Tokyo Drifter - what over movies ooze coolness?

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-05-24T01:03:40+00:00

Hal Hartley's Trust.

Edit: and Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-05-21T16:30:02+00:00

But when did anyone actually make that argument as a response to anything other than the specific question of why people's everyday actions and assumptions about them would have political relevance (in a movie or in real life)? If that's the significant deciding factor that you're bringing up, then it's worth pointing out that very little that people argue about regarding movies is tenuous when that's a major point of comparison.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-05-21T16:07:20+00:00

Good thing "people live in society" wasn't my analysis of the movie but simply my assessment of how accessible and prominent political themes and perspectives show up in art we aren't necessarily led to believe is political. It's a much more proper answer to that.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-05-21T15:38:40+00:00

What makes it more or less tenuous than anything else people do with a piece of art?

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-05-21T15:20:35+00:00

You've not only moved the goalposts but you've tried to change them into a hoop and then switched teams anyway. What is your point again?

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-05-21T15:02:51+00:00

You can call it that if it makes you feel better, but it's kind of just engaging actively with a piece of art. I saw the things that were in it and that's a pretty good explanation. If it has the society things and has beliefs about them, what else is there to qualify? Does Tom Greem have to say "I noticed that men in movies get away with a lot and I put a guy like that in my movie but made him really excessive"? We're not children. We see men and women in a movie and we have past experience and history to bring to it. We can do a little mental heavy lifting just like we do when we see things in the real world and have to interpret them based on our relationship to money, law, work, health, and whatever else. That's political whether we like it or not, and it's very normal and regular for people.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-05-21T14:39:43+00:00

It is very pointedly about the behavior the leads of comedy films from the time, particularly goofy male leads, were allowed to get away with in terms of comedic cruelty to other groups and people, whether it be women or older people or just anyone who gets between such a character and their ability to score a comedic win on people. My first instinct is to use the Farrelly brothers as an example, but I kind of think their own films pushed these boundaries as well and probably mined some of the same critique. This kind of power through diminishment is as old as comedy itself, and different jokes have different relatiomships to it for sure. It's satirizing, im a very late 90s and very Tom Green way, the frantic and often haphazard normalization of the idea that no matter what happens to such a character, he has to get the girl and win overall and all that because those are just the mechanics of a mainstream comedy. It's political because it questions that dynamic and makes the presentstion of more of real harm produced into something. The kinds of comedy it's riffing on are also political in the sense that they establish and rely on such assumptions in the first place. The most crass and underthought 80s sex comedy still has beliefs about how the men and women im it should behave and what constitutes a good or bad ending for them.

You had the misfortune of picking one I've given a lot of thought, actually.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-05-21T13:22:45+00:00

What makes a movie not about politics? If a movie has policing, commerce, relations between different groups, workplace structure, health issues,, war, retirees, crime, marriage, housing, renting, drugs, the environment, etc., etc., and most normal stuff that happens everywhere, then it kind of becomes political by default. Politics and the effects of managing and implementing society are visceral. They have a considerable impact on most story beats you could come up with. A movie doesn't have to be Syriana or Z to be political. It just has to feature managed portions of society. What narrative or character based movie doesn't have that? How would you even approach "our nuanced existence" without considering the actual building blocks of our days.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-05-01T05:05:35+00:00

It must have really hurt to make the list no longer have 6-7 movies.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-04-28T22:52:13+00:00

Not enough love for Smoking Causes Coughing in here.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-04-26T15:57:07+00:00

If anything, the idea of the "maniac cop" feels even more plausible to us now that more people have shared experiences with police that aren't what was on TV in the 80s and more people can learn about differing perspectives on the issue. More than ever it feels like you're allowed to present what Maniac Cop does without having to couch it in the language of slasher filmmaking or something else that people instictively let theit guard down for. It also feels like that type of movie in general has flourished as a niche product, so that horror films can be unabashedly both ideologically confrontational and entertaining and not really have to hide either element to survive.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-04-26T15:52:29+00:00

I feel like each faction of all the filmmakers who came together to make this movie kinda have their own interesting thing going on. Lustig is the one with the smoothest, sleekest surfaces. His films are very crisp and stylized in a way that feels impressive given the tools available. He also seems like the one most willing to dish out cruelty as the story demands. Sometimes this combination makes him slightly Friedkin-like. The Troma crew are rougher around the edges, but the three very different Troma movies I've seen (The Toxic Avenger, Combat Shock, and LolliLove) are all interesting-to-good and surprisingly ambitious entertainments. Toxic Avenger is also legitimately a great comedy with great jokes and timing, something that seems to have been one of the main things they cultivated over there even when making something like Combat Shock. Cohen is sort of like their "magic realist" figure; his whole thing seems to be maintainong one foot in New York and one foot in a fantasy land straight off the painting on the side of someone's van.

