Wednesday, April 13, 2011 -

Well....Looks like going to be the longest night yet for me in a 3 week string of late nights spent cobbling together the marketing proposal for some Aus 500-1 billion mandate for the Australian state pension fund.....the past 3 weeks has been a blur ......and April is already alomost half over... the mind reels...


Waiting for those Kangaroo-loving mofos from the sydney branch to get back to me with their inputs/changes/feedback/comments/more changes......well its as good a time as any other to blog I guess.... So as per my last post, here's my review of Ichi the Killer, truly one of the most bizarre and nastiest movie ever comitted to film...

Ichi The Killer:

Takeshi Miike’s highly-touted Ichi the Killer is Not an easy film to watch. It is a psychological tour-de-force of violence, sado-masochism and sadism and Miike is absolutely unflinching in his exploration of these themes. The film is bold, daring and pushes the envelope, perhaps a little too far in terms of good taste.

Every character here is psychologically-damaged to the nth degree; the main protagonist, Ichi, is a seemingly mild-mannered, man-child who is prone to excessively brutal bouts of violence and can literally only get-off on violence. The antagonist, Kakihara, is a flamboyant and sado-masochistic Yakuza enforcer with a Cheshire smile stretching from ear-to-ear, held on only by his facial piercings. Add in a manipulative old-man with hypnotic abilities and a body-builder’s physique, a dominatrix prostitute who speaks in 4 languages and a pair of twin detectives who sniff women’s underwear for clues and you have got one of the most bizarre collections of characters that I have ever seen in a film.

The violence in this film is over-the-top comic book violence for the most part but there are certain sequences that are so realistic in their execution that you can’t help but flinch. While I am fine with violence that is used in service to a story, violence for the sake of violence (Hostel, Saw, etc.) is a pointless exercise to me. Unfortunately, Ichi dips into the latter a little too frequently for my tastes. The treatment of some of the female characters in particular, verged on being misogynistic.

The characters themselves are psychologically rich in their complexity and Miike explores their motivations, psychosis and quirks in a substantial amount of detail in between the mayhem. Tadanobu Asano in particular steals the show as Kakihara, one of the more memorable filmic creations in recent memory, who undoubtedly inspired Health Ledger’s version of the Joker in The Dark Knight.

If I could boil down the plot of the whole film to its basics; it is essentially a twisted love story. Kakihara is a sado-masochist who loves his boss, due to his ability to inflict pain upon him like no other. When his boss gets killed by Ichi, Kakihara wants revenge on Ichi for eliminating his greatest source of pleasure but after witnessing the massive trail of destruction left behind by Ichi, Kakihara grows to believe that Ichi may be the perfect person for him, the one that can truly inflict the level of pain he craves.

Highly regarded though the film may be, the lack of any character with redeeming qualities, the overriding theme of sado-masochism, the level of sheer brutality (especially towards the women) made for a bizarre and heady brew that ultimately…just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Next Post: More reviews!.... so many movies to watch so little time and energy...

5:55 AM