by ·1 Comment

Ah, I was right when I watched Scars of the Sun and assumed that it wasn’t Miike’s primary focus of 2006. This movie (AKA 4.6 Billion Years of Love) is where all the innovation went. After all, the man himself called this his masterpiece.

Opens with a clapboard, a guy reading poetry about light and the past and the five senses, an older fellow telling a kid about homoerotic rites of manhood, then suddenly Masanobu Ando is doing a frenetic dance against a white background. Later there are intertitles, crazy sets, unusual CGI, and an animated segment of someone frying on the electric fence.

image

Masanobu Ando also starred in Kids Return, played a villain in Battle Royale:
image

Once you unlock the story from all the craziness, it’s about two guys sent to prison together – tattooed tough-guy Kazuki (Ando) and weak, sensitive, gay Ariyoshi. K likes A and looks after him, but doesn’t quite warm to his sexual affections. Both are frustrated, yearning for escape (symbolized by their long conversation in an imaginary outdoor field in front of a pyramid and a space shuttle).

Ryuhei Matsuda (Ariyoshi) is the guy on the poster of Oshima’s Gohatto and the star of Nightmare Detective:
image

At the end it turns into a whodunit, as Ariyoshi is suspected of strangling Kazuki to death. He’s caught in the act, and tells everyone he did it but nobody believes him capable so the investigation continues.

Warden Takatsu is Ryo Ishibashi, star of Audition, recently seen in Suicide Circle:
image

But it’s not the kind of whodunit where the audience participates and could possibly guess the culprit. We’re just left to wonder “Did Ariyoshi kill him, and how?” because the other inmates don’t get much to say until after the investigation is underway. I figured Kazuki could’ve let A. kill him, a la In the Realm of the Senses, but no – it was giant Tsuchiya who works in the infirmary and regularly summons A.’s co-worker from laundry duty for sexual liasons. Even Tsuchiya didn’t think he could take Kazuki – he attacked him as a way to commit suicide, and when K. let himself die, T. took his own life a couple days (hours?) later.

image

Sounds like kind of a sad story, but the filmmaking is so invigorating there’s no time to be bummed out.

D. Kalat from TCM (?):

For a film whose premise is a homoerotic romance set in a prison, Miike has studiously avoided the obvious, the cheap, and the cliché. The prison itself is not so much a set as an abstraction—the architect appears to have run out of ink and paper before he got around to designing the usual attributes of a prison: cells, bars, walls.

image

Tom Mes:

There is a lot of meditation in Big Bang Love, Juvenile A too. It’s perhaps one of Miike’s most meditative films ever. Oddly, on the one hand, because it was produced by Hisao Maki, responsible for Silver, Family and several other of the most thick-headed turkeys in Miike’s career. Not so oddly, on the other, because it was scripted by the great Masa Nakamura, writer of Dead or Alive 2, The Bird People in China, Young Thugs: Nostalgia and several other of the very finest films in that same career. The big bang of the title is also the clash between the two furthest extremes in Miike’s filmography and the spectacle of its scattering stardust is one to behold.

Yes, but is it any good? This is a Takashi Miike film. It will make you wonder, curse, marvel, tremble, scratch your head, grow bored, and awaken rudely. Celebrate it.

by ·Comments Off on Scars of the Sun (2006, Takashi Miike)

Sho Aikawa starred in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Eyes of the Spider and Serpent’s Path, which felt like revenge-drama genre-killers, then he starred in Miike’s Dead or Alive series, which felt like an action genre-killer, now here he is starring in a by-the-books actioney revenge-drama for Miike. How quickly we forget. Or how quickly undistinguished screenwriter Toshimichi Ohkawa forgets, anyway. I get the feeling that Miike’s heart was in Big Bang Love this year, and Scars of the Sun was a standard studio flick a la One Missed Call.

