Lights! Gamera! Action!

Ask a serious American film fan to name a Chinese director and the answer will be Zhang Yimou. Indian? Mira Nair. Korean? Maybe Im Kwok-taek. Contemporary Japanese? Takeshi Kitano or Hirokazu Kore-eda. With the wayward exception of “Beat” Takeshi, who makes slow-fuse movies about tough guys, the directors and films are always from the art-house contingent. These movies have the scent and fragility of crushed flowers; they are on the torpid side, usually bleak, with doomed characters suffering in static frames. But they are the films selected for festivals and U.S. distribution, and they tell us more about the Westerners who choose them than about the national cinemas they emerge from. They are also a big reason that foreign films, once catnip to educated Americans, no longer play an important role in our cultural life.

From a look at the official list you’d think that Asian moviemakers and moviegoers live on a diet of aesthetic tofu. If the Mandarins of received movie taste had their way, you would never have heard of Jackie Chan (whose Hong Kong action films took decades to arrive here). You wouldn’t recognize that the Bollywood citations in “Moulin Rouge” and “Ghost World” are loving tributes to the Indian film musical, a genre every bit as delirious as a dervish after six cups of coffee. Even now, you may not know that there are such creatures as Korean romantic comedies, Thai war movies or (still, and bigger than ever) Japanese monster thrillers. These Asian pictures are made not for international juries but for home consumption — for moviegoers very like the Americans who prowl the plexes on a Friday night or the video racks any time.

But what do these Asian films look, move and smell like? What does the rest of the world’s cinema do for fun? To find out, take a taxi or a plane right now to Anthology Film Archives in lower Manhattan, where the populist movie collective called Subway Cinema is putting on quite a show: a 11-picture spree called Asian Films Are Go!!! All those exclamation points are warranted, for the series fairly screams with the agitation and aggression of a form of popular entertainment demanding the same fair shake as their arty siblings with the goatees and the low pulse rate. Like a bunch of illegal Chinese refugees sardined into a boat sneaking up the East River, these movies — not films, get it?, but fast-moving pictures — just need to land in New York to prove how hard they work, how well they work.

In any truly film-savvy country, the directorial signatures attached to some of these movies would be brand names. Americans don’t know Mani Rathnam from Manny Rothman (a Bronx tailor who retired to Miami Beach), but much of the world recognizes him as the prime mesmerist of Indian musical dramas; a native of Tamil, he finally made a Hindi-language extravaganza, “Dil Se,” on show at Anthology. Seijun Suzuki — who in 1967 squatted and hatched “Branded to Kill,” the gnarliest, alltime-noiriest existential gangster pic — is back at 78 with a femme remake, “Pistol Opera.” Tokyo’s renowned and reviled naughty-boy Takashi Miike (“Fudoh: The New Generation,” “Audition”) makes movies that go nuts by efficiently tightening the story line like piano wire around your…we’ll say, neck. His psychotic sitcom “Visitor Q” is this festival’s succès de scandale.

“Visitor Q” is one of two entries in the Subway series that have already made an impact where it counts: with Hollywood moguls and with the censors. DreamWorks has bought the U.S. remake rights to the Korean romance “My Sassy Girl.” And the New Zealand High Court has shut down a screening of Miike’s illuminating cinematrocity at the Becks Incredible Film Festival and threatened to fire the chief censor because he allowed it to be shown in that one cloistered venue. Who says films have no power to effect social change?

What follows is a rundown on the films. To readers not in New York, or those who have missed some of the film in the series (which runs from April 26 to May 2), I can suggest only that you find the video stores in any large city’s Japantown or Indian enclave. For Korean movies, Manhattanites should pester their neighborhood grocer. If none of these options avail you, do at least read the promotional material by Grady Hendrix. It’s fabulously muscular writing, as high-octane as the films and often more artful; I expect that it will soon land Hendrix in Elvis Mitchell’s chair at the New York Times, or mine at TIME.

