Results tagged “Takashi Miike”

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I’m used to Takashi Miike working on multiple levels by now. He did this before with Great Yokai War, which was a kiddy movie in the guise of a satire of same … or maybe the other way around, depending on how old you are and how conscious you are of the wink-wink approach to such material.

Tatsunoko must have liked Yokai, ‘cos they put Miike in the driver’s seat for a live-action remake of their show Yatterman and gave him a budget that was probably the GNP of several small countries. What he gave them back was a mostly straight-up adaptation of the original, with physical gags galore and terrific set / costume / prop design — but with his trademark nudges-in-the-audience’s-ribs dialed down a bit. It’s just subversive enough to be funny, but not quite transcendent in the way the best of Miike’s movies seem to reach by not only poking fun at the goings-on but squeezing them until they popped.

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You know within the first few seconds of Yakuza: Like a Dragon that you’re watching a Takashi Miike movie. That is, if you’ve seen his movies before, you’ll recognize all his amusing little hallmarks here: the dazzling, fast-moving cinematography, the stable of actors he draws on regularly (e.g., Sho Aikawa), the bizarre off-center humor that blooms in every scene like weeds coming out of concrete. They’re all on parade in a movie based on a videogame franchise that felt like it was itself a Takashi Miike movie — no small feat since many of Miike’s movies already feel like they’re video games. What’s the term for this? Circular one-upsmanship?

No, I haven’t played the video game, although my friend Eric has more than made up for me in that department. Although from everything I can gather, Yakuza has little enough to do with the game that it won’t matter — it draws on the game more for situational inspiration than as an attempt to make it a live-action walkthrough. Fine by me, since it is possible to be faithful to a fault: I don’t think Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children appealed to anyone but fans of the game, and I’m not sure it was designed to do anything but that in the first place.

Some bits and pieces from AICN Anime...

The smash-hit manga/anime franchise Gin Tama (a favorite of mine) is apparently set to be adapted into a live-action film Over There. Warner Bros. Japan is footing the bill — which means due to their weird licensing deals we'll probably only get to see this one domestically thanks to the parallel-import mill. Ten to one they get someone like Jō Odagiri to play everyone's favorite testy, silver-haired troubleshooter with a glucose level problem.

The Blu-ray of Versus has been "postponed indefinitely." No word if that's because of Media Blasters just cutting back on titles generally (they've put a lot of titles on hiatus lately) or if they're just finding a new spot in the schedule for it.

Another live-action version of Yasutaka Tsutsui's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is set to be made. Given the number of times it's been made and released, how about giving the original story an English premiere, too?

Apparently Astro-Boy wasn't just a dud here, but in Japan as well. Why? I'll still need to see it for myself to get an idea, but from what I've gathered there was enough deviation from the feel of the original story (I've read the manga and seen the show) to alienate existing fans without drawing in a lot of new ones.

A bit of news that brought a twisted smile to my face:

Japanese studio Nikkatsu is launching an extreme gore label, Sushi Typhoon, to produce films from Japan’s leading cult directors including Takashi Miike (Yatterman) and Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police). The first project from the label is action Samurai drama, Alien Vs Ninja, directed by Yuji Shimomura (Death Trance).

Alien vs. Ninja? What shrine do I make the sacrifices at?

Janus Films (the folks who are basically the theatrical arm of Criterion) have a website up for Nobuhiko Obayahshi's mind-chewingly insane House. Words will fail you when you see this film; my own exposure to it was limited to a very bad, blurry bootleg that nevertheless had me pawing at the screen and going "WHA? WHA!" for a couple of days. (The poster is awesome, too.)

Anime News Network and Nikkei news source report that a work by the late manga and anime creator Shotaro Ishinomori will be adapted into a live-action and computer-graphics film in Hollywood in 2012. Ishinomori conceived of several popular classics, including Kamen Rider, Cyborg 009, Harmagedon, and The Skull Man.

Odds on it being Kamen Rider. (If it was Harmagedon, I would be flabbergasted — the anime version is either embarrassing or brilliant depending on your approach.)

