AUDITION
ODISHON (Audition)
September 8 2007, DVD, home living room, borrowed from Celeste Ramsay
I had this on my shelf for a year before I actually got around (and got the guts to) watch it. I was a fool for waiting so long, but it's good any ol' time. In fact, it's absolutely delightful and I will also commit to chasing down as many Takashi Miike movies and projects that I can. (I particularly want to see MPD-PSYCHO and of course, the legendary ICHI THE KILLER.) ODISHON didn't quite have me crawling up the back of the couch, but I was alternately shrieking "Cool!" and groaning in dismay at the icky stuff, most of which has nothing to do with blood, so I can't really call it "gore".
The icky stuff is so very much not the point of this movie, though. The point of this movie is to fuck with your head. The description copy on the back of the DVD states (I paraphrase) "What starts out as a melancholy, lyrical romance becomes a breach of contract with the audience for which Hitchcock would be proud" (emphasis mine). For that is what it is, in a most beautiful and fucked up way. I feel a kinship between this and the films of David Lynch - except that Lynch doesn't even pretend that things are normal to begin with, whereas Miike lets you get all relaxed and cozy and optimistic before he wrecks your entire perception of what it means to experience longing, desire, happiness, and pain. Seriously. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I actually don't think I am.
Fantastic performances from the two leads - Ryo Ishibashi is Aoyama, the lonely widower with a teenage son who comes up with what seems like a very clever idea to find a new wife, and the sublimely freaky Eihi Shiina as the girl Aoyama's been looking for all his life, except that she's got more issues than National Geographic. She's fantastic - why isn't she a megastar? Maybe she hasn't been able to find a role more intensely fucked up than Asami. If she never did any other work than this, she deserves immortality.
I want to sample the hell out of this movie and make a terror-core album, Skinny-Puppy style. More fodder to bring to Gerard Way if I ever get a chance to meet the dude...
September 8 2007, DVD, home living room, borrowed from Celeste Ramsay
I had this on my shelf for a year before I actually got around (and got the guts to) watch it. I was a fool for waiting so long, but it's good any ol' time. In fact, it's absolutely delightful and I will also commit to chasing down as many Takashi Miike movies and projects that I can. (I particularly want to see MPD-PSYCHO and of course, the legendary ICHI THE KILLER.) ODISHON didn't quite have me crawling up the back of the couch, but I was alternately shrieking "Cool!" and groaning in dismay at the icky stuff, most of which has nothing to do with blood, so I can't really call it "gore".
The icky stuff is so very much not the point of this movie, though. The point of this movie is to fuck with your head. The description copy on the back of the DVD states (I paraphrase) "What starts out as a melancholy, lyrical romance becomes a breach of contract with the audience for which Hitchcock would be proud" (emphasis mine). For that is what it is, in a most beautiful and fucked up way. I feel a kinship between this and the films of David Lynch - except that Lynch doesn't even pretend that things are normal to begin with, whereas Miike lets you get all relaxed and cozy and optimistic before he wrecks your entire perception of what it means to experience longing, desire, happiness, and pain. Seriously. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I actually don't think I am.
Fantastic performances from the two leads - Ryo Ishibashi is Aoyama, the lonely widower with a teenage son who comes up with what seems like a very clever idea to find a new wife, and the sublimely freaky Eihi Shiina as the girl Aoyama's been looking for all his life, except that she's got more issues than National Geographic. She's fantastic - why isn't she a megastar? Maybe she hasn't been able to find a role more intensely fucked up than Asami. If she never did any other work than this, she deserves immortality.
I want to sample the hell out of this movie and make a terror-core album, Skinny-Puppy style. More fodder to bring to Gerard Way if I ever get a chance to meet the dude...