But enough of my pen envy. A bounty awaits you. One way or another, you need to open your veins to the toxic liberation of Asian pop films. Warning: they are addictive.

DEJA VOODOO

What’s more fun than seeing sequels to movies you never heard of? Four of the 11 films are follow-ups, but that shouldn’t scare you away. Except for “Pistol Opera,” which is mystically mystifying on all levels, these movies are self-contained, or simple enough that you can get your bearings before the next plot-twist cloverleaf.

“Gamera 2: Attack of the Legion” (1996) and “Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris” (1999) are actually the 10th and 11th episodes in the giant-flying-turtle series that began in 1965, babysat a generation of American TV kids on Saturday mornings and inspired some of the finest musical japery on “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” Smile in memory of Tom Servo’s hipster improv on the “Gamera” theme (“Night bleeds out into the Tokyo streets and Gamera shakes his tail at a Ginza bistro with eyes like baby moons. He lights up a skyscraper like a Chesterfield and strolls singin’ ‘Gamera!'”) and Mike Nelson’s Michael Feinstein lounge-pianist version (“The second part is a little more fun. It has a sort of George and Ira Gershwin feel to it. ‘Shell, teeth, eyes, claws, scales, breath, fun.’ It sort of sneaks up on you. ‘Boo,’ it says.”)

The Subway fest’s two “Gamera”s, both directed by Kaneko Shusuke, are pretty good on their own; mature, no-nonsense affairs with handsome special effects, they don’t require robot jokes or a five-year-old’s sense of wonder and indulgence to keep you awake. Eventually, of course, Shusuke has to hand reins to Gamera’s keepers, the computer and puppet wizards, who do a swell job. And when the local Gamerologist articulates the riddle of the ages — “Why is Japan continually besieged by monsters?” — even a toddler can reply in two words: box office. Stay away and they’ll go away.

“Gamera 2” sends a few seismic jolts to the nervous system with the appearance of metallic insects who feed on the hardware in computers, transistors and cell phones. In other words, Tokyo’s toast — unless “Earth’s guardian,” as the movie’s super-cute heroine calls Gamera, comes to the rescue at supersonic speed (he’s a Mach turtle). Some citizens are skeptical about vesting all hope for the nation’s survival on a 200-ft.-tall monster who squishes tall buildings at a single tromp; they don’t want Japan’s equivalent of Reagan’s Star Wars to be a Strategic Tortoise Initiative. But the humans here don’t matter much. Their function is mostly to provide color commentary on the athletic contest in the sky: Gamera vs. a scissors-beaked bug that won’t let go. Until the end.

“G2” takes its subtitle from Mark 5:9: “My name is Legion, for we are many.” The more satisfying “G3” is anchored by a quote from “I Ching.” A girl named Ayama (ethereal Ai Maeda), orphaned by an earlier Gamera attack, discovers something under a rock in a cave: a dodeca-tentacled thingie that will soon be the scourge of Nippon. That’s all right with Ayama: “I’m going to raise him. And then he’ll take revenge for me… He’s just like me. Gamera killed his family too.” Iris, as Ayama calls the creature, becomes her demon lover — a first boyfriend she’ll never forget — as it enfolds and enslaves her. (Like David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” from 1986, “G3” is about the fusion of a bright, lonely person with a predatory beast.) Then Iris is ready to fight it out with the big turtle guy.

“G3” is the best “Gamera” I’ve seen (for what that’s worth), in part because it has much less Gamera; there’s only so much character richness, let alone fun, to be found in shell, teeth, eyes, claws, scales, etc. But the movie has thrills for those who need ’em. Toward the end, a young scientist faces Iris and his doom and, a moment before he dies, screams like a cheerleader at his own immolation: “Oh boy, is this scary? Yes!” I second that notion.

