Darker Than Black

A few years back...well, at the dawn of the new millenium, anyways, it was possible to look at Japanese anime as the ground under which a new way of storytelling might grow. Certainly a new style was sprouting there, what with shows like COWBOY BEBOP, NEON GENESIS EVANGELIAN, VISION OF ESCAFLOWNE, REVOLUTIONARY GIRL UTENA, FOOLY COOLY and THE BIG O. But we are nearly ten years away from that profusion of narrative innovation, and the world of postmodern storytelling is looking bleak as can be. New anime series are leaping up with regularity, but none are filling the void left by these turn-of-the-millenium wonders.

These now older shows provided fertile ground for new innovations in narrative. For one thing, none of them quite stuck in what appeared to be their respective genres. COWBOY BEBOP is a perfect example; it was a space opera of sorts, but it drew inspiration from beatnik culture, 70s kung fu films, yakuza movies and Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass. Rather than the exploratory fervor of Star Trek, BEBOP's space odyssey had a self-annihilating fatalist drive towards extinction. The show ends quietly, rather than with a bang. Most of the supporting characters have simply wandered off by the end, and rather than an our way of life being obliterated, a la AKIRA, one man meets the destiny he has sought hard to arrange. The stakes are small - or, more accurately, they are personal.
BEBOP may be the smallest-scale story of these large, 26+ episode series - although UTENA, for all its harping about an "absolute destiny apocalypse," ends with one girl missing from a school - our hero, albeit, but a small event in the scope of the universe around us. Those shows that sought to end things with a bigger bang did so in surprising new ways. No doomsday timer in FOOLY COOLY; rather, a building that looks like a giant iron is made to begin "ironing" a town full of eccentrics by a giant robot hand. "Well," says one on-looker to the havoc; "it always looked like an iron." Meanwhile, THE BIG O ends with a wild stripping-away of everything that seemed real about the show. In the end a giant robot is walking across the world turning it into a soundstage, and lights are falling from the heavens. Rather more metaphorical than AKIRA ever managed, with its explosions inside an Olympic stadium.

Contemporary anime has taken some cues from the successful turn-of-the-century shows, but now the tables seem to be turning. While the older product seemed prime to replace live action movies as a fount of new storytelling modes, modern anime seems to want to emulate old genres and styles more slavishly. The animation is definitely more sophisticated than it was in 2000; but the storytelling has taken a back seat.

DARKER THAN BLACK, a new series from Studio Bones (they animated the similarly ambitious and problematic WOLF'S RAIN a while ago), displays all of the virtues and problems of modern anime. It has intriguing elements that seem to spring from the late-90s, adventurous anime, but it tries to wrap them up like a Dirty Harry sequel - convincing us that all will be right in the world, and that things will return to equilibrium (note that the original DIRTY HARRY has the cop throwing away his badge in despair - yet the sequels saw fit for him to fish the badge out of the drink and put it on again like nothing happened). Many of the plots are very clever and passionate, but the story goes for AKIRA-like bombast at its finish, and relinquishes its most impressive assets: namely, modest, meticulous character detail.

Like almost every adult-oriented anime ever, DARKER THAN BLACK begins in the wake of an apocalypse. Two gates have mysteriously appeared on the globe: a "Heaven Gate" in South America and a "Hell Gate" in Tokyo, Japan. Behind the gates, parts of cities are obliterated wastelands, fatal to humans. Shortly after the appearance of the gates, a new species of humanoids began to appear all over the world. They looked and acted basically like humans, but these new people, called "Contractors," had special powers they could employ, for which they payed a high price.

The series excels here. The contractors have fantastic powers, which are explicated with beautiful animation and clever storytelling. And their penance for these powers is more fascinating than the powers themselves. A teleporter must arrange stones in order on a tabletop after each teleportation. A man who can turn liquids to stone has to smoke a cigarette (which he hates) after every time he employs the power. His partner, an MI-6 agent who looks like a new-future version of Coffy, has to drink a beer - which she simply loves - after every time she manipulates the weather.

