Know Your Asian Cinema: Takashi Miike (Japan)

The weirdest western film I have seen. Actually, its the only weird western film there is!

Takashi Miike (I don't know the guy's previous works) is apparently a big shot director in Japan and his latest film "Sukiyaki Western Django" is an ode to Italian spaghetti Westerns and directors like Corbucci, Leone and Kurosawa. The film is about a gunslinger who is thrust in the middle of a town where two warring clans, the White Genjis and the Red Heikes, duke it out for the rumored treasure hidden deep in the town.

When I first heard about the film, I expected a lot of good old shootouts, above awesome dialogs and really, really cool characters. Upon watching it I only ended up with the really cool characters. The dialogs and script was not that bad but it would be really cool if the characters aren't stuttering with their "engrish". I honestly cannot understand what they're saying, I found it really hard to keep track with the flow of the story. The action is a complete zero. Its like hunting down the Loch Ness and you end up with a tadpole. The big showdown in the end wasn't really that cool and the supposed climax was a quick 5 second fight scene between the Gunman and the Genji leader.

Halfway through the film you'll find yourself painfully listen to the engrish these characters speak and you'd rather just get on with the ending than endure the carabao language, bad dialog and bizarre scenarios. On a positive note, the characters in the film looked really cool even though they were drenched in either white or red. Was there a dress code back in the 1100's?

The Genji leader, sporting a frizzy windblown hairstyle, is a skilled gunman and swordsman. His coolness factor went off the roof when he shot his gun sideways and the bullet went straight to the poor guy with red highlights. The Heike leader's coolness factor went off the charts when he shot the white boys with a gatling gun. Quentin Tarantino makes an appearance as Bloody Benten's husband, Ringo. Bloody Benten is a skilled marksman with eight hands, figuratively speaking. She helps the Gunman in the end but is soon killed by a conniving Gollum-like Sheriff.

"Sukiyaki" is style over substance. It had so much style that it affected the substance. 2.5/5

"She always gets a part"

Widower takes an offer to screen girls at a special audition, arranged for him by a friend to find him a new wife. The one he fancies is not who she appears to be after all...

REVIEW
While it takes some of its psychological cues from the early thrillers of Roman Polanski, and stylistic excerpts from Kubrick to David Lynch, "Audition" stands on its own as a disturbing, post-modern horror film with passages of genuinely nightmarish surrealism. Director Takashi Miike weaves a tale of an aging widower who holds a fake film audition in hopes of meeting the perfect woman; his intentions are sincere, and he seemingly finds his match in Asami, a physically and psychologically damaged 24-year old who hides a dark past...or does she? While a bit too deliberately-paced at times, overall Miike builds an unusual atmosphere drowned in mounting suspense; his actors sell the premise, and transform "Audition" into something more than a De Palma-esquire exercise in style.