Kim Song-jin’s “Kick the Moon” is another sequel, this to the 1999 Korean hit “Attack the Gas Station,” about four teen hooligans who rob a gas station, beat up a few hostages and get caught in a crossfire between gangsters and delivery boys. Now it’s a few years later. Gi-dong (Cha Seung-won), the lead punk of “Gas Station,” has become a high-school teacher, and Young-joon, the victim of the rough boys’ pranks (Lee Sung-jae), is a brainy gangster. But old traits die hard: Young-joon is still earnest and watchful, while Gi-dong is the teacher as rogue cop, with such tricks from the Three Stooges school of pedagogy as slapping his charges’ scalps and twisting their ears. Love interest Ju-ron (Kim Hye-su), who runs the local fast-food joint that turns both men into ramen-noodle fanciers, is also a severe disciplinarian. She kicks and bites her bigger kid brother, then flips him to the ground in front of his friends and teacher.

Since the setting is the venerable city of Gyeongju, for a thousand years the Korean capital, it’s not surprising that underclassmen relate the exploits of “Gas Station” as if they were retelling an Arthurian legend, or that Gi-dong wants to go medieval on his class. The teacher’s students join the gangster’s gang, and tempers invariably escalate; as Young-joon warns his old adversary, “You’re opening the gas valve in a burning house.” The gas hits the flame in a climactic multi-gang melee that leaves more casualties than Inchon. “Kick” could be saying something about the modern Asian stand-off between scholarship and capitalism, or how, at heart, everyone’s a thug. Anyway, this is a symphony of teeming mayhem, punctuated by the clash of symbols.

BRAND NEW KILL

For many, the most eagerly awaited film in the Subway set was “Pistol Opera,” But first, a little backstory about its predecessor “Branded to Kill,” recently released on a Criterion DVD and a must for any film lover with a strange streak. Like two other superb movies from 1967 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samourai” and John Boorman’s “Point Blank” — it’s an existential-gunman saga. As incarnated by Jo Shishido, Hanada is an assassin who wears cool shades at midnight, has a 24-hr. craving for boiled rice, and radiates a sang-froid you could cut a hole through and go ice fishing. But he’s no chiseled Eastwood or haunted Mifune, partly because Shishido had undergone collagen injections in his cheeks; it made him look like a chipmunk blowing a Dizzy Gillespie high C. If this were 90s Hong Kong instead of 60s Tokyo, he’d be an Anthony Wong thug who mistakenly thinks he has Chow Yun-fat’s killer charisma.

But then, as laid out in the Hachiro Guryu script,Hanada is not charismatic antihero material; he’s No. 3 in the pistoleros’ hierarchy, and thinks he’s more likely to tumble down the list than ascend to No. 1. His face is creased with the fretfulness of a middle manager in Japan’s cradle-to-grave corporate structure — accent on the grave. Plus, his wife is shtupping the boss. Indeed, he has trouble with all sorts of women: the romantic, suicidal sort and the chatty, homicidal kind. But eventually he has to go against the top gun. They eat together, sleep together (each handcuffed to a cot) and talk through most of the final act. When Bastard No. 1 asks questions of Bastard No. 3, it’s like “The Dating Game,” except, at the end, somebody dies. And why must life so abruptly doused? No. 1 shrugs: “Things happen.”

You can find all the bravado and gunplay familiar and still be entranced by the movie, because Suzuki makes things happen. He fills the wide-screen frame with way-off-center compositions in bold chiaroscuro; yet he doesn’t editorialize — this is style as terse as a coroner’s report. Without preening or dawdling, he provides plenty of cool visuals: the women who gets shot, falls into a swivel chair and takes her last carousel ride; or the overhead shot of her head facing up resting on a toilet bowl, with her blood muddying the swirling water below. The twist at film’s end is not so wrenching as the surprise Suzuki’s bosses at Nikkatsu had in store after he finished it. They declared that the movie “made no sense” and fired him. I doubt that the director took much satisfaction in being validated by film history; he didn’t make another picture for 10 years.

