MONSTERS CLUB is another offbeat and unusual tale from Toshiaki Toyoda
MONSTERS CLUB (MONSUTAZU KURABU) (Toshiaki Toyoda, 2011)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Sunday, July 15, 6:00
Japan Cuts series continues through July 28
212-715-1258
www.subwaycinema.com
www.japansociety.org
Two years ago, Japanese auteur Toshiaki Toyoda presented The Blood of Rebirth at the New York Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts, his first movie in four years following a hiatus involving drug charges, as well as his previous work, 2005’s extraordinary Hanging Garden. The iconoclastic Osaka-born director of such other films as Blue Spring and 9 Souls is now back at the dual festivals with his latest, another bizarre, offbeat tale, Monsters Club. Inspired by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto that called for revolution, Toyoda has crafted another surreal mood piece that can be as mesmerizing as it is frustrating and silly. Ryoichi Kakiuchi stars as Eita, a quiet, disciplined young man who has quit society and instead lives in the middle of a snowy forest, where he calmly chops wood, cleans his cabin, and sends out letter bombs to kill corrupt corporate executives and politicians. There he is visited by his supposedly dead brother, Yuki (Yôsuke Kubozuka), as well as a strange, haunting face-painted creature (Pyuupiru) who is an oddly charming mix of Sid Haig’s freakish Captain Spaulding from House of 1000 Corpses and Hayao Miyazaki’s adorable Totoro. But soon the idyllic little life Eita has built for himself is threatened as he discovers it’s not so easy to escape from today’s must-stay-connected world. A weirdly meditative tone poem, Monsters Club is screening at Japan Society on July 15 at 6:00 and will be followed by a Q&A with director Toyoda.
Brazilian filmmaker Eryk Rocha’s feature narrative debut, Transeunte (Passerby), is a beautifully poetic, lyrical examination of loneliness and connection. Fernando Bezerra gives a brilliant performance as Expedito, a sixty-five-year-old man who spends his days in Rio de Janeiro walking the streets and riding buses as he puts flowers on his mother’s grave, picks up his benefits check, takes a nap on his couch, goes to the doctor, listens to his old-fashioned transistor radio, and stops by a bar for a few drinks. A simple man who seems to be content in his small life, Expedito is an innocent bystander in the world; Rocha often cuts to extreme close-ups of Expedito’s eyes as the character watches and listens to other people singing, dancing, preaching, celebrating a birthday, and just having regular conversations as he takes it all in from a distance. He rarely even speaks, saying only what is absolutely necessary as he goes about his daily business. Yet he does all this with a quiet confidence, his deeply chiseled face, rigid brow, and slow gait (in opposition to his name) revealing him to be a simple man with simple pleasures instead of a sad, lonely man leading a nowhere life. Rocha, who has made such documentaries as Rocha que Voa and Pachamama and has also been an editor, actor, composer, and cinematographer (though still only in his thirties), uses that varied background to create a mesmerizing tale that mixes fiction and reality, set to a lively score and shot in a lush black-and-white, recalling such seminal films as Charles Burnett’s 
Born in 1945 in rural Georgia to a mother who abandoned him when he was three months old, Winfred Rembert grew up picking cotton, dropped out of high school, spent time in jail and on a chain gang, and lost nearly all his teeth. But it was his years behind bars that turned him into a new man, as he learned to read and write and developed a unique art style that soon had him carving out the tales of his life on leather. Longtime journalist, producer, and writer Vivian Ducat tells Rembert’s amazing story in her engaging feature-length debut, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Ducat follows the oversized Rembert, who regularly bubbles over with joy, as he returns for a show in Cuthbert, Georgia, and prepares for a big opening in New York City. “I know he’s here for a reason,” his sister Lorraine says in the film. “To help people and to be a witness through his art.” Throughout All Me, Rembert discusses many of his works, in which he uses indelible dyes on carved leather, in great detail, each one representing a part of his life, focusing on being a poor black man in a white-dominated society. It is quite poignant late in the film when he points out that his art seems to be most appreciated by whites even though it is meant as a visual history for blacks. But what really makes the documentary work is not just that Rembert is such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure but that his art is exceptional, his self-taught, folksy style reminiscent of such forebears as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, capturing a deeply personal, intensely intimate part of the black experience in twentieth-century America. The film was previously shown at the Maysles Institute this past January, but it’s now back for a return engagement July 11, with Rembert and Ducat participating in a Q&A following the screening of this extraordinary story.
