Blogathon Top #1 - Takashi Miike

Welcome to the Blogathon Top Three Movies. A section where me and you can elect your three favorite movies about a specific topic. Feel free to respond to my top or elect yours in your Blog! We shall start with a major modern director like Takashi Miike. As we all know, this man-with-hundred faces is greatly responsible for Japanese Cinema boom in the late 90's, delivering us a great number of genre films mixed with unlikely aesthetics (some of them approaching the B-movie formula, others even expressing dadaist tendencies). Other fact that can't be forgotten it's his extensive filmography, remembering that even the genius must work hard to experience new possibilities. If today Takashi Miike is more commercial than ever, he proved us in the past that he could do all in cinematic terms, plus evolving them in new, kinda provocative ways.

So, here's the top three:

Number 3:

(Dead or Alive: Hanzaisha, 1999)

Dead or Alive: This is the film that absolutely blew me away. It was one of my first experience of a Miike film (maybe my truly WTF? experience too, and trust me I had many...). What can I say about this? Niihilistic movie inside and outside the filmed world. Truly an amazing experience, in a plot laughing at itself and at the viewer too. The end scene is pure unexpected madness. I still remember Riki Takeuchi's terrific face and Sho Aikawa's cold gaze in a fierce appocaliptical world.

Number 2:
(Odishon, 1999)

Audition: Maybe the most famous Miike movie, and yet it still deserves to stay at the top. If Gozu, another millestone, was horizontal in its pace and mood (horror is everywhere, in the same levels of intensity) then Audition develops a vertical climax like no-other Japanese horror film. Who can expect that the tumultous love story of a middle-aged man could be so scary? The horror lies on the dreams, which were projected by the little details in life. Carefully crafted, Audition plays with the viewer's sensibilities in order to show what is truly scary: solitude, the feeling of dying lonely.

Number 1:
(46-Okunen no Koi, 2006)

Big Bang Love, Juvenile A: When I saw The Bird People in China, I kept asking myself how was that possible? How was possible that such a fast-paced and furious director like Takashi Miike could delivery us such a tender, humanist story. When I was about to see Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, I already knew what to expect from the director's versatility, however, it still left me with open mouth, not knowing what to say or what to think. "Wow, this is beautiful", and those words open the way to silence, to a delightful silence.