Got in a convo with Roberto in the talkback on Hostel, which he compared to Audition, one of Takashi Miike's masterpieces. It completely makes sense that Roth would pull heavily from Miike, who even has a cameo in the film. I've been hearing about Miike for years. He's part of the last decade of Tokyo Shock Cinema which includes Kinji Fukusaku (Battle Royal), Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus, Godzilla Final Wars), Katsuhito Ishii (Shark Skin Man & Peach Hip Girl) and for all I know also includes Beat Takeshi and Chan-Wook Park (Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and 2005's Fuck You, That's My Name Award Winner - Oldboy (to anybody who's seen it, I mean, holy shit, right?)), and I'll shut up there because I only kind of know what I'm talking about and Chan-Wook Park would be surprised to find he's part of the Tokyo Shock movement because he's from Korea.
Anyway, point is, like most things in life, I know enough to strike up a conversation.
So I started hearing rumblings about this Miike guy, and how he made 14 films between 2001 and 2002 and how Ichi the Killer is the most fucked movie on earth. So I decide to track down and finally watch some Miike. But I figure I gotta do this right, I'll start with his early shit. Like Woody Allen, start with Tiger Lily. Earliest shit I could find (at the time) was Fudoh: The Next Generation and Dead or Alive. And that's where the filmfest stopped. Somehow I got derailed two unconsequential films into his huge huge career. But while those two may be obscure, holy shit are they enjoyable. I don't know a Visitor Q from a Gozu, but Dead or Alive and Fudoh are balls awesome.
Fudoh is about a High School kid who's head of the Yakuza or next in line I think, so he's a High Schooler but he's putting all these hits out on people who fuck with him at High School, like the principal. I'm probably butchering the plot but here's what's important, the hitmen are little Asian Schoolgirls who go to Fudoh's High School and also strip in his club. The little Asian Schoolgirls kill Fudoh's opponents by sticking blowguns in their coochies and firing darts out of them.
And then there's Dead or Alive which has THE GREATEST FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF ANY MOVIE EVER.
It begins with a five minute montage to this rocking screaming guitar over a concert images: a body falling out of a building, and having a bag of coke stripped from it's hand, a dude fucking another dude, only to have someone stab the fuckers neck spraying a paint-sprayer amount of blood all over the fuckee who turns to try and catch some blood in his mouth as he comes. This Yakuza guy doing a line of coke that is a ridiculous 35 yards long in this warehouse, and some Fat Yakuza who eats 40 bowls of noodles, then gets shot in the stomach splattering the noodles out and over the camera lens, blacking the whole sequence out.
So no, I haven't seen Audition, Ichi, or Visitor Q, but I have a feeling I'm starting to get a grasp of Takeshi Miike.
I'll end on a spoiler, so bow out if you don't want to know the ending to Dead or Alive, I assume most of you could give a toss. So at then end of the movie, all of a sudden the main good guy and bad guy meet in a desert and face off. And after an entire movie that (crazy as it might be) is real-world based, one of the guys creates some total sci-fi space laser ball in his hands and fires it at the other guy (and you're like, "what?") Then the other guy has his robot back open up and a missile launcher Tranformers out of his back and lands on this shoulder. He fires a missile and the entire country blows up in a giant explosion seen from space.
Ridiculous.
No comments:
Post a Comment