image

Not that it’s bad – just standard, well-made but with no particular flair or invention. Sho Aikawa’s hardworking architect hero is perhaps too blank of a character, though his acting is thoroughly excellent. Sho stumbles across some kids beating a homeless man senseless, moves to intervene and gets attacked himself, so he beats hell out of the youngsters then is surprised when the cops let them all go and tell him he’s in trouble for pummeling underage kids. The screenwriter wants us to know that youth crime is a problem in the city and that the laws aren’t equipped to deal with it. This is best expressed by having an unrepentant 15-year-old, shamed from having been beaten by Sho, kidnap and murder his young daughter. Better still would be if the ensuing media circus finds out about the earlier incident and portrays Sho as a bully who drove the kid to crime. And best of all, since we don’t want to accidentally end up with long scenes exploring the relationship of parents dealing with loss a la In The Bedroom, have the wife (Miho Ninagawa of Dream Cruise) kill herself straight away (we see her on a rooftop, then we see Sho walking past a car. Camera stops moving and I know the body will hit that car two seconds before it does).

image

Three years later the murderous kid (Kamiki) is out of prison. Sho tracks down Kamiki’s parole officer Mayumi (above left), his slimeball lawyer, and his ex partner-in-crime, trying to find Kamiki and meet him face-to-face. The movie hammers its theme of criminal youth being coddled by the justice system as Kamiki is left free to create a new gun-toting youth-crime syndicate while Sho is treated as a dangerous criminal and watched closely. Finally Sho goes on the run, takes out the kids with guns, is jumped by Kamiki, shoots the parole officer by accident, then kills the hell out of Kamiki. Sho is either dying or going to jail, but the movie doesn’t tell us which, as he calls his sister’s cop boyfriend and tells him to take care of her, then roll credits.

I thought Kamiki was a girl for a while:
image

The one cool stylish part: since Sho seems incapable of expressing emotion facially (not in general, just in this movie), Miike connotes his inner trauma cinematically, fading to black and white as he watches his wife die, and suddenly snapping back to color three years later after he’s returned to his old neighborhood to find Kamiki, a dripping faucet bringing back the memory of his wife’s bloody death.

image

by ·Comments Off on Sukiyaki Western Django (2007, Takashi Miike)

The “gunman” (Hideaki Ito, star of Cross Fire from the Gamera director), a stranger who blows into town, plays one of the two ruling gangs against the other and emerges as the sole adult survivor.
image

Ruka Uchida, love child of the red and white clans, the other survivor and only non-participant of the bloodshed. According to closing titles he will grow up to be sequel-happy Italian hero Django.
image

Shun Oguri (Azumi, Miike’s Crows Episode 0) is Akira, the boy’s father, killed before the movie even starts but shown in flashback.
image

Yoshino Kimura (Glory to the Filmmaker, Dream Cruise), mother of the young boy turned Red Clan prostitute and killed off at the end.
image

Koichi Sato (Ring Spiral, Kinji Fukasaku’s Gate of Youth), cruel leader of the red clan, rips it up with a chain gun.
image

Yusuke Iseya (Memories of Matsuko, Distance, After Life, upcoming Blindness), stylin’ leader of the white clan, kinda the less evil of the two evil lords.
image

Kaori Momoi (Izo, Kagemusha), Akira’s mother and a legendary badass in hiding who comes out and helps our hero for the final fight. Falls somewhat in love with a white-headbanded guy whose name I couldn’t figure out.
image

Teruyuki Kagawa (of Memories of Matsuko, Serpent’s Path and the next K. Kurosawa film), the town sheriff torn between loyalties to both sides, becomes schizophrenic. Probably Miike’s most interesting new character in the story.
image

Quentin Tarantino (Destiny Turns On The Radio, Little Nicky) plays the funny-talking white guy in the framing scenes.
image

Watched late at night with Jimmy. Full of eager anticipation, turned quickly to apprehension when we’re unable to understand half the dialogue (plays at festivals with English subtitles, which we lacked). Then movie seemed to get longer and louder and more tedious, and I got sleepier and less interested…
image

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it has visual appeal, and a few stand-up-and-clap moments of bravura. Didn’t leave me cold exactly, just… wasn’t thrilling and I started to regret suggesting it.
image

But ya know what? Looking through the screen shots I started to like it a lot more. It’s a really awesome movie when… you know…
image

…when I’m not watching it.
image

by ·1 Comment

Would Katy have liked it? One day I hope to find out.

