takashi miike Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The weekly Asian Cinema Scene returns to share recent news and answer reader mail.

Breasts Spark Concern. An upcoming sports comedy is creating consternation in Japan. The movie's title, Oppai Bare (AKA Boobs Volleyball), reportedly has embarrassed both theater owners and potential moviegoers because of what "oppai" means, so theater marquees and movie tickets will display the title as O.P.V. Evidently everyone is OK with the premise, in which a high school teacher promises to show her breasts to her all-male volleyball team if they win the big game. The film, directed by Eiichiro Hasumi, releases on April 18. Twitch has the trailer; it looks like a pleasant, feel-good flick. [Cinema Today, via Toronto J-Film Pow Wow.]

Recent Releases. Derek Yee's Shinjuku Incident, starring Jackie Chan in a straight dramatic role (no kicking, no punching), opened the Hong Kong International Film Festival a couple of weeks ago and has now opened in Thailand, where Brian of Asian Cinema - While on the Road saw it: "It has to be said that Jacky is really not all that great a dramatic actor and I think this hurts the film overall." Still, he found the film to be "quite compelling." (Trailer can be viewed here.)

Takashi Miike's Crows Zero II has opened in Japan, and Mark Schilling of The Japan Times says: "As in the first film, the brawls are nearly nonstop ... the group battle scenes, with hundreds of punks whaling on each other, have a scale and impact reminiscent of the gaudier clashes in Braveheart ... Miike directs with an energy, velocity and cheeky bravado that are pure punk." Check out the trailer, embedded below.

After the jump: Nippon Connection opens this week. Plus, a reader asks, 'How do you find your own local Asian cinema scene?'

Was it the controversy over the title? Or the controversy over the bloody tampon scene? Either way, Alan Ball's Towelhead finished the weekend with the best per-screen average of all films, earning $13,250 at four engagements in New York and Los Angeles, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. Neither this flick, first unveiled at Toronto last year, nor Ball's recent return to HBO, Southern Gothic vampire drama True Blood, have drawn unanimous critical praise, but specialty audiences still seem interested in whatever the American Beauty scribe / Six Feet Under creator is doing.

Speaking of directors with a strong following, Takeshi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django expanded to Los Angeles and maintained a healthy $4,200 per-screen average in its third week of release. Also in its third week, comedy I Served the King of England expanded into 37 locations but hasn't picked up much steam ($2,262 per screen), while steady earners Tell No One ($2,263 per screen; 11th week), Frozen River ($2,011 per screen; 7th week), Elegy ($1,948 per screen; 6th week), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona ($1,724; 5th week) all saw somewhat predictable declines in business. After all, sex and thrills only go so far among indie filmgoers.

Our criteria for inclusion in the Indie Weekend Box Office report hinges on the distributor, so here's another shout out to the #1 overall earner, Burn After Reading, from Focus Features. Likewise, soon-to-shutter Picturehouse released Diane English's The Women on the largest number of of screens they've ever handled -- 2,962 -- resulting in a per-screen average of $3,405. The picture earned more than $10 million total.

Take one renegade Japanese director, set him to work on a Spaghetti Western, add a cameo by a talkative American filmmaker, and what do you get? First place in the indie four-day weekend box office race. Sukiyaki Western Django, directed by the prolific and extremely versatile Takashi Miike and featuring Quentin Tarantino in a small role, tore it up at the single Manhattan theatre where it opened, grossing $13,100, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. The version released in the US does not represent Miike's original vision, however. Distributor First Look edited 20 or so minutes for the bastardized edition currently playing, so this is a muted triumph. *

The light-hearted I Served the King of England had the right stuff to average $8,487 per screen at eight locations. Directed by Jirí Menzel, the film stars Ivan Barnev, Oldrich Kaiser, and the always wonderful Julia Jentsch. Naked Penélope Cruz outdrew mostly-clothed Penélope Cruz, as Elegy bested Vicky Christina Barcelona on per-screen numbers, $5,697 to $5,102. To be fair, however, Woody Allen's latest is playing on nearly 700 screens and cracked the Top 10; it's made more than $13 million so far, though Elegy's $1.7 million is nothing to sneeze at in the specialty field. Right behind came two consistent cold-weather flicks, Frozen River ($5,028 per screen) and Transsiberian ($4,728). The more temperate Tell No One blew past $4 million in total US earnings in its ninth week, averaging $4,480 at 102 theaters.