These contractors are a secret and secretive group. After normal humans see their powers, they erase those humans' memories of the encounter. However, the contractors aren't united for any common goal. Able to suppress most human emotion, they work mostly as assassins; wetworks agents for the CIA, for MI-6, for terrorists, or for one of the mysterious "syndicates" - secret societies to rival Fantomas and Irma Vep's Vampires. One such syndicate employs a sinister contractor known as "The Black Reaper," an acrobatic character in a harlequin mask and black coat, who electrocutes with a touch. He is sort of our main character in the series, and he works against the grain, killing contractors without remorse but trying to save humans caught up in the contractors' criminal underworld.

The "Black Reaper" is a young Chinese immigrant named Li Shengshun. In the beginning of the story he stumbles onto one of the show's clever deviancies from convention: he moves into a student apartment building filled with international students. While he barely interacts with these people, other members of the cast build rapport with these neighbors. Indeed, part of the problem with the series as a whole is that it takes all of 26 episodes for Li Shengshun to warm up to any of the other characters. At that point they are all laying their lives on the line in a very confused and dispiriting "end-of-the-world" scenario that rolls back all of the series innovations to expose a very conservative core.

The primary strength of the show is character. We come to know and genuinely care about many of the members of the supporting cast, from a blusterous private eye named Kurosawa Gai and his cosplay-clothed young assistant (the show's main comic relief) to a talking cat with a rich, sonorous voice and a head that can connect to computer interfaces. The characters who we wait on most are Li Shengshun and his medium, a seemingly blind goth-garbed girl named Lin. These two crack their veneers so slowly that the wait almost isn't worth it, and in the meantime we come to identify closely with the police officer who is pursuing Li, the human liason between Li and his syndicate, the talking cat, the police officer's three assistants, the owner of a noodle shop and his daughter, and the various contractors we meet along the way.

The series is composed of a series of 2-episode story arcs, many of which focus on other characters besides Li. One of the most effective deals with Lin's past before she became the practically inert medium for Li's intelligence-gathering. Lin, it turns out, was a European child studying piano with a melancholy music professor. The professor secretly loved Lin's mother, and when Lin's father died in a plane crash, the mother tried to make a romantic connection with the professor. Lin entered the room right at that moment, and tragedy resulted. Now the professor has arrived in Tokyo, looking for Lin. Meanwhile, two contractors have been dispatched to remove Lin from Li's team, and Li races to stop them. The contractors in this episode are a fascinating pair - the best, in fact, in the series. One appears to be an opera singer, and the other looks like a Charles-Dickens-vagabond. The mismatched pair spend most of their two episodes driving a car cross-country to find Lin, and they engage in some very droll conversations that play out like the talk between Sam Jackson and John Travolta in PULP FICTION. By the end of this tirade of blankface conversation, we know enough about these two contractors that their deaths at The Black Reapers hands at the end of the episodes genuinely hurts. This gentle buildup of character is the primary success of the show, and in many cases characters remain in the show and turn up again and again until near the end. And this brings us to that end, and to the horrible failing of the show.

After we've built this network of engrossing characters, and watched them play out their lives in various small, dramatic set pieces, the series comes together in the last three episodes and plunges head-first into a doomsday scenario. The scenario itself couldn't be more convoluted; suffice to say, it involves the government of Japan overrun by syndicate goons and crazy professors who plan to aim a laser cannon at the hellgate and refract its energy through a translucent "meteor shard" in order to eradicate all the contractors in the world in one fell swoop. Could this really happen, wonders the very appealing police officer who has been tracking Li Shengshun. "We've done tests," insists one of the cackling scientists. Really? I thought to myself, my primitive bullshit detector finally flagging, how could they have done that? Next I found myself wondering why the conspirators would be telling the police officer any of their plan. Everything she has done in the show has been upright and unquestionably humane. Did they actually believe she would join them in a secret cabal? But this is only one of the strands of plot in the show that gets squeezed and bent out of shape to accommodate the doomsday scenario of the last few episodes. In the final minutes of the show we learn that Li Shengshun has never been a contractor at all. Really? I thought to myself, primitive bullshit detector hitting the wall. Then how did he do all that cool electrocuting and swinging around on ziplines? Yes, the nominal hero swings everywhere on ziplines. He's like real-world Spiderman in that regard. It is one of the coolest things about the show. Note to anime writers: build a show entirely comprised of zipline action sequences. Maybe a hit? We shall see.

