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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Takashi Miike: Sweet baby Jesus, that's a lot of movies.

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02:53 / 30.03.05

At last count, Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer, Gozu, et cetera, et cetera, ET CETERA) has made something like 65 movies in about ten years. No exaggeration. I've seen the ones noted parenthetically, and am convinced (despite my usual lack of enthusiasm for almost everything) that Takashi Miike is God.

However...

I just...*can't* accept the notion that one could make six movies a year and have them all turn out watchable. At the same time, I'm staggered by the vast array of Miike films that have been released in the US on disc of late (to say nothing of those that haven't but can be found on ebay, presumably burned from Japanese or British releases), all of which feature droolworthy/intriguing titles (The Bird People of China! Full Metal Yakuza!), and am insanely tempted to buy every...last...one...I...find. Is this such a hot idea? Which ones are genius, and which ones are...not so much? Uncertain, I turn to Barbelith.....

03:34 / 30.03.05

Just a quickie before I go to work, but I've Katakuris, Ichi, Audition, Gozu and Visitor Q and haven't been disappointed yet. All very different films, all excellent in my book. He has a tendency to split his audience though, you can never be sure who'll like any given one of his films.

Next up One Missed Call and Zebraman if I can find them!

13:18 / 30.03.05

Yeah, I've seen five or six of them and they've all been quality. Of course, maybe the worse ones don't find their ways overseas.

I'll be seeing Izo next week. Can't wait.

18:27 / 30.03.05

I've recently glutted myself on a lot of Miike (Dead or Alive 1,2, and 3; Visitor Q; Deadly Outlaw Rekka) in addition to the ones I've seen before. I'd say the issue isn't varying quality nearly as much as varying depth. Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q are much deeper films than Deadly Outlaw Rekka or the Dead or Alive trilogy.

However, in the case of all of his films that I've seen, they are all engaging films that at many (if not all) points are films that only could have come from his sensibility. Outlaw Rekka and Dead or Alive 1 are particularly interesting because for almost the entirety of the two films, while they are rife with Miike's style and distinctive brand of goretastic imagery, have stories that could come from any other Japanese Yakuza/Detective/Action film with nothing to particularly identify them with that director.

Up until the last three minutes that is.

Both films were clearly done on a lark in his downtime between films he took more seriously but he still invests them with idiosyncratic and, to my mind, wonderful personal twists. Essentially, I'd say, while some of his films are better than others, if you rent one of his lesser films and then compare it to the last five mainstream movies you saw then it'll probably come out on top. In fact, I'd say I didn't even know how much I liked Miike until I saw how good his bad films were.

If you know what I mean.

D Terminator XXXIII

11:41 / 04.04.05

At my local dvd pusher last week I saw many tantalizing offers, and I walked away with Storytelling, The 3rd Man and Ichi for 2 pounds each.

Although I'm glad I didn't pay more for this pan & scan version, I'm still uncertain if I should hunt out the letterboxed version. Don't others find the pacing a bit... Odd? That's my main problem with Ichi, Audition and a third whose title escapes me (I think it was about a couple of corrupt cop lovers, or thugs, and one of them has a white wig - why I can't recall - and a tendency to lash out at everybody with a knife; and somewhere along, I think, a family man kills his daughter who's playing the piano, his wife and himself; and those corrupt cops, or thugs, all meet their maker at the end; or something). They sport a language that is incomprehensible at times. And I'm torn whether the explanation is because I haven't obtained enough exposure to Japanese movies in general, or if it's because Miike has an unconventional storytelling method.

How does he compare with the mainstream Japanese efforts?

14:25 / 04.04.05

It's not just you.

Well, probably not.

Miike is ... not a typical auteur.

Hell, he's as mad as a bag of ferrets, basically. The second half of Audition and the entirety of Ichi play like fever dreams, like a psychotic fugue state viewed from inside. It's not just a cross-cultural lost-in-translation thing—these movies are meant to be fucked-up and disorienting.

For reference: people have lots of interesting things to say about Miike in the pre-existing threads on Audition and Ichi. This thread might be a good opportunity to expand on some of those...

23:01 / 06.04.05

Awwwwww yeah, more threads! I will visit them momentarily. In re: the above-stated Ichi issue, though, I should say that a pan-and-scan Ichi strikes me as a little bit suspect. Not just because pan-and-scan is wrong and evil (which of course it is), but also because the use of a format that exists to appeal to folks who just don't feel like they're getting their money's worth unless the (cropped) image fills the whole screen implies to me that you may have seen the squeamish MPAA cut of Ichi, which excises roughly twenty minutes of the intended film. Much of that is gore, naturally -- gore that's CRUCIAL TO THE STORY! -- but certain character arcs are altered dramatically (and unintentionally; i.e., as a result of blind-eyed film butchering done with no consideration as to the final effect on the movie) as a result of the edits, and the pacing is certainly off in the R version (I've seen both).