I was probably as surprised as you to learn an OEL Vampire Hunter D manga was slated to go into the works at some point. Well, it never happened, no thanks to a clash between the original licensors and the creator they hired, Jimmy (Power Girl) Palmiotti. The Japanese manga, which are almost beat-for-beat adaptations of the novels, are pretty decently done even if the art style isn't what I had been jonesing for personally.

The name Michael Arias doesn't ring bells? Tekkonkinreet, maybe? He's since worked on a live-action film, Heaven's Door, which I'd love to see out here sooner rather than later. Let's find out what the man's been doing with a real camera and real actors.

I also confess to be insanely curious about Barbet Schroeder's Inju, his movie adaptation of Edogawa Rampo's The Beast in the Shadows. That book was one of the first of Rampo's full-length works to be translated in English after literally decades of only a handful of short stories making it to this side of the ocean.

Also don't forget about the live-action Kamui Gaiden / Legend of Kamui (dir: Yoichi Sai).VIZ, kindly get off thine butts and bring this one back out for us.

File under: Hm, Interesting. Haruki Kadaokawa, back in the director's chair, now has a version of the classic Norwegian crime novel The Laughing Policeman, also adapted back in 1974 into a very good U.S. version with Walter Matthau (and Bruce Dern, and Lou Gossett Jr.). The book deals with the problem of random violence in otherwise peaceful societies, something that was diluted a bit for the U.S. version, although they attempted to salvage some of that aspect of it by setting it in the relatively tranquil urb of San Francisco. Set the same story in Japan, even in Tokyo, and you can preserve that aspect of it more or less intact. (From what I can tell, they missed a bet by not casting Ittoku Kishibe, he of the perennial basset-hound expression, as the homely middle-aged detective protagonist.)

One of Japan's "new religion" outfits, Kofuku no Kagaku, produces big-budget theatrical films that ought to function as thinly-veiled propaganda — that is, if audiences weren't busy laughing themselves silly over them. These are the same goofballs who brought us the insane catastro-flop Nostradamus: Sen ritsu no keiji, which I picked up on VHS for $3; I felt like I'd been cheated out of the cost of three perfectly good candy bars. Now they have a new movie about — an animated film, no less, about "Why Do We Need Buddha?". Color me all kinds of scared, and give me Tezuka's manga version of the life story of the Teacher instead.

And be sure to check out the trailer for Ryuhei Kitamura's animated project Baton, which looks trippy and wonderful.

(Word of advice to creators of Japanese movie sites: PLEASE STOP MAKING THE HOME PAGE A FLASH LOADER. At least give us the option to see something without having to sit through an hourglass icon.

(My review of Zetsubo-sensei #4 also got a shout in the same column; thank you, Scott!)

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At this point Takashi Miike could shoot a movie about tree bark and make it work. He has made films in every conceivable genre — and some of no conceivable genre — and is not only comfortable but downright revolutionary in many of them. Crows Zero is Miike returning to territory he practically has a monopoly on: gangsters and delinquents. What I didn’t expect was how oddly charming the results would be. It’s a great example of how Japanese movies go for the heartstrings at the same time they go for the gut.

The plot’s straight out of a shonen manga — in fact, it is one, since it was adapted from the comic of the same name. It’s set in Suzuran High, one of those fantasy schools where the students are all ass-kicking punks, classes are never in, graffiti covers more surfaces than ads do at the Indy 500, and everyone’s fighting to be the king of the hill. In strides freshman Genji (Shun Oguri), determined to climb to the top of the heap as a way to score points with his gangster father. He sets his sights on the current #1, Serizawa (Takayuki Yamada), and while he has strength and heedlessness to spare, he’s only one guy. He needs to build an army, and he doesn’t know how to do that yet.

