takashi miike

Izo is quite numbingly depressing save for a couple great scenes. It's very well made, but my brain just turned off midway through. He sure loves birthing scenes and lactation.

http://monkeytownhq.com/horrorweek.html

http://imdb.com/title/tt0257885/

Holy crap - Miike is IN Hostel (directed by that Cabin Fever guy)!

http://www.kaijushakedown.com/2006/11/weirdness_ho_mi.html

oh man.... awesome!!!!!

This will rock my socks.

Audition: His best. I don't care if he never tops it, it's a bit like complaining Coppola never topped The Godfather; there are plenty of other goodies in Miike's swollen corpus.

Box: This is his segment of Three: Extremes, and its probably my favorite after Audition. At first you'll say "oh noes scary Asian girl w/ long straight hair again" but then Miike goes so far in 3 different directions that your eyes start to gently cross. There's a poetic fairy tale simplicity to the way the story unfolds, and the final shot both surprises and makes perfect dream-logic sense.

Graveyard of Honor: This is quite good, and those who complain that Miike is incapable of maintaining mood need to absorb this 2+ hour straight forward character study of a gangster careening his way into an early grave. If you need to empathize with a character's actions in order to enjoy a film then this probably isn't for you, but as an unblinking study in self-destructive sociopathy it's hard to beat.

City of Lost Souls: Embodies many Miike tendencies that I don't like (hyperactivity, shallow characterization, cheap action) but this one works for some reason. Don't laugh, but the light touch + forward pitch used to tell the tale of doomed criminal lovers trapped in a postmodern funhouse reminds of me of early Godard stuff like À bout de souffle, Band à parte, and Pierrot le fou (though this may be received-Godard by way of Tarantino/Scott's True Romance). Lots of replay value, and anytime I put it on I find myself sucked into its ridiculous web.

Ichii The Killer: Manga made flesh, think X-men Go Salò, and a very potent rumination on sadism, masochism, and vengeance. A lot of people are put off by the misogyny, and they should be. It's not a pretty movie, and I'd fault it more if the film weren't so successful at creating a fantasy world that operates by its own twisted rules. By rights it shouldn't be as funny or as effective as it is, but it is. Like Cronenberg's Crash on crank. I wish they had kept the original name, though: Killer #1.

Happiness of the Katakuris: You must have a very sensitive funny bone to be amused by most of what goes on here, and George Landis and Michael Jackson did dancing zombies much better a long time ago. But it is tres wacky, and there are several numbers worth the price of admission, mainly the first love song and the final number.

Visitor Q: If it were half as involving as it were shocking, it would be a success, but I didn't care a) what happened to any of these characters, or b) where it was going. The song playing over the final credits is fantastic, though.

Dead Or Alive: I just couldn't get with this. Yes, it's hyperactive and the ending is mind-blowing. So what? Maybe it'd be different in a theatre with 100 brahs throwing popcorn at the screen, but as a movie there was not a lot of substance there for me to grab hold of. I've heard DOA 2: Birds is better, though.

Still want to see: Black Society Trilogy (Shinjuku Triad Society, Ley Lines, Rainy Dog), DOA 2, DOA Final, Blues Harp, Bird People of China, Gozu, Sabu, Great Yokai War and Imprint

Not very interested in (should I be?): Fudoh, Nostalgia, Innocent Blood, Full Metal Gokudo, Salaryman Kintaro, The Guys From Paradise, MPD Psycho, Zebraman, Family, Yakuza Demon, Agitator, Andromedia, Violent Fire, One Missed Call, Izo

On a final DVD nerd note, Miike's films are available in varying quality. All the US DVDs of Audition are crap (get the UK R2), and Ichii The Killer's best incarnation I believe is still the Dutch version (US has a soft transfer and UK is cut). Graveyard of Honor isn't available in the US, but I think there's a release coming in 2007. The German DVD has no English subs, but does have a great cover:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/graveyard_of_honor.jpg

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/graveyard_of_honor.jpg

Singing and dancing zombies. Insane lactating mothers. Incestuous killer sisters. A son rebuilt by mad science from pieces of a father figure. A minotaur-licking loser. Two daughters literally joined at the hip. Images that mix literal, metaphoric and just plain bizarre Oedipal nightmares. Others that gush over-the-top gore and sentimentality in equal parts. In the course of films that shift from abject horror to slapstick comedy, one can easily miss the fact that Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike is a family guy.

