Walking home a few days ago,I visited the local used DVD shop on the way. Finding the shelves filled with the usual titles,I was pleased to find at the end of one a movie from Takashi Miike which I've not heard of before,leading to me meeting the new generation.
View on the film:
Holding the page of opening credits back from being turned until 15 minutes into the film, directing auteur Takashi Miike unleashes a action-packed, 15 minutes pre-credits blizzard on the viewer, coming in from Miike & one of his regular cinematographers Hideo Yamamoto kicking Miike's unique brand of quirky, gory humour landing in the lap of the viewer, being welded to Heroic Bloodshed-style gangster assassinations igniting a explosive atmosphere of red spray and broken walls scatted across the screen.
Backed by a great jet-set elite synch score from Chu Ishikawa, Miike breaks the ranks of the gangs and continues to extend on his thread of earthy surrealism, glowing here in a sexual romance (which in a rare Miike move,is not violent) between hermaphrodite Mika and bi-sexual Jun Minoru,whose from fading-to brightened tattoo display that even in the bedroom,they can't fully be freed from the ties of the gangs (with tattoos and LGB romance being recurring motifs in Miike's work.)
Peeling the Manga origins onto the screen,Miike and Yamamoto attack all the gangs with cannonballs stuffed with Miike's distinctive animated extreme violence, rolling from decapitated heads spinning and a stripper who has a unique killing method, to ultra-stylised whip-pans landing on each killed rival gangster, all tied with Miike's brittle ambiguous ending.
The first of two times he worked with the film maker, (the other being Blues Harp (1998) ) the screenplay by Toshiyuki Morioka excitingly sets out the future recurring themes that would feature in Miike's works, fuelled by the abrasive masculine urge for revenge Riki Fudoh (a great Shosuke Tanihara,who matches young buck swagger with a unbreakable pain for revenge) after secretly witnessing his dad make a "Sacrifice" of his younger brother.
Foot soldiers of Riki's team sharing the goal to take down the powerful group of underworld gangsters his dad has a head role in, Morioka places a focus on the most peculiar members on Riki's side, (something which Miike would continue with) storming in a cyborg Aizone (played by a comedic brute Kenji Takano) and the deadly vixen duo of Touko and Mika ( Tamaki Kenmochi and a scene-stealing Miho Nomoto)all leading the charge of the new Fudoh.
View on the film:
Holding the page of opening credits back from being turned until 15 minutes into the film, directing auteur Takashi Miike unleashes a action-packed, 15 minutes pre-credits blizzard on the viewer, coming in from Miike & one of his regular cinematographers Hideo Yamamoto kicking Miike's unique brand of quirky, gory humour landing in the lap of the viewer, being welded to Heroic Bloodshed-style gangster assassinations igniting a explosive atmosphere of red spray and broken walls scatted across the screen.
Backed by a great jet-set elite synch score from Chu Ishikawa, Miike breaks the ranks of the gangs and continues to extend on his thread of earthy surrealism, glowing here in a sexual romance (which in a rare Miike move,is not violent) between hermaphrodite Mika and bi-sexual Jun Minoru,whose from fading-to brightened tattoo display that even in the bedroom,they can't fully be freed from the ties of the gangs (with tattoos and LGB romance being recurring motifs in Miike's work.)
Peeling the Manga origins onto the screen,Miike and Yamamoto attack all the gangs with cannonballs stuffed with Miike's distinctive animated extreme violence, rolling from decapitated heads spinning and a stripper who has a unique killing method, to ultra-stylised whip-pans landing on each killed rival gangster, all tied with Miike's brittle ambiguous ending.
The first of two times he worked with the film maker, (the other being Blues Harp (1998) ) the screenplay by Toshiyuki Morioka excitingly sets out the future recurring themes that would feature in Miike's works, fuelled by the abrasive masculine urge for revenge Riki Fudoh (a great Shosuke Tanihara,who matches young buck swagger with a unbreakable pain for revenge) after secretly witnessing his dad make a "Sacrifice" of his younger brother.
Foot soldiers of Riki's team sharing the goal to take down the powerful group of underworld gangsters his dad has a head role in, Morioka places a focus on the most peculiar members on Riki's side, (something which Miike would continue with) storming in a cyborg Aizone (played by a comedic brute Kenji Takano) and the deadly vixen duo of Touko and Mika ( Tamaki Kenmochi and a scene-stealing Miho Nomoto)all leading the charge of the new Fudoh.