BD 159 Creepy

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domino harvey
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BD 159 Creepy

#1 Post by domino harvey » Wed Mar 30, 2016 8:46 am

Announced for the next quarter from MoC

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Finch
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Re: Forthcoming: Creepy

#2 Post by Finch » Sat Jul 02, 2016 1:29 pm

Theatrical release for November so the BD/DVD should follow later that month.

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rapta
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Re: Forthcoming: Creepy

#3 Post by rapta » Sat Jul 02, 2016 7:51 pm

Finch wrote:Theatrical release for November so the BD/DVD should follow later that month.
25th November it looks like.

If it's anything like Journey to the Shore, they'll be releasing it on Dual Format just the week after (or two weeks after like Sweet Bean and Queen of Earth). Might want to get it out in good time for Christmas though, for obvious reasons.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Forthcoming: Creepy

#4 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sat Jul 02, 2016 9:00 pm

Glad to hear this is "in the pipeline".

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What A Disgrace
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Re: Forthcoming: Creepy

#5 Post by What A Disgrace » Thu Aug 25, 2016 12:31 pm

Coming in January. The Amazon page doesn't display the cover art, but it does show up as a thumbnail when searching for the title. It seems to be spine 159. That leaves three spines currently unaccounted for.

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rapta
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Re: Forthcoming: Creepy

#6 Post by rapta » Thu Aug 25, 2016 3:01 pm

What A Disgrace wrote:Coming in January. The Amazon page doesn't display the cover art, but it does show up as a thumbnail when searching for the title. It seems to be spine 159. That leaves three spines currently unaccounted for.
How did you read the spine number? That thumbnail was way too small for me to even see it.

Yeah, interesting they've gone for a January release on this one. Guess they want the theatrical/VoD release to breathe for a couple of months first. That may mean they have Varieté and/or Death in the Garden readied for November/early December instead...

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swo17
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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#7 Post by swo17 » Thu Aug 25, 2016 3:14 pm

You can see it bigger if you change the number that controls the size in the url. It's posted in the MoC cover art thread.

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rapta
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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#8 Post by rapta » Thu Aug 25, 2016 4:43 pm

swo17 wrote:You can see it bigger if you change the number that controls the size in the url. It's posted in the MoC cover art thread.
Thanks for the heads-up.

I wonder if Eureka are picking up Kurosawa's next film The Woman in the Silver Plate (aka Daguerrotype) for the UK? Seems they've gone all-in for two of his latest, so why not his French-language debut?

It'd also be interesting to see if they could get things like Cure or Pulse, but something tells me those are the kinds of films Palisades Tartan are hanging onto for dear life (for whatever reason - it's not like they're actually doing anything of note in the UK market).

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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#9 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Aug 25, 2016 8:35 pm

I'd love to see a great transfer of Charisma....

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dadaistnun
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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#10 Post by dadaistnun » Thu Aug 25, 2016 10:46 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:I'd love to see a great transfer of Charisma....
Yes. I've not kept on top of Kurosawa's films as much as I would like, but this is probably my favorite: weird, creepy, oddly hilarious at times, and beautifully photographed (as far as one can tell from the existing non-anamorphic HVE disc).

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repeat
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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#11 Post by repeat » Fri Sep 23, 2016 6:50 am

Saw this the other day on the big screen, and I can say that those four adjectives attributed above to Charisma certainly fit this one as well: it's probably his (darkly) funniest and most genuinely harrowing film for a while. 130 minutes went breezily by, didn't feel the slowness that people have felt about this and Journey to the Shore (I do remember feeling it slightly in Real though). Crowd seemed to like it, as almost all the critics have done (averaging 95/100 on Critics Round Up): nice to see Kurosawa get some widespread acclaim for a change. Hoping this release will do well for Eureka!