Simply put, a conservative compulsion on the part of the producers or writers or director just torpedoes this show. Most of the episode arcs are quite compelling, and one feels both a drive to know more and a real reticence to leave the proceedings for some "better world" at the end of the apocalypse rainbow. Li Shengshun's past is quite compelling, but it is never exposited in a satisfactory way. We see him involved in a massive contractor battle in South America, which we are told leads to an incredible explosion that decimates most of Brazil. Then in the final episode we actually see scenes of that battle. We tense, hoping for revelation, but the scenes are handled so cryptically that nothing is made clear. We are given to understand that after the events of this battle, Li Shengshun has somehow carried his sister in his own body, without being aware - he has spent the entire series searching for his sister. I would have liked some more practical information here. What the hell actually happened? How could he be unaware that he was harboring his sister's psyche, and that the contractor-like powers he possessed actually belonged to his sister? You want to stop the series here and rewind it and tell it again, the way one can intervene in a lucid dream. Wouldn't it have been more in keeping with the wonderful, small scope of the series if Li Shengshun's sister simply disappeared somewhere real and plausible? Couldn't his actual search for his sister be metaphor enough, without making it a completely metaphorical search for the sister inside his own psyche? Psychological realism has been the lynchpin of the show up until this point - we care for the characters simply because we can identify with them and believe in them. This pseudo-Freudian breakdown of the show's dramatic crux harkens back to an earlier era of Gundam-style shows where people learn that the real key to defeating the impending apocalypse lies in believing in themselves and unlocking blocked parts of their psyches through introspection and teamwork. Frankly, this crap was always happening in 80s anime, and one part of the ending to NEON GENESIS EVANGELIAN that felt alarmingly right was the parody of this self-realization; in EVANGELIAN, this psychological breakthrough means nothing; the physical threats in the show have all been defeated two episodes prior, and the unlocking of the hero's buried ability to think positively about himself is pointless even more than it is rendundant - and this is given special irony (as a parody of all those more complacent, cookie-cutter plots of previous shows) in that the hero didn't win the day with this new positive self-image, but rather, with his recessive, negative self-image of before.

I have another axe to grind, in that above the limits of other film and television anime has often been the source of genuinely-felt vicarious romantic feelings: one aches for romance between Roger and Dorothy in THE BIG O, just as one shirks at every awkward sexual feint or parry in Fooly Cooly. And where in most modern film is there a more fully explicated romance than in the manic early-2000s anime HIS AND HER CIRCUMSTANCES, in which a teenage couple goes through every permutation of a romance, from shy crush to mature relationship evolving past pure compulsion and dependency, before the final credits roll? DARKER THAN BLACK builds a tense pre-romantic interplay between Li Shengshun and the cop who is chasing him. By the end of the show, the cop knows Li Shengshun so well that she is able to identify him as the "Black Reaper" on a grainy video image. The romantic tension draws toward the hot and the heavy...but it never gets there. In the end the cop and the killer, the heroine and the hero, never meet. Conservative convention bows its head and drools all over the story. The cop and the killer can never be together. I would have liked, just for this once, for the story to play out in a less gone-over vein. The cop is just as much in danger from her superiors at the end of the story as Li Shengshun is - and incidentally it is suggested that their employers are in fact the very same people. Why couldn't they just lay their cards on the table with each other and try to make things work together? Maybe in South America, or what's left of it? I was reminded of the end of David Cronenberg's EASTERN PROMISES, where Naomi Watts and Viggo Mortensen reveal their attraction to each other, but remain in their cloistered worlds, separate from one another. Why couldn't they have given love a chance? I wondered. Then the story might have become truly and naturally dangerous. It's not as if people don't generally take chances on dangerous relationships in real life. DARKER THAN BLACK stands in just the same sphere as EASTERN PROMISES; filled with promise that never delivers. And, like EASTERN PROMISES, which is also full of spies and double-agents, DARKER THAN BLACK plays its cards so close to its chest that when the world is blowing up at the end of the story, you long for people to just throw down with important confessions and revelations. The end is nigh! Why couldn't they start telling each other how they felt? Or, if they were never going to do it anyway, why bring the pot to such a boil?