Best known in the U.S. as director of the mega-disturbo Audition, Japan’s mad dog of pan-genre disturbance is as obsessed with family as Steven Spielberg is, with comparable technical chops but more honesty and a way better sense of humor.

Sometimes it’s a “normal” family under siege by outside forces (The Happiness of the Katakuris). Sometimes, the nuclear family fragments on contact with spiritually void consumer culture (Visitor Q). More often, that “family” is a substitute unit — the Japanese yakuza crime families that fill many of his films. (If this seems a stretch, note that Miike has a yakuza franchise called Family.)

In the most extreme instances — and when talking Miike, “extreme” takes on new meaning — you get something like Gozu, in which a lonely yakuza separated from his crime family gives birth to himself via a lover’s birth canal, which makes her his default Mom. Or something.

Miike’s family thing is a prime reason why, despite the cultural details lost in translation, his films sink deep claws into a Westerner’s back brain. Viewers can depend on nothing but knowing that the unexpected is the rule. Like an early Brian de Palma on amphetamines, even his most horrid nightmares exist cheek by jowl with tenderness. Or as Eye Weekly’s Jason Anderson smartly summarized, “Takashi Miike is not just some sick bastard — he’s a sick bastard with heart.”

He’s also insanely prolific. Miike has finished two movies this year and is filming his third, while this month will see the DVD release of 2005’s The Great Yokai War. So, rather than attempt to be comprehensive, the following is a list of representative titles that might help you get a grip on a sizable filmography.

Miike masterpieces

The Bird People in China (1998) — Magical realism, tragedy and comedy blend as a salaryman and a yakuza travel on a Herzog-like upriver search for a mystery tribe. An amazing underwater CGI shot of a flock of turtles powering a boat and a strobe-lit gangster gunfight nightmare are early indications of Miike’s febrile invention, while a character sums up the director’s career-long modus operandi, “It’s a metaphor, dummy!”

Three Extremes (2004) — After two feh shorts by Chan-wook Park and Fruit Chan, this anthology becomes essential because of Miike’s Box, the tale of a woman novelist whose increasingly surreal/frightening memories of patriarchal incest are causing her reality to break into sad, conflicting bits. Elegiac and visually gorgeous in a way suggestive of an Asian Bergman, it’s a meditative, mature look at identity.

The Great Yokai War (2005) — Miike shocks by doing a Jim Henson-y, super-cute kid’s movie involving a boy from a broken family ending up in a supernatural battle between some supernatural creatures of Japanese mythology.

The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) — The aforementioned zombie musical. What else can be said? OK — it’s a deeply spiritual, family zombie musical. With jokes.

Audition(1999) — Widowed patriarch systematically seeks new wife, finds sexually traumatized girl his daughter’s age. Multileveled hallucinations, mangled desire, acupuncture needles and knives meet body parts in less-than-conventional ways.

Visitor Q (2001) — An emasculated TV reporter tries to reconnect with his family via the creation of a documentary on family; incest, interfamilial lactation, necrophilia and worse follows. In the end, it’s actually an affirmation of familial happiness. Really.

Flawed but freakishly fab

Ichi the Killer (2001) — Thought Peter Jackson’s Dead/Alive was the last word in operatic gore? Think again. With one main character into lacerating S&M (when not blowing away roomfuls of yakuzas) and a meek programmed “assassin” who slices people sideways with his knife-enhanced Reeboks, Ichi is a reprehensible piece of manga slaughter that also manages to be, well, quite funny.

Gozu (2003) — A mystery woman indulges Miike’s lactation fetish, a character gives slimy birth to himself through his girlfriend’s birth canal and a minotaur haunts the director’s incomprehensible but hilarious idea of a road movie.

MPD Psycho (2000) — So there’s this detective suffering from multiple personality disorder. He goes after a cult with bar codes on their eyes and a killer who cuts off the tops of people’s skulls and plants sculptures in their exposed brains. Then Miike’s TV series gets weird.

Zebraman (2004) — This film is Miike in full-on adorable mode: A failed dad gets to “be” his favorite superhero. Despite or because of the loopy premise, it’s a sappy delight.

Fudoh: The New Generation (1996) — In his efforts to avenge the killing of his brother by his yakuza dad, a boy enlists the help of other teen malcontents, including a herm-aphrodite whose vagina shoots poison darts. While boasting unique set pieces and feverish, inventive style, Miike hadn’t yet perfected the mashing of melancholy, gore and comedy.

