’s this really. I, it was a striking shot. It’s a closeup of his hand on the leather and he like caresses the leather a little bit. And then he gets this look on his face.
Like he doesn’t feel quite right and he stands up and he starts to feel worse and he’s walking along and he just falls over, just falls flat onto the floor. He starts to fall over. Yes. And now we get to see all of the conversations and the perspectives that he missed. This is where it comes in.
So he, remember, we go back to that conversation where they’re sitting at the restaurant, she’s talking about her family and it’s nothing at all. Like he remembered. Her parents were divorced when she was young. So she went to live with an abusive uncle and his wife there. She was beaten and abused so badly.
The doctor suggested they go live with their mother at seven years old. And her mother had a new husband who hated her and was always around. And she would hide in her room until her mother got home from work. Dancing is what helps her cope with all that. And the whole thing’s very surreal because it’s flowing from one thing to the other.
And it makes sense that it’s surreal because he’s been drugged. This is almost like a dream state for him. So it flows like that. So they’re not just in the restaurant talking about this and dancing helps her cope. And while he’s remembering this Rio CU his wife, his deceased wife and his son, the young son, and she, he goes, current girlfriend are sitting at the table next to him.
And Rio tells him not to marry us army and he’s cause he introduces the two together and then it cuts to a sound. Yeah, this is the woman I’m going to marry. Don’t marry her.
It cuts to Assamese apartment. And she just drops to her knees to pleasure him. And he like looks down and it turns out it’s his secretary, all of a sudden. And she says, she slept with him once. Hoping it would make him love her. And he didn’t. Now we have an explanation for all of the weird awkwardness between the two of them, because he was her boss slept with her.
Didn’t think another thing of it, but it hit her hard and she was convinced that this man was going to love her.
Then it changes the Shiga. He goes girlfriend and he freaks out as he’s trying to escape back away from her. He trips over the laundry bag, which cause he’s in Assamese apartment and it wiggles and he comes up to it closely, pokes it with his foot and he reaches down to untie it. And there’s a man inside only part of a man though, because he’s missing three fingers and ear and a ton.
Now we know where they came from. Yes. I am going to bet. This is the guy from ACE records. They never specific say specifically, say this, but he’s been missing for 18 months. And at first this was a weird thing. Cause you mentioned the time thing at first, I thought that was him in the bag. I thought he was.
You know that time thing that she tied him up, he was in the bag and that was him. And he found himself. Cause right after that he finishes his fall, but I was like, hold on, what the hell just happened? It was very boom, like really pay attention there. Yes, it’s true. I always took it as you were going to be the man in that bag too.
Yeah. Either way. And the whole scene though, again, you question, is it real, is it happening in his mind? How is he getting all of this and based on, what I said about the spirit in the house and what you said about her being the spider controlling things, it’s like, she’s manipulating reality almost here and changing what actually has happened or whatever, or he’s been under her control and he’s breaking out of it a little bit and seeing things differently.
It’s his chance to get away, which doesn’t really happen. Yeah. So here’s a pretty disgusting part of it. He sees this guy missing his fingers and his tongue and his ear, and he looks over and saw me standing there holding a dog food bowl and she throws up in it and sets it down in front of him.
And he starts to suck it up because apparently it’s the only thing he gets to eat now to make it a little more disturbing. The actress actually did throw up into the bowl. Oh, that’s dedication because she was so method into this film. Wow. Yeah.
So then Assami turns into the little girl young Assami and she reminds him that he will love only her and it cuts back to the dance instructor burning her thighs. But she’s an adult. This. And we see her approach him from behind it as he’s playing the piano and she’s got this weird wire GoRat and she he’s just sitting there and she says, oh, the wire cuts through bones so easily.
And she wraps it around his head and just start sawing back and forth. And he cuts his head off. Yeah. Yeah. So there, is that something that actually happened since she met what’s his name? She got her sense of they met or is it something that she thought about or was it something she did before?
