Rainy Dog (Takashi Miike, 1997)

I don't have too much to say about Rainy Dog - Takashi Miike is one of my favorite filmmakers, and this, his experiment in noir, is hit and miss. It's marginally confusing in places, and devoid of almost any dialogue; as a matter of fact, one of the main characters is a mute child, and another is a prostitute who lies about herself on the internet. Miike does an admirable job stripping away the layers of these people, and revealing them for who they really are, or, at least, who they really want to be. I wanted to blog about this film, because I found in it yet another scene "homaged" in Kill Bill. In the last scene (spoiler!), when the brother-in-law kills Yuji, and Ah Chen looks on, he tells the child that when he grows up, if he's still mad, he should come and kill him. Ding ding ding! Sounds like the exact same thing the Bride tells Vernita's daughter in the first volume. When I first saw Kill Bill, I was amazed at its ingenuity; four (right?) years later, after I've seen a lot more exploitation and Asian films, I realize that Tarantino really co-opts a lot of shit. More than any filmmaker should without acknowledging it. So while I appreciate Tarantino still, I think more people should be aware of that. Hey, just watch the originals that he stole his ideas from instead! But back to Rainy Dog: 6.5/10

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