A Dedicated Life (Kazuo Hara, 1994)
Kazuo Hara's filmmaking M.O. is pretty simple: he attaches himself to compelling, strong-minded characters, turns the camera on, and hopes to come across something interesting in the process. He struck gold with Kenzo Okuzaki in
The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (which you should watch right now!), but his other movies are all pretty boring, and
A Dedicated Life, a documentary on Japanese writer Yasushi Inoue, is no exception.
Inoue is a narcissist par excellence, a sad little man, way too much in love with himself, who spends his time demanding admiration from those around him at boring lectures and boring boring dinner parties. Hara, unfortunately, is working at Inoue's level, trying his hardest to destroy the image the man created for himself over the years, and taking great pleasure in uncovering petty lies such as these:
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Inoue may have been a great artist, but you wouldn't know it from watching this. Which is sad. But I guess that was the point.
"I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society." — Kazuo Hara
Whatever, guy.
The Longest Nite (
Patrick Yau Johnnie To, 1998)
Johnnie To loves the big finale, hum? Let's start at the end then. After 70 minutes of senseless violence, farcical bad ass posturing and silly plot twists, a bald Ching Wan Lau and a bald Tony Leung find each other in a mirror warehouse (?!). Cue ridiculously awesome shootout in which they "kill" each other over and over again in a blaze of exploding glass and heavyhanded symbolism!
*sigh*
Now back to the 70 minutes of film that precede this. In the first round verdict, Clovis called this movie a mix of
Bad Lieutenant,
The Shield and
Pulp Fiction. I would say
The Usual Suspects is a more apt comparison, but that's beside the point. All of those have an emotional core that's completely lacking here. I would go into detail, but I'd merely be cataloguing the numerous ways in which this movie is offputting, which I really don't feel like doing. Instead, I have prepared a Tastelessness Reel to do the job for me. Just play it on a loop until you get a sense of it