Showing posts with label Weird. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weird. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Angelinos! FUNKY FORREST Playing Friday June 5th at Midnight!


Hi Blog,

Katsuhito Ishii's gigantically weird film ナイスの森 (aka FUNKY FORREST) will be playing this Friday, June 5th, at midnight at the Silent Movie theater.

What's to say about the film? Well, it features color coordinated girls DJ-ing gnarled and moss covered trees; prolapsed anuses built into TV-sets; men dressed up as fuzzy animals with, erm... tails coming out of their crotches... Oh and it features Tadanobu Asasno and a fat, chocolate bar eating Caucasian kid as the Guitar Brothers. I dunno... You all should just go and see it. This is one film that is better on the big screen with a crowd (that is potentially high/drunk).

Here's what the Subway Cinema folks wrote about the film when they screened it in NYC back in 2006:
Not since David Lynch slunk onto the scene with ERASERHEAD has a more singular vision broken out of one man's skull and run riot across the silver screen seducing audiences with its sugary strangeness. But FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT is a hermetically sealed, fifth dimensional artifact from Planet Japan beaming out of our eyes and into our universe. The only movie with an A side and a B side this is a full-on invasion of third-dimensional Earthling brains by a twelfth dimensional alien consciousness.

From the director and cast who brought you last year's Audience Award Winner THE TASTE OF TEA, this flick invites you to drink the Kool Aid, take the red pill, show us your dancing and break the chains of reason and logic that bind our brains. Director Katsuhito Ishii (who directed the animation in KILL BILL VOL 1) and a crew of ace comedic actors (including Tadanobu Asano as the laconic Guitar Brother) have made a movie featuring TV's made of giant buttholes, powered by belly button energy and capable of producing miniature sushi chefs. Not everyone can master this frequency. As the Shorty Trio says, "Some days people laugh, some days…they don't." With its shoe obsession, fixation on Snickers bars, and its firm belief that the secrets of the universe can be unlocked by dancing, FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT strips everyday life of meaning, turns mundane tasks into bizarre rituals, and makes surrealist hay out of our most sacred ideals. This is not a movie. This is an invitation to join a dancing army of holy fools and travel through time and space to the super-elastic, thoroughly fantastic Planet of Piko Riko." (Link)




Other stuff I've written about Ishii.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

That queasy feeling you have in your stomach? It's the bugs.

Hi Blog,

People collect bugs in Japan. This isn't the something just for kids-- but in fact adults, with paychecks, buy them in stores or even on Yahoo! Auction.

Look this one here ->

Costs 4100円

(Here's the auction page if you want to buy it.)

Anyhoo, it appears that sometimes folks also collect bugs to watch them fight. And sometimes they record these fights and post them on the interwubs with pro-wrestling announcements and flying graphics. Like this site: Japanesebugfights.com.

Before you think that this is a free-for-all, apparently there are rules. Three of them. And they are not to be broken. ("Rule 3: No Outside Weapons." !?)


I will freely admit that I couldn't stop watching these videos and that I had the creeps the whole time. That queasy feeling you have in your stomach? It's the bugs.

Here're a couple of the fights. (For some reason, the folks who do this site love fighting with scorpions. I've tried to mix it up a bit.)











Oh! And if you have your own bug fights that you've recorded and want to share with Japan Bug Fights, go for it! There's a submission link on their front page.

Dozo.