Dead or Alive
Late last night I watched Miike's 1999 Yakuza movie, Dead or Alive. At Scarecrow (the video store I frequent), the employee recommendation tag underneath the Takashi Miike shelf described it as a film "that will toilet snake your soul". No kidding. The scene that may well have inspired this comment consisted of a disemboweled stripper soaking in a pink plastic kiddy pool filled to the brim with brown water and the former contents of her own intestines. This may well be the most gruesome image I've seen in any movie, and that Miike was able to invest more than just shock value in it says a great deal about his talents as a director. It certainly is shocking, but then he just stays with the shot: the woman lies still in the tub and the gangster remains placidly seated in his easy chair, watching her. He seems bored, or impatient. What began as one of those real-and-yet-somehow-unreal moments soon becomes grating, and then even boring. With a bare foot (so as not to dirty his shoes) he pushes the woman under water, killing her. What a waste. Something more complex than shock or disgust, I think, and that Miike opens the scene up for this kind of reaction in a movie that elsewise seems to aim for little more than B level yakuza status is a risk seldom taken by other directors in the genre.
The movie begins at a frenetic pace. To the accompaniment of choppy, 80's era metal guitar chords, the camera races through restaurants, titty bars and back alleys somewhere in Tokyo. Men are gunned down while standing at urinals, strippers spread their legs for better viewing, and a businessman does a line of coke a hundred feet long. Nuts. As is evident in such later Miike movies as Audition (2000) and Ichi the Killer (2001), Miike later slows the pace down, affecting a realist tone that also sets the viewer up for further explosions of violence. At other times the movie turns quite sentimental (slow motion shots of a young man dying, a cemetary in the rain), the utter lack of which made 2001's Visitor Q a minor masterpiece.
The ending is way, way over the top as the picture descends from B to C level gimicks, however flashy. With this descent he shows how unseriously he takes himself as a director, all the while pursuing the logical end of the characters' hateful, egoistic pursuit of total annihilation. In their own destruction they see the destruction of the entire world, and Miike invites us to laugh. But that Miike manages to maintain a moral vision - the long line of coke, the atomic bomb, and and even in spite of that occasionally mawkish sentimentality - is no small achievement. Riki Takeuchi's blow-dried hair and doughy exterior belies his characterization of the gangster with a heart of flint. Sho Aikawa is especially good as the salary man cop beleaguered by trouble at home and his superiors at work. B
The movie begins at a frenetic pace. To the accompaniment of choppy, 80's era metal guitar chords, the camera races through restaurants, titty bars and back alleys somewhere in Tokyo. Men are gunned down while standing at urinals, strippers spread their legs for better viewing, and a businessman does a line of coke a hundred feet long. Nuts. As is evident in such later Miike movies as Audition (2000) and Ichi the Killer (2001), Miike later slows the pace down, affecting a realist tone that also sets the viewer up for further explosions of violence. At other times the movie turns quite sentimental (slow motion shots of a young man dying, a cemetary in the rain), the utter lack of which made 2001's Visitor Q a minor masterpiece.
The ending is way, way over the top as the picture descends from B to C level gimicks, however flashy. With this descent he shows how unseriously he takes himself as a director, all the while pursuing the logical end of the characters' hateful, egoistic pursuit of total annihilation. In their own destruction they see the destruction of the entire world, and Miike invites us to laugh. But that Miike manages to maintain a moral vision - the long line of coke, the atomic bomb, and and even in spite of that occasionally mawkish sentimentality - is no small achievement. Riki Takeuchi's blow-dried hair and doughy exterior belies his characterization of the gangster with a heart of flint. Sho Aikawa is especially good as the salary man cop beleaguered by trouble at home and his superiors at work. B
posted by Quin Finnegan at 3:17 PM
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