Hey folks, Harry here... Personally, I've yet to see a Miike film that I've liked as much as ICHI THE KILLER and AUDITION. I've seen tons of Miike now, and it may just be that those two were my introduction, but I desperately love ICHI. It is absolutely insane in a great fantastic inhuman sort of way. Just tearing apart the screen and forcing me to my edge in terms of tolerance of violence and extreme imagery, but at the same time being a great story that happens to be about some of the most disturbed and rotten characters in cinema history. I love it. I'm anxious to see both of these, and have to admit, the idea of a Miike family film makes me giggle non-stop. Here's Elaine...
2004 ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
I was going to give you reviews of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Bright Future” and Jang Jun-hwan’s “Save the Green Planet!” today, but time constraints (ah, the joys of watching five films a day!) have forced me to adapt my plans somewhat. Instead of Japanese-Korean alienation flicks, I’m going to give you reviews of the two Takashi Miike films in the festival, “Zebraman” and “Gozu”. Strictly speaking, there is actually a third Miike movie in Rotterdam (he also stars as a yakuza in Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s “The Last Life in the Universe”, one of the better entries in this year’s line-up), but I’m afraid I’ve only got time for two reviews at the moment. Which means both the “Last Life in the Universe” and the Kurosawa and Jang reviews I promised you will have to wait until later.
For now, enjoy the Miike reviews. I know the guy’s got some fans on this site!
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ZEBRAMAN
(Written by Kudo Kankuro, directed by Takashi Miike)
Yokohama, 2010. In an otherwise normal-looking city, animals are starting to behave funnily, and new, previously unheard-of species of animals such as giant crabs are sighted. Clearly something is amiss in the city, but primary-school teacher Ichikawa (Miike regular Sho Aikawa in his 100th film role) has other things on his mind. His wife is having an affair, his daughter is a teenage prostitute, his son is bullied by his classmates and he himself is a lousy teacher with no self-esteem. The only thing that keeps him going is the memory of “Zebraman”, a superhero series broadcast in the 1970s but cancelled after seven episodes because of disastrous ratings. One night, after Ichikawa has put on his home-made Zebraman suit (you’ve guessed it: black and white stripes), he hears a funny sound and goes out to investigate. Out on the street, he gets into a fight with an unsavoury individual who turns out to be an alien. And he isn’t the only one; it quickly transpires that all of Yokohama is beset by aliens, who have taken over the bodies of their human hosts with a view to taking over the whole planet. Unexpectedly, Ichikawa in his Zebraman guise turns out to be a match for the aliens, and so he begins to realise that he is not just ACTING Zebraman anymore, but through some weird process he doesn’t understand has actually BECOME Zebraman – which, among other things, means that the hair on his neck stands on end whenever he senses alien mischief in the vicinity, like a zebra’s. Needless to say, his uncaring family members and colleagues don’t note the change in him, nor do they appreciate what he is doing for mankind. The only person who seems to understand what he is going through is one of his pupils, a geeky, wheelchair-bound boy called Asano who, thanks to the blessings of the Internet, knows more about “Zebraman” than Ichikawa himself does. The two outcasts strike up a friendship which gradually turns into a father-and-son-like relationship when Ichikawa finds himself attracted to Asano’s mother, a gentle woman (conveniently single) who likes her son’s teacher despite his clumsiness and incompetence. And so Ichikawa’s confidence grows, to the point where it looks like he might actually become a bonafide superhero, despite the fact that he wears a crappy suit and cannot fly. The question is, is he confident and heroic enough to tackle “the green dread” (the blobbish, shape-shifting entity that threatens life on the planet), or is it up to the American army to solve the problem with a few well-targeted nukes?
Billed as “the first Takashi Miike film the whole family can enjoy”, “Zebraman” marks Miike’s first foray into the superhero genre, and it’s a decent one – if you’re into Japanese cinema, that is. For although “Zebraman” bears the hallmarks of a regular American superhero flick (such as an insecure hero whose loved ones, few as they are, both boost his confidence and make him vulnerable, to name just one) and borrows from about a dozen Hollywood sci-fi and superhero films (see how many references you can spot!), it is very much a Japanese family film, meaning there is a lot of slow expository stuff with which most western directors would have dispensed, and not much trademark Miike violence to make up for it. Thankfully, there IS a fair bit of wacky Japanese humour on show. Although “Zebraman” isn’t nearly as hilarious as it should have been, it features some good laughs, mostly with regard to the silly superhero costumes and the near-authentic-looking footage of the invented “Zebraman” series, replete with campy 1970s theme song. There are some great moments when Ichikawa first gets into Zebraman mode (yelling “Zebulaman back-kick! Zebulaman suck-a-rew punch!” before launching into an attack), and when Asano’s mother makes an appearance as – wait for it – Zebranurse, things get downright hysterical. Not even the creative slayings that are the highlights of the second act can top the hilarity of the Zebranurse scene, which ranks amongst the funniest non-violent things Miike has done.