If “Branded” is a jazz theme in black-and-white, “Pistol Opera” is a brightly daubed, more abstract variation played by an all-girl band. Now No. 3 is called Stray Cat (chicly incarnated by ex-volleyballer Makiko Esumi), on assignment from “the Guild” to knock off her rivals — here the assassinations are all in the Family. After a splendid early scene of a perforated gunslinger tumbling from the roof of Tokyo Station, the film becomes a chat session: Stray Cat with a grandma, a little girl, a Muse in a visor and, preeminently, with the oldest gun in the East. The alterkocker’s aphorisms peg him as Suzuki’s stand-in: “With all your wisdom and technique, killing blooms into an artwork. … We make the impossible possible, and turn it into art. … Be proud to be a pro.” Pride is all the old man can cling to. “I may be disabled,” he says, “but I can still pull a trigger.” He tosses a leeringly hopeful aside to Stray Cat: “Want to try me?”

Set to reggae and steel-band music, the film is also Caribbean in its visual scheme: bright primary colors as background for the black- and white-robed killers. The action sleepwalks through fabulous architecture of the futurist and industrial modes, and there’s a gorgeous tableau of the women against a rippling digital sea that seems to reflect a burnt-sienna sunset. If the art of direction were only art direction, “Pistol Opera” would be a masterpiece. Instead, it’s the movie Nikkatsu thought it got back in 1967: a pretty abstraction that tosses narrative logic in the air and plugs it full of holes. Suzuki makes the implausible laudable, and turns it into cinematic glamour.

WOMEN ON THE VERGE

Much Asian pop cinema is gonzo (and Ginza) guy stuff: a parade of acid testosterone attitudes and mine’s-bigger gunmanship. Even Stray Cat sports a set of chrome cojones. In Thanit Jitnukul’s “Bang Rajan,” the Siamese patriots, male and female, wield mean machetes in defense of their village against the marauding Burmese, and the air is thick with beheadings and dis-armings. If there’s a femme side to Derek Chiu’s Hong Kong suspenser “Comeuppance,” it’s that the killer’s weapon of choice is poison, and neither he nor the implacable cop on his trail cares to speak above a whisper. The macho posturing here is handled by the triad thugs who get a few moments of bombast before they become cyanide corpses.

But unlike American movie pop, the Asian variety is an equal-opportunity exploiter. It offers starring roles to women and potent characters for them to play. Often, at least in the Subway selections, women are complex figures whose mystery and exasperations lure decent Joes into their web. Rathnam’s “Dil Se” describes such a pairing: a radio journalist (Indian charm-boy Shahrukh Khan) meets a pensive lovely (Manisha Koirala) and pursues her despite her protestations. “What do you know about me?” “Nothing, except that I love you.” We know, though he doesn’t, that she is a militant on a suicide-bomb mission.

Before the explosive finale, they dance through some giddy production numbers: atop a speeding train, cocooned inside a red silk bag, cootching through those favorite Indian musical trappings, slo-mo and smoke pots. “Dil Se” (literally, From the Heart) is not major Rathnam; for that, track down the director’s great gangster epic “Nayakan,” his inside-Bollywood drama “The One” or his earlier terrorist love story “Roja.” This movie is just an enjoyably irresponsible romp.

Two more radio journalists fall in love in the Korean “One Fine Spring Day,” from director Hur Jin-ho. They meet on a joint assignment to record rural sounds for a show called “Nature and People.” The movie is as aurally attentive as the two recordists; it’s got a lush sound track of the wind tickling high reeds and the thump of two wayward hearts. The young man, Sang-woo (Yoo Ji-tae), is the more sensitive of the two — he can hear snow fall! — and has a tighter grip on their affair than does Eun-su (Lee Young-ae). He gets it going and wants to keep it going. So does the viewer, who’s here to watch a love story. The film is a minute chronicle of any affair’s anxieties and banalities, its negotiations, ecstasies and inevitable inequities. This is what happens when two people try to become one.

