Tag Archives: Takashi Miike

Capsules

2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART ONE

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Montréal 2025

The Fantasia commercial, about the Fantasia audience, before the Fantasia screening, really spoke to me.

7/16: Fragment

The festival pulled a fast one on me this year, adding a day to the front end. Arriving at the bus depot just after 5 o’clock, I made it first to my hotel, then to the accreditation office around 6:15: just in time to wander into Kim Sung-yoon’s directorial debut. Fragment is a well-acted drama about grief and culpability. A little disjointed at the start (as could well be appropriate, considering the topic and title), it finds its footing as the characters creep toward a reconciliation of sorts with their circumstances. The young leads are all commendable, with a special shout-out to the kid sister. She suffers no nonsense. Fragment is not a film made for me, but nonetheless I must admit it left me touched. (A good touch, that is.)

7/17: The Wailing [El llanto]

Pedro Martín-Calero, you fiend! There is a great deal to enjoy about this story of the supernatural: an evil presence (creepy old dead guy, from what I could glean) has haunted a series of women in a family, moving from mother to daughter when the former succumbs to despair. This is something of two movies in one, when I feel it should have been three. The chronicles of the characters are all well paced, and the scares are real. (The hook here is: this entity can only be seen through video capture, be that the large camcorder of the mother as a youth, or the ubiquitous smartphones of the latest victim.) Sound design is dead on, with the titular wailing emanating from a tower block whose second story room is always up for sale. The mood is set, details established, and then, BAM: it’s over.

I suppose there are greater sins in filmmaking than leaving me all too curious how this occult situation is resolved.

7/18: “Nyaight of the Living Cat”, Episodes 1 – 4

Tomohiro Kamitani and , judging from their specially recorded video introduction for the Fantasia screening, are two chill middle-aged guys with a love for cats. Or at least a love of global apocalypses involving cats. Although, perhaps the feline menace is safely Continue reading 2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART ONE →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ZEBRAMAN (2004)

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DIRECTED BY: Takashi Miike

FEATURING: Shô Aikawa, Kyôka Suzuki, Naoki Yasukôchi, Kôen Kondô,

PLOT: An inept 3rd-grade teacher with heroic aspirations becomes Zebraman, a superhero from a cancelled 1978 television show.

Still from Zebraman (2004)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Takashi Miike goes all in with Zebraman, pushing everything—buffoonery, low budget violence, conspiracy, and, erm, eye-catching costumery—to their extremes, while remaining family-friendly and building to an in-your-face zebraction climax which must be zeen to be zelieved.

COMMENTS: All told, Equus quagga is not an animal to take seriously. Its mane lacks the nobility found in fellow members of the genus; the striping confounds; and they spend their days nibbling grass, hoping not to get killed. These traits, however, lend themselves perfectly to Ichikawa (I’ll spare you his official “-san“), an ungainly overseer of third-graders with closet aspirations of middling superhero status. But before you look a gift-zebra in the mouth, consider the sources: director Takashi Miike, forger of god-level violence and oddities, and screenwriter Kankurô Kudô, whose flirtations with the absurd would culminate in the Mole Song shenanigans. Through their powers combined, we’ve got a lot of weird and wacky crammed into an ungainly combatant who’s out “Striping Evil!”

ZEBRA DOUBLE-KICK!

Recently attempting to explain the narrative to a pair of innocent bystanders, I quickly realized that the mounting ridiculousness mounted even more quickly than I had at first surmised. There is a secret Japanese government organization concerned about an alien infestation; its head agent is a suave ladykiller, suffering from a case of crabs. Speaking of crabs, there’s a serial killer on the loose, with crab headgear and brandishing a pair of 10-inch shears in each hand. Speaking of shears, there’s that third-grade teacher toiling away on a DIY Zebraman costume, working from his memory of a television show which was cancelled after seven episodes. Speaking of the television show, the new student at the school also knows about Zebraman, and kindles the would-be vigilante in his teacher. Speaking of vigilante, the school’s principal has formed a security group of school staff to guard against an unspecified danger which appears to be slowly overwhelming the city. (Spoiler Alert: it’s aliens! Little, green, bulbous, adorable aliens.)

ZEBRA CYCLONE!

The premise beggars belief, but Miike and Kudô go all in. Every player is on form, and Zebraman has almost a family drama or character study feel to it. The disillusioned super-agent wants a cause worth fighting for. The new kid, unable to walk after a mysterious incident, wants hope in the impossible. And the principal desperately seeks atonement for his sins. When Ichikawa emerges as Zebraman, he gets lost on his way to the new kid’s house, but hears a cry for help—and suddenly the powers he’s been mimicking (badly) become real. His hair springs up, unsolicited, and he leaves hoof-mark kicks in a dastardly crab-man. As he combats greater dangers, the government agents hone in on their extraterrestrial targets, eventually capturing one and bringing it back to their steam bath/observation lab.

ZEBRA BOMBER!