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#12 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sat Jul 08, 2017 12:04 am

I liked Creepy well enough -- but only moderately -- despite not really "believing" hardly any of the plot (rather similar to my reaction to Elle). Didn't feel it was slow (but didn't feel this way about Journey to the Shore either). Curiously, the most interesting (and overall believable) character was the daughter of the creepy neighbor, who was only a supporting character (albeit a not unimportant one).

Not sure why this has sparked essentially zero post-BD release discussion...

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Jean-Luc Garbo
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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#13 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Sat Jul 08, 2017 12:38 am

Feihong had a lengthy analysis of it here.

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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#14 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sat Jul 08, 2017 12:51 am

Jean-Luc Garbo wrote:Feihong had a lengthy analysis of it here.
Feihong wonders about the ending, my sense is that...
SpoilerShow
...the key figure was the girl -- who seemed more resistant, if only fitfully, to the control of the villain. She was able to keep her hatred (and one might assume her desire for revenge) alive. The villain seemed sure of his control over her -- and trusted her most to carry out his orders -- and I would guess she "forgot" to inject the new victims -- just as she did her mother. I suspect I wouldn't have liked the film much at all if this character (and the young actress portraying the character) had not been present

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Mr. Deltoid
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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#15 Post by Mr. Deltoid » Thu Aug 03, 2017 3:02 pm

Overall I thought this was a pretty hackneyed film, pretentious in it's approach to what is - when you boil it all down - a rather schlocky premise. The former detective with a troubled past, who, reluctantly, is drawn back to a case involving a potential serial-killer, is as clichéd as they come, but I went with it initially, hoping that Kurosawa might be able to spin this straw into gold. Unfortunately the film saddles itself with a central coincidence of plot that really takes some swallowing and a rather whiplash-inducing change of character for the protagonist's wife that is a stretch too far. On the plus side, Kurosawa's framing is pretty good, using off-kilter high-angles and empty doorways to generate a palpable tension. It's the kind of film you can see Hollywood remaking in a year or two without having to alter a thing!

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knives
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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#16 Post by knives » Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:16 pm

I liked this, only my third Kurosawa, for a lot of the reasons that feihong seems to have trouble liking it. It takes Kurosawa's Antonioni side and forces it into an intimacy that made me deeply uncomfortable. The ending is kind of a sick laugh proving the villain as ultimately useless. There's no cure for the disease of disconnect.

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Re: BD 159 Creepy

#17 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Mar 26, 2022 4:46 pm

I loved this so much more on a second viewing, and agree with knives regarding his inverted Antonioni reading. My two cents on the ending, following feihong’s excellent post (even if I completely disagree with his take and personal feelings on the film’s parts not gelling):
SpoilerShow
Per usual with KK, I’m inclined not to take anything literally, but broadly metaphorically. I think the ultimate joke is that Nishino’s powers/confidence in the brainwashing drug is less independently potent than he -and we- believe, but rather that it’s this semi-placebo weapon mixed with the key ingredient of an overwhelming desire to connect that makes it effective.

KK seems to be interested in the aspect of dominance as a language of containment (from the nebulous mass of alienation pulsating at the seams) within his social culture. With so much rampant isolation, that’s how most people- at least these neglected characters- translate intimacy as; the girl who lost her family seems to have felt disconnected from her family members in recollection prior to their demises, and Yasuko is easily manipulated by Nishino because she too is so desperate for connection. It’s no coincidence that KK spends a significant portion of the film’s spacious runtime focused on exhibiting her continual magnetism back to Nishino: bringing gifts, trying to forge a connection, to make him like her- submitting to his dominance.

It’s made clear that her actions are not rooted in similar motives to her husband (another thematically relevant segregated relationship). She’s not spying for clues or acting on the confident individuality of her suspicions, but she keeps coming back because she needs this containment-mistaken-as-reciprocal-connection in some indiscernible way. She’s being honest when she talks about Nishino’s creepiness and feeling put off by him, but she only mentions this soberly when she’s with her husband; so it’s fitting that she feels drawn to return to him when she’s alone and her husband is at work- though it’s also implicit that her partner is not providing her with the submissive intimacy she craves, himself now submitting to a life of apathetic routine vs being the active, thirsty detective he was in a prior chapter.

