The mere thought of death is enough to scare anyone, let alone us here in the States. Those that aren’t haunted in some way of our final breaths are desensitized or brainwashed; you can shrug your shoulders all you like, but we’re always at the graceful whim of the reaper. But what if you could elude Death, for however short of a time, by