Dangan ranna (1996)

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1. 

   Jpit

   Down on his luck man is heading towards a bank he is planning to rob, but realises he doesn't have a mask with him. He tries to steal one from a convenience store, only to end up running through the streets with the clerk from the store in his heels. The clerk has a drug problem and owns money to a yakuza. These two runners bump in to this very yakuza, who in turn starts chasing the clerk. This yakuza too has issues of his own. This sequence with three characters chasing each other which this was build around, it wasn't filled with adrenaline in the style of Sogo Ishii's Shuffle, it was more like three characters running in line with a moderate pace, with nothing going on. They're just kind of running. Once the characters see a woman picking up something she dropped and we see the different ways the characters fantasise about her, but all you see is the woman in the same room with the same bed, just dressed differently or moaning in a different manner, and that's it. That's not even trying. The tone overall is too silly, and the level of humor is bad. Other thing that comes to my mind is the cop character with glasses who is otherwise quiet, but when it turns out he likes guns, he starts, like, name-dropping different types of guns he enjoys with the kind of serious and firm tone, and that's joke I guess. Then he starts going about how, "we need to go get them American style. Freeze, get on the ground!", something like that. Well I'm paraphrasing, but he says those last lines in English. Reminded of Kitano's Ryuzo and the Seven Henchmen, where one of the characters is called 'Mac', because he's a big Steve McQueen fan who wears a leather coat, pilot glasses and a revolver. That kind of stuff, it just feels childish.
   
   Even with these kind of zany cases, it would often work much better if the characters didn't act like they were in that type of movie. This is especially true with the long-haired convenience store clerk. It's a common problem for me. Katsuhito Ishii's Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl, the film I watched earlier this year, that too seemed to suffer from a problem such as this. And it's not just that, the randomness of the storytelling is another thing. The convenience store clerk has a drug problem, the yakuza feels bad for failing to protect his boss, the introduction of a group of yakuzas and the introduction of a group of cops, these random, forgettable non-characters who take up the screen and offer nothing. They throw all this stuff one after another, without any real build up or storytelling, and it only helps to make the whole thing feel more confusing, and a mess with that. I thought of the movie Drive by SABU while watching, though I only found out after watching that it was from the same director. Not very surprising, as that movie seemed to have somewhat similar problems. It may not have been as bad as this, but the way I remember, the overall tone and the way the characters acted just made it a bit of a frustrating view as it went on. 5 years 1 month ago

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