by MATTHEW HAYS

Though Japan's national cinema has brought us so many amazing things - kinky anime, tormented heroines in melodramas, Cruel Story of Youth and Godzilla, to name a few - the subgenre I think of as techno-commentary isn't one I'm partial to.

In Yutaka Tsuchiya's Peep "TV" Show, we see all the hallmarks of this type of film. There are two tortured characters at its core: Hasegawa is a hapless voyeur, caught up in Internet sex, who finds that the footage of planes flying into the World Trade Center is strangely beautiful, almost erotic. Moe is a lass thoroughly caught up in Japan's Gosloli trend (or Gothic Lolita), in which she dresses up in retro frocks in a misguided effort to be cool. They're both dehumanized by all the technology around them. It has isolated and alienated them. It is so very, very dehumanizing, this film tells us - and we learn much of this in video diary form, in which the characters recount things (using new digital video technology - get it?) with their camcorders.

Trouble is, all of this dehumanization means someone got so dehumanized they forgot how to make movies for other human beings. To be sure, Peep "TV" Show has certain things in its favour. The collusion of sex and violence, of someone getting off on images of carnage, is certainly an astute critique of our capitalist consumption of misery via the electronic media (witness the TV coverage of the recent tsunami, something which approached the ludicrous almost immediately after the disaster struck). And there's some kinky mindfucking going on here, especially during a scene in which a man is degraded sexually while a voiceover reads the last will and testament of one of the 9/11 terrorist suicide bombers.

But too much of Peep "TV" Show feels like gratuitous posing. True to form, Peep "TV" Show feels much like a schoolgirl's diary: flashes of intrigue here and there, but for the most part just downright tedious.

Peep "Tv" Show opens at the Cinéma du parc Friday, Jan. 21

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