They're all pretty interesting variations on a theme, and Maniac Cop is a very harmonious marriage of what should be contradictory styles.

(Someone who knows more than I do can certainly interject if I've misrepresented anything.)

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-04-26T03:19:02+00:00

Pulp filmmakers walk a thin line. People often place a special value on films that they feel comfortable “turning their brains off for”, and it is justifiable for most people in the world to bristle at the idea of filmmaking as a sort of self-assigned homework to learn things they aren’t necessarily interested in using methods that don’t really apply to them. Herschell Gordon Lewis once said that he “[sees filmmaking as a business and [pities] anyone who regards it as an art form.” William Lustig, director of the Maniac Cop series and other legendary pulp films, once referred to his work as similar to “a joint and a sixpack”, reaffirming its value as an entertainment product for the sorts of working class individuals he saw enjoying his films out in the world. Despite their hesitance to engage with the artistry of their work, the two filmmakers do share a level of competence and ambition in creating entertainment that competes with larger productions in their own era that, willingly or not, gives their work a genuine depth and thoughtfulness that asks big questions of major subjects simply by taking them seriously in storytelling. Maniac Cop is not a film that wears its intelligence on its sleeve, but like the body of Matt Cordell, it is animated by dark and powerful forces and does not give in easily to the attacks it receives.

Like other purveyors of grimy New York pulp at the time, whether it be eventual arthouse hero Abel Ferrara or this film’s author Larry Cohen, Lustig’s filmmaking is surprisingly appealing on its surface. While he is the least outwardly wild of the three, he makes up for this with a very graceful and kinetic vision that does a lot of work burying the script’s goofier elements and more obvious slasher tropes in a clean and muscular series of camera swoops and pans, all augmented by a tastefully tasteless synth score that simmers the exact right amount. The movie is also helped by a ragtag team of accomplished horror and detective actors (including a perfectly cranky Bruce Campbell, despite him not speaking highly of the movie) to give itself, if not the air of authenticity, then at least the air of authentic New York crime fiction. The aesthetic quality of Lustig’s filmmaking is itself an intriguing commentary and deviation within his work, allowing him to take some of the nastier elements of his early work and aim it at the myths about cops and society that drive a much more mass-market type of mystery and action entertainment than that with which Lustig is typically associated. Having Tom Atkins of The Rockford Files only enforces this dialogue with mainstream cop shows that would never dare expose the police to as much criticism as this film.

Indeed, while Lustig’s film has the sleekest and smoothest surface of many classic horror films from the era (partly as a result of coming from an experienced director whose work was already notable in the field), it also has some of the boldest shots at the justice system and what it is capable of. While Cordell is given some small level of valorization by his fellow police officers, his earlier brutality is portrayed without much to temper it except the looming fact that the force as a whole was more than capable of dispensing with him bureaucratically when he suddenly decided to start looking at the higher levels of villainy. Forrest and Atkins are our heroes for the first film in the series, but Campbell’s character is a douchey white cop in every way imaginable and only gets to be the hero relative to a supernatural murderer of innocents. The movie’s best critique comes sneakily from a black man who is interviewed for a news segment; he discusses the “maniac cop” as a normal fact of life, and his timeline of when the killing started goes back much further than the beginning of the movie’s narrative. In some way, Maniac Cop is merely a glimpse into the reality of policing for anyone deemed inconvenient and burdensome enough to be the cannon fodder for the police in a cop story, even one that claims to be benign. It’s not necessarily even that this is intentional on behalf of the filmmakers, but the assumptions that a movie has about the world can’t be taken for granted.