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Here’s a metaphor for you: Takashi Miike has become the David Bowie of Japanese filmmaking. Just when you think you’ve got him pinned down, he metamorphoses on you into something entirely different. There’s the Miike that gave us the reprehensible Ichi the Killer, the transcendent Bird People in China, the wild and heedless Dead or Alive trilogy, the hallucinatory Gozu, the doubly hallucinatory Izo, the touching Sabu, and so on. He tries a little of everything, in every way imaginable, but that doesn’t mean he always pulls it off.

Mark Schilling has pointed out that Miike’s view of his work is that it’s all part of the same ongoing continuum. To him, there’s no division between the “silly” and the “serious” stuff; it all comes from the same place (that is, from inside him). I’ve been watching his movies for long enough to see how the earlier, kookier material connects to his more recent, ambitious work — yes, even the allegedly kiddy-grade stuff like Yatterman and Great Yokai War. But just because he sees the connections on his side doesn’t mean we do, and sometimes the results are just muddled.

Another one I overlooked. Takashi Miike's Audition hits Blu-ray in October. I looked at it back on DVD but I think I significantly underrated it at the time, and it's going to be worth a second look. I'm personally hoping for Izo and Great Yokai War to come to BD sooner, but I'll take what I can get from his catalog.

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Kinda figured that would happen. That’s what I kept muttering to myself throughout Sukiyaki Western Django, Takashi Miike’s too-hip-for-the-room remix of West and East. It’s the kind of movie where someone fires a crossbow bolt at someone and they blast it back at you with a gun, and you sit there and go: Yeah, kinda figured that would happen. It’s not because I’ve lost the capacity to be surprised, I hope, but only because the movie’s so fundamentally dumb that they could have held the camera upside down and it wouldn’t have mattered. In fact, I think at one point they do.

The movie is, I guess, a retelling of the Genji and Heike struggles in the form of a stylized western, or maybe a reworking of Yojimbo in the context of same, but in reality it’s none of those things, neither history nor allegory nor even entertainment. It’s essentially an excuse for Miike to use all the stuff you see in westerns — the showdowns, the sets, the costumes, the clichés upon clichés — as raw material. The ingredients were pretty banal to begin with, but the end result is a horrible mess. It’s strawberry jam on pasta instead of fusion cuisine, and it is quite possibly Miike’s worst and most thoroughly unwatchable movie yet. Yes, even worse than Izo, for those of you who thought Izo was a mess. At least Izo had the courage of its experimental convictions; Django is wholly pointless and insufferable.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, he of Push Man, etc., has a manga biography coming out called A Drifting Life (edited by Adrian Tomine, who also edited the other Drawn & Quarterly Tatsumi productions). I still have to do reviews of Abandon the Old in Tokyo and Good-Bye when time permits.

An interview with the director of the upcoming Geisha Vs. Ninjas. Come on — with a title like that, what's not to like? It doesn't hurt that he's worked on Death Trance and the soon-to-be-released-here One[e]Chanbara. No word on when G×N comes Stateside, though.

Ichi the Killer is to be one of the next Blu-ray releases from Tokyo Shock. I'm one of the few Miike fans who dislikes the film intensely; the man's a talented director, but I felt Ichi squandered his talents in the service of a story that wasn't anywhere nearly as smart or edgy as it thought it was.

Kar-Wai Wong's Ashes of Time Redux is getting a Blu-ray release, although I'm not sure if it's an all-region or Region B only encode. (The same company also appears to be releasing Chungking Express on BD, but you might as well go for the Criterion version if you're in the U.S.)

The third of the Shinobi no Mono films is also getting a domestic release. I've still to finish with the first two, sadly.

Fans of Kino's Journey will be heartened to know a full series box set is on the way.

The domestic Blu-ray for Akira, set for a March '09 release, is being solicited right now.

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The inside of Takashi Miike's head must be like a cinematic scrapyard, where the front end of a musical comedy can be bolted onto the back end of a Coen Brothers-like thriller. That's more or less what he's done in The Happiness of the Katakuris, a sort-of-a-remake of a Korean film, The Quiet Family (which I've not seen), apparently just as darkly comic in its approach. Miike's port of the material adds singing and dancing, almost in the vein of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, but not always to an explicitly satirical (or coherent) end.