Part of me longs for the impossible here, of course. I want the romance, the danger, the confessions of true feelings...without the end-of-the-world scenario. The show that mixes that off-kilter cocktail will be one for the ages. As it is, DARKER THAN BLACK is beautiful, controlled, well-explicated...until the ending, where it jettisons all its slow-building momentum and swaps out its intimate, well-balanced plot in exchange for AKIRA's exploding stadiums. It's time for anime writers to turn back the clock and take a good look at 1999, when something new was possible.

Watchmen amiss.

WATCHMEN, the movie based on the cult classic graphic novel of the same name, hit theaters today, and the reviews are out. In Variety, Justin Chang calls it, "a meditation on the nature and value of heroism in uncertain times..." Yikes. What does that even mean? The uncertain times Chang refers to appear in WATCHMEN as a nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States, circa the mid-1980s.

As usual with science-fiction movies, Roger Ebert remains neutral. He thinks it makes comic books seem quite adult and sophisticated, and he plans to see the picture again in IMAX. Kenneth Turan's review is one of the most interesting and spot-on. An excerpt: "(director Zack) Snyder has been unable to create a satisfying tone for the proceedings. While the graphic novel played everything as realistically as it could, the film feels artificially stylized and inappropriately cartoonish. That, in turn, undercuts the film's key point that these superheroes have very human flaws and limitations."

I saw it at 12:01 this morning. Leaving the theater three hours later, the audience gave a long and thorough ovation. I didn't join in with them. Having read the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel earlier in the year, I was amongst those thrilled by the previews for the picture; most especially at how many images in the previews matched images in the comic with eerie tenacity. The movie packs panels in as if this was its sole mission, and the story, which made basic sense in the comic, seemed almost incoherent in the film adaptation. More to the point, it seemed purposeless. One could argue the same case for the comic book, as Anthony Lane does in the New Yorker. True. The graphic novel, while intensely wrought with layers of detail, is passed its "sell-by" date, and director Snyder doesn't seem to care. He has rooted the movie in a strange alternate future in which it is the mid-80s again, Nixon is still president, and America has won the Vietnam war, thanks to a blue demon with an unnerving phallus called Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan strides across screen, member swinging (a somewhat different interpretation than that in the comic book, where Manhattan seemed to have no genitalia), extending his arm towards Vietcong soldiers and vaporizing them in an explosion of blood. Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" thundered on the soundtrack. The audience laughed. And I started wondering how many people in the audience had any real sense of the history behind Vietnam. Did this seen legit to them? It seemed as if Snyder wasn't trying to recreate Vietnam, as much as he was trying to recreate APOCALYPSE NOW.

I have seen Zack Snyder's remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, and I have seen his other comic book adaptation, Frank Miller's 300. DAWN OF THE DEAD impressed me as interesting, tense and fun-a worthwhile expansion of the original film. 300 was pretty terrible, with only Gerard Butler distinguishing himself amidst the fake plastic abdominals and slow-motion football take-downs. 300, like WATCHMEN, seems indifferent to tone or feel, and Snyder seems willing to disregard poor performances in favor of slavish visual replication of comic book panels.