Up next? Chris Smith's very good drama The Pool opens on Wednesday; Friday will see the release of Chris Eska's entrancing poetic drama August Evening, Jessica Yu's playful comedy Ping Pong Playa, romantic comedy Everybody Wants to Be Italian, thriller Mister Foe, drama Save Me, and the self-explanatory comedy/drama Surfer, Dude.

* UPDATE: A representative for First Look says that the company acquired the film after it had already been edited from 121 minutes to 98 minutes, and further states that Miike did the editing. My apologies for the error.

As a further aside, the original-length version screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2007 and was released in Japan shortly thereafter.

By chance, two Takashi Miike movies, Dead or Alive and Audition, opened in my town with in a week of one another in 2001. It was pretty eye opening seeing the huge difference between them, the speedy carnage of the former and the slow suspense of the latter, and I became an instant fan. Since then I've managed to track down just six more Miike movies, and in that same time he has made over forty (including videos and TV shows). The speed of his production fits perfectly with the personality of his movies. They're often nonsensical; I couldn't make heads or tails of two of his more recent pictures, Gozu and The Great Yokai War. And they're very definitely energetic, verging on crazy. He reminds me of the great German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who cranked out over 40 movies and TV shows in less than 15 years and died at the age of 37. Miike is now 48 and one wonders how much longer he can keep going before he combusts.

Miike's new movie, Sukiyaki Western Django, finds him making a slight change of pace. No, the movie is still crazy and fast and nearly unintelligible, but he has stopped for a moment to consider the work of other filmmakers. The movie is a tribute to Spaghetti Westerns, and especially Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which in turn was based on Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961). Remember Bono's taunt at the beginning of U2's cover version of "Helter Skelter"? ("This song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We're stealing it back.") This movie feels as if Miike is doing some stealing back of his own.

A detective, a zebra and revenge! What more could you ask for when seeking out Japanese films newly-released on DVD? I've been hearing terrific things about Nightmare Detective since it came out in Japan early last year. Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, who also made Tetsuo, the Iron Man and A Snake of June, among other wonderfully weird and twisted concoctions, the film was described by Mark Schilling of The Japan Times as probably "too dark and disturbing for the average punter expecting, from the title, something in the X Files line. ... Be prepared for not just the usual goosebumps, but a viral infection of your dream life." The DVD from Dimension Extreme includes a documentary by the director and a "making of" feature.

Originally released in Japan three years ago, Takashi Miike's Zebraman finally sees the light of digital day in Region 1. This is the lighter side of the notoriously edgy Miike, a comic fantasy about a schoolteacher who pretends that he's a superhero, only to discover he is "fated to become the real-life protector against an alien invasion," wrote Aaron Hillis for The Village Voice. "Miike's most accessible exploit to date ... is still deliciously insane." The DVD from Tokyo Shock includes a motley collection of extras, such as a look at the singer of the theme song and TV spots, according to SciFi Japan.

Asian monster flick D-War tore up the box office in its native South Korea this past summer. Slightly retitled to Dragon Wars by distributor Freestyle Releasing, the film did surprisingly well in the US, grossing more than $10 million, making it the most successful Korean picture released in America. (Total worldwide box office was $66 million, according to Box Office Mojo). It didn't screen for critics, but I saw it anyway, propelled by a childhood love for Godzilla and his monstrous friends.

Director Shim Hyung-Rae's film is incredibly cheesy and nonsensical, but strangely satisfying if you're a fan of monster movies in general and keep your expectations just barely above zero. Unfortunately, the lead characters, played by Jason Behr and Amanda Brooks, are wan and colorless, in part because their roles are so thinly written. Happily, B-movie greats Robert Forster and Chris Mulkey are on hand to juice things up. Most of the production budget was evidently spent on the special effects, which would have been state of the art ten years ago. It's the kind of movie that made me roll my eyes and mutter to myself throughout. Yet days later I found myself quoting some of the more outrageous lines and scenes to others. The DVD includes a featurette entitled "5,000 Years in the Making," storyboard to screen "animatics" and conceptual art gallery.

