Helter Skelter

You know I'm spoiling you when I do two posts within the space of seven days.

Last night I watched Helter Skelter on DVD. That's right, I watched a whole film and not on the tiny iPod screen but on my computer. I had to wait for my son to go to bed and to finish a bit of work I was in the middle of but I watched a 127-minute film that was absolutely fantastic. The trailer below doesn't really do it much justice:




You need to see it because it is beautifully shot. It has a great plot. It's sexy. It's feminist. It doesn't offer easy answers to life's problems but it makes you feel a bit better about them. It also is very disturbing in places too, but that's only a good thing in my opinion. See it!

My wife is a big fan of Kyoko Okazaki, the manga writer whose book the film is adapted from. We waited so long to see it because we can't go to the cinema because of my son, although I did urge my wife to go without me while I stayed at home but she hummed and aahed too much. I would have loved to have seen it on an actual cinema screen because I think the vibrant colours would come over well on the larger screen and it's the kind of artistic film that would probably benefit from a collective rather than individual audience. Everybody gasping and laughing at the same times makes a film, whether it is Un Chien Andalou or Beavis and Butthead Do America.

The acting is great and the production values are high, which is unusual for a Japanese film because it's difficult to sell them to foreign markets so the budgets are usually small so films are shot on crap digital with zero post-production, or so it would seem. This is gorgeous and frequently painterly. The closest comparisons I can think of are Roger Greenaway or Terence Malick. It is directed by Mika Ninagawa, whose photographs are beautiful and the film looks a lot like her still shots come to life.

See it. Treat yourselves!

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