Takeshi Miike

I watched The Happiness of the Katakuris on Friday evening and it was fantastic. A Japanese musical comedy about a family in a remote guest house who keep seeing their guests die under bizarre circumstances and bury the bodies in the woods to avoid bad publicity. There are lots of musical numbers including a fabulous karaoke number complete with soft focus, mirror balls and the lyrics at the bottom of the screen. There is another songs with the dead guests acting as a chorus, a conman who claims to be the nephew of the Queen of England and claymation demons.

Oh, and a volcano erupts at one point too.

It really is quite unlike anything I have ever seen before but is really rather wonderful and not what you would really expect from Takeshi Miike.



I've been a fan of his for a while and he is actually a very versatile director so a musical should not be a surprise. However his other films do tend to be darker and certainly much more violent.




Ichi the Killer would be the one that people will remember for the violence and at first glance it really is very far removed from the world of the Katakuris

Somebody is suspended from fishhooks and has boiling oil poured over him, the title character has shoes with blades in them and cuts people in half with high kicks, another character cuts out his own tongue to apologise for a failure to his boss. And yet the violence is cartoonish and the film is a very dark comedy. And the ending. Well, he has a way of pulling these truly bizarre endings right out of left field. They may not always make sense but you do realize that you are watching something quite special where just about anything is possible.



Another good example of his odd endings is at the climax of the first Dead or Alive film. What started as a Yakuza thriller suddenly turns into something completely different in the last couple of minutes. That film also has one of the best starts to a film ever. The story goes that the script had about 40 minutes of setting up the characters and their world. Miike decided that this was too long and so gives the whole 40 minutes in a blinding ten minutes of quick cuts, extreme sex, violence and noodle eating set to a fantastic rock track (which I am still trying to track down somehow). It's a truly outrageous piece of film making and it works so well. The other two films in the series have the same actors but they swap roles, the tones are very different and as good as they are (and they are very good indeed) they never quite reach the heights of those first ten minutes). I think they would probably be the best films for a novice to start to get to know Miike.

Of course his nest known film is probably Audition but I refuse to watch it due to my needle phobia as apparantly the last half hour does feature quite a lot of needle and piano wire based mayhem.

So there you go. Here ends today's lesson in odd Japanese cinema.