And he was really talking to a ghost, a spirit in the dance studio, and that’s why that’s an interesting take for me. Because the dance instructor is such a creepy character. I was hoping that it was something that she did after he had visited him. She just showed up and like tying up loose ends beheaded him, but it could have been, he, she might’ve done it a long time ago and the guy was just talking to his hip, the guy’s ghost.
Yeah. It’s it just adds to that multiple levels. She’s she be heads him. And then she says, I never felt unhappy, really, because I never stopped being unhappy. And all the time she’s saying these that’s her voice. It’s just I never felt unhappy really, because I never stopped being unhappy.
And you’re just like, considering the words you’re saying and the tone you’re saying them, and it doesn’t match up. Yeah. I have that note too, with her high pitch little girl voice, which she might’ve done for the role or whatever and what is going on. It’s again, one of those things that makes it even creepier.
Yeah. This movie is nothing. If not creepy, I mean it’s long for sure. But once you get into the creepy parts, it’s creepy. Yeah. And then there’s this whole little compilation of memories, culminating and him lying on the floor of his house. And here is where you finally see Assami not wearing white. She is wearing white, but she’s putting on black leather, a big black leather apron, giant black gloves.
There’s a, you see a shot of the dog lying on the floor, dead tongue line out of its mouth, thumbs, liking to kill dogs, America all about that, so she comes into the room, dressed like this. And if you ever look up audition this outfit is what you always see her on. And Google, like all the Google images is her and her black leather apron.
And she’s carrying this giant medical bag, big, old bag. That’s always a scary thing. Something. Yeah, she opens it up and pulls out a syringe and fills it up. And she’s explaining to them with that beautiful sing song, voice that you’re paralyzed, but your nerves still work. You just can’t move. And then she injects his tongue with whatever was in the syringe and you’re like, yeah.
Oh my gosh. Even the tongue, the only worse is going through the eye socket or something, the ear.
Yeah. Speaking and, stop, what they need to do with this character. They need to do the next hell raiser movie with her becoming one of the whatever they’re called incentivize. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She gets out this great big tarp or it’s not a tarp. It’s a canvas. Lays it on the floor.
Yeah, rolls him on top of it, and then straddles him with a pair of scissors and cuts his shirt off. She explains to him that she knew the audition was just a trap to have sex with girls. And then she gets out this box that has looked like acupuncture needles on steroids. There are no bigger around the acupuncture needles, but they’re, nine inches long for goodness sake.
So she sits there and starts putting them into her, his abdomen. And they’re long enough to reach like his soft organs. And she keeps saying deeper as she goes. In Japanese. And again, apologize for my pronunciation, but it’s like ticket. It can take a day. She keeps making that noise as she’s putting it in.
You’re just like, oh shuttering. Yes, he can take it to the Fitbit. And sh she’s words are lies, but pain doesn’t lie. When you’re in pain, you see your own shape. Clearly she’s got all these words of twisted wisdom throughout this entire thing. So then she moves to his eyes. Cause Steve asked for it.
You gotta have that. And as she does it, there’s this point of view shot, as she’s putting the needles in and when the camera pulls back, she’s not putting it into his eyeballs. She’s putting it into the tissues directly around the eye, which perhaps is even worse. That is one of the things, a lot of Asian cultures, they study all the.
Clusters. And that’s why they do the acupuncture. So she, and she was a dancer, so she probably knows right where to put it where it’s going to hurt the most. Oh yeah. And then she does like one of the it’s I don’t want to say one of the worst things because this whole ending part is pretty bad, but she flicks one of the needles as she’s getting up and I’m just like, Aw, that’s got to, because, especially with the analysts, the city of the metal, it’s going to sit there and vibrate for a while too.
Yeah. It’s the last part of this is very cringy. This is, this will make you butt pucker.
She goes over. She starts putting these weird metal things together and she’s, she mentions that she got Hico lives in the house and he too should achieve clarity. Just like she could hero is right now. She’s yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah. So she takes this metal thing. It’s like a cuff, but it’s like a cuff tourniquet.