If that didn't seem the emphasis in DAWN OF THE DEAD, it was perhaps because that film was filled with talented performers like Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames and Mekhi Phipher, who had many a time to contend with standing out in a bad movie. All those performers ganged up together and made the degree of acting brought to bear in DAWN OF THE DEAD a cut above average. I think Snyder had very little to do with it. 300 was peppered with performances ranging from bizarre to flat bad, as witness a lost David Wenham and the sheer insanity of the way the film treats Darius. What WATCHMEN suffers from more than anything is some of the lousiest performances in a recent feature film. Between this and miscasting, it seems as if the director doesn't know a stellar performances from a flaccid carp. To pick one example, Jeffrey Dean Morgan looks just like the Comedian character in the graphic novel, but he has none of the resolve of the Comedian in the story. A genuine anarchist, the Comedian is shown executing a woman who was carrying his child, lighting fleeing Vietcong soldiers on fire with a grin, and raping his fellow "Minuteman" Sally Jupiter. The Comedian of the comic only cracks when he learns of the villain's insidious plan for world peace-the prospect is so far beyond his simple need for mayhem in life that he just cracks-but rather than playing the role as a cold-hearted, self-aware sadist, Morgan tries to see him as a likeable, sympathetic guy. The Comedian of the movie is filled with self-doubt, something which in the graphic novel clearly enters his psyche only when he discovers that the world of militant chaos he has lived in and loved for so many years is about to go up in smoke. Morgan looks ready to bear a wounded soul to his illegitimate daughter and even to milquetoast superhero Nite Owl.

Speaking of Nite Owl, here's some of the worst casting of the picture. Patrick Wilson seems committed to channeling Christopher Reeves Clark Kent in this part. As we understand it in the story, Nite Owl is a former superhero who hung up his cloak when the Keene act outlawed costumed vigilantes. He sits around eating well and getting very complacent. When he finally dons his superhero costume again, in an effort to dispatch his fear of nuclear armageddon and regain his virility, he has trouble fitting the waistline. Early on they appear to be trying to stuff Patrick Wilson's gut and make him look dowdy. Then Wilson takes off all his clothes for an abortive sex scene, and we see not some pudgy, middle-aged guy who writes articles for ornithology magazines, but rather a guy built like a rugby player. Wilson is ripped-but this is obvious even when they have stuffed his gut-his face remains lean and his eyes hungry and perceptive. Sure, Wilson looks a lot like Nite Owl in the face, but every move he makes to appear this character comes across as a put-on; cleverly thought-out, but not really felt.

Sally Jupiter, the former Silk Spectre, is the worst bit of this whole squalid affair, and final proof of Snyder's indifference to performance. Carla Gugino plays the young Jupiter in the flashback scenes, and she is statuesque and pretty appropriate for the role. The problem is that most of her screen-time is devoted to the older incarnation of Jupiter as the mother of the current Silk Spectre. So, as is the grotesque custom in current Hollywood, rather than hire a capable elderly actress, they simply cover the young Gugino in prosthetic wrinkles that fail to hide a full, round-cheeked, young face. Then Ms. Gugino ambles around conveying her impression of an elderly woman. It's a little like watching Blanche DuBois in a state-college production of "A Streetcar Named Desire." The performance, so central to what meaning remains in the graphic novel, is intolerably bad in the film, and it simply calls attention to the millions of dollars poured into other aspects of the production while the performances wallow langorously, always refusing to gel into more than their disparate, nearly incoherent parts.

That's the main problem with the WATCHMEN movie, in a nutshell; while millions of dollars went into creating perfect comic-book panels on film, no one was minding the store on the performance front. The drama present in the dense plot of WATCHMEN, largely preserved by Snyder and company, fails to coalesce because nobody is acting on the same wavelength. Often they don't even appear to be in the same room together. And so no tone ever comes together, and none of the more emotional beats of the story register properly.

Of course, it's a popular phenomenon, well-promoted by the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world (would Time Magazine put it on their list of the century's most important books if Time Warner didn't have to promote the movie like crazy?), and it will probably gross tons of money and follow the same route to ersatz glory as 300 did. Every week I meet another person who loved 300, and my spirits sink. Is this what it's come down to? Has the subtle sway of drama been completely excised from popular filmmaking for the general population? Does it matter that we identify the emotions and motivation behind a character's actions? Is action enough? The fights in WATCHMEN throw down as hard as in a Jet Li movie cross-polinated with FRIDAY THE 13th. Maybe that's enough for some folks, but, well, yikes.