Next to Takeshi Kitano and Shunji Iwai, Takashi Miike is Japan's most consistently interesting and daring filmmaker, cranking out an absurdly large number of movies a year, each stamped with his own oddball (but often brilliant) outlook. Not all of his films hit the target for me, but they are never less than fascinating even if because they're just so far off the beaten cinematic paths. Katakuris is no less odd than some of his other projects (his most recent movie as of this writing, Gozu, mated his usual yakuza territory with David Lynchian dream-world symbolism), but it's decidedly an acquired taste. If you're already interested in acquiring the taste, however, don't let me stop you.

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The Great Yokai War brought back to mind an on-again-off-again debate I’ve been having with friends for a long time: Are kids today more jaded, cynical and worldly than they were even a generation ago, or is that just me? I ask this because the movie serves as the perfect context for such a debate: a fantasy epic aimed mainly at younger viewers, one which comes on like an overheated Asian version of The NeverEnding Story — but it’s been put together in such a way that only adults might really appreciate it. That said, kids today are a lot more sophisticated than most of us are willing to give them credit for, so maybe this is just further evidence to that end. I know I enjoyed it, but I wondered if even the Pokémon and Naruto set would connect with it. Maybe they will, and I’m simply being cynical.

What really had some people’s heads spinning about Yokai was the director: Takashi Miike. Yes, the same Takashi Miike who gave us the cheerfully lurid madness of Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer, City of Lost Souls, but also more whimsical stuff like The Happiness of the Katakuris and the genuinely bucolic and understated Sabu. As it turns out, he’s a pretty good fit for the project: Miike’s playful, juvenile sense of humor mates well with the movie’s need for a fun center. Even what could have been preachy moralism (“Those who discard the past have no future”) winds up fitting nicely into the movie’s overall feel.

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Takashi Miike’s Izo is in some ways the movie he has been trying to make his whole career — one which sums up his ambitions, exceeds all his earlier works, and may end up alienating everyone involved. Izo springs from the one question that Miike’s been revisiting through every movie he’s ever made — why are we such violent monsters? — and asks that question in the form of a movie that has no linear plot, no roots in objective reality, no hero to empathize with, no speck of hope, no ultimate answer (not that there could be one), not even a beginning or an end.

Understand something: I’m not lambasting Miike for all this, I’m praising him. This sort of thing is far from easy. Look at Chuck Palahniuk, who for all of his initial promise as a writer has turned into the postmodern equivalent of Stephen King. His idiosyncrasies have turned into personal clichés. Miike sometimes veers close to that, but with Izo he’s turned such quirks to his advantage, or at least to serve the movie’s greater purpose. This movie will draw few admirers. It is pretentious, exasperating, repetitive, violent, gory and obscurantist — and I defend it for exactly those reasons. I’m sure even Miike would agree that no one’s obliged to like it.

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Fans of the blues know that most of the best blues songs are about broken hearts and violent revenge, two themes Takashi Miike seems happy to explore endlessly in his movies about Tokyo's criminal underground. Blues Harp is one of the very best of his urban-gangster movies, not only because it's got plenty of Miike's usual grit and crazy style, but also because it has an unexpectedly touching story. Miike can be gentle and poetic when he chooses to be (Sabu was a wonderful example of that), and it's films like this that I've come to savor most from him, not his splatterfests (Ichi the Killer) or his style-chewing showcases for lurid violence (the first Dead or Alive).

Almost all of Miike's protagonists are either criminals, quasi-outcasts in Japanese society (Koreans, Chinese, Russians, Brazilians, half-bloods), or both. Chuji (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, of Charisma and Space Travelers) is both: his father was black, his mother was a prostitute, and after growing up he drifted into Tokyo's criminal underworld, tending bar in a rock club and selling speed on the side to make ends meet. He has no fondness for the life he's leading — early in the film he administers a rather perfunctory beating to a smart-mouth American — and his real love is music, as expressed through his harmonica. One night there's a chase and a shootout in the alley behind the club, and almost without trying Chuji saves the life of up-and-coming gangster Kenji (Daisuke Iijima, Gohatto).