Sadly, the film is rather uneven, mostly because it cannot make up its mind as to whether it wants to be a “Men in Black”/”Mars Attacks!” spoof, a superhero flick or an ode to Hollywood and the campy Japanese TV series that inspired the “Zebraman” stuff. Although the story is undeniably entertaining, it is rambling and occasionally predictable. Parts of it are excellent; other parts, though necessary for the set-up, feel long and dullish, lacking the outrageous black humour that characterises Miike’s less family-oriented work. That said, the actors and the director of photography do a good job, and there are some nice slushy bits (a rarity in Miike’s oeuvre) to make up for the relative lack of anarchistic humour. In short, it’s a fine and entertaining movie – no better or worse than the countless other superhero flicks that have been released in the past few years, and considerably more original than most (despite the fact that half of it appears to have been borrowed from American blockbusters). As long as you don’t expect it to deliver lots of gory murders and torture scenes, you shouldn’t be disappointed.
This is a family film, you see. Who knew Miike had them in him?
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GOZU (COW HEAD)
(Written by Sato Sakichi, directed by Takashi Miike)
Sato and Miike first worked together on the script for “Ichi the Killer”, the ultra-violent gore-fest that has become a classic amongst AICN’s resident Miike fans. They liked the collaboration so much that they decided to write another film together, in a genre they like to call “yakuza horror”. The result is “Gozu” (Cow Head), which is not so much a yakuza horror flick as a hallucinatory LSD trip. Whether or not you’ll like it as much as Miike’s previous films hinges on your tolerance of trippy movies. If you like your films weird, hallucinatory and Lynchian, chances are you will enjoy this one, which is VERY weird, VERY hallucinatory and VERY Lynchian. If not, you’re likely to be bored by its crushing lack of development, as were 25 per cent of the people with whom I attended the screening. They walked out about half an hour into the film, and so missed one of the most spectacular endings in cinema history.
“Gozu” is a yakuza road movie. Kind of, anyway. In it, a young yakuza called Minami is ordered to escort his “elder brother” Ozaki to the yakuza dump in Nagoya. Ozaki, you see, has lost the plot. Deranged and paranoid, he mistakes a harmless pet for a well-trained yakuza-killing dog and a perfectly normal car for a high-tech yakuza-killing vehicle. And since he tends to get rid of enemies (real or imagined) in an embarrassingly public manner, the mob bosses want to get rid of him. As soon as possible. So Minami (the increasingly baffled Hideki Sone) and Ozaki (Sho “Zebraman” Aikawa again, this time in a far more disturbing part) set out on a trip to Nagoya. On the way there, Minami tries hard to summon the courage to kill Ozaki, but he fails miserably, both because he is a nice guy and because he feels he owes his “brother” some loyalty. Then, as luck would have it, Ozaki appears to peg out on the back-seat. For a moment, Minami is relieved, but his relief quickly turns to panic when the corpse goes missing. What follows is an increasingly nightmarish quest to retrieve Ozaki, in which Minami finds himself up against a scary coffee-shop owner, bizarre coffee-shop customers who keep repeating the same dialogue over and over again, a mechanic with a strange skin disease, the hyper-lactating manageress of an inn, her strange brother, and the spirit Gozu, which has the body of a man and the head of a cow and is given to licking those it haunts. Finally, a beautiful girl (played by Kimika Yoshino) shows up in his life, and then, incredibly enough, things get even weirder.
Personally, I liked “Gozu” quite a bit. True, I found myself wondering where on earth the film was going and whether there was going to be any character development at some point, but even when it turned out that the film wasn’t really going anywhere and that there was to be no character development whatsoever, I remained in my seat, hooked by the strange, ominous atmosphere Miike had wrought and waiting for the eponymous spirit to show up. Once I had learned to undergo rather than try to enjoy the film, it was quite a good experience. That said, I know plenty of people who disliked the film; people who found the trippy second act long and tedious and wished not only for more character growth, but for more humour, as well. They had a point, for truth to tell, there are very few laughs in “Gozu”. After the opening scene, in which Ozaki kills a pet dog in customarily spectacular Miike style, the humour goes out of the window, to be replaced by a string of bizarre “What-the-fuck?” encounters which make one frown rather than laugh. Personally, as I said, I didn’t mind the relatively uneventful bizarreness, but I can see that those who go in for big laughs and gross-out action will be disappointed, at least until the insane ending. As will those who expect “Gozu” to tell a story with some actual plot development.
If you do decide to give the film a try despite the lack of a story, be sure to watch the whole thing. I won’t spoil the ending for you; suffice it to say that you’ll never say or hear the expression “holy fuck” again without seeing some profoundly disturbing images in your mind’s eye. That’s a guarantee.
“Holy fuck”, indeed.
Elaine
