Just gearing up for a long night of pretty extreme cinema at the Leeds International Film Festival.(1) The evening kicks off around 6pm with some Korean ultra-violence then there's a few hours to kill before the 'Night Of The Dead V' kicks off at midnight: four horror shorts, four horror features and a very sore arse. Anyway before I start getting ready for all that I'll just mention a couple of films I've seen over the last few days:
"The Great Yokai War" (2004)
Dir. Takashi Miike , (Japan)
So before I get into this particular film Takashi's reputation demands some explanation for those who've never heard of him. He is, to my knowledge, a complete one off, and that's probably no bad thing because while his work is undeniably brilliant and valuable, the world is just not strong enough for more than one Takashi Miike.
Simply put, there are just no limits whatsoever to a Takashi Miike film, either in where the plot will go or to how nasty things get onscreen. 'Ichi The Killer', for example, is easily the most insanely and disturbingly violent film I've ever seen and, having been lucky enough to see it at the cinema at an earlier Leeds Film Fest I know that several scenes in the theatrical release did not make it to the DVD. These films are deeper than the simple voyeurism most descriptions seem to imply however. Instead they present surreal experiences so extreme as to become almost completely abstract.
In the light of such an intro it may seem strange then that 'The Great Yokai War' is billed as Takashi's first "family friendly" film. Having seen it I understand this description but feel it is misleading as it only refers to half the film. The plot is indeed a mainstream, family matinee style affair wherein a young boy coming to terms with his parents recent divorce undertakes a fantastical journey to save the world and grows up some where along the way.
The 'Yokai' are mystical personifications of, well, just about everything, river sprites, snow people, walls, everything. The great war between them is the crises our young hero must face and the film opens with mankind receiving a desperate warning about the forthcoming danger. The thing is that although the nature of the onscreen action was somewhat restricted by this storyline it was still Takeshi Miike.
The aforementioned warning, for example, comes in the form of a farmer entering his cattle sheds on a stormy night to investigate a strange noise. He discovers that one of his cows has given birth to a weirdly deformed calf with a human head that screams terribly of impending doom before it short, pain filled life ends.
See what I mean?
I'm not really selling this so far am I? Well there's another aspect of the film to consider and that's the fact that it is a complete romp. Almost randomly funny then shocking then just plain weird, it delivers a genuine Takashi Miike experience, albeit in a relatively unusual format.
As mentioned above, the guy makes a lot of films and it's fair to say that they're not all masterpieces. This one just about is though and I can't recommend his other successes highly enough because the fact is you just haven't fully experienced cinema until you've seen a Takashi Miike film.
"Survival Style 5+" (2004)
Dir. Sekiguchi Gen, (Japan)
I have to keep reminding myself that the Japanese films I'm seeing at the moment are all fringe, genre stuff, ie. in the minority of Japanese culture. If not I can't help but ask, 'what the hell is wrong with Japanese people?' This is not, for one moment, a negative statement, it's just that these films, as much I'm loving every second of them, can only be the products of deranged minds.
Here Sekiguchi Gen has taken five stories, each one strangely unique enough to be a film of its own probably, and swirled them together into what the Film Fest brochure accurately describes as: "..an extreme surrealist maelstrom.."
My favourite story was that of Ishigaki whose wife just won't stay dead, and then she does; but the mild mannered father living life as a simple bird because the hypnotist was murdered half way through the show who eventually learns to fly was pretty good too. Vinnie Jones pops up, adding to the disorientation, (no pun intended,) as an aggressively philosophical hitman as the stories overlap and twist round one another.
Another fantastic cinematic experience which only when seen can be believed but never fully understood and I laughed my arse off.
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