Another AUDITION I Didn't Get

[It's always cool to know that people read my site. Here's a massive movie review for Beth, who requested this way back in October. Thanks for reading. ]

The Japanese film Audition made one thing obvious--Japan has absolutely no interest in building foreign relations between themselves and me. I'm trying, Japan. I eat at your restaurants. I play as you guys in Axis and Allies. Hell, one of my favorite movies is about a ninety-year old janitor who beats up a bunch of teenagers in skeleton costumes using your most rad and lethal export, but I guess that's not enough. I've sent Japan my ambassador, but Audition was the peacemaking equivalent of their ambassador punching my ambassador's grandmother in the face.

Audition opens in a hospital room where our hero and his son watch their mother die. Cut to seven years later--the son, now seventeen, notices that his dad has been upset lately and mentions that maybe he should consider remarrying. The hero, who we'll call Aesop, thinks this is a good idea, but soon gets discouraged because he can't meet any nice women. His strategies for doing this, by the way, have so far included not dating, not talking to women, not making eye contact with women, and making sure to never appear in a room with anyone who has ever met a woman. It's then that a movie executive friend of his comes up with the genius idea (I'm not being sarcastic. I seriously think it's genius) of holding a fake audition for a fake female lead in a sort of real movie, in which the hero could sit in on to screen applicants for a wife. I think.

Something really needs to be pointed out here before I continue. See how my review was able to get to this point in the story in one paragraph that probably took you less than five minutes to read? The movie took 45 minutes to get me to the same place. I was even kind enough to toss a few jokes into the opening paragraph. All Audition gave me was 45 minutes of this:


(Reviewer Re-enactment)

Another thing I noticed is that in Japan, their horror movie characters are just as fucking moronic as ours. After the hero picks a shy, soft-spoken girl as the winner, his movie executive friend checks out some of the cryptic answers she gave during the audition. He's even nice enough to point out that she lied about her:

- address
- family
- studio contact
- place of employment
- favorite food not being "people."

He goes so far as to beg the hero not to call her, but I've seen enough horror movies to know that things just wouldn't be right if directly after this plea, the camera didn't instantly cut to a close-up of the hero smiling while on a date with the girl anyway. Which it did.



The guy and the girl go out on two or three dates, and somewhere around this point in the movie was THE GREATEST SHOCK SCARE I'VE EVER SEEN IN A MOVIE EVER. The movie had been completely docile up to now and I never NEVER fall for the shock scare, but in all the horror movies I’ve ever seen, I've never been scared as bad as I've been at that moment. If I sound kind of ambiguous describing exactly what happened and why, it's because it didn't make any damn sense at this point in the movie and makes just as much sense today, but that doesn't mean it was less scary. Just ask my underwear.

Anyway, I guess that doesn't really matter though because nothing else scary happened for the next thirty-five minutes. Nothing. I'm not kidding. The guy even confesses that the audition was less than genuine, and the girl is totally cool with it. They even go on another date, and at this point I realize that this Japanese doughboy has squeezed three more dates out of a fake audition than I've gone on in the last six months. I'm an hour and twenty minutes into the movie, which, disregarding the above paragraph's half-a-second, has been a fucking love story. It might as well have been your common chick-flick fare with Hugh Grant as the hero, Sandra Bullock as the girl, Haley Joel Osmont as the son, and my middle finger as the film's most honest critic.

It's not until the man has sex with the girl at a beach getaway and wakes up the next morning to find her gone that the movie starts to get a bit weird. As he walks around town looking for her, discovering where she lied about working, lied about living, and lied about not making sandwhiches out of peoples faces, he starts to uncover bits of her shady past, but still nothing too shocking by horror movie standards. By the way, according to the timecode that's been on top of my TV screen the entire time thanks to me losing my VCR remote years ago, we’re an hour and forty minutes into the movie.