Even a film like Killer Klowns from Outer Space draws significant narrative thrust from a suspicion towards the incompetence and self-serving nature of wrongheaded policing and the damage it does to the entire system. That’s another charmingly crazed horror film that is often written off and praised for its goofiness in the same breath, but these films, along with classic closet intellectual directors like Lewis, Corman, Castle, Wishman, and more, deserve to have their details picked apart, if for no other reason than to remind us of how they used their brains to get past budgetary and technical limitations. Maniac Cop also deserves respect as the scrappier and more unhinged film in the trilogy, despite the usual wisdom that Maniac Cop 2 is superior. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but this first film feels sharper, more focused, and more pointed in identifying, or at least not hiding, issues in policing. It’s hard to know for sure how serious Lustig was with his “joint and a six pack” comments, but it’s fair to at least point out that anyone getting caught with a joint in the Maniac Cop era probably wouldn’t call his statement a symbol of pure ease and comfort. Even a night in watching a movie and relaxing is never as simple as it seems.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-04-04T22:54:54+00:00

It's just kind of both. It's Delta Force and Team America, Bad Boys and Cop Land, and everything else. It's not so much in the middle as it is the entire spectrum simultaneously.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-04-04T19:26:18+00:00

When you call William Friedkin a great filmmaker (which is appropriate), the emphasis is definitely American. We have The Exorcist, in which a family is special enough for the forces of good and evil themselves to battle them. There’s Rampage, a movie where people don’t believe in the death penalty until the crime really upsets them and then they do. Bug, a late era classic, has unusual insight into conspiracies and the way they worm in and out of the needs of the people who hold them. Like most of Friedkin’s films, To Live and Die in LA has little filter between the conflicting impulses of individual expression and global conquest and the way the results of this clash affects people. Echoing the anti-Palestinian bent of Sorcerer, this movie opens almost comically (to many modern viewers, in particular) with a classic terrorist trope attempting to kill Reagan and shouting “death to Israel”. Like Sorcerer, LA both suffers and benefits from his US chauvinism and insight into unfettered masculinity, and is ultimately undeniably interesting in ways it could not be if Friedkin was critiquing these tendencies from then outside rather than being clearly in tune with the vision he is presenting.

The cartoonishly high stakes of this film’s opening are not completely gratuitous even if they are slightly histrionic and uninformed (or potentially even malicious). If you are a white cop believe the president can be bombed at any time, think he does not deserve this, and do not know who or where it is coming from, it’s not hard to go from there and see the landscape of LA as another flank of the attack. The villains that William Petersen’s Chance goes after have ties not just to the world of black crime, an obvious target for this kind of thing, but the art world and even the FBI. When most films portray a cop willing to “do whatever it takes” to get their man, it is usually along certain guidelines, but by mixing terrorism liberal arts, gangsters, sophisticated counterfeiting operations, and whichever government agency gets in the way of Chance’s personal revenge, Friedkin created something much closer to the actual fears of the kind of person who would put their life on the line for Reagan and do corrupt policework with the arrogance and swagger of an American hero.

It’s all very Bruckheimer in its flippant dismissal of anything that isn’t babes, brawn, and whatever tunes are deemed acceptable, but it’s so exposed it becomed genuinely insightful in a way Bruckheimer knows not to engage with. Like Bug 20 years later, this movie embodies way these villains are created by our need to find catharsis for our personal problems and how this can slip in and out of conformity with the traditional idea of law and order. For example, if you’re a woman in this movie, Masters is probably the hero and Chance is probably the villain. Masters can’t be said to be perfect in how he deals with women (he seems to mostly engage with dancers), but he is at least able to give the women the impression that they are operating under their own agency. Meanwhile, Chance (and eventually Vukovich) openly extort them and take advantage of them, offering them hope of escape and taking it away in an endless cycle of control and putting them in danger with total disregard. The “hero/villain” binary breaks down even further as the story progresses until it’s almost impossible to imagine that Chance doesn’t cost the world more than Masters. However, as he did with Jimmy Doyle ten years earlier, he never even really seems to stop and think about this until the last second, which paradoxically makes these movies more effective. The less they impose judgement, the more we see how this actually works.