Ironically, my uncut version of Ichi sports subtitles vastly inferior to those in the wussvision cut. You can't win.

05:06 / 07.04.05

Similar problem here, dude. I have the uncut version from China, and the subs are well wonky.

01:54 / 13.04.05

I, for one, cannot wait for Yokai.

D Terminator XXXIII

11:15 / 13.04.05

eddie 13: [you may have seen the squeamish MPAA cut of Ichi, which excises roughly twenty minutes of the intended film.]

One of the great things about living in Scandinavia is that I never have to worry if something is censored or not. This means that the movie bewilders me because the pacing is what it is: uneven and unfamiliar.

And doesn't Ichi look sickeningly like the bloke from O.C.? Even their behaviour is a match.

13:17 / 13.04.05

At the current film festival here, I've just seen Izo and One Missed Call.

One Missed Call is a standard Japanese teen horror flick. Bit of a combo of Ring and Grudge, but still a lot of fun. Basic premise is you get a voice mail on your cell phone from youself at the moment of your death, complete with the date and time you will die.

Izo was one of the craziest movies I've ever seen. A samurai travels through time and space killing almost every authority figure (plus anyone who works for an authority). Some really great bits in it, loads of fighting, and plenty of cryptic bits to interpret and philosophize over, but unfortunately it was also really tedious.

D Terminator XXXIII

09:30 / 18.04.05

Czernobog Don't Surf: [Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q are much deeper films than Deadly Outlaw Rekka or the Dead or Alive trilogy.]

Deeper how?

22:56 / 19.04.05

Perhaps I should rephrase by saying that the intentions that motivated their creation were deeper. Which is to say that some of his films are an active personal effort towards making an artistic statement (whether about people, art, whatever) wheras with others the work is more mercenary or workmanlike in nature. But having said that, one of the things that I like about him is that he tends to make idiosyncratically distinctive films even when, by all rights, he could just phone it in and get his paycheck.

In Ichi he seems to be making statements about the nature of identity and obsession. In Visitor Q . . . um, well . . . he clearly seems making some kind of statement but that one is a considerably more oblique entity. Perhaps a metatextual commentary on the uses of extreme imagery and content in artistic media but that's just a wild guess on my part.

Dead or Alive 1 and Deadly Outlaw Rekka, on the other hand, are considerably straight forward yakuza/crime/action flicks with the Miike specific touches thrown in. Dead or Alive 1: Cop and gangster kill each other's loved ones, vow revenge in phantasmagoric action sequences. Deadly Outlaw Rekka: Yakuza's father is killed and seeks revenge through phantasmagoric action sequences. Dead or Alive 3: Dystopian future pits cop working for the evil establishment against antiauthoritarian replicant in a series of, you guessed it, phantasmagoric action sequences.

Again, all fairly straight forward but for his own little personal (and really weird) touches.

But that's just one fellow's opinion. . .

10:49 / 20.04.05

Ichi isn't about the nature of identity and obsession! Ichi is the greatest romantic comedy of all time!

12:29 / 20.04.05

Naw, it's the best Batman/Joker movie ever made!

Sean the frumious Bandersnatch

01:26 / 02.06.05

Ba-dump bump

I saw Visitor Q last week (have seen five other of Miike's films before this)- what do people who saw it think it meant and are there any movies more unsettling than this in the world?

To answer my own questions, I think he was using the different fetishes and obsessions to show that a family, like an individual, can only work if it embraces its disfunction. And "not that I've ever seen."

lonely as a cloud...

08:09 / 02.06.05

If it's unsettling movies you want, check out Chan-wook Park's Sympathy for Mister Vengeance, and especially Oldboy. There should be a thread on them lurking somewhere. Apart from Audition, they're the most unsettling movies I've ever seen...

08:19 / 02.06.05

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance left me feeling violated. And I have a hugely high tolerance for that kind of thing.

I get a little miffed that there are people who think it's just about the extremity, though. Being a fan of Miike doesn't necessarily make you the kind of person who'd wank off over snuff if they could get our hands on it.

10:53 / 02.06.05

Has anyone watched the MPD-psycho TV show that he made in 2000?
dvd times review here

Three dvd's worth of episodes just apppeared in my local video shop this week (not a specialist one either, just a standard brand name video store) and I've been in two minds about trying it out.
This local video shop now has a better selection than the specialist store I used to walk halfway across town to reach!

lonely as a cloud...

