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Sky High
Media Blasters // R // March 29, 2005
List Price: $29.95 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Let me state my general bias right up front: ever since Ryuhei Kitamura burst onto the scene with the exhilarating Versus he has proven to be something of a polarizing director. Some absolutely adore him and everything he's done. Others tend to find him incredibly frustrating. I belong in the second group. Here's why. I think the man's got a masterpiece in him but he keeps finding ways not to make it.
Kitamura is very obviously an enormously gifted visual director with style to spare. With Versus Kitamura made a film that was openly about nothing more than that style – cramming as many ridiculous shots and extended fight scenes into his film as he possibly could on his restrictive budget. It worked because it didn't take itself too seriously and because it had a star with major charisma in former street fighter Tak Sakaguchi, who has strangely been limited to only cameo appearances in Kitamura's work since. With every successive film Kitamura's budgets have gotten bigger and he has taken his stories more seriously and the dissenters have gotten increasingly more vocal insisting that the man needs a script editor in a big way. There are as many impressive shots as ever but his films tend to be over long and the characters a little bit thin, and he has this disturbing habit of casting fight oriented films with actors who make for some mighty appealing eye candy but very unconvincing fighters. Sky High falls neatly into this mold. If you're already a fan you're going to love it, if the weaknesses of his earlier films drive you nuts then this will likely do the same.
Based on a Japanese television show that Kitamura did a directing run on Sky High opens with one of the most unforgettable sequences in recent years. Kanzaki Kohei (Tanihara Shosuke) is a young detective hunting down a brutal serial killer who carves the hearts from the chests of his victims, all of them young women. The film opens with Kanzaki approaching the scene of the latest crime, an enormous underground bunker where the latest victim has been found suspended from ropes at least a hundred feet in the air with a gaping, bloody hole in her chest. How anyone could possibly have gotten her there is a complete mystery, and as the police discuss how to get her down the knots slip and the corpse falls to meet a violent end on the concrete floor far below. The shot fades out and comes back up the next morning with Kanzaki, asleep at his desk, being awoken by an impatient man holding a tux. It is Kanzaki's wedding day and he is late for the ceremony. The pair rush out to a waiting car, slap the police light on the roof, hit the siren and peel off to the church, Kanzaki changing on the way. He looks in briefly on his beautiful bride Mina – did I mention that Kitamura likes to cast eye candy? Yum – then hurries to take his position at the front of the church. Moments later the church doors are thrown open and Mina walks down the aisle to cries of shock and dismay. The camera swings overhead in a complex crane shot to reveal what the audience has seen but we have only guessed at: bright red blood streaming down the front of Mina's pristine white dress from the freshly carved hole in her chest. Mina manages to make it almost the entire way to the shocked Kanzaki before she collapses in a heap on the floor – the serial killer's latest victim. That, my friends, is a hook, and a great one.
From this point on the film veers into supernatural ghost story territory. Mina, now in limbo, arrives at The Gate of Hatred – a place reserved for this killed violently – where she is presented with three options by the waiting Guardian of the Gate: she can ascend to heaven, she can remain on earth as a ghost, or she can curse her killer and be sentenced to hell herself. She has some time to make her decision and when she learns that Kanzaki plans to find and kill her killer – an act that will sentence him to hell – it becomes a question of whether Mina can find some way to intervene and stop Kanzaki from condemning himself.
This being a supernatural film, however, it is – of course – not as simple as finding a common serial killer. The killer in question here is collecting the hearts of reincarnated Guardians – the role Mina had in the previous television show, a helpful but non-essential piece of info here – as part of a complicated spell to free a destructive demon from behind the Gate of Hatred in return for which he hopes to have his long comatose sister restored to health.
Kitamura is aiming fairly high here. He has taken the premise of a cult hit television show and tried to stretch it into a larger statement on love and how far people will go for the people that they love. There's a definite risk of veering into sappy Ghost territory here but, for the most part, he avoids the excessive melodrama. He dodges that bullet in two ways, neither of which – sadly – is a particularly good thing. First he avoids having his characters over-emote by giving them far too little in the way of believable emotion and interaction. They are – to borrow a phrase – wafer thin. Secondly, he loads the film up with a stack of girl on girl swordplay which, in itself, is a very good thing, but the girls here aren't particularly convincing with the swords, a fact Kitamura tries to mask with rapidly changing camera angles, crane shots o'plenty and wildly excessive sound editing. He's got that whole 'whoosh' thing down. Lots of rapid cutting with at least one 'whoosh' per cut.
Sky High is a film many people had, well, sky high hopes for based on the early trailers and, frankly, the film doesn't live up to expectations for many. There are lots of good elements, yes, but they never quite gel into a convincing whole. But for those who like the film Media Blasters is giving them an absolutely top drawer DVD experience. The two disc set features the theatrical version of the film on disc one with the soundtrack offered in Japanese 5.1 as well as a 5.1 English dub. There is also a subtitled audio commentary from Kitamura, the lead actors and the producer of the film which is a little light on content but heavy on personality. The entire crew obviously had a lot of fun making the film and the commentary reflects that in a big way. For the Kitamura enthusiasts who will, no doubt, roast me for knocking the man in any way disc two features the longer directors cut of the film, featuring an additional eleven minutes of footage cut from the theatrical release. Throw in a making of feature, a gallery of stills, an excellent crisp transfer (anamorphic, of course) and beautiful packaging and you've got a dead solid package.
