| Ordell Robbie | 1.5 | Lost in a Forest |
With A Forest with no Name, Aoyama Shinji tries to rebound in a peculiar way, that is to say through an episode of the TV serie Mike Yokohama (name paying tribute to Mike Hammer). If the contraints of TV can restraint some director's drawbacks, this ain't really the case here. We already knew that Aoyama had a posing way of filming which functioned in Eureka thanks to the extreme slow beat coherent with its theme but didn't in Two Punks for example. It's still the case here even though Aoyama uses some interesting camera moves for creating breaks of beat in the movie. But it's Mike's character who makes watcheable a movie that would be if not as painful as Charisma (both movies share the theme of relationships between human and vegetation): with its delirious punklike allure, he creates some distance as he arrives in sect of which he must deliver the daughter of a rich guy. And Aoyama is still good for picking up nice music. But what ultimately ruins the movie is the director's extreme pretentiousness. Dialogues are as heavy and posing as in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's movies: the discussion about the self, the dialogue "Who are you? I don't know yet.", the sentence saying that freedom is an illness, the really really subtle character of the woman who says she's gonna die if a guy touches her, all of this expresses heavily the observations of Aoyama about Japan in between coming back to nature and individualism. The shots showing the guy "doing one" with a tree are ridiculous. And the changing of genres inside the movie doesn't function here as well as in Eureka. As a consequence, this episode, oscillating between very bad and kinda good, isn't convincing and confirms the limits of Aoyama as a director.
