Not Just Another J-Horror Film
PULSE
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
JESUS IS MAGIC
Directed by Liam Lynch
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, about dead souls spilling through the Internet, isn't just scary, it's primally disturbing. Its deadpan chills surpass the usual don't-open-that-door genre clichés and tap into dream logic. Like Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, The Shining, The Innocents, The Tenant and similarly subdued, circumspect, psychologically oriented shockers, it's the kind of movie that is only intermittently scary while you're watching it (it's easy to make fun of), but gets scarier as you think about it later. Kurosawa dispenses with most of the clichéd elements we've come to expect from commercial horror (including the mandatory scene where a character explains the nature of the threat, a stock moment that's amusingly parodied here) and instead dips into horror's roiling emotional undercurrent: the dread that comes from contemplating death.
Completed four years ago, then bought and shelved by Miramax in preparation for an American remake that might never happen, Pulse unfolds in a technological context that's frankly a bit dated now. Coworkers at a rooftop nursery try to get ahold of a coworker named Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi) who has a floppy disk that they need; one of the workers, Michi (Kumiko Aso), visits Taguchi's apartment and finds him shell-shocked after going on the Internet. Then the poor man hangs himself and disappears, seeming to melt into the wall and leaving what looks like an oil stain in his wake. Kurosawa combines the greenhouse workers' fumbling attempts to figure out what happened to Taguchi and the computer education of a Luddite college kid named Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato) who goes on the Internet for the first time and stumbles onto a site where ghostly figures congregate and a typed message asks visitors, "Would you like to meet ghosts?"
Pulse only gets weirder from here. Embracing the cool logic of a long, tangled, outwardly "realistic" nightmare, the narrative is built not around plot points, but creepy images: grainy Webcam shots of pixillated figures drifting across the screen; a hooded figure very slowly removing his hood; forbidden doorways sealed with red duct tape; a hidden room where a corporeal-looking, seemingly live woman scoots and shimmys like a broken doll being made to dance by a child's hand; a screen saver full of bright dots that attract or repel each other. (The latter symbolizes the uneasy coexistence of living and dead souls, and the inability of both types to ever really connect. The metaphor would be more effective if the filmmaker didn't explain it to us in dialogue, a rare instance of Pulse telling rather than showing.)
Kurosawa prizes ambiguity because not knowing is scary. We never find out what, exactly, is happening in this world, or why, or what it means. We know only that with each passing day, the bell tolls for more people, and that sooner or later it will toll for our protagonists (and for us). The film's last act, which unfolds against increasingly depopulated cities and highways, is not just knee-jerk scary, but beautiful and sad-less reminiscent of zombie pictures (the obvious comparison point) than The Birds, Weekend and the final leg of L'Eclisse. ¶
It would be a shame if moviegoers wrote off Pulse as another J-horror movie, because it actually predates many of the films that sparked the genre's global vogue, and is superior to all but a few. Kurosawa, the brilliant director of Cure and Bright Future, gave Pulse its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 9, 2001. In retrospect, it seems an astonishingly prescient movie, and not just for its rejection of reductive theological explanations and its oblique visual invocations of mass death by suicide, plague, war (the disappearing dead leave Hiroshima-like stains) and terrorism (a burning cargo plane crashes into a cityscape). Pulse chills us to the marrow by daring us to admit the unspeakable truth: that despite thousands of years' worth of religious and philosophical assurances, we still don't know if being dead is better than, equal to or worse than being alive, and we will never know until we're dead ourselves. ¶
"I was raped by a doctor, which is really bittersweet for a Jewish girl," says Sarah Silverman in her comedy feature Jesus is Magic. If that line elicits a frown or a gasp, you'd best avoid this movie. Silverman specializes in the sorts of jokes that got Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay in trouble 15 or 20 years ago. She throws around incendiary slurs (nigger, chink, cunt, faggot), announces that she wants to be known as the first comic to shit on Martin Luther King, and goofs on incest, rape, Jesus, the Holocaust and 9/11 (mock-praising the art of corporate spin, she dares American Airlines to change its slogan to, "First through the towers.").
Shock humor hasn't been intrinsically daring since George Carlin had hair. But Silverman's foregrounded self-awareness, sexy figure and kewpie doll delivery (she sometimes sounds like Jennifer Tilly) make the material feel fresh again-and funny, up to a point. She and her director, Liam Lynch, have put together a sampler of cute/provocative/offensive bits-stand-up, sketches, musical numbers - that will appeal to the same crowd that didn't merely embrace The Aristocrats as a filthy, funny movie, but heralded it as cathartic and brave. ¶
Jesus isn't all that; it's more of a mixed bag, by turns explosively funny, cynically "outrageous" and a bit tedious. It misses twice for each time it hits (a pretty good batting average for shock humor). Only half of the skits and musical numbers really connect, and even the best of these are counterproductive, because they halt any giddy momentum Silverman can build during the standup portions. Like every other movie, Jesus doesn't know when to stop, but unlike every other movie, it can justify its eclectic, disorganized structure as a confrontational-analytical take on low humor. (During the last five minutes, the outtakes and the dumb post-credits stinger, the movie seems to be daring you to gripe that it should have ended sooner.) Silverman's girlishly cheerful delivery taps into the Clinton-era, Los Angeles-based, "Isn't it hilarious that I'm standing up here trying to entertain strangers?" meta-humor movement, exemplified by the likes of Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Tenacious D, the pre-politics Janeane Garofalo and the "Mr. Show" guys (represented here by Bob Odenkirk, who has a cameo as Silverman's whipped toady of a manager). The whole movie is in italics, including the slurs. ¶
Intriguingly, Jesus feels truly dangerous not when Silverman is zinging us with material a self-described JAP isn't supposed to recite in public, but when she's lampooning herself (and by extension, all performers) as little monsters of narcissism, steamrolling her friends, colleagues and fans. The movie's true climax-its conceptual peak-is a Raging Bull moment after the show in Silverman's dressing room, when she stares in druggy hunger at her own reflection, then tries to deep-kiss it, greasing up the mirror until she can barely see herself. As a metaphor for talent obscured by vanity, it's hard to beat.