User Reviews

Cold Fish was a film I was really itching to see, not necessarily because of its story but because of its genre: Asian Extreme. After spending the last couple months dredging through the likes of Burst City, Death Powder and 964 Pinocchio, I was really eager to see how this type of storytelling has progressed. Also as I'm am taking part in my cities international film festival, I wanted something a little dangerous in amongst the documentaries and dramas, just to spice it up a bit. Needless to say I got what I wanted and perhaps a bit more than I cared to witness. Though I am a film viewer who can appreciate gore and guts and depravity, this film still managed to test my boundaries of personal taste, and I came out of it with mixed emotions, some stuff I truly liked, while others, pushed the line I've drawn for myself as to what I can handle in a film. I'm thankful to find a film that challenges me thusly, but now it's over I can say this, too far! Cold Fish is about a recently remarried father named Shamoto who enters into business with an exuberant and strange tropical fish salesman named Murata. It isn't long before business turns sour as we find out this salesman has a penchant for killing those that defy him, and enlists our protagonist as an accomplice through fear and shock. As Murata begins offing more and more people, Shamoto finds himself getting pulled deeper and deeper into the crimes, trapped by this crazed killers with his career and families lives at stake should he show signs of betrayal. Can Shamoto find a sensible way out of this predicament, or will end up a stone cold killer like the man who claims to have found his apprentice. To watch you'll have to dive into the bloody water of Cold Fish and see what bites.

OK whoa! Hey! Whoa! This movie was wild and raw and crazy. There is a lot of depravity and violence throughout the film, much of it pushing the boundaries of tastefulness to the point that several audience members left half way through, several other during the final act. It's not a easy film to stomach as almost immediately we're treated to a lengthy sudo-rape scene that is all together unsettling, strange and sinister. From here things just get more insane as we're high jacked and handcuffed to the loud and brash personality of Murata. This is a great performance, and a performance that could only work in this type of film and culture. Murata is wacky, over the top, and down right evil at times, but it's so perfect, the film needed a vivid and crazy character to give it a necessary black comedy element and it got that and much more. In a perfect world, this guy would be nominated for a best supporting actor award, sadly performances like this get lost in translation, even still Murata commands and controls the film throughout; it's also helpful that our lead actor isn't fleshed out or acted nearly as well. Our protagonist is missing a major component of admission of his feelings on his situation to himself or someone he trusts. It's hard to tell what goes on in the mind of Shamoto, which makes all his actions quite puzzling, Shamotot is too quiet for too long to find any reasoning in his actions. The other female counterparts are badly written, I tried to chalk it up to a culture of docile women, but that doesn't cover how objectified and stupid all of the female characters are portrayed; they live for, and are abused (brutally) by the men they claim to love. Not a single redeeming quality exists on any of these characters, and even our hero is reluctant to be one, which becomes even more apparent in the final gruesome act.

The final act of this film had my heart racing with a hand covering my mouth to stifle the shock of one of the bloodiest and goriest endings to a film I have seen in a film. That said, I loved the direction it took towards the end, switching over to a gory thriller that had me wincing from its scenes. Still there are certain things I feel inclined to draw a line at. As far as cinematic depictions of rape go, I can tell myself it's just a film, but even still, Cold Fish subjects the viewer to a brutal rape scenes that go on to long and to far into perverse and wrongful territories that it became hard to take, or even justify as valid entertainment. I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying don't glorify it, and I felt that may have happened here. Story and ensemble aside, the film has some pretty sophisticated direction, a perfectly used score and great editing, the film transitions from creepy to criminal and feels so right in doing so, a film that builds to a cataclysmic event seamlessly. I like the film overall, but take issue with some of the content (or at least the duration of it) that takes place within.

So while I can sit back and say, wow, that was a film that pushed and tested my as a viewer, I think other just might not want to bother, while others may run for the bathroom. The film is for hardcore horror fans and fans of extreme cinema. People who prefer their plots on the tamer side, please steer clear, this is the bloodiest, goriest film I've seen this year, or maybe even in the past few years. All I know is that by the end of it, I was shocked and in awe of what I had witnessed. Truly an offensive and macabre piece of work, crafted with skill yet lacking in sensibility. See it if you like your blood by the gallon.

Sono Shion amps it up in this tale of a tropical fish store owner, Shamoto, who crosses paths with alpha male Murata and finds his weaknesses exposed and inner strengths tested to the limit.

The film is part gorefest, part schlockfest, and very, very bloody. The actors come at their parts full tilt, especially the Lady Macbeth-esque Asuka Kurosawa as Aiko, who surely watched Lena Olin in Romeo Is Bleeding to prepare. Denden as Murata is overblown but deeply disturbed and disturbing. The physicality of the performance means he is all feral restlessness. Women can't resist him, men can't defeat him. When finally overcome, his pathetic babbling in a return to childhood is unnerving. This contrasts in the extreme with the meek, eyes-always-downward Shamoto (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), who is disconnected from his daughter and has re-married badly. He needs shaken from his reverie, and Murata is a sobering, nerve-jangling wake-up call.

With Japan's current concerns about heinous crimes, herbivore males and willful young females, there are elements here that speak to the times. Except they don't so much 'speak', as scream and shout. Sion thinks how far everything can go and then doubles it, so that any social message is hard to tease out from the relentless battering of the senses. Like Love Exposure, this film is too long, and enjoys exploiting its female characters too much. But there is something here that seeps through the hacked flesh and spiralling body count. Perhaps it is an interrogation of the crisis in Japanese masculinity. Whatever it is, this is a bold and provocative film that dares you to try and dismiss it.

