Beyond the Multiplex

I'm not going to pass myself off as an expert on the cult-fave Japanese director Takashi Miike; I've seen five or six of his 60 or so films (some of which are straight-to-video quickies). But I would venture to guess that nothing in Miike's often hallucinatory and ultra-violent output up to now would be suitable for 8-year-olds. That has changed with the utterly delightful "Zebraman," a loving spoof on the "Ultraman" tradition of 1960s and '70s low-budget Japanese TV superheroes. "Zebraman" was supposedly a canceled show that aired for seven episodes in 1978, and which, in Miike's version, actually contained a coded prophecy about the future of humanity, crafted by a well-meaning alien.

"Zebraman" has all the semi-coherent genre blending you'd expect from Miike, who works too much and too fast but is nonetheless one of contemporary film's most original synthesizers. (Maybe that's a contradiction in terms; but see also Tarantino, Quentin). It's an apocalyptic fantasy set in 2010, with aliens invading the earth -- and they're cute, "Ghostbusters"-style aliens with green gumdrop bodies at that. It has a handsome, arrogant cop hero (Atsuro Watabe) who keeps spouting hilarious hard-boiled dialogue and complaining about his venereal diseases. It has a mild-mannered schoolteacher named Shinichi (played as a bottomless fount of social unease by Sho Aikawa) who dreams of harnessing Zebraman's powers -- never dreaming that he really is Zebraman.

For any fan of Japanese pop culture, the clips from the alleged original series (Zebraman's theme song! His kicking and punching technique! His stylish guitar-strumming in his alternate existence as a beloved, joke-cracking schoolteacher!) are positively to die for. As usual with Miike, the overall film is hit and miss -- and the digital transfer I watched was pretty crappy -- but the brilliance of the concept here more than makes up for the sloppy moments and purposeful obscurity. Zebraman is aided by a lovable kid in a wheelchair and a comely single mom (who appears in Shinichi's dreams as the sexed-up Zebranurse!), and even if this is clearly pastiche it has a gentleness you definitely can't find in "Audition" or "Ichi the Killer." Zebra screw-kick! Striping evil! (Now playing at the Pioneer Theater in New York. May play other cities; DVD release will follow.)

I could complain about a world where Miike is vastly better known, even among film buffs, then is Italian director Davide Ferrario, but A) there's no point, and B) it's dumb to act like you can't enjoy both of them. Ferrario is something of a lone wolf in the murky landscape of contemporary Italian films; he isn't all that well known at home, let alone overseas. His films, both narratives and documentaries, are dryly amusing and fueled by intellectual curiosity. In Ferrario's newest, he follows the legendary journey of writer Primo Levi after his 1945 liberation from Auschwitz, walking 1,000 miles from central Poland to northern Italy.

It's a haunting and disorienting film that bounces from place to place and era to era. We see historical footage of Levi himself, snippets of Soviet propaganda and a neo-Nazi rally in contemporary Western Europe. Ferrario travels from contemporary Ukraine (where thugs recently murdered a pop singer because of his choice of language) to the ghost towns around Chernobyl to a desperately awful touring zoo in Moldova, which is apparently the poorest country in Europe. He visits Belarus, a collectivized police state that seems virtually unchanged since the so-called end of communism. On the other hand, he also encounters an Italian millionaire who has moved his business to Hungary, and discovers that the open-air market where Levi once scavenged for food is now run by Chinese immigrants. "Primo Levi's Journey" is a profound meditation on the unevenness of history, reminding us -- as Faulkner once remarked -- that the past not only isn't dead, it isn't really past at all. (Opens Aug. 17 at the Quad Cinema in New York, with national release to follow.)

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