Friday Mar 05, 2004

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Well today is my birthday - not much more to say other than that!

For some reason every christmas & birthday I now get Liquorice Allsorts from my sister... I'm not sure why as I'm really not a big fan. I mean I don't dislike them but I've never really stated a great desire for them either?!?!

I also got some Thorntons Peanut Brittle off my Mum and they look delicious love ! Mmmmmmm, peanuts!
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
koyaanis:
hey,

Happy Birthday! Sounds like you had a good time out on the lash! biggrin

I'm kinda drunk at the moment so I can't post any sort of reasonable debate but I really though Audition was one of Takashi's better offerings. Yes it can be painfully slow but as that was kind of the original intention of the piece I couldn't really find fault with it... I mean his films are almost cartoons sometimes with the constant bombardment of violence and vulgarity so when in Audition (after waiting so long) Asami hacks Shigeharu's foot off with the wire... well that was more effectively chilling because we as the audience had to wait for it... at least in my eyes...



I agree with that, it does give the scenes more impact as Miike has set them in a very real world, unlike say Ichi The Killer which is ridiculously ott, or cartoony if you like, with its violence from the off. I'd heard that Miike was a very stylish director, but mostly I just found his films to be dark and gritty looking, the mise-en-scene isn't generally very nice to look at.

whilst the first film could be seen as a slight parody (although it wasn't really intended that way) the sequel is really meant to be a parody both of current world politics (the war on terrorism, etc) and also of Japanese culture (the original intention is that Nanahara is rebelling not only against the BR act but about the americanisation of the Japanese culture)...


I didn't really pick any of that up when I was watching it, perhaps I should take another look at it, I sort of lost interest after Nanahara's speech and the second shot of the buildings collapsing. I thought the two speeches about america's post ww2 war activities was baseless, not being properly contextualised within the film and so it seems to be courting controversy more than anything that adds to the the film.

I'd say it's foolish to write off Asian cinema though just because of those movies... movies, like all art, are very subjective. And okay you didn't like those movies... but in my humble opinion asian cinema in general is often more inventive, more beautiful... and hell plain old more interesting than a lot of the other stuff out there...



Yeah, I agree with that, but I haven't really written it off, its just that i'm not as excited about it than I had been before seeing these two films which were ones I was desperately looking forward to.

At the moment I have Black Angel to watch, and on my rental queue are....
BlackAngel 2
DeadOrAlive
DeadOrAlive 2
Dolls
Versus
Freezer
Fudoh-TheNewGeneration
HanaBi
HappinessOfTheKatakuris
Junk
PerfectBlue
Ring
Ring 0
Ring 2
Tetsuo:TheIronMan

So gimme a month or two, and I should have much more of an idea of what I'm talking about smile You know of any others that should be on that list?
koyaanis:
eep. turns out black angel 1&2 are itallian. who woulda thunk it!

*update, dvds365.com are the fuckwits. not me. surreal

[Edited on Mar 08, 2004 12:56PM]

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