She puts it on his leg and like cranks it down. She says, no one. She has no one. So she could love him. Totally. She could love Shigeru. Totally. Cause she has no one, but he can’t because he’s got a son and he’s got a deceased wife that he has to share his love with. So then she gets out her old wire wraps it around his left foot with the tourniquet and just starts and off, goes to.
Smiling and singing and enjoying. Yes. It’s like a little girl sitting in a field of flowers is what she cause she’s sitting, in that kind of kneeling position almost. And then she just takes his left foot and throws it there’s this scene for outside the window. She throws it and it hits the window and falls down.
And I thought to myself as carelessly, as they were throwing away the hopes and dreams of all these girls in this audition, she is throwing away his left foot. Wow. So what you’re saying is all those hopes and dreams are worth nothing more than a left foot. My left foot, speaking of movies yeah, she’s smiling and laughing and she’s doing it.
And then she goes and get started on the right. And for me, this is almost worse. Yeah, she gets started on the right, but she comes home. So she stops. And the reason why for me that seems worse is because at some point in time, someone’s going to have to get that wire out. That’s true is left. What? They don’t have to just leave.
It’ll grow in like a tree, like a chain around a tree. Ooh. She gets out this spray stuff and she harvest starts to hallucinate, kudos to him for still being conscious, even at this stage of the game right now. But he’s elucidating. And in, in this hallucination, he wakes up in bed with her at the resort and she accepts his proposal for marriage.
And even there in, in his hallucination, she knew that the audition was a scam. And just about here, you’re like maybe this whole thing has been a nightmare and there actually are being happy, but then you hear this D picky, any wakes back up. Yeah. She, he co comes into the room.
Cece’s dad there freaks out and Assami comes running out with the spray and there’s this chase. She keeps trying to spray him and he keeps like getting out of the way he runs up the stairs and she’s following up the stairs, spraying the whole time. And he’s on his back as she gets to the top of the stairs and he kicks and connects and she doesn’t fall down the stairs because I don’t think she touches them.
She just falls onto her neck. And so she does, she’s motionless now. She’s not dead. She laying there and she can see, she got Haru and she hired who can see her and the kids calling 9 1 1 and saying, Hey, this, my dad’s here, this woman’s here. And they zoom in on her. And I gotta imagine, it’s just, she’s really thin, like her bone structure, but the way she was laying, it looked like you could see that her neck was broken, yeah. It looked like that. Yeah. Yeah. And then she’s talking like she doesn’t stop talking. She’s I thought you said you were busy. I don’t understand your business. You may think I’m a Queenie sort of woman, but I’ve been waiting and waiting for your call. And she just keeps repeating like her lines from earlier in the.
Which is reminded me of a broken chatty Cathy doll pulled the string and the lines, she’s so psychotic that it’s like practice lines. And she was just saying this, cause that was the right thing to say, to keep luring him in. And now she’s really messed up. Yeah. Yeah. She got Harvard has a voiceover at the end about how we all have to carry on in the face of difficulties in our lives, like losing feet and and then it ends with a shot of Assami as a little girl tying up her ballet slippers probably the last time she was actually happy.
And that’s where the movie ends.
Now I w first of all, two things, one, there was a very distinct lack of music throughout this movie. We talk about the music and a lot of the movies, this one did not have hardly any music until if it wasn’t in the background. Yeah. It wasn’t there. Yeah. So like at the party, it’s interesting.
Yeah. It’s interesting. Cause we talk a lot about how music can help set the tone and the mood. And this totally went on what you were seeing as setting the whole mood for the whole film. The other thing I noticed was our season one opener with martyrs, where we watched that and it was very horrific and some very psychotic things, but we said, if you look at it from the viewpoint of the group, you almost understand and appreciate what they’re doing.
It’s still horrific. You still don’t want to do it and you feel terrible about it. And that’s what makes that movie so great. Watching it, the feelings it evokes, I don’t really feel anything for her. She’s really psychotic. She may have been driven that way, but I don’t have any feeling on her side of it.
