Some filmmakers will go to any end for their art. Werner Herzog notoriously put cast and crew through hell in the making of "Fitzcarraldo" (1982) in the Peruvian jungle, with hundreds of indigenous people hired to drag a 320-ton steamship over a hill with real ropes and real injuries.
Yosuke Okuda has similarly pushed realism to a mad extreme in making his second feature, "The Dork, the Girl and the Douchebag" — but with himself as the principal victim. Playing a skinhead extortionist and drug dealer who gets into trouble with the yakuza, he staged his own beatings with real punches, real blood and, in one memorable scene, real rings being torn from his nose.
Described in the program introduction as a "gob in the face" of a Japanese film world that is "overflowing with disinfected movies," "The Dork" is filled with touches of black humor that make the experience of watching it less than excruciating. Also the film's portrayals of its socially marginal characters, with the glaring exception of its passive-victim women, have a crazed energy that verges on the cartoonish (though the script is an Okuda original). Forced to scratch out a living as a day laborer and night worker in the four years between his first feature, the similarly violent "Tokyo Playboy Club," and this second, Okuda knows whereof he speaks.