Japanese auteur Takashi Miike has made dozens of films in almost every conceivable genre (the remake of his horror flick One Missed Call was just released this weekend), but Big Bang Love -- Juvenile A is, I believe, his first foray into the homoerotic prison drama genre. Mark Schilling of The Japan Times noted that it "differs from much of his previous work (especially his recent commercial outings) in its theatrically stylized sets, complex narrative strategies and basic tone." The DVD includes an interview with Miike, "behind the scenes special," an image gallery, trailers and program notes.

It seems like an odd choice to hire a Frenchman to remake a film by Japanese master Takashi Miike. I've only seen half a dozen Miike features to date, which isn't many considering that he makes at least that number in any given year. But I can say that his style ranges from utterly insane to completely cracked, and few French filmmakers -- who generally specialize in intelligence and austerity -- could match him. But director Eric Valette brings something interesting to the new remake of One Missed Call. Most horror remakes come complete with an undisguised sense of callousness, and almost flat-out disdain, for their intended customers. But One Missed Call has a kind of effective low-key tone. Perhaps it was confusion or sheer laziness, but it worked for me far better than some other junky remakes I've seen.

Sure, the story is unbelievably stupid, and the film doesn't do much to justify its silly logic. Both this and Miike's film were adapted from a novel by Yasushi Akimoto, and I'd like to believe that the novel made a far better argument for its plot. A med student, Shelley (Meagan Good), dies after receiving a mysterious phone call. After her death, her phone mysteriously dials a friend, and that friend dies. And so on. The calls come in dated and timed to some point in the near future, and the recipient of the call hears his or her own voice at the moment of their death. So they know exactly what day and time they're going to die and they know what they're going to say, but that information can't help some of the dumber characters from saving their own lives. One character sits at a café with only one minute to go to his impending death. Instead of sitting there safe one minute longer, he decides to get up and cross a busy street.

I don't have a subscription to ScreenDaily.com, so I can only read the headlines, but those headlines sure are handy. Here are three that caught my eye, all deals taking place in and around the American Film Market (AFM) in Santa Monica, California.

• Carlos Reygadas' challenging drama Silent Light sharply divided critics when it debuted at Cannes earlier this year, though everyone seemed to agree that certain scenes were indelibly beautiful. Tartan Films has picked up distribution rights in the US; they previously released the director's Battle in Heaven. Expect a limited theatrical engagement. It plays at AFI Fest in Hollywood next week (November 7 and 9).
  

• Blood Brothers (pictured), on the other hand, has united critics: no one seems to like it. Alexei Tan's reimagining of John Woo's A Bullet in the Head has been criticized for being too glossy and lacking substance -- none of which discourages me from wanting to see it. First Look Studios has acquired US distribution rights. First Look has handled genre titles before, often sending them straight to DVD, so a theatrical release is not assured, especially in view of its lukewarm reception so far.
  

• Sukiyaki Western Django, Takashi Miike's English-language Spaghetti Western, apparently confused everybody. Some were disappointed that it not as outrageous as from the versatile and prolific director. First Look has picked up US rights for this one as well, but it's a new, edited version that is 25 minutes shorter than what was previously screened at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. Given Miike's name recognition, this has a shot at a limited theatrical release before heading to DVD.
  

AFM runs through November 7. AFI Fest, which opened last night with a gala screening of Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, runs through November 11.

[ Via ScreenDaily ]

If you're a film geek like me, you're sitting on pins and needles waiting for the full Toronto International Film Festival schedule to be announced. I'm skipping out on the fest this year because I just put my kids through a 2,000 mile move (though I will be at Telluride giving you all the coverage you can handle from there), but that doesn't mean I'm not pumped up about Cinematical's TIFF coverage, which will be extensive.