But does it usually happen this slowly? Does anybody pause between declarations and stare meaningfully into the middle distance as much as these two? The film’s measured ordinariness is meant to be edifying, but eventually it suffocates. Though it ladles on the soppy music (“Plaisir d’Amour”), and though its style isn’t controlled enough to be mistaken for European minimalism, “Spring Day” is an art-house movie in all its longueurs and stifled emotions, its camera as immobile as a child too frightened to move. I suspect the Subway people put it their festival as a point of comparison with more vigorous fare.

Like, for example, “My Sassy Girl” — a huge hit in Korea and, DreamWorks hopes, a smash when translated into American. Based on an Internet diary that became a best-selling book, “Sassy” is a cinematic Slurpee: soft, sweet and cool to the palate. Mind you, if our heroine (Jeon Ji-hyun) were handed one of those 7-Eleven snow cones, she’d probably dump it on the head of our hero Gyun-woo (Cha Tae-hyun). She’s a troubled soul who has a knack of vomiting on a stranger’s toupee; Gyun-woo is mistakenly pegged as her boyfriend, and that’s this movie’s version of meeting cute. He’s a sensitive guy with a fondness for pastel sweaters and a gentleness toward a woman who won’t kiss him. He is, somehow, also heterosexual; can there be such men?

This clinically nice guy is the classic co-dependent who realizes the absurdity of his obsession. He says, “I want to heal her sorrow,” yet when classmates say she’s pretty, replies, “A girl needs to act pretty.” She doesn’t act pretty. She writes movie scenarios with titles like “Demolition Terminator” and exercises her need to be a public scold. The plot is an elaborate obstacle course she sets up to test his love. She insists he show up for a date she has with another man. She asks for a rose and he brings it onstage while she is playing piano before a large audience (this being a love story, the tune is predictably Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major’). She gets the warms for him and pages him in the subway; he runs to embrace her, but she snaps, “Who told you to hug me?” and slaps him hard; when he cringes, she explains, “You were supposed to duck.” He never ducks. He is forever walking right into the fist of her magnetism.

Throughout, he lives in hope, she in some secret regret. That’s the secret of the movie’s emotional holding power, along with the appeal of the two leads and a canny mining of old movie tropes by scripter Kim Ho-sik and director Kwok Jae-young. “Sassy” brazenly makes use of time-capsule love letters and pining for a dead beau. It boasts not one but two “Love in the Afternoon”-style scenes in which a lover runs down a platform after the beloved on a departing train.

All this surely appealed to the DreamWorks scouts, but I’ll bet it was the “ten rules” scene that clinched the deal. When Gyun-woo dutifully appears as the third wheel on her blind date, he instructs his possible successor in the ten commandments of making this wayward child happy. It’s a selfless declaration of his own love, and helps make “Sassy,” for all its calculation, into the most endearing Asian date movie since Jingle Ma’s 1999 “Fly Me to Polaris,” a Hong Kong blind-dead-guy love story.

Someone just informed me that not all men are sweet puppies who long to be whacked on the snout of their unconditional devotion. A few fellows still have a nasty streak, and they all show up in the Japanese “Freeze Me.” Harumi Inoue plays Chihiro, who lives in Tokyo and has an OK boyfriend. Five years before, she was the victim of a three-guy rape in her home town; now one of them has forced himself into her apartment. What’s a girl to do but conk him dead and stuff him in her freezer? (Small flat, big fridge.) Then a second thug arrives. “It’s your fault,” says this once-and-future rapist, echoing the rationale of all weak men inflamed by strong women. “You’re too sexy. Your face, your tits, your ass.” Soon he’s in cold storage, just before the third and worst one, an older yakuza, drops by. “Don’t struggle,” he mutters as he brutalizes her. “You’ll break my watch band.” That’s his cue to chill out.