Kitamura is very obviously an enormously gifted visual director with style to spare. With Versus Kitamura made a film that was openly about nothing more than that style – cramming as many ridiculous shots and extended fight scenes into his film as he possibly could on his restrictive budget. It worked because it didn't take itself too seriously and because it had a star with major charisma in former street fighter Tak Sakaguchi, who has strangely been limited to only cameo appearances in Kitamura's work since. With every successive film Kitamura's budgets have gotten bigger and he has taken his stories more seriously and the dissenters have gotten increasingly more vocal insisting that the man needs a script editor in a big way. There are as many impressive shots as ever but his films tend to be over long and the characters a little bit thin, and he has this disturbing habit of casting fight oriented films with actors who make for some mighty appealing eye candy but very unconvincing fighters. Sky High falls neatly into this mold. If you're already a fan you're going to love it, if the weaknesses of his earlier films drive you nuts then this will likely do the same.
Based on a Japanese television show that Kitamura did a directing run on Sky High opens with one of the most unforgettable sequences in recent years. Kanzaki Kohei (Tanihara Shosuke) is a young detective hunting down a brutal serial killer who carves the hearts from the chests of his victims, all of them young women. The film opens with Kanzaki approaching the scene of the latest crime, an enormous underground bunker where the latest victim has been found suspended from ropes at least a hundred feet in the air with a gaping, bloody hole in her chest. How anyone could possibly have gotten her there is a complete mystery, and as the police discuss how to get her down the knots slip and the corpse falls to meet a violent end on the concrete floor far below. The shot fades out and comes back up the next morning with Kanzaki, asleep at his desk, being awoken by an impatient man holding a tux. It is Kanzaki's wedding day and he is late for the ceremony. The pair rush out to a waiting car, slap the police light on the roof, hit the siren and peel off to the church, Kanzaki changing on the way. He looks in briefly on his beautiful bride Mina – did I mention that Kitamura likes to cast eye candy? Yum – then hurries to take his position at the front of the church. Moments later the church doors are thrown open and Mina walks down the aisle to cries of shock and dismay. The camera swings overhead in a complex crane shot to reveal what the audience has seen but we have only guessed at: bright red blood streaming down the front of Mina's pristine white dress from the freshly carved hole in her chest. Mina manages to make it almost the entire way to the shocked Kanzaki before she collapses in a heap on the floor – the serial killer's latest victim. That, my friends, is a hook, and a great one.
From this point on the film veers into supernatural ghost story territory. Mina, now in limbo, arrives at The Gate of Hatred – a place reserved for this killed violently – where she is presented with three options by the waiting Guardian of the Gate: she can ascend to heaven, she can remain on earth as a ghost, or she can curse her killer and be sentenced to hell herself. She has some time to make her decision and when she learns that Kanzaki plans to find and kill her killer – an act that will sentence him to hell – it becomes a question of whether Mina can find some way to intervene and stop Kanzaki from condemning himself.
This being a supernatural film, however, it is – of course – not as simple as finding a common serial killer. The killer in question here is collecting the hearts of reincarnated Guardians – the role Mina had in the previous television show, a helpful but non-essential piece of info here – as part of a complicated spell to free a destructive demon from behind the Gate of Hatred in return for which he hopes to have his long comatose sister restored to health.
Kitamura is aiming fairly high here. He has taken the premise of a cult hit television show and tried to stretch it into a larger statement on love and how far people will go for the people that they love. There's a definite risk of veering into sappy Ghost territory here but, for the most part, he avoids the excessive melodrama. He dodges that bullet in two ways, neither of which – sadly – is a particularly good thing. First he avoids having his characters over-emote by giving them far too little in the way of believable emotion and interaction. They are – to borrow a phrase – wafer thin. Secondly, he loads the film up with a stack of girl on girl swordplay which, in itself, is a very good thing, but the girls here aren't particularly convincing with the swords, a fact Kitamura tries to mask with rapidly changing camera angles, crane shots o'plenty and wildly excessive sound editing. He's got that whole 'whoosh' thing down. Lots of rapid cutting with at least one 'whoosh' per cut.
Sky High is a film many people had, well, sky high hopes for based on the early trailers and, frankly, the film doesn't live up to expectations for many. There are lots of good elements, yes, but they never quite gel into a convincing whole. But for those who like the film Media Blasters is giving them an absolutely top drawer DVD experience. The two disc set features the theatrical version of the film on disc one with the soundtrack offered in Japanese 5.1 as well as a 5.1 English dub. There is also a subtitled audio commentary from Kitamura, the lead actors and the producer of the film which is a little light on content but heavy on personality. The entire crew obviously had a lot of fun making the film and the commentary reflects that in a big way. For the Kitamura enthusiasts who will, no doubt, roast me for knocking the man in any way disc two features the longer directors cut of the film, featuring an additional eleven minutes of footage cut from the theatrical release. Throw in a making of feature, a gallery of stills, an excellent crisp transfer (anamorphic, of course) and beautiful packaging and you've got a dead solid package.
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