Who needs a film of Neuromancer, when we’ve got this music video by Sigue Sigue Sputnik (who knew Japan was cool before many of you were born, I suspect…)

Bonus video: ’21st Century Boy’

When I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of the images that lingered after I finished (and I’m not alone in this) was the coffin hotel that Case calls home in Chiba. The inverse of a ‘coffin hotel’ is, of course, a ‘hotel coffin’ - where presumably the dead would go to spend their after-lives in catered comfort. The problem - and the solution - are really the same for both…namely, how do you house lots of people who aren’t going anywhere in a limited amount of real estate? Simple - just stack them on top of each other.

For 79-year-old Shinya Shimada, paying his respects around the time of Japan’s annual Bon festival, when the spirits of ancestors are believed to return home, means a visit to a modern vault rather than a traditional graveyard.

“Initially, I was a bit uncomfortable with a high-tech grave. But now, I have come to see it positively,” Shimada said.

At the nondescript three-storey building alongside a Buddhist temple, Shimada uses an identity card to dial-up the gravestones and urns carrying his ancestors’ ashes.

A library-stack-like machine behind altars transports them, complete with accompanying music and pictures of the deceased on a TV monitor.

“Looking at their pictures, I actually talk a lot more to my deceased parents and sister,” Shimada said. “Unlike the usual gravestone, this makes me feel nostalgic.”

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There’s a certain irony to Vexille that sets in quickly after the opening credits. The film’s central theme is the subjugation of humanity by an increasing reliance on technology. And yet, the film is itself an example of the very sin the screenwriters seek to purge.

Following closely on the massive success of the CGI film Appleseed, director Fumihiko Sori (aka ‘Sori’) uses the same 2D/3D approach that made the former film a smash hit amongst anime enthusiasts, both here and abroad. Instead of adapting another well-known work, however, Vexille is an entirely new universe, albeit one that borrows heavily from Shirow-san in more ways than one. The result is a film that *almost* succeeds despite itself, a beautiful-looking but fairly run-of-the-mill experience that reminds you of better films, but doesn’t quite achieve their level of success.

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Fans of 2004’s Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade may or may not be aware that it was not Mamoru Oshii’s first foray into the dystopian society portrayed in Hiroyuki Okiura’s film. In fact, the Kerberos Pazer Cops, the organization that officer Kazuki Fuse belongs to, appeared three times before, in a manga series and two live action films. These two films, The Red Spectacles (1987) and its prequel Stray Dog (1991), have recently been issued for the first time in the U.S. by Bandai Entertainment, owing no doubt to the success of the anime.
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My favorite underground media outlet G-Pod (aka Grey Lodge) posted a pair of .torrent files for a couple of really cool Sogo Ishii flicks, Halber Mensch and Burst City. Ishii is sort of the proto-Miike, and these two videos are prime examples of his work.

Halber Mensch is a sort of concert film / video compilation featuring German Industrial band Enstürzende Neubauten, while Burst City is a sort of odd Japanese cyberpunk musical. Well worth checking out if you’re into wierd Japanese movies, industrial music, or both.

Link

Here’s a sample of Halber Mensch, if you want a peek.