tokyo! . ninja scroll . city on fire .

of the three films that make up 'tokyo!' my favourite is easily the michel gondry 'interior design'- a film about the insane density of the city and the lives of two recent migrant sharing the home of a friend. while he finds a job and adulation for his experimental films, she gradually turns into a furniture (literally). with his trademark whimsy and special effects the films worked for me because ti did not try and overstate a profound point about the city. the other two films ended up being 'city films' in the most traditional sense- each presenting a fictional 'tokyo' distorting the current city into something else. in merde! a creature from below the sewers emerges and randomly murders innocent bystanders before descending into an underground littered with fragments of past wars. when he is finally caught and brought to the court, he becomes some sort of a celbrity raking up inherent racist stereotypes. its all a thinly veiled allegory about the east and the west, terrorism and xenophobia. the last of the three films concerns a man who ahs spent 10 years living alone as a recluse, living off the phone. when he finally overcomes his fear of the outside to connect to a pizza delivery woman he realises that the whole city has retreated into private perfections. they only emerge when the earth shakes and then retreat into their private domains immediately.

'ninja scroll' had an outline of a story concerning some devils and a ship full of gold. a swashbuckling hero and heroine whose kisses are poison rush in to save the day with ultra-violence in the most stylised form. bodies are sliced into pieces as blood spurts out in rivers and fountains. great fun- as was 'city on fire'- an old fashioned hong kong action film- before wang war-wai moistened our gaze. a 'white heat' of sorts- an undercover cop (chow yun fat ; fabulous) goes undercover to catch a bunch of jewellery robbers and ends up making friends with one of them.