nfaust1

This Neo-noir styled character drama follows three emotionally detached, spiritually damaged characters through the dark, neon spotted, Tokyo night. Each broken by lost hopes and disappointment, they take to the streets to find something or someone to validate their loneliness and even perhaps fill the emptiness.

We learn that one of the characters plans to commit suicide ant the end of the evening; another character loses his job and drunkenly insults his boss. The boss, once alone, sits quietly in an outdoor cafe looking at his phone longingly at photos of his dog. The drama here is not in what happens next. What keeps us tied to these characters is the way circumstances provoke them to reveal themselves - to each other, to themselves, and to us, watching the film.

Robert Capria, writer, director, cinematographer, and editor, confidently urges the viewer to keep watching; we wonder, even worry about these characters. What are they going to do next, where is this film leading? Capria focuses our attention firmly upon the people we follow, achieving, moment by moment, a genuine sense of lives being randomly lived, moments of connection and moments of loss flowing back and forth across the screen, leading to some irrevocable conclusion. The acting is impeccable, as is the entire visual display that Capria seems to causally create on his small budget, drawing us deeper and deeper into the dark and into the lives of these characters.

A deeply moving, visually compelling independent film, well worth an audiences' attention.

Rated 10 because this movie does not deserve the 3.9 rating in has (as of the date of this writing). It's detractors here call is preposterous and unbelievable as if Toho Studios had intended it to be realistic! Well, I'll let you in on a secret: they didn't. I just watched the 2007 DVD release, the 90 minute version that was not shown in the United States. With all the connecting scenes intact, one may follow a particular narrative logic, but its just enough to justify the film's wild, out of this world visuals. For once, this series of films starts out with a very human story. After the pre bomb sequence, we jump to (the film's) present and learn that a boy is scavenging the area for food. It is assumed that he is a casualty of the Atomic Bomb, orphaned and left to fend for himself like an animal. Introducing this character into the world of giant monsters, a genre that Toho exploited after the success of GODZILLA, makes explicit what the other films in this series imply. Add to that, the fact that the boy's blood beats through his veins aided by a heart carried across oceans, from Nazi Germany before the end of World War II. This Frankenstein creature is a child born from the unsettling union of war time villains; World War II's two fallen countries. He has been tossed out into a hostile world, destined to tower over all, feared and shot at, like the creature born of dead bodies imaged by Mary Shelley. The monster foe that Frankenstein eventually fights has been awakened from the earth's core. We first encounter it during an earthquake at an oil rig. The implication is clear. The Toho special effects were rather obvious even back then. But if you settle on the notion that the story itself reaches outside anything realistic, one finds widescreen splendor in the surrealistic visuals that grow more and more operatic as the film progresses.

Slow and boring — a badly told story: are the two objections reviewers here reiterate in different ways over and over. And yet, the film I saw couldn't be more enticing. PORNOGRAPHY: A THRILLER is methodical, character driven, but certainly not boring; and considering its ambitious three part narrative, I'd say this seamlessly rendered film ends up being the engaging puzzle it was intended to be. Writer/director, David Kittredge has clearly thought about his subject long and hard, for the kind of cubist back and forth he's cooked up brilliantly exploits thriller hooks to explore the relationship between hardcore sex acted for the camera and the imagination of those who get off on watching it. Even with the ghost of David Lynch in obvious attendance, Kittredge's thriller plot does not seem stolen or manufactured, as others would have you think; it reflect the artist's ambiguous relationship to the subject. The film is saying that pornography arouses us, body and mind, with temptation and dread; two sides of the same coin. Here's a gay film that truly challenges its audience to think. No gay bar clichés, no stupid, camp posturing pandering to a marketable demographic. If someone says this is boring or not well done, it means the film went over their heads.