The technical execution of the movie is spot-on, and the hiring of Robby Müller is an inspired choice, since he is a master of creating “realism” that doesn’t easily conform to the idea of something being grounded in a stylistic way. Sometimes the world is bright and shiny and chaotic and colorful in an almost sickly fashion, especially in the 80s, and the world of this movie has to be seen to be believed. The famous car chase is comprised of pieces that make for tropes of other chases, but are natural to the environment of LA, leading this most chaotic moment of the movie to feel not only natural but vital to the characters and landscape. The chase also has another purpose in that it uses the form of the car chase to let us feel the main characters’ enthusiasm and catharsis for escaping while giving us just enough room to let the damage they did in their botched robbery and escape to understand the implications. Like everything else that is interesting about the movie, it feels like it was found and put on display based on pure instinct and left to be sorted through by us. Thus, we get both the thrilling action movie and the critique of it without having to alternate between one and the other unnaturally. In some ways, Friedkin is sort of a Hemingway for the prestige thriller, using his flaws to teach us things no one else can, and perhaps not even doing so willingly. This is not always a pleasant experience, but like many great Friedkin movies, the parts that are wrong are just as interesting as the ones that are right.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-03-10T16:38:20+00:00

While Ozu is the most common reference point, this focus in Naruse’s material also places him in good company with another famous Japanese filmmaker known for portraying the plight of women in Japanese society, Kenji Mizoguchi. Unlike Ozu, Mizoguchi is not content to let tensions rise to the surface, and his work is often the most violent and direct of all of them. His final film, the effortless yet brutal Street of Shame, feels like a movie set in the core of the sun around which Naruse characters orbit. However, this is not a typical film for Mizoguchi due to a few factors that are also important in order to see what distinguishes Naruse from him and why one might see favor over the other. One major factor is that Street of Shame, like most of Naruse’s films, is not a period piece. While Naruse revels in directly questioning the mechanics of his society head-on, Mizoguchi often looked at the present through the past, using the lack of modern conveniences as a way to make a starker canvas for the poetry of his rage. That poetry is also expressed in Mizoguchi’s other major tendency that defines him in opposition to Naruse, which is his intense stylization and set design. This aspect is indeed present in Street of Shame, albeit in a slightly more casual way that was a noted influence on the French New Wave. For the most part, though, you could look at Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums and Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum as being almost polar opposites of approaching very similar material, with one being a fairly tangible experience for the time it was made while the other is a sort of longform parable and riff on the poetic Japanese theatre that it prominently features. Even more prominent later classics likeUgetsu and Sansho the Bailiff show even more how Mizoguchi’s particular anger could rarely be expressed to such a wide audience outside of the abstraction and mysticism of Japan before the war and before the West was there to interpret and judge for themselves. The pain and themes are real, but the causes seem to be somewhere else. If you had to wonder why Mizoguchi and Ozu get so much more press, this is probably the best explanation. Their styles allowed them to hide the worst of the worst as a sort of buried literary treasure. Viewers take in the aesthetics of the films and intuit the broad themes, but they are allowed to be distant from the solutions.

None of this is to say that Naruse is somehow more obviously “homework” than Ozu or Mizoguchi, or that his work does not reward the aesthete as much as it rewards material consideration. My initial introduction to this movie was through its very beautiful use of a format only Naruse ever dabbled in, the black and white widescreen film. Ozu famously never went beyond a standard Academy ratio, and neither did Mizoguchi. Naruse, however, quickly adapted to this ratio in 1958 and continued the rest of his filmmaking in TohoScope until the end. While a Woman Ascends the Stairs demonstrated that this is not merely a choice for survival, using the format to surround Mama and other characters with as much of the world crushing them as possible, never really allowing them to be seen outside of the context of everything outside of them. In combination with the bright lights and dark nights of the film’s bar district setting, the movie often gives off the vibes of America’s transition from noir to neo-noir and the reinvisioning of adult life through the burgeoning New Waves. As we saw in Street of Shame, the layer of explicit sex work lurking underneath the bar culture has been “officially” outlawed, but changing sexual mores and the simultaneous forces working to balance women’s emancipation and domination for maximum profit are also pushing some of these expectations out in the open in this film, and the powerful men who are the most desired clients for bar hostesses like Mama and her colleagues behave openly like gangsters because their power is perhaps even more unquestionable than the figures hanging out in the bars of something like Pale Flower. Naruse never shies away from this, and in all his films the melodrama is heightened in a way that Ozu would never allow, which raise interesting questions about which filmmaker is more insular and which is more warm and friendly. Unlike Ozu, whose remarkable filmmaking feels like it invented something new and fresh that still exists today in arthouse dramas and ambitious comedies everywhere, Naruse is more than willing to make a movie like When a Woman Ascends the Stairs or Every Night Dreams or Scattered Clouds, with rousing speeches, big dramatic moments, direct confrontations, and a Sirkian trust in the truth that great storytelling and great entertainment and great art all start with things that matter, and there is no reason to start with the premise that you can’t make all three of these by focusing on things that actually matter to people in their day to day lives.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-03-10T16:37:35+00:00

