Youtube Festival / Reincarnation
M Arnold
ma_iku at hotmail.com
Sun Nov 19 17:28:18 EST 2006
From: "Stefan Nutz" <nuzumaki at gmx.net>
>Here's a subbed exclusive clip of Kurosawa's upcoming "Sakebi"
>(Retribution).
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKRHQUJ7u1o
The second half of the clip looks very familiar. . .
In other news, there's a horror movie "festival" playing at several hundred
theaters around the U.S. right now. (http://www.horrorfestonline.com/). The
eight films in the festival are playing in rotation this weekend only (Nov.
17-19). The series is being advertised as a group of movies that were "never
seen by the public" until now because their content was too graphic and
disturbing (yeah, right--at least two of them are already out on DVD). I
noticed that Shimizu Takashi's 2005 film, Reincarnation (Rinne) was one of
the selections, so I ran out to see it on Friday afternoon. I'm mentioning
it here because Kurosawa Kiyoshi has a cameo as a college instructor in one
scene.
Maybe it's all the Hitchcock theory I've been reading recently (or maybe I
was just braindead after a busy week), but I thought Rinne was very
interesting. The story is about a murder that happened 35 years ago when a
husband and father of two killed his family and all of the people staying in
a rural hotel (ala The Shining). A movie director in 2005 Japan decides to
make a film about the killing, and during the casting process the lead
actresses-to-be starts having hallucinations with little girls running
around and nightmares about being in the hotel during the murders. She
starts to think she's the reincarnation of the killer's daughter, and as the
filming starts and her haunting continues she becomes convinced that she's
going to be murdered by the father's ghost (whose spirit is most likely
inhabiting the director). There's a nice twist at the end though. When the
heroine wakes up from one of her nightmares, she discovers an 8mm camera
left behind by the father. She hands the camera to her manager, who develops
and watches the film. (Some of the footage reminded me of Stanley Kubrick's
home movies in "A Life in Pictures.") Soon enough he realizes that the
father even filmed his killing spree (ala Peeping Tom?), camera in one hand,
knife in the other. Then we get to see what 'really' happened . . .
Michael Arnold
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