Fudoh: The New Generation (Takashi Miike, 1996)

Are there many filmmakers as diverse as Takashi Miike? Just the other day, I wrote about his 1997 noir effort Rainy Dog, and today, I'm writing about Fudoh: The Next Generation, an ultra-violent, crude, and no-holds-barred yakuza revenge film from just a year earlier. In fact, his wikipedia entry mentions the fact that Miike has one of the most confusing career paths ever; he is becoming both more and less mainstream at the same time. But back to Fudoh. Riki Fudoh, as a little boy, secretly witnesses his father kill his brother in order to solve a rivalry with another gang. Ten years later, Riki has acquired a gang of classmates and children, and decides to take revenge on his father and their entire yakuza organization. The fact that children are used as killers isn't used as a funny or silly thing; in fact, they are pretty creepy, and really effective. Fudoh's bodyguards are two female classmates, one with powerful vaginal muscles and, uh, a little something extra. Some of the things in the movie are so crass that they're hilarious, and some are just weird and a bit disturbing. Plus, I think this film takes the prize for using the most fake blood in one scene ever -- a car is literally flooded with it. Shocking, but not outside of Miike's realm. A good, brainless time. 7.5/10

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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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Dead or Alive (Takashi Miike, 1999)

Being a pretty big Miike fan, and having heard about how outrageous and violent this movie is, I was expecting a lot. Dead or Alive doesn't necessarily disappoint, but it doesn't really deliver, either. It is the story of a cop, Jojima, with a very sick daughter, who is incredibly involved in his job, much to the chagrin of both his superiors on the take and the criminals on the street. Ryu is a yazuka boss (I think) with a brother who's studied in the United States, and wants no part in his brother's business. When Jojima and Ryu's paths cross, as they inevitably do, it means a lot of fighting and explosions. And one really cool gunfight in a club where probably fifty people die. Dead or Alive is an entertaining cop film that gives a little insight into the relationship between the Japanese and the Chinese in Japan. Apparently there's a lot of tension between the two groups, a tension that fuels a lot of the violence in the film. Again, there's a lot of cool, stylized violence, but there's not too much more to it than that. The ending, though, is what divides people so strongly about this film, and is probably the single most ridiculous thing I've seen in a movie in a long, long time. It's worth seeing, if just for the last thirty seconds. Really. I hope that the next two films in the series are just as entertaining as this one. 6/10 RIYL: Quentin Tarantino

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Imprint (Takashi Miike, 2005)

This infamous, unaired episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror certainly is horrifying, but I also think it's an example of Takashi Miike - one of my favorite directors - at his most ridiculous. The story of an American journalist (a truly terrible performance by Billy Drago) who travels to Japan in order to marry the prostitute he promised he would come back for, only to find out that she's dead. Another prostitute, a woman with beautiful blue hair and a deformed face, tells him the story of how his beloved Komomo died, starting with a brutal but tolerable lie and moving to the horrific truth. The woman asks the journalist Christopher, before telling him the truth, why people want to know the truth so badly, why no one can ever been content with a more pleasant lie. This is the question Miike wants the audience to ask themselves after hearing the women's tale - wouldn't we have been happier with the lie? The woman tell of working with Komomo, and, both because of her immense beauty and because she talked about her American lover, how she was tormented by the other women in the geisha house in which they both worked. The woman was Komomo's only friend, supposedly, and defended her from the attacks until one fateful day. The scene where Komomo is tortured is incredibly intense and painful to watch, even worse for me than anything from Audition or almost even Visitor Q. Unfortunately, the length and excess gore of the scene make it seem almost superfluous; the scene would have been more effective had we seen less, I believe. When the woman tells of her story, growing up with her abortionist mother and abusive father, the story becomes even more intense. There are plenty of fetuses deposited into the river, some of which are creepy, but others that are so fake looking to be silly. The movie borders on silliness in its climax; without explicitly ruining it for those who haven't seen it (although there's no real twist ending, the twist comes more in the middle of the film), the special effect that goes to work on the woman's head is incredibly silly, so much so that I couldn't take it seriously. The movie is so intense as to be ridiculous at times, something I'd seen Miike work with before (such as in the superb Ichi the Killer), but always with a sense of humor that makes the ridiculous real. There is no humor in this movie, not even in the final scene, which is creepy, but again, a bit too much. Before it sounds like I didn't like this movie, I must say that I do recommend it for fans of Miike or Masters of Horror, if only to see what was so controversial that Showtime refused to show it. It is pretty controversial, but almost for shock value at times. I can't really blame Miike for this, as he didn't write the script, but this is still a triumph for him if only because of how gorgeous and atmospheric it is. The prostitutes all have red hair and kimonos (except for the unnamed woman), and the scene where they are all sitting in the room together is heavenly in its use of color. The woman's blue hair is a radiant symbol throughout the film, and even during the silly parts, everything is so eerily beautiful. 6.5/10 RIYL: Audition

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