Mordant wit imbues Japan’s
late-night skits

HIFF FACTS

---

By Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.com

What comes to mind when you hear of a movie titled "The Color of Life"? I thought of African savannas, Elton John tunes and cute animals a la "The Lion King." I did not think of rotting corpses, cooking shows for cannibals or bikini-clad mannequins dripping with blood.

Which just goes to show you how ignorant I am of late-night Japanese TV, where the hit program "Vermillion Pleasure Night" was spawned. ("Vermillion is the name of a color, it is the color of a scream," explains the host.) A collection of skits poking fun at various facets of Japanese life, "Vermillion" apparently struck a chord with millions of youthful viewers even as it offended older ones with its graphic displays of sadism and gross-out humor.

"The Color of Life" purports to present a compendium of the show's greatest hits, as well as a memorial. (Yoshimasu Ishibashi, "Vermillion's" creator, abruptly ended the show after only six months.)

"The Color of Life" Screens at 9:30 p.m. today and 1 p.m. Sunday at Signature Dole Cannery, 735 Iwilei Rd.

Loosely organized into four sections called "Family," "Food," "Anger and Fear" and "Love," the 90-minute compilation provides only intermittent clues to the show's popularity, but Ishibashi's campy subversiveness lifts "Vermillion" above much of late-night American TV (especially "SNL").

For starters there's a running skit called "The Fuccon Family," which follows the adventures of three mannequins -- Mom in a blond flip wig, Dad with a Midwestern comb-over and Junior in a baseball cap -- as they adjust to life in present-day Japan. In an opening scene, the family clashes over the son's desire for a dog, tempers flaring even as the mannequins' smiles remain frozen.

Later, Dad is caught in an affair with another mannequin and Junior is kidnapped by an older man ("Phone us before you follow a stranger," smiles Mom when he returns home safely). Using mannequins to highlight the banality of family conversation is a tired simile; still, domestic disputes take on a heightened pointlessness in Ishibashi's hands.

"Midnight Cooking" is another running gag, its host a sweet-featured young woman who is apparently an expert at cooking human body parts. (Avoid the liver, she counsels, until you know its owner's alcohol history.) As in "Six Singing Girls" -- a raucous hymn to the pleasures of dance, vegetable chopping and accordion mastery -- later episodes of "Midnight Cooking" poke fun at the excesses of music videos, and indeed the entire show is an anti-MTV of sorts.

Rough, sophomoric and evincing a rather blurry satire, "Color" is mostly harmless -- not a good thing for a show that fancies itself a cutting-edge affair. Still, there's a mordant wit in spots -- those rotting corpses, say, discussing topics like aging -- not to mention another helpful window onto the modern Japanese psyche.

And "Color" manages to come up with the same conclusions (i.e., people are brainless, passionless fools) without the self-importance of many other Japanese films. Which is an achievement of sorts, I guess.

Click for online
calendars and events.