5 Directors You Should Know

Nowadays the Cahiers du Cinema critics' "Auteur Theory"-basically that most movies, the product of many hands, actually have a primary author, which is usually the director-is accepted pretty much unilaterally. So prevalent is it, that even major movie studios, usually the last holdouts against popular change, hire certain directors to be auteurs. Of course there are still many pictures here and everywhere that are more produced-or just coralled into being-than directed, but what one can't deny is that from the inception of film many bold directors have exercised an authorial hand over the proceedings, and stamped their names irrevocably upon a film. We all know, for instance, who Steven Spielberg is, and we can probably summon up images in our heads of E.T. or JAWS or maybe even SCHINDLER'S LIST. Though perhaps very few of us might have recognized his imprint on the episodes of Columbo he directed. I would bet many young fans of action movies might know who Michael Bay is-probably many fans could describe for you the peculiar authorial traits Bay brings to his films (in his case no great compliment to a motion picture, or its target audience).



For those of you who, like me, end up "reading" a lot of movies, you might recognize the authorship of some famous names: Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, or Michaelangelo Antonioni, for example. And there's a great deal of critical work out there which lays plain the auteur traits of these directors and more. There are autobiographies and critical analysis of Bergman, of Luis Bunuel, production style and subject analysis of the traits of directors like Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, even loving treatises to some of the greatest filmmakers, from Jean Renoir to Kenji Mizoguchi. There are comprehensive genre analyses that group great names together: the westerns of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher; the noir films of Nicholas Ray, Jules Dassin, Robert Wise, Jacques Tourner; horror film fans have made a cottage industry out of identifying and illuminating their patron saints, from John Carpenter to Terry Fisher, James Whale to Wes Craven. There's more names than you can shake a stick at.



Still, a lot of names fall through the cracks. As it happens, a good 15 of my favorite directors-wonderful, distinctive auteurs, all of them-sit in critical neglect, missing vital works of criticism and analysis, biographies and retrospective celebrations. Many of these are just now beginning to slip into critical consciousness, but some have yet to be properly illuminated for their special talents and for their particular voices.



In my next few posts I'm going to focus on a group of five directors; vivid auteurs, who everyone ought to know as well as Steven Spielberg. Hopefully, when this is through, you'll know them better than you know the work of Spielberg or Lucas or Michael Bay, or John Hughes.

Here are the five: Robert Altman, King Hu, Jean-Pierre Melville, Seijun Suzuki, Johnnie To.They have unity as a group in that they all might be called filmic formalists. Each of them deal in diverse genres of filmmaking (significantly three of them made a more permanent home in crime pictures, a longtime haven for formal abstraction in the cinema) and in every instance the genre is bent to accommodate the special concerns of the author. This might be said to be true of many auteur filmmakers-Ingmar Bergman, for example, was often said to be making horror pictures that were nonetheless inescapably Bergman-but formalists are somewhat different. While many auteurs are identified by a set of habits and concerns, like Bergman's obsessions with personal suffering and agnosticism, or Antonioni's intellectual despair of human communication, formalists are more closely associated with a style. In the case of each of these directors, it is a deeply personal and codified style that is present in all their pictures (certain allowances being made for Johnnie To, whose auteur voice emerged freakishly in the middle of his ongoing career), and it is this style that is the source both of their auteur status and their critical neglect. In each case the filmmaker is treated as a minor figure, or a willful maverick outside the realm of meaningful moviemaking. Nothing further from the truth. So in these articles I'll attempt to prove, through analysis and enthusiasm, the quintessential merits of a series of abstract formalists: the stripped-down crime methodologies of Melville, which melt upon analysis into existential frescoes; King Hu's writhing labyrinths of struggle; Seijun Suzuki's subsumed narratives and absurdist interior monologues. Each of these picture-makers is a relevant artist, and all of their pictures are a whomping good time. I hope you see some of the pictures I'll mention, and I hope you enjoy the writing.