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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

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

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STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

19:50 / 12.04.06

British TV (Bravo) showed his MOH episode... thanks to the wonders of BitTorrent, it's there for all to see.

Not necessarily the most disturbing thing I've ever seen... but it's a fuck of a long way from being the least, and it's definitely among the bleakest. Again, a work of (evil) genius.

SPOILERS AHOY!!!

Beginning with a dead pregnant woman floating in a river (which could well be the Styx or equivalent), it gets madder from there. Needles under fingernails and into gums, a fucking HAND WITH A MOUTH GROWING OUT OF A GIRL'S HEAD FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!!... and ending with a man HUGGING A BUCKETFUL OF FOETUS AND SINGING LULLABIES!!!!!!!!!

END SPOILERS

It's definitely Miike. It's wonderfully shot, and drips foreboding. It's... well, I can see why they may have had problems with a TV broadcast in the States, put it that way. (I'm fairly impressed we showed it here, to be honest).

And it's got that lingering effect... the more I think about it, even now it's over, the more fucked it gets.

I should probably carry this on in the MOH thread.

But if you like Miike... watch this motherfucker.

Essential Dazzler

13:04 / 17.05.06

Gozu is now my favourite Miike film, Part claustrophobic horror, part ludicrous farce.

It has to be saluted for smacking you upside the head with a ridiculously happy ending, seconds after a scene which had me screaming "What the Christ!?" and pointing a toy gun at the screen for protection.

When was it made in relation to Visitor Q? I noticed a few repeating elements, notably the nasty ending to sex scenes and lactation.

Forced into this conversation

19:42 / 17.05.06

Every Miike DVD should come packed with a toy gun!

Visitor Q was made in 2001, Gozu in 2003. There is definetely some revisiting of the same elements, although it's by a different writer. The guy who wrote Gozu is the same who wrote Ichi (and played the Charlie Brown guy in Kill Bill).

Applying author theory to the works of Miike, now that would be an interessting topic.

Essential Dazzler

21:52 / 10.05.08

Anything I write in this post is quite likely a total misinterpratation of Miike's intentions, my metaphor processing-fu is a bit frazzled recently

I watched Izo earlier today and it's still brewing in my head. It's definitely one of the weirdest films I've seen for a while. Really good, but fairly tedious by the end, which I'm not sure is unintentional. The film is about a Samurai Assasin who is executed in the films opening. The rest of the films 2 hour running time is his journey through the land of the dead as an Avatar of Absurdity exacting Divine Retribution on a shadowy council of 6 individuals that control humanity, "Religion", "Commerce", "law", "War", "Academia", and BEAT TAKESHI, and their luckless human tools.

It's a difficult film to watch, it has no grounding in reality, huge chunks of the film happen like this:
a. Izo is confronted by opponent(s)
b. Opponent(s) are criptic
c. SCREAMING
d. Dead Opponents
e. Time and space abruptly shift
f. Izo is confronted with opponent(s)

The time/space thing is awesome, Izo slicing up a special forces team in Medieaval japan was a geeky joy to watch. Also Izo's concscience briefly temping in an office.

I haven't seen a film with a body count as high as this for ages. I'd estimate that at least 40% of the film is soundtracked by screams of rage/terror/pain. Seriously. It's a grind at points. The film is interspersed with montages of archive footage of the World during major conflicts, and one of the major themes is the horror/pointlessness of war.

Also, Izo is followed through Space/Time by an acid folk singer/guitarist. How ace is that?

tl;dr: Symbolism + sociology lesson delivered through the means of superhuman screaming samurai death - coherence = difficult but enjoyable film.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:47 / 10.05.08

Okay, that sounds like the best film EVER. I'll get back to you when I've watched it, but... even if I weren't a Miike fan already, you've fucking sold me.

01:03 / 11.05.08

My all-time favorite Miike is still Fudoh, featuring Riki Takeuchi as the bad guy, sort of. There isn't really any good guy.

11:54 / 11.05.08

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.

I'm sure that I read somewhere that Visitor Q is some kind of homage to Pasolini's Theorem (Teorama), I don't know if this is something Miike has acknowledged but to me it does make a twisted kind of sense. In each film family life is disrupted by a mysterious stranger who is somehow able to have a profound effect on each character. In Teorama though the effect in each case seems to be to separate the family members from each other and ultimately drive the family apart whereas in Visitor Q his intervention turns the (to say the least) dysfunctional family into a happy (albeit murderous) one.
Then again you could also say that the plot is similar to Entertaining Mister Sloane but I've never seen anyone compare it to that.

19:07 / 11.05.08

AUNTIE MAME!

HE WAS DOING A REMAKE OF AUNTIE MAME!

BWAHAHAHAHA!

19:09 / 11.05.08

Seriously, though, Miike doing Passolini? Jinkies.

I may have to rent Teorama if only for dint of comparison.

22:34 / 11.05.08

Is there a legit Eng-subbed release of Blues Harp? It's quite possibly my favorite Miike film, but the two or three bootleg editions I've seen all have terrible translation and spelling/grammar issues that annoy.

07:18 / 12.05.08

I may have to rent Teorama if only for dint of comparison.

Just in case you do look for it I've realised I should have said Teorema. It's a fairly boring/pretentious film (in my opinion) but it has an interesting soundtrack by Morricone and it's got Terence Stamp as the visitor character who seduces every member of the family.

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