Destroy All Podcasts DX Episode 184 - Sonatine
Hosts: Dustin, Jeremy, John, Rebecca
This is about Russian roulette, rock 'em sock 'em robots, Hawaiian shirts, and cold -blooded murder.
Click [HERE] to eat a popsicle on a bus.
This is one time I'm kind of mixed on the Japanese poster versus the American one. The American one is blunt and all, "Hey, this is a gangster movie", which it is, but it's a very artistic gangster movie. That said, I'm not sure a fish on a spear gives any indication at all what this movie is about, so I'm not sure it works either?
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Posted 18 April, 2011 - 00:00 by Destroy All Pod... |
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Comments
10 comments postedIt's a great film. How about doing a podcast on Violent Cop?
I'd definitely like to do a podcast on Violent Cop. I think it's interesting to compare against Sonatine and Fireworks, which are both poetic and beautiful in addition to being bloody, tough guy movies. I'll save it for the podcast, but I feel like Violent Cop is brutal everywhere Sonatine and Fireworks are graceful.
It seems bizarre that they would repackage the film as an 'extra' rather than give the film a standalone release; here in the UK it was released seperately alongside Kitano's other works. I've been meaning to look into his filmography after I discovered Hana-Bi a long time ago as a young teenager.
From some reason though I always get Takeshi Kitano and Takeshi Miike confused. :P
Good podcast either way, shame not more listeners seem to tune into these live-action based podcasts based on the lack of comments or posts on recent editions.
I can't speak for the demographics, but I can say things aren't what they seem. Just because they don't leave comments here doesn't always mean they don't listen to them. Chances are folks e-mail DAP w/ adult-rated content which is prohibited here, or folks like me are just busy doing other things like filing out taxes for big rebates & we all need money to live in the internet.
But anyway, I like Sonatine a whole lot. Been a while since I've seen arthouse gangster films like this since Pulp Fiction.
Hah! Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike couldn't be more different as filmmakers. Speaking of which, Zuey and I just previewed Miike's live action Yatterman adaptation last night. That movie is insane. I guess you can look at the US release of Sonatine as disrespectful to Sonatine, or you can look at it like the best bonus feature ever.
And we always enjoy comments and would certainly like to see more! I can also assure you we are NOT getting lots of emails from listeners. We almost never get emails these days. It's tough to gauge which podcasts people are into and which they are not. We don't have very thorough statistics and unless we get comments (whether here or on Twitter or whatever), we don't really know.
We've been slowly expanding the material we cover since our 12th podcast was about Hollywood Zap! and the original Battlestar Galactica movie a month later, but I feel like there's always been resistence among a certain segment of listeners to live action material. I'm not sure why, but there it is. If you like live action stuff, let us know in comments!
Sounds like an interesting film! I'll have to check it out!
I must admit though, I had my fingers crossed for MLP:FiM. ;-)
A surprising number of people have been suggesting this. Maybe we'll run a poll and if enough people really want it, we'll do it? Glad you enjoyed the podcast!
I watched parts of the Miike-version Yatterman a couple of months back and it was absolutely awful, worse than I expected.
As for comments, I've only just recently joined the site but I have listened to this podcast for years, so it does not necessarily mean that live-action oriented casts are more popular in general than others, because this is after all a Japanese toy site (for the most part), and people into robot anime are going to make up most of the members, while "lighter" listeners are probably not members, but still they listen to and enjoy the show.
I have nothing against podcasts on live-action material, sometimes it helps me find new things, like The Green Slime -- I know Fukusaku Kinji but I didn't know about that movie! I generally listen to all the podcasts here and I really enjoy the variety (especially things like the interview with the "Evil King Mechacranios" or whatever guy who archives robot toy print ads, that was a good one.
I have only two complaints in general:
1) Is there a list on the site of all the posdcasts? Maybe I'm blind, but all I can see is a list on the side with the five most recent posts. A "see all" option would be useful.
2) Enough with the freaking Turtles, already.
Sorry to ramble on for so long. I love Sonatine, there's nothing else I can say about that.
Hi Renato,
Thanks for your comments! I left Yatterman wondering what just happened to my eyes for two hours. I don't think we can podcast on it until we dig up some of the Yatterman cartoon and really dissect what the heck we are seeing. I'm not sure if this is a weird Japanese humor thing that I do not truly grasp, or if the movie was just created by diseased minds. Rarely have I been so confused by a film.
You make a good point about CDX readers versus people who are only podcast listeners. Do you think it would help to have the podcasts both available on CDX and have a dedicated Destroy All Podcasts website? Then "lighter" listeners, as you put it, might feel less intimidated by the robots.
The plan is to do more Fukasaku and Kitano stuff in addition to our usual diet of old cartoons! If you have specific suggestions for live action Japanese movies you'd like us to cover, please let us know.
You can indeed see all the old podcasts on the site. At the bottom of every podcast post there's a link called, "Destroy All Podcasts DX's blog". If you click on that, it will take you to the list of every podcast we've ever done, though it is broken into pages and only 15 podcasts show up per page. You can select a page number or click "next", "last", "first", or "previous". If you are looking for a specific podcast, you can also use the CDX search engine.
We're still probably going to do more Ninja Turtles but there will be a big break, as with last time where we waited a good four months. Let me give you a brief peek behind the curtain: The big chunk of Turtle podcasts all at once last year was mostly due to the CDX upgrade -- we had to churn out a month's worth of podcasts in less than a week, recorded, edited, and ready to post. We just did a Turtles marathon so we could get it done in time.
Hope the occasional Turtles podcast doesn't bug you too much!
Hi, thanks for the response.
I don't mean to make more work for you guys, but yeah, I feel that this podcast has diverged far beyond the realm of CollectionDX's topics, so having its own website would likely open it up to a much wider range of listeners. I mean, if CDX had its own podcast where people talk about Chogokins and stuff I'd listen to that, too (I really like the "Some Assembly Required" videos), but that's not what you guys are about, this podcast is its own thing now.
As for Yatterman, the cartoon is a national treasure here (I got a cel from one of its incarnations when I visited Tatsunoko about ten years ago, but didn't know what it was at the time!), so I assume the movie makes perfect sense to Japanese viewers. But that doesn't matter, I like the Time Bokan series, Yatterman I can take it or leave it, but the live action movie was just... Ugh.
Thanks for the info on how to look up old posts. I remember before the website upgrade you could display a list of titles of all of the podcasts, but at least they are still accessible. I'm going to take a listen to the Votoms one next.
As for suggestions... I guess "Violent Cop" is a given. How about "Kikujiro"? Then there's an odd one which came out a few years back called "Takeshi's", which, I heard, is kind of a meta-movie, where all the Takeshi characters come together or something. I never saw it, but it's on my list.
Finally, how about old-school 80s forgotten classics like D.A.R.Y.L.? And did you already do Project A-Ko?