Chihiro is getting good at this. She is also working up a sweat. She tells her freezer geezers: “You guys are lucky. It’s cool where you are. Out here I’m dying of the heat.” Finally Mr. OK Boyfriend comes to visit, but by now she’s deep into her payback groove, even against the one lover who hasn’t wronged her. “Freeze Me” says we are programmed to violent behavior: men to be predators and women, eventually, to see all men at their worst and to mete out indiscriminate vengeance.

The picture is often programmatic too, not much more than a “Panic Room” with a sub-zero thermostat. But Inoue is an eyeful as well as a handful. She carries the film on her comely shoulders, leaving moviegoers to decide how to react to the grim proceedings. Will they be sympathetic onlookers or pathetic voyeurs, taking pleasure in her plight, high on her naked agitation?

“Q” DONE IT

Our journey through Asian pop cinema ends with “Visitor Q,” the sort of film that scholars call “transgressive cinema” — which means movies that are dirty or violent, but pretentiously so. And that’s right up my critical alley. So are some of Miike’s pictures, like the gangster-gorey “Fudoh: The New Generation” and the colorful “City of Lost Souls” (less so his exercises in sadism, “Audition” and “Ichi the Killer”). A proponent of the moving-target theory, Miike keeps busy: he directed 19 films in the past three years, and Internet Movie Database lists five more already in 2002. “Q” was made in a week, for about $70,000, as an entry in the CineRocket video series. It’s meta-weird, and sometimes a chore to watch, but most rewarding, and not just as a test for your threshold of squirm.

The movie, written by Itaru Era (“Full Metal Yakuza”), poses three questions. “Have you ever done it with your dad?” This girl (Fujiko) does, in the film’s first scene. She’s a prostitute who charges her father (Kenichi Endo) an exorbitant ¥300,000, calls him an “early bird” for his premature ejaculation and captures the event on digital video. “Have you ever been hit on the head?” A stranger (Kazushi Watanabe) does, while Dad sits in a train station. Hey, it’s human contact, so Dad invites the guy home. “Have you ever hit your mom?” Young Takuya (Jun Muto) does belt his mom (Shungiku Uchida) with a switch, when he’s not tossing her through the paper walls of an apartment way too cramped to contain all this domestic animosity. Mom can hardly find the privacy to shoot the balm of heroin into her thigh.

“Dysfunctional” hardly does justice to this family’s individual and communal eccentricities; disastrous is closer. Like daughter, like mother: Mom turns tricks to support her habit. Takuya is a sadist at home, a victim at school. Classmates pitch firecrackers at him; later they force the boy to defecate by a highway and urinate on him. Like so many of the family’s adventures, it is captured on video, this time by Dad. He’s a TV reporter, you see, sacked for obsessive fidelity to his metier, which is interviewing teens in moments of their greatest brutality or humiliation. His big scoop came when a gang of thugs trapped him, depantsed him and stuck his TV mike where the sun don’t shine.

Re-viewing the video of his micro-sodomy, then seeing Takuya’s classmates kick him, Dad has the inspiration to film his own son’s adventures in victimhood, and drags along a skeptical female colleague (Shoko Nakahara) to observe. When she protests, he assaults her, kills her and takes her corpse home to test his kitchen and bedroom skills on it. Meanwhile, Mom has befriended the stranger and shows him her facility for lactating. As he massages her breasts, she reaches orgasm…

Hel-lo! Anyone still out there in cyberland? If so, you’ll have to take our word that “Visitor Q” is neither cruel nor exploitative toward its bizarre characters. It takes ordinary family vectors — a father consumed by his job but interested in his children, a mother who feels estranged yet needs to nurture, two kids who find that, however much they rebel against their parents, there’s no place like home — and bends them into melodramatic metaphor. For all the extreme behavior on display, the movie gradually reveals a tenderness toward the clan. If they are a distortion of the standard TV-family household, the Cleavers with cleavers, they ultimately unite in a symbiotic Pieta. Perhaps to understand this family is to go mad with them … but what are movies if not vehicles for exploration into the beyond and the beneath, into what can’t be spoken but can, with such rough poignancy, be shown?