The start of the fest seems ages away, and the full schedule isn't even announced for six more days -- stop teasing us already! (Yes, as a kid I did try to scope out the hidden locations of Christmas gifts well before the big day -- I've never liked surprises. What can I say, I'm a control freak.) In the meantime, here's something to whet your appetite: The TIFF Blogs are up and running at full steam. A little sampling of what you can find there:

The Full Frame Documentary Film Fest programmer Phoebe Brush shares her picks from the Real to Reel section with the group. Since docs are one of my own fave genres, I was especially interested in what Phoebe has to say about the TIFF selections. Phoebe's picks are The Dictator Hunter by Klaartje Quirijns (about the brutal regime of Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad) Weijun Chen's Please Vote for Me, which played Silverdocs in June, where it won the Sterling Feature competition, and Encounters at the End of the World, which Werner Herzog fans and fanatics will no doubt be lining up to see in droves.

Other TIFF docs that we're especially interested in include Darfur Now, Hollywood Chinese, A Jihad for Love, and My Enemy's Enemy. Scott Weinberg and I saw My Kid Could Paint That at Sundance, and I'd recommend that one for a great doc to see and then talk about over late-night ales at a pub or a 2AM pizza slice.

Midnight Madness is always one of the most fun parts of TIFF, and Scott Weinberg will once again be Cinematical's Man at Midnight, bringing you all the hottest horror reviews and on-the-scene action from those always-zany midnight crowds. Over on the Midnight Madness Blog, MM programmer Colin Geddes gives you a sneak pick at one of the most-anticpated films in the Midnight section, Fumihiko Sori's Vexille. Geddes points all you anime fans to the film's official website, which is streaming the first 12 minutes of the film. Vexille premieres at TIFF on Sunday, September 9 at Midnight Madness.

Other Midnight Madness coverage we're itching to bring you: Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, The Diary of the Dead, Mother of Tears, and Stuck.

TIFF is one of the few places where you can really sink your teeth into some Canadian film, and there are some hot films from Canada in this year's lineup, including David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, which stars one of my other secret movie star boyfriends, Viggo Mortenson. I stood about 10 feet away from The Viggo at last year's TIFF while waiting to interview Laura Linney, and I can attest that he is even better-looking in person -- the man just radiates "movie star" -- but I must confess that I prefer him all dirty and bearded as Aragorn to golden and glowing for press interviews. Other notable Canadian offerings that we'll try to cover: Francois Girard's Silk, Bruce Sweeney's American Venus, Ernie Barbarash's They Wait, and Martin Gero's Young People F*cking (that one just because ... well, because the title alone intrigues us).

That's enough to get us excited for the fest, now we just need to see the full lineup and start counting down the days. Let us know what you're hot to see us cover at Toronto. And hey, indie filmmakers -- if you have a film at TIFF you'd like us to check out, let us know. Some of my own fave fest finds would've gotten lost in the shuffle if a filmmaker hadn't contacted me to let me know about it. Also, please get your film listed on IMDb and get an easy-to-find official website up! The more we can find out about your film, the more likely it will be to stand out from the slew of films we have to sort through to decide what to cover, so help us out a little here, will ya?

Men are stupid. We grab hold of a romantic notion and won't let go. We become instantly enraptured by someone's face, body, voice or written words and move forward in rabid pursuit, ignoring evidence that the other person is already involved in a relationship, wants nothing to do with us -- or is a total psycho. Audition helped make Takashi Miike known to a wider international audience in 2000, though he'd been making films for television and the direct to video market in Japan since 1991. His prolific output, and especially his sometimes sensationalist subject matter, influenced a raft of younger filmmakers, including Eli Roth, who gave him a cameo in Hostel. But don't blame torture porn on Miike.

Though I missed Audition when it played in theaters, I picked up the unrated director's cut as soon it became available on DVD. A recent viewing reaffirmed its capacity to shock. Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) sits in a hospital room and helplessly watches his beloved wife die. Seven years pass and he is nothing but a hollow shell of a middle-aged man, lonely to his core, rotely performing his duties at a video production company. Even his teenage son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) can see that he "looks old" and encourages him to remarry. While having drinks with his producer friend Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), he listens to Yoshikawa bemoan the sad state of the film industry and expresses his own desire to find a nice girl to marry. With the mind of a producer, always seeking to solve problems, Yoshikawa quickly decides that they should hold an audition.