I've decided to watch "Cold Fish"because of its acclaimed director and the good critics. I was disappointed.

Though the movie was undeniably entertaining, it entertains because of its shock factor, and not exactly because it has a good plot.

This is the story about two owners of aquarium shops who meet for banal circumstances. The eldest of them seems to be a nice, generous man but ends up showing that he's a serial killer.

The movie explores themes like rape (very shocking scenes, which were a little unwarranted IMO), murder, domination, humiliation and authority. I could accept better the scenes filled with gore if gore there wasn't so gratuitous. Yet many of its bloody scenes are unnecessary to the plot, to the point of making the viewer bored of seeing so much blood in one movie, with no point at all.

Not only that, the movie is filled with plot holes. Many aspects of the movie remain unexplained at the end of it - when a certain character disappears and his family starts searching for him, the family quickly gives up searching and pressuring the last man who saw him to tell them where the character is. The police in the movie has completely unrealistic behavior as well - fortunately Japanese policemen are much more prepared in real life than they are depicted in this movie!

The ending, which is supposed to show the moral degradation of a man who used to be dignified, did not convince me. His character lacked development, and the final act to me was absurdly cliché and unjustified.

If you want to be shocked for a little with a good amount of bloody scenes, watch it. Now if you expect a good psychological drama and a well-written plot, you'll definitely not find it in this movie.

'I hope you like cold fish' is probably the sexiest thing I'll ever hear a French girl say.

Completely out of context, 'Cold Fish' is the latest work of 'Love Exposure' director, Sion Sono. Being that it is over four hours long – and not even I can be arsed to sit through a film for that long – I have never seen 'Love Exposure', and so this was my first experience of Sono's work.

The old 'based on a true story', then grossly exaggerated for cinema premise, we see boring, dull, pet fish shop owner, Shamoto and his family's lives turned upside down when the big and brash, tropical fish shop owner, Murata walks into them.

What follows is a pretty standard offering, with violence, blood and sex thrown in for 'shocks', and it's all pretty entertaining, in a popcorn- movie kind of a way. Despite being another long film, it rarely drags, with some nice camera-work to contrast industrial Japan in the shadow of Fuji-san.

There are attempts to add the odd psychological element here and there, though these never get too deep, as 'Cold Fish' plods along its dirty, sexy, bloody way. Don't search for any hidden meanings here; there's little fishy about this one.

www.politic1983.blogspot.com

In what will very likely be the most brutal of the films this year, Sion Sono's latest film Cold Fish purports at the start that it's "based on a true story." Doing a little research one finds that it is based on a story of serial killers, albeit dog breeders instead of fish. But this isn't to say Sono likely doesn't take some liberties in his story, despite (or with the help of) those title cards saying what the date and time is conveniently and then when it comes to the real crunch time of madness in the climax of the film there's even a stop-watch time code on the screen running even milliseconds as to the countdown of events. It's a neat trick, perhaps the only real 'device' that Sono allows himself amid the naked honesty of the emotions of the characters.

It's the story of a two fish store owners, one the timid but 'normal' Shamoto (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) husband to a second wife (beautiful Kagurazaka) and father of a daughter who is not hers. His daughter is caught one night shoplifting but comes to the attention at the store of a loud-but-seemingly-cheery other fish store owner, Murata (Denden). He seems a little too brash to be warm, but is friendly enough to invite them over to his store, which has five times the fish and exotic ones than Shamoto's. The dynamic on the surface appears to be like out of one of those mob stories where the little shop clerk meets the Big Guy in town. Turns out it's not too far off an assumption.

After Murata somehow convinces Shamoto's daughter to become one of his 'girls' who works at the fish store (and in the midst of his 'gettin-to- know-you-family' stuff has his way with Shamoto's wife), he drags the meek guy further into his darker pastime: he kills people, he and his wife Aiko (bubbly Kurosawa), who take a body from a guy who basically looks at Murata the wrong way to chop him up into little pieces and spill the parts into the nearby river. All the while Murata seems to be enjoying himself, maniacally, along with Aiko just as messed up and giggling as the older-richer-psychopath fish-store owner bosses around his "apprentice". Shamoto doesn't know what to do. He thinks back to the Earth being 4.6 billion years old, and will end in another 4.6 billion years, staring at the stars in the planetarium...

If you're familiar with any of Sono's previous efforts- Suicide Club, Love Exposure chiefly for worse and better- you may know what to expect. Then again, maybe not. Unlike those films, Sono, in a rather wise move, doesn't sensationalize the violence and gore, and believe you me there is plenty of it to go around, since he's trying to stick to a somewhat more realistic aesthetic than the sensationalism of the epic Love Exposure. He draws out his characters more naturally, and the acting is sometimes over the top (certainly from Denden, who chews up scenery faster than Sono can dish out lines for him to bark), but not to the point where we're drawn out of the film's weirder moments... that is until the last half hour, when it goes into total Gonzo-mode. This is especially helpful as Sono is dealing with some highly dramatic things on screen: abuse, rape, insanity, the works.

It might be telling that the poster image of the film is almost identical (and probably not by accident) to the one for Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, also a film about a man bottling up everything inside and then it exploding when pushed to the edge. For the Japanese, and for a character as emotionally bottled up as Shamoto, who's only release is looking at the stars, a guy like Murata is both the best and worst thing that's ever happened to him (best as in he does finally open up emotionally, worst in that his life will forever be in misery and madness). Cold Weather is extreme in violence and subject matter, but it has strong points about human responsibility and familial dysfunction.