10:55 / 02.06.05

A lot of the violence in Mr Vengeance struck me as being quite gratuitous, and the movie as a whole seemed a little weak, plotwise. Oldboy has just as much or the old ultra-violence, as well as quite a bit of sickness, suspense, and plot. I'd recommend it to anybody with a stomach for gore !

Sean the frumious Bandersnatch

14:07 / 02.06.05

...there are people who think it's just about the extremity, though. Being a fan of Miike doesn't necessarily make you the kind of person who'd wank off over snuff...

True enough. I'm not all that sexually demented- for my part, I like Miike films because I like to be challenged and am guaranteed to see something new. But I'm not denyinig that there might be a little masochistic urge in me that wants to see how much depravity I can take.

21:33 / 05.06.05

If your store has all three volumes of MPD Psycho, I'd be inclined to check it out. I rented the first volume (not knowing it was *only* the first volume -- i.e., I thought it was a complete story) and was both totally fucking confused by 90% of the goings-on and seriously pissed off when I got to the "end" (which resolves absolutely nothing, and may end on a cliffhanger...I honestly have no idea). As far as I can tell, the whole series is not yet (legally) available in the US. It seems like lesser Miike thus far, with some cool visuals, but I reserve judgment till I've seen it all.

Tom Tit's Tot: A Girl!

11:31 / 06.06.05

Chan-Wook Park should be noted for making a particular brand of beautifully shot nihilistic claptrap. I hate how his films always reel me in on the promise of an interesting story and good cinematography, then leave me feeling like it was just an excuse for gore and bitterness.

I recently saw Three... Extremes which consisted of three short films, one by Park, one by Miike, and one by up-and-comer Fruit Chan.... weirdly enough, found Fruit Chan's work to be the most interesting visually and story-wise. If you have the opportunity to either see the short, or the entire movie (called Dumplings) definitely watch it. I haven't seen such a beautiful and unsettling fairy tale in absolute ages, and I'll never look at a Dumpling the same way again...

Miike's short film, Box was very beautiful, but the ending was under-par for his ability, in my opinion.

And, as usual, Park started full of promise but never came close to paying off.

19:35 / 01.02.06

I've seen Audition, Ichi and Gozu. Of the three, Gozu was my favorite, and I'm wondering which of Miike's films I should check out next. There's a bunch mentioned on here, but no definitive take on what's essential. So, what's the best to check out next?

03:12 / 02.02.06

I don't get the Park love (here and elsewhere) at all, and mostly think it's espoused by people who like Takashi Miike movies for all the wrong reasons. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was a beautifully shot but pointless exercise in sadism; Oldboy, similarily, is a perfectly executed film (although on a story level it is possibly the single most preposterous film I have ever seen in my life), and also doesn't seem to exist for any reason but to generally make people feel bad about being alive.

Three...Extremes (man, that "..." is annoying) should be out on DVD in the US sometime this month. It's bedtime for Eddie, so you'll have to find the exact release date of your own accord, but I know it's February.

I'd suggest, for the lighter side of Takashi Miike, The Happiness of the Katakuris. Kinda depends on how you feel about so-bad-it's-good Japanese pop music and musicals, though. I love this movie so much it hurts me; it shouldn't be funny, but it is -- it should be scary and disturbing, but it's not -- and it really, absolutely should not be emotionally moving, but somehow it is (then again, I was taking cold meds when I watched it). Or, if you'd rather feel sick and oogy for ninety minutes, and finish a movie wondering what the fuck you just watched, knowing only that it was genius, Visitor Q.

09:00 / 03.02.06

While I vaguely agree with the above sentiments concerning Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, does anyone else agree with me that Oldboy is just a really fun farce, a kind of turbo-charged romcom romp? With added claw hammer?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:11 / 03.02.06

I'd also recommend both Happiness... and Visitor Q- I'd say watch them back to back, Visitor Q first. Happiness... should make you feel a little less sordid, like taking a lovely warm bath after wading crotch-deep in the entrails of your enemies.

lonely as a cloud...

09:29 / 03.02.06

Yes! What Seth said, that is. Plus, the claw-hammer fight sequence in the corridor in Oldboy absolutely rules.

lonely as a cloud...

09:32 / 03.02.06

Oh, and eddie - if you don't like Park's Vengeance stuff, check out JSA.

09:56 / 03.02.06

I'd strongly recommend Zebraman to anyone who likes Miike's more light-hearted movies. It's worth it just for the Ring piss-take, Zebranurse and the first time you see his Zebrasense in action. Oh, and the final battle is one of the finest scenes I think I've ever witnessed.