Kid has divorced parents, is picked Kirin Rider at an annual festival. Meets a red-faced guy, a cute gerbil muppet, and a hot naked girl:

image missing

Kid must wield the legendary goblin sword and defeat the big evil guy (actor from Loft) and his hot girl assistant:

image missing

Once we have our two opposing hot girls in place, the movie just cuts loose with nutty imagery:

image missing

image missing

Awesomely disturbing children’s movie on the level of Neverending Story. Want to some day show this movie to actual children to warp them forever. Will have to narrate the japanese subtitles live, I guess, but it will be worth it. Me, I enjoyed every minute of this cruelly twisted flick.

by ·1 Comment

What is P-Net? Who or what is Lucy Monostone? How can a virus cause people to get bar codes on their eyeballs? How come some bar codes are black and some are red? What exactly went on with the detective’s wife and why? When was the detective changing personalities and why did it matter? Why do iMac computers appear prominently in every episode? And what exactly is the deal with the eyepatched snuff-film collector and what cult is he in and what does it have to do with anything else?

These are just some of the things I never figured out about this movie.

image missing

image missing

Our MPD detective (above center) is both Amamiya Kazuhiko and Kobayashi Yosuke, and sometimes (?) also Nishizono Shinji. Played by Naoki Hosaka from Salaryman Kintaro. Not exactly a Miike regular, and in the interviews he said Miike barely spoke to him.

The police chief in this town is Sasayama (below, reading the source comic), played by Ren Osugi of at least ten other Miike films, six Kiyoshi Kurosawas, six Takeshi Kitanos, Twilight Samurai, and Uzumaki (he’s the dad who eats the spiral-rolls). Wow. Accordingly, he was my favorite actor in MPD Psycho.

Then we’ve got evil psychologist Isono Machi (Tomoko Nakajima of Parasite Eve), hilarious model-crafting young cop Manabe (Sadaharu Shiota), the detective’s wife Chizuko (Rieko Miura), eyepatch-bearing video collector Toguchi (Yoshinari Anan) and Sasayama’s wife or mistress or both, Mami[ko] (Fujiko, the slutty daughter in Visitor Q).

image missing

image missing

Each episode has its own bizarre series of deaths – from a religious cult schoolgirl machine-gun killing to pregnant women’s babies being surgically replaced by telephones, to the ol’ skull-saw flower-in-the-brain (above) to spontaneous combustion. Each is somehow caused by ghostly killer Nishizono Shinji, who can pass from one person to the next through touch, telephone or internet. Everyone’s girlfriends and wives get killed, Machi turns bad, the whole police force turn their back on the cases and pretend Sasayama and Manabe don’t exist, we learn the terrible truth about Shinji and trans-gender rock star Lu-C Monostone (the terrible truth is probably not terribly important, but it’s summarized 17 minutes into the last episode if you want a refresher course later), the Gakuso Group and P-Net are mentioned from time to time, and all along, Kobayashi is turning into Amamiya and vice-versa but lead actor Naoki Hosaka’s face remains so blank that I can never tell when. Besides the iMacs, we get recurring scenes on a giant ferris wheel, black-and-white snippets of animation, regular appearances by the eyepatch guy, cool totally fake rain (sometimes glowing green, as seen below), and Lucy Monostone’s hit song “same blue sky in a strange new world”.

image missing

image missing

I didn’t love the movie… didn’t even like it as much as I thought I would… but definitely not bad, worth watching. Makes for good rainy-day viewing. Would maybe like to see again and figure out the MPD side of things. Cheap, made-for-TV looking video lots of times, but Miike always manages to make the best of his low production values. The non-MPD cops’ scenes have a lot of humor, and Chief Sasayama ends up as a really well-defined character by the end, more so than anyone else.

image missing

image missing

Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy would not have liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Visitor Q (2001, Miike)

Opens with ineffectual dad bedding his whore daughter while she takes photos, and only heads downhill from there. Son is bullied by kids who break family’s windows and shoot fireworks. Son beats his mom constantly. Daughter is mostly absent, and dad is former TV reporter who has lost all respect. Visitor Q is young man who smiles, busts family members in head with large rock, and moves in without asking. Soon, wife is lactating gallons, husband murders then rapes co-worker (and kills a bully or two), and a happy ending has both kids and dad drinking from mom.

So… what’s happening here? Unrespectable dad, druggie mom, tyrant spoiled son and unsupervised promiscuous daughter all need a rock to the head to force ’em to function as a family unit again? Surely it’s a horrid commentary on modern Japan in some way. Enjoyable Miike movie at any rate. One of his most extreme, and probably lowest budget (video made-for-tv look throughout). No special effects to speak of, except mom’s watergun breasts.

Visitor Q