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Gozu is a movie where a man receives a dream visit from a monster with a human body and the head of a cow, and that’s one of the less bizarre things that happens to him. It would be tempting to call this an Asian David Lynch movie, except that director Takashi Miike has been staking out his own and equally outlandish territory for a decade now without needing an explicit comparison to the American master-of-the-weird.

No question that Gozu does work in the same eccentric way as Lynch’s odder films (Lost Highway and his near-perfect Mulholland Drive come to mind), but there’s no question it’s its own animal, pun intended. It may also be among the very best movies Miike has ever made, and — strange as this may sound — one of his most accessible, because we don’t need to know anything about Japan or the yakuza to find it exhilarating. Existing fans of Miike should see it as a matter of course, even if they wind up just as baffled as everyone else.

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Takashi Miike has made more than thirty movies in every conceivable genre — science fiction, fantasy, slapstick comedy, gross-out horror, surrealism, cold-blooded gangster violence, and intermixings of all and any of the above. With Young Thugs: Nostalgia, he’s dived back into his own past in a way that brings to mind Fellini’s Amarcord. Nostalgia isn’t a clone, though: it springs unmistakably from Miike’s own raucous and sometimes vulgar sensibilities. And like many of his other movies, it’s funny, wistful, grotesque and painful — often all at the same time, and without apology. It is also one of Miike’s most accessible movies, and given how whacked some of his films are, that’s really saying something.

Nostalgia follows no particular plot-line at first, just the ebb and flow of a few weeks in the life of a ten-year-old boy and his chaotic family. We see his birth in flashbacks (and his father winning a bet with his co-workers that the baby would be a boy), and then jump into late Sixties Japan, where the kid hides out in drainpipes with his buddies and paws over skin magazines. He’s not yet a delinquent, but he’s getting there: when his rivals spray him with fireworks, he lashes back at them and takes a beating. Then his father finds out, but instead of whipping him, he invites over all his friends for a round of drinks to celebrate (and gets the kid sloshed in the process).

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The third of Miike’s “Black Society” trilogy of films about the foreign criminal underworld in Japan is called Ley Lines, and it’s one of those titles that doesn’t make sense until you’re well into the film. Ley lines are divisions across the face of the earth with mystical significance, bringing previously unconnected things into connection. In the same way, the characters in Ley Lines intersect in unexpected ways, revealing connections between them they weren’t aware of.

Ley Lines features three young men, a loose affiliation of criminal youth with no particular direction in life. Their ringleader-of-sorts, Ryuichi, is of Chinese parentage and has no legitimate way to leave the country. He’s fed up with his studious brother for not supporting his folks, but he hasn’t done much of a job himself: his favorite hobbies are petty theft and dope-smoking. He and his two comrades are prime targets for being recruited into the criminal life.

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Ichi the Killer is the movie of Frederic Wertham's nightmares. The psychologist who railed against violence in TV, movies and comic books and is responsible to this day for the notion that media violence begets real-world violence (ignoring just about every other sociological factor in the bargain) is no longer with us, but his shade hangs heavy over every heated discussion of the issue. Ichi the Killer plays like an upraised middle finger to the Frederic Werthams of the world, and to a great many other folks as well. I think I may be one of them.

I'm really at a loss. Ichi the Killer is one of the newest offerings from Takashi Miike, a disturbing and disturbingly prolific director with a slate of films that seem hell-bent on dislodging one's last meal (Fudoh, Audition, Hazard City, among many others). And yet underneath his surface shock tactics there is a very skilled and intelligent man at work. He sets up unlikely and sometimes unlikeable characters in even unlikelier situations, and then tries to see them as people and not plot devices. Sometimes this works (as it did in Audition and to a lesser extent in Fudoh); sometimes, as in Ichi, it just seems a great deal of effort for very little result.