There’s a potentially fatalistically depressing reading where any sense of overtly affectionate reciprocity has been omitted from even one’s subconscious drives, thus creating the allure of dominant-submissive containment in strange unaffectionate forms as the only chance left at “connection” by the updated evolution of a psychosocial definition of intimacy. The idea of our collective brains morphing, against thousands of years of ingrained nature in response to a withering social context, is as nightmarish as it gets from a KK-branded intervention of inexplicit and subversive philosophical query.

Since I don’t think it’s the literal drug itself that sways a person into submission, but their own insecurities and introverted needs, I believe Koichi is ‘immune’ to the drug because he’s not desperate and already complacent in an existence of individualism- which is perversely viewed as equally sad, despite it being the more literally self-preserving trait to possess in this milieu. For KK, mental well-being is validated with equitable compassion as a life-or-death physical survivalism, and the concept of self-actualization as a death certificate to an existence of complacent stagnancy within an antisocial cocoon is so warped that I can’t believe he manages to pull off such a backwards insinuation. KK is trapping us deterministically to be helplessly alone at every turn, through every character, and every decision.

Mio is similarly ‘resilient’, at least that’s what I gather- that she doesn’t ‘need’ this false security that Nishino ironically provides his other victims- who then presents with equal banality once he has them under his spell! Perhaps her family was one of the few loving ones left. That’s what I assume, and it’s in this elision that lies the greatest tragedy of the film: that the worst consequences initiated by killers like Nishino aren’t necessarily the micro-instances of murder, but a macro-effect of wiping out all remaining affection and intimacy from this society, by the nature of their erratic anti-choosing strategy. Some victims might already be caught in cycles of lifeless existences and beyond hope, but is KK positing that others might have contained the antidote to this pervasive isolation, and thus the disease he spreads infects both what is already infected and the last remaining signs of life indiscriminately?

At the beginning of the film, Koichi describes three types of serial killers: the predictable “organized” and “disorganized” and then the alternative ‘mixed’ kind. Is it a coincidence that he mentions how he only ever worked with the latter, and that they’re impossible to get a handle on with our corporeal tools of assessment? Is that, alone, an admission of powerlessness, and perhaps more expansively a confession that these might be the only kinds of killers? Of people? Are our attempts to stay grounded to rote structures and domesticity against nature, and simultaneously fruitless to contend with our needs for what doesn’t exist in a form we require? So does Koichi’s immunity (and false belief that there are killers and people out there, along with himself, that can be met with predictable diagnostics and satisfied with tangible constructs and strategies of engagement, including interpersonal harmony) actually an indication that he’s less sober to his needs than his wife- that he’s defensively burying the truth deep down? Maybe it helps him with immunity here for survival, but it keeps him further from achieving authentic connection? Is this the disorganized randomness of the mixed, alternative ‘nature’ of existence? Or is it, tragically, the only hope to get by in the vacuum of our current permanently fragmented society?

Regardless of whether one chooses to buy into a reflexively all-inclusive interpretation of that idea, this version of a serial killer is both organized and disorganized, or rather follows a code of ‘organization’ untranslatable to us common man. He is ‘disorder’, representative of God in at the very least an enigmatically inconceivable spiritual rationalism. If Nishino represents a neutral emotionless objectivity- one that God might have, or the higher power randomly or selectively reigning over our world- what does that say about how valuable this intimacy is in objective terms? And if there’s no higher level discrimination, where’s the hope for us to achieve what we need- in any form along the spectrum of how the detective operates to his wife? If there’s no one looking out for our needs- except, in a twisted way, killers like Nishino- what’s the point?

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