03:49 / 04.02.06

(off-topic)

I may have to check out JSA, though I'm a little wary of being burned -- and I should backpedal a little and say that I would be a joyless soul indeed if I failed to appreciate things like the clawhammer battle in Oldboy. I did, and liked the first half-hour a lot, actually, but have no idea what possessed Park to make...well...the rest of the movie. It's-a-farce feels a lot like it's-a-satire to me; increasingly, the latter seems to pop up often when defending works of art that don't stand up well to criticism. If it is a farce, it's played pretty straight. The violence is over the top, yeah, but that's not the stuff that anyone is saying is goofy or poorly done -- that's the stuff that most obviously works. It's the story that doesn't work, and I think it doesn't work not because I don't get how clever Park is being here, but because it's shit. If it's supposed to be shit, I dunno, that really doesn't make a lot of sense to me as an artistic goal. Eh.

At any rate, I wish I'd seen the movie you guys did! Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was so well-done despite all the things I hated about it (which were...kind of a lot, actually) that I went to Oldboy ready to enjoy it, but it was not to be. Maybe -- maybe! -- that Park film that I'd love, the one I know I is in there somewhere, is JSA...or maybe I'm just a sucker...but anyway...

(on-topic)

Soooooooo want to see Zebraman. And that was before I knew there was a Zebranurse, even. As I try desperately to pass on badly-subtitled bootlegs, I'm gonna have to see if an "official" one is coming soon (it wasn't the last time I checked).

By the way, has anyone watched all of MPD Psycho? I was let down by the first disc, but all three are available now...

Essential Dazzler

15:05 / 11.03.06

I watched all of MPD psycho over a couple of days this week. It confused the bejeezus out of me. It was a gorgeous thing to behold, chock-full of bizarre cinematic techniques, like nothing I've ever seen before. But it all felt extremely disjointed.

There was no real visual consistency, with Miike just using any crazy idea he had (let's digitally add all the rain, but have one scene of real rain! Let's make it neon green sometimes! Let's have characters vanish randomally during this convesation!), and plot threads disappeared for whole episodes at a time.

It's adapted from a Manga which I haven't read yet, but can be downloaded here, and it feels like Miike might have missed out a lot of important plot stuff, and carried on as if he'd included it, without explaining how characters know certain things, etc.

Well worth a rent at least, just for the (not so) prettiness.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:44 / 19.03.06

Just watched Gozu. The guy who lent it to me described it as "Takashi's League Of Gentlemen"... he wasn't far wrong. Up until the last twenty minutes, when it just went absolutely mental.

Must watch again, methinks.

15:38 / 25.03.06

Saw Three...Extremes a few days ago. It did nothing to improve my opinion of Park (the intentionally cheesy vampire movie-inside-a-movie -- I'm sorry -- actually looked better to me than the rest of Park's contribution, an incredibly fucking long "short" entitled "Cut" that has a few visual flourishes and funny moments but is basically more sadism/mutilation from a director who is apparently unable to bring anything else to the table), and I think I'm missing the boat on Fruit Chan's "Dumplings," which wasn't all that shocking. Not to spoil, but once I got past the central ewwwwwww of the plot, I actually got a little restless waiting for something else to happen. It's a very good film, but not exactly the mindblowing shocker I'd expected from all the hype.

But:

"Box," Miike's film, will all on its own probably compel me to buy the disc. The reviews I've seen of Three...Extremes have nobly managed not to ruin anything, and that's a tradition I'll continue here. In tone, "Box" is probably closer to the quiet parts of Audition than anything else of his I've seen, but it's really not much like that film at all...honestly, I don't know what to compare it to. It's kind of like latter day Lynch, but with a control over the narrative that Lynch has never, ever displayed -- and, frankly, with a level of control that I wouldn't have thought Miike had in him. And visually, it's just stunning; Miike makes the wintry outskirts of Tokyo look like the most beautiful place I've ever seen. Most of his films have that fast-cheap-and-out-of-control mojo working, and it usually works to their benefit (I think Izo would have benefitted from a little more time and care, personally), but "Box" is something else altogether -- I don't know that the time and money that would normally go into three of Miike's feature films went into it, but it sure does look that way. In any event...yeah. See it. See it now!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:02 / 26.03.06

Apparently the man himself has a cameo in Eli Roth's "Hostel"... also his episode of Masters of Horror has been cancelled because it's too disturbing. So, no toning himself down for American TV, then. Go there, my son!

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