So much silliness, so much heart, so much drama, so many bad costumes, dumb songs, and gloopy aliens. Just when you expect your head to not explode, Miike pulls the trigger on the finale. The city is spared a neutron bomb drop, but at the cost of a magical display of bombastic action that will leave you shocked and moved. Zebraman somehow manages to achieve a silly charm greater even than its inspirational beast.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Miike refuses to get real, but his gonzo, punch-drunk surrealism has never felt so arbitrary.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (contemporaneous)

Zebraman: Ultimate Z-Pack [Blu-ray]

Zebraman: Ultimate Z-Pack [Blu-ray]
  • Takashi Miike's Complete Zebraman Saga
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Capsules

CAPSULE: SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO (2007)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Hideaki Itô, Yūsuke Iseya, Kōichi Satō, Kaori Momoi, , Masanobu Andô,

PLOT: A nameless gunman rides into a town where two rival gangs of samurai scheme to find and seize a hidden cache of gold.

Still from Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

COMMENTS: A hawk grabs a snake in its talons and flies off into a painted sunset. A man wrapped in a Navajo blanket (Quentin Tarantino) rolls onto his back, shoots the bird out of the sky, catches the snake as it falls, and in one swift motion uses a knife to slit the body and remove a bloody egg from the serpent’s neck. While he’s absorbed in that operation, three Japanese gunslingers get the drop on him. Tarantino, using a fake Western accent, then describes a rivalry between the red Heike and the white Genji clans, as he slips into an even weirder take on a cowpoke with a southern drawl mimicking a Japanese accent. Not surprisingly, the nameless man turns the tables on the three interlopers and kills them all, without breaking the egg.

This opening suggests a level of stylized surrealism that Sukiyaki Western Django doesn’t quite maintain. Tarantino’s character is not the non sequitur narrator he initially appears to be, and the rest of the movie generally takes a more straightforward tone. Essentially, it’s a series of spaghetti Western archetypes, clichés, and homages—a Man with No Name, a hidden cache of treasure, a weapon stashed in a coffin—wrapped in a gimmick: the action all takes place in a mythical version of feudal Japan where desperadoes pack both six-shooters and katanas. In the strangest directorial decision, the Japanese cast delivers their cowboy dialogue (“you gonna come at me… or whistle ‘Dixie’?”) entirely in heavily accented English (learned phonetically, in most cases).  Because the actors’ English pronunciation ranges from passable to difficult to understand to nearly incomprehensible, this odd, distancing choice will be an insurmountable barrier for some.

If you can clear the dialogue bar, the rest of Sukiyaki‘s recipe will be familiar to Miike fans: fast-paced action, absurd comic violence, heavy doses of morphing style, and throwaway bits of surrealism. Holes are blown through torsos, through which crossbow bolts are then fired; bright flashback scenes are graded toward the extreme yellow and green ends of the spectrum; babies are found curled up in hybridized roses. We also learn that, in old West saloons, samurai were fond of interpretive dance performances scored to didgeridoos. All this nonsense leads to a heart-pounding, if hackneyed, finale that proves the old maxim that the more important a character is to the plot, the more bullets they can take without dying. After the gunsmoke clears from the village-sized battlefield, a silly closing epilogue will make Spaghetti Western fans groan.

Tarantino’s involvement in Sukiyaki is a testament to the mutual admiration between he and Miike, and it’s noteworthy that his role here comes five years before his own revisionist take on Spaghetti Westerns in 2012’s Django Unchained. As for Miike, in some ways Sukiyaki marks the beginning of the winding down of his weird movie period; his next major work seen in the West was the excellent but entirely realistic Thirteen Assassins (2010), and since 2015 has been spending more time on Japanese television series aimed at elementary school girls than on making weird cinema.

In 2020, MVD visual released Sukiyaki Western Django on Blu-ray for the first time (in the North American market). All of the extras—a 50-minute “making of” featurette, six minutes of deleted scenes, and a series of clips and promos—are also found on the 2008 DVD. The one thing that makes this release special is the inclusion of the extended cut that played at the Venice Film Festival and in Japanese theaters. The box cover claims this extended cut is 159:57 minutes long—a typo for 1:59:57, as the cut clocks in at almost exactly two hours. There are no significant differences between the two versions; Miike simply snipped away insignificant bits from many once-longer scenes, resulting in a shorter, faster-paced, and improved film. (A detalied list of the differences can be found at the always-excellent movie-censorship.com).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…utterly deranged homage to westerns all’italia… dialogue is delivered in phonetic English so weirdly cadenced that self-conciously cliched lines like ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ approach surreal poetry.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

Sukiyaki Western Django: Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]

Sukiyaki Western Django: Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]
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Apocryphally Weird

1*. THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001)

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Katakuri-ke no kôfuku

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda, ,

PLOT: The Katakuri clan retires to a remote mountain area to run a bed and breakfast, but the place seems cursed, as every guest who stays there dies. The Katakuris try to cover up the deaths to avoid bad publicity, while frequently bursting into song and dance numbers.