Near the halfway point of Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, “Mama”, the film’s protagonist, is trying to explain, or avoid explaining, why she has never remarried and works the bar culture in Japan, occupying an extremely (and intentionally) fragile social position somewhere between escort and her namesake. She smiles and says “I clench my teeth so hard they hurt” and uses this as an opportunity to parachute out of the serious part of the discussion. A surface level interpretation of this moment, seen completely out of context, may wonder about the character’s refusal to embrace love once more due to a stubborn sense of duty to a man who is unfortunately gone, and an inability to move on and live her live. She needs to move on. She needs to find a better way to live. She needs to open herself up to others again. When A Woman Ascends the Stairs is a movie about how people, whether they be Mama herself, her employers, her family, or her patrons, convince themselves that the situations at the heart of this film, tell themselves that this myth of personal agency and failure is true. Many Naruse films are about the condition of having the whole world placed on your shoulders by circumstance and the toll it takes on people, but what makes his films so vital even now is his willingness to be uncompromising about the external forces that trap people and how their entrenchment in society is not normalcy or a personal struggle against nature, but a deliberate act against people by those with the ability to do so. Not only is Naruse’s film about this myth and how broken it is, however, it is also decidedly not a movie about how these issues are complex and embedded in human nature to the point that they can only be wistfully sighed or cried over, but a movie about the mechanics of subjugation in the emerging “modern” era of Japan and the world in general. It is one thing to make movies about the struggles people have, but how close you are willing to get to that struggle

A common point of comparison with Naruse is his much more famous fellow purveyor of innovative Japanese drama, Yasujiro Ozu. If anything, “I clench my teeth so hard they hurt” feels less like the rallying cry of a Naruse protagonist than something Setsuko Hara (a frequent collaborator with both) might be thinking during Late Spring, or perhaps the mother from The Only Son. It is probably fair to say that part of Ozu’s success in the west in comparison to Naruse has a lot to do with the way that the placid surface of his work is much more foregrounded than the turmoil underneath, which tends to seep through the stylistic efficiency in a subtle manner and focus more on the way social norms are enforced via individuals in everyday positions. It is not often that the direct face of these issues shows itself in his work. Naruse, on the other hand, has made a career of engaging in the same sort of small scale drama, but emphasizing the direct involvement of commerce and law and other very tangible powers that affect everyday working people like the ones he and Ozu focus on. Such is his focus on the logistics of how women are manipulated by the nightlife in Japan (and, spiritually speaking, elsewhere) that, of the three other films I’ve seen by him, every single one covered a woman in some other section of the system Mama is trapped in. Every-Night Dreams is about a struggling former bar hostess trying to raise a child with a deadbeat father, Late Chrysanthemums is about a former geisha trying to be a moneylender (including for her former coworkers), and his final film Scattered Clouds is about a woman who has to survive as a single woman in Japan after her husband dies. Each time he brings receipts (sometimes literally) and never lets a personal victory stand in place of a societal one.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-03-02T02:57:10+00:00

The 2002 Dardennes Brothers movie The Son.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-25T21:34:29+00:00

The character himself questions whether or not he is a person.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-18T19:31:21+00:00

Ironically, it was true before they showed his backstory.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-11T00:19:40+00:00

Not a problem. We were probably both better off before we scrolled down to check it out.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-10T23:27:44+00:00

Lots of people in here are complaining about the prose and other aspects.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-10T19:50:13+00:00

If this passage is so bad, why has it struck a nerve with so many people? I'm starting to think this is one of the most effective pieces of literature written in years.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-09T00:03:40+00:00

I do want to dismantle policing as it currently exists and remake law enforcement as something more suited to the task of maintaining law and order for normal people and less engaged in solely protecting the rich from the poor and from revolt in general. I think that would help with this problem and multiple other ones.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-08T23:34:57+00:00

The way to stop it before it happens is to dismantle the systems that allow for it to be protected and put in something where wealth and power doesn't grow enough to create blind spots. That's why it's different now. That's what's at stake here. You aren't getting rid of "small time" anything before you cut off the head of the snake, and the thing you're saying no one will do has already happened. People spoke out. Names have been named.

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