Like I did with martyrs. That’s funny because. Again, this might not at all. Somebody has at one point in time speculated that Mika, this movie was like a warning from him. Hey, all of you guys in Japan who think you’re hot, shit, this could happen to you. This is what you’re opening yourself up to see.
He should have, let me watch this movie long ago. You should have seen it in 99 when it came out. But again, it speaks different things to different people. And to me, I saw this as Assami was the personification of all of the women who had just been objectified and used and cast away by the Japanese patriarchy for, centuries.
And I hadn’t given any supernatural thought, element to it until you mentioned it. I saw her as representing that, but now I’m thinking like maybe she didn’t just represent it. Maybe she was that personified. And the whole thing was like this driven thing to give voice, to an oppressed people who don’t have, voice.
And I’m not saying that women in Japan are oppressed, I’m just saying, it, it was a very patriarchal society for a very long time. And so that’s how I, it and so like you, I didn’t necessarily connect with her. But I’m not part of that marginalized group either. True, very true. Or that culture.
And I definitely agree with that. That’s why that’s one of the reasons I think this movie is so amazing is you could show it to a hundred people in a hundred people are going to walk away with something different when they had done. Yeah. This movie definitely wasn’t made for your big popcorn, eating blockbuster movie, going people.
This is one of those, like we’ve said before, you would see sitting in a film critic, film learning 1 0 1 class in college and discussing it, or a beatnik art group that gets together to watch art films or something. Cause it, you could interpret it like, like you said, several different ways and get several different feelings out of it.
Depending on your feelings and background and who you’re with and everything. And I think. With this case. And I felt bad that we didn’t say this with the innocence, because I felt like we should’ve said this with the innocence. The innocence is not a movie for kids who are under the age of 18 and not because of the content it’s because you guys won’t appreciate it.
And I think audition is very similar to that. If you’re young and you want to, I would say martyrs isn’t for people under 18, but it’s not because they wouldn’t get into it. It’s because of, the subject matter and how it’s depicted, it’s a crazy heady mature film.
This, on the other hand, you’ve got a lot to slog through to get to the reward at the end. And for me, I didn’t mind it, it that’s what made the reward so rewarding. If I was just sitting down, I wanted to watch a horror movie like we did the other night. Let’s watch a bunch of horror movies. If this would have been one of them, I probably would’ve been like, ah, probably could have had something better to put into that.
Fun Halloween, scary spirit. Ooh, let’s watch horror movies. This isn’t one of those, but sitting down to watch it because I want to do this podcast. I want to analyze it and appreciate and understand it. It’s definitely a good choice for that type of setting. Again, this is not one that I’m going to go recommend to most people I know.
It’s because it needs, a different viewing and you will find when we have Halloween movie horror movie blast outs, like we do. I’m not going to be bringing these kinds of movies to the table because it’s not a play for the general audience. I’m not going to be like, Hey, Steve, let’s watch martyrs this year.
You’re like, oh, okay. I love it. Yeah. I’m not going to do that. Walk out of the room. Yeah. The houses October built was probably as weird esoteric as I’m going to get. But we watched paranormal activity yesterday cause Jason wanted to and he Wouldn’t go to sleep last night and left every light on downstairs when he did.
Oh, wait, you should’ve done was waited until three in the morning and just stood over his bed and then made a little noise. I actually wouldn’t do that. That is something I would do, but this boy is now taller than I am and he outweighs me. So if he really freaked out before realizing it was me, I don’t know what type of pain I could be in real life.
What was going on some sets in his room now. So I could be skewered very easily. Yeah. All these jokes that we might’ve played in our youth, we have to think twice now that we’re reaching our doTERRA ages. Yeah, you say that, but honestly, I don’t think twice very often, much to my wife’s chagrin. She’s constantly like how old are you when you don’t come on?
Yeah, I’ll admit that. So that was audition. Yes. Yeah, our next movie, I would bring to a Halloween horror Fest. This is grabbers it’s is a much lighter, fair very enjoyable film for me and I hope you’re going to like it too. Cool. All right. Then next time, grabbers.
