changes…

I decided to drop the domain and stop pimping out amazon.com. New reviews coming soon.

The Bird People in China (1998)

The Bird People in China is probably one of the worst Takashi Miike films. It’s slow and boring as hell. The basic plot is of two foreigners in a different land forming a friendship. One of the men is a yakuza with a bloody past, the other is a quite business man. They go to a small village in the mountains of China and are trapped there. They both go a bit insane. In the interview in the special features, Miike says that the point of the film was the create a unique world, which is actually accomplished. I just wish more would have gone on. I guess some people would call this film haunting and tragic but I just found it tedious.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Yakuza Demon

On my Netflix que I put all of the Takashi Miike films that I haven’t seen at the top. So if you aren’t into Miike you should probably not read this blog for the next couple of days.
Yakuza Demon is a good film. Riki Takeuchi stars as Seiji a member of a small yakuza family trying to stay alive. But this film was directed by Takashi Miike so you know everything isn’t going to go well. The rival yakuza gang Tendo has crossed the lines and pissed off the Date family. He puts his boss in jail so he doesn’t go through with a plan that would have gotten him killed, and then he does the plan himself. The plan was to kill a high ranking member of the Tendo gang to punish them. But Seiji instead goes on a rampage and angers both of the gangs. I think this is one of Takashi Miike’s best straight forward yakuza films. It has a very sad feel to it. This film is violent but not gory. Definitely worth watching.

In The Mood For Love

Directed by Wong Kar-Wai In The Mood For Love is an incredibly boring film. I had a hard time paying attention to it and it almost put me to sleep. It is about two people almost having an affair in Hong Kong in the 60′s. A man and a woman move in on the same day next to each other in a small apartment building. Both of their partners are away for long periods of time and they become close.

I just simply couldn’t care about them or their situation. Cheating is not a subject that matters to me, because as a polyamorous woman I believe in having sex and/or relationships with whomever I choose. Monogamy is just so tedious and soul destroying. It’s an absurd though that you can find sexual satisfaction with only one person. The concept of monogamy always just reeked of ownership more than love to me.

There seemed to be more emphasis on the wardrobe, cinematography, and on the irritating music loop than on the plot. There were no sex scenes, no nudity, and no real reason for me to watch this film.

film rant

I wish that I could have seen some of my favorite films in the theater. I think that a film that Audition or Ichi the Killer would be great to see on the big screen. i try to see as many films as I can in the theater but it doesn’t happen very often. Money is one of the main reasons. Time is another. I also lived in a small city in Ohio, and didn’t help much because nothing came to that pit. No one is going to bring cool cinema to the Midwest. It would just be waste of their time.

I now live in Seattle now so I may be able to see more films the way that they were meant to be seen. They have a film festival that happens every year here and I’m hoping that I can ketch it. They also have an erotic film fest that looks fun too. Then I have to deal with the money problem.

I don’t buy films that often. I love to rent. I just don’t have deep enough pockets to spend twenty dollars every time a film looks good. I used to rent from video stores but I now use netflix. Everyone knows how fond Blockbuster is of censorship and their rental prices were always sky high. Local stores never had a good selection and the major chains like Hollywood tend to mostly buy shitty American indie films to fill their horror section. Do many people actually like these films where these idiots are just redoing old films? I get so mad that so much of the space is taken up by horrible films. I used netflix because it’s cheap, reliable, and the selection is better than any store could have. For twenty bucks a month I get to watch all the films that I want to from across the world. The only bad thing that I’ve had to deal with is neighbors stealing my mail, but you get problems like that wen you live in bad areas.

This probably just sounds like a bad commercial but I love netflix and always recommend them to any film fan I meet. Besides, I’m not selling subscriptions to netflix so what would I have to gain by saying how great they are, if I didn’t think so? I do buy films, but only films that I know I already love or films that are on sale for an absurdly small amount. You don’t lose much on the dollar deals.

This rant went everywhere. my point is that I love films and I spend quite a large part of my life watching them. Seeing films on the big screen is cool, but renting and watching movies at home is just as fun to me. I want to this site to be as interesting and personal as I can, so anyone reading this will have to suffer through these silly rants as well as my half-assed film reviews.

Imprint

Imprint was directed by Takashi Miike for the Master’s of Horror series that runs on Showtime. It was banned from airing on television for being too graphic which it definitely is. But the Master’s of Horror series should have thought of that before they allowed Miike to direct one of their episodes if they were going to be so touchy about it.

The main plot is about an American who goes back to Japan to find a woman but the story is a bit more complicated than that. The movie is drifting and strange as a deformed prostitute tells the man the tale of his lost love.

The movie slams in so many taboos that I was pleasantly surprised. A great torture scene, a mother who is an abortionist, infanticide, incest, rape, prostitution, and patricide all fit in this awesome and sick movie. Not many movies has the balls to show graphic depictions of late term abortions or scenes where a dead baby’s corpse is washed down a river. If you want to watch something very messed up pick this movie up and don’t forget your puke bag.