Other nonessential but fascinating offerings include 1999’s N-Girls vs. Vampire (virgin models become vampires), 2000’s The City of Lost Souls (a moody interracial gangster love story highlighted by a Matrix-style CGI cockfight) and Shangri-La (2002) a comedy that deals with, um, homelessness.

Miike misses

Look, the guy makes a lot of movies; some duffers are inevitable. These are titles you might want to skip. A good deal of these lesser efforts are yakuza films aimed to fill Japan’s ravenous direct-to-video appetite. The best (i.e., most perverse) of the lot is Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (2002), a gang turf–war/inter–crime family soap opera that is alternately dull and almost unbearably hyperviolent.

The most genre-recombinant is Full Metal Yakuza (1997). Equal parts gangster revenge film, RoboCop rip and Frankenstein, it’s a flawed jaw-dropper about an oafish yakuza who is killed trying to protect his father figure, a crime-family boss; a mad scientist “rebuilds” him with spare cyber-stuff and parts from the aforementioned boss.

Graveyard of Honor (2002), Dead or Alive (1999) and Kikoku (2003) prove that even Miike can be generic, and nobody will dis your Miike cred if you skip his competent but inessential J-horror entry One Missed Call and the extended J-pop video Andromeda.

But as career downsides go, and considering his astonishing fecundity, these few off entries are small beer indeed. Especially in light of the fact that Miike is only 46 and just now hitting a new aesthetic peak as his ongoing family “project” is gaining a tighter focus. God only knows what images and ideas we’ll be gasping over when this article is hopelessly obsolete in, say, three months.

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Then get THREE EXTREMES, skip the first two films and dig BOX.

Then BIRD PEOPLE OF CHINA.

*THEN* get VISITOR Q.

heh heh

uh
http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/post.phtml?pk=2301

^^^^ that's the trailer for Sukiyaki Western Django starring Q.T.

not sure whether this looks good-bad or actually-bad

mm....I haven't seen a lot of this dude's movies, but loved Audition, liked Ichi the Killer (although this one I REALLY have to be in the mood for)...

relaly disliked Visitor Q. it was too far into left field for me....though no doubt others probably worship it.

saw that preview on G4. why anybody would cast Tarantino in anything (other than to draw people to the theatre) is beyond me. Dude can't act at all, especially in his own movies....

woulda loved the "does my garage say Dead nigger storage" scene a lot more if someone else had been playing the part.

who?

orson welles

nice to see Bird People getting a lot of love up there. That and Visitor Q are really the only movies of his I re-watch.

I have a few of his movies on my netflix queue that I keep pushing back because I've never heard any positive word of mouth from any of my Asian film buff friends. Anyone have thoughts on any of these?

Bang Bang Love: Juvenile A
Neighbor 13: Special Edition
Sabu

Sukiyaki Western Django is a lot of fun, though as you'd expect the Tarantino bits are pretty cringeworthy.

SWD is great even with (or perhaps helped by) laughable Tarantino part. Parts of this reminded me of the awesome Tears of the Black Tiger.

Audition: FUCKIN HELL.

What else is good?

I love The Happiness of the Katakuris, but it's a very different movie.

Katakuris was fun but The Quiet Family is a much better film

i dug great yokai war

had IZO sitting at home for about a month now--worth watching?

Izo's a chore. Yokai War was fun, but I'm getting the impression that the late 90s/early 00s were a creative peak for Miike. His recent work seems to lack the intensity and wildness of the films that really made his rep in the West. Haven't seen everything he's done lately by any means, but Gozu was the last Miike flick to really grab me, and as great as it is, it's still a bit restrained and coherently organized for my tastes. Its excesses feel intentional rather than exploratory. Still a fantastic movie, funny and creepy as hell. Even romantic.

Visitor Q rules.

whoa! i thought i’d learned my lesson to not get too excited about new miike movies from the last decade or two but… that’s pretty exciting

I really wish The Bird People in China was more available.

I haven't seen any of his movies since "13 Assassins" (and probably only 5 of the ones before that), which tbf I recall all being really good or at least worthwhile, but the downside of releasing so many films is that I doubt I'll ever even dip into the 20+ he has released since then. I don't even know if this will be his first (reportedly) English language film.

I've seen First Love and Blade of the Immortal, liked both of those

Yakuza Holocaust has been on uk tv. it is... odd. starts like a normal film, ends up in Power Rangers territory

13 Assassins and Harakiri remakes are probably the best of it

Yakuza Apocalypse, sorry