Still from The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

BACKGROUND:

  • The Happiness of the Katakuris is actually a remake (some say a “very loose” remake) of a Jee-woon Kim’s (non-musical) Korean black comedy The Quiet Family.
  • Miike made Katakuris the same year as Visitor Q, an even blacker comedy which also deals with the theme of a “happy” Japanese family. Katakuris and Q were two of a remarkable eight movies the prolific auteur released in 2001.
  • The Happiness of the Katakuris received the highest number of total votes in 366 Weird Movies first Apocryphally Weird movie poll, making it arguably the most popular weird movie left off the 366 Weird Movies canon.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We’ll have to go with that little claymation yōkai/imp that pops out of a random diner’s soup and falls in love with her heart-shaped uvula—with bizarrely comic results.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Claymation infatuation; reanimated corpse song and dance

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Katakuri clan came about as close to making the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made as possible; we held off honoring them partly because their movie, while weird indeed, was overlong and uneven, and partly because Takashi Miike was already well-represented with three Canonically Weird movies, and it was time to give someone else a shot. The movie’s inclusion on the secondary list of Apocrypha titles was assured, and it’s a highly appropriate choice for the inaugural title in our runners-up category.

Short clip from The Happiness of the Katakuris

COMMENTS: The Happiness of the Katakuris begins with a four-minute scene, which really has nothing to do with the rest of the Continue reading 1*. THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: ICHI THE KILLER (2001)

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Koroshiya 1

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: A sadomasochistic Yakuza relishes being hunted by a mysterious hitman named Ichi, hoping the killer will bring him to undreamed of heights of pain.

Still from Ichi the Killer (2001)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Ichi is strange, for sure, but as important as it was in developing Takashi Miike’s cult and bringing his work before more round-eyes, it values gruesomeness and shock value over pure weirdness.

COMMENTS: Ichi is notorious for its violence and sadism, and rightfully so; but, as a Takashi Miike joint, it bears an undeniable brand of quality and style. Also, as is typical with Miike, it’s uneven, almost by design, changing from yakuza intrigue to gross-out torture fest to campy black comedy at the crack of the director’s whip. The complicated plot echoes both Yojimbo (in the way one character pits rival crime factions against one another) and Memento (in the way a vulnerable man’s memories are manipulated to make him a tool of vengeance). Tadanobu Asano gives a cool, cult star-making performance as Kakihara, the ruthlessly sadomasochistic villain with dyed blonde hair and unexplained facial scars that have carved his face into a perma-Joker grin. As with every Miike movie, it contains a few moments of transcendent gonzo poetry—my personal favorite being when Jijii (played by Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto) strips off his shirt to reveal an improbably jacked physique.

Still, even Miike’s best movies tend to have troughs along with its peaks, and Ichi has a number of problems that prevent it from rising very far above its nihilistic base. The ostensible protagonist—Ichi of the title—is not at all believable as a legendary assassin; in fact, his prowess at killing is completely absurd in a way that doesn’t match, or serve, the serious and frightening tone of the Kakihara’s segments. Nor does the performance of otherwise fine actor Nao Ohmori fully exploit the sympathy one might have for the character, had he been portrayed in a less cartoonish manner.

Even more problematic is the film’s violence—not its extent so much as Miike’s inconsistent attitude to depicting it. At times, torture and cruelty are depicted with a realism that makes one cringe and empathize with the victim, while at other times it’s treated with a insouciance (as when a shocked face is detached from its head and shown sliding down a bloody wall). Sometimes these inconsistent tones coexist in the same scene: Ichi witnesses a brutal rape, with the victim’s face painfully swollen from a merciless beating, then dispatches the assailant by splitting him vertically from head to toe with his razor shoe. In some sense, alternating the absurd and realistic approaches to violence makes the scene more nightmarish, keeping the audience off-balance by mixing fearful anticipation with an unexpected result. I can appreciate this effect, to some extent, without actually enjoying or approving of it. The problem is that it’s more authentically sadistic to treat suffering as a joke than to face it head-on; Ichi too often takes on the sadist’s attitude that others’ pain is entertainment. Although torture and gore is pervasive and extreme throughout Ichi—including a man hanging suspended from hooks dug into his skin, among other atrocities—the violence in Miike’s previous Audition is far more harrowing and meaningful, because a fleshed-out human beings whom we can care about suffer (and inflict) it, instead of the pain being just a revolting exhibition occurring between two caricatures.

Ichi the Killer is one of those canonical cult movies (like Donnie Darko) that is constantly being restored, tinkered with and reissued in new home video editions. The latest on offer is the 2018 Blu-ray from Well Go USA, which bills itself as the “definitive remastered edition.” While it is reportedly an improvement on the 2010 Blu from Tokyo Shock, it lacks any significant supplemental features aside from the decade-old commentary track from Miike and original manga writer Hideo Yamamoto recycled from an old DVD release. In any release, it should go without saying to beware the English-language dub.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the kind of deeply horrible and bizarre movie that really can only be viewed from between your fingers, or behind the sofa, for most of its two-hours-plus running time.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Caleb Moss, who called it “Pretty weird, more leaning on subtle absurdity, but when [Miike] goes for it, he can deliver some really great black comic intellect…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)