At the 100-minute mark the girl sneaks into the guy’s house and poisons his drink. The guy passes out, and for the next ten minutes…

I’m not a cultured man at all, but by the time this movie’s end credits finished rolling I had learned something very important about Eastern civilization that they don’t mention on those Zodiac menus they hand out at their restaurants: The Japanese don’t play by the same rules we do. Case in point: our cartoons make people laugh. Their cartoons give people seizures. I was about to learn the hard way that Japan wasn't all Mogwais and Bonzai Trees, which, until tonight, I totally thought it was.

…for the next ten minutes we get a first-person look into this girl’s past through a sequence that, unless you’ve happened to catch a glimpse of the aerobics class at the Steele Creek YMCA, will be the most disturbing thing you’ll ever see. Although I can’t find any screen caps on the Web, you can turn this into an interactive review right now by shoving your finger down your throat. Without giving too much away, we find out what really happened to her family, her studio contact, her place of employment, and oh yeah...a guy eats vomit.

So after this dreamy montage the man awakes on the floor of his house, fully aware and concious but unable to move, to find the girl standing over him in full Catwoman regalia. Apparently she's decided that this time, saying she can't go out because she has to wash her hair tonight, asking if they can still be friends, and then later giggling with her friends about the size of his genitals won't be sufficient enough of a breakup. True story: in 10th grade, this girl I barely even dated was so mad that I liked her best friend instead that she wrote that I was an asshole in huge letters on her locker. I thought this was a little extreme until I saw the Audition chick slowly sink acupunctue needles into the guy's stomach. Again. And again. And Again. And Again. And Again. Apparently the Japanese haven't developed "zoom out" technology for their cameras yet, because every one of these are shown in excruciating close-ups. Do you know what the worst part about all of this is? The guy didn't even do anything wrong. He hooks up with her, and the next thing I know, he's getting acupuncture needles shoved in his gut, which is why I came to the conclusion that this must all part of the natural Japanese courting process. Next she shoves one in his tongue. It's also very possible that she put one in each eye, but it's around this point that I quit watching.

I don't consider myself a pussy by any means. I've jumped out of moving automobiles, broken concrete blocks with my hand, and even had a stripper give me her phone number, but I'm not ashamed to say that as of press time, I've still never seen a girl in oversize prophylactics put needles in a Japanese man's eyes. So now I'm literally laying there with my face under the covers listening to this girl's creepy chirpy dialog when I hear a strange noise. "Hmmmm," I say to myself. "That noise sounds a lot like...a Japanese man getting his feet sawed off with piano wire? Could it be?" I pull down the covers. Yep.

The guy's son finally bursts through the door to find his footless, pin-filled father lying on the floor who, if he could talk, would say "About fucking time, Captain Punctual!" After a brief struggle the son pushes the girl down a flight of stairs, and that's Audition. No, really. That's it.

Audition was, without a doubt, the most whacked out thing I've ever seen. It didn't make any damn sense from beginning to end. Unless, of course, the two end sequences were visual metaphors illustrating what the man feared would happen if the relationship failed, and his equally horrifying fears of what would happen if the relationship actually worked out. In the reveal of what really happened to the girl's ex-boyfriend, the horrific severity of the imagery was necessary to convey the severity as it existed in the hero's head. If things didn’t work out he's worried she'll go batshit--an understandable conclusion drawn by the vague answers and cautionary advice he constantly received when asking others about her past. Of course, his mind went to work, inflating just how batshit she went in the past to hyperrealistically horrific levels like our minds always do. If things DID work out, he’s so in love with her that he knows she’ll get under his skin "deeper and deeper" (the transration of the Japanese word she says as she pushes the acupuncture pins into him) until it will be painful to even look at another girl (the needles in the eyes). He’d gladly surrender his very independence over to her without thinking twice about it, living every moment of his life for her (his paralyzation). The problem is, he realizes that once he does this he won’t have enough power over his overwhelming emotions to ever walk away (his amputated feet), and he doesn’t know if he’s absolutely ready to give up that independence. The reason Audition sucked as a horror movie was because it was not a horror movie at all. It was a When-Harry-Met-Sally type guy-meets-girl love story with an unprecedented, unique, and dare I say genius plot denouncement that American cinema would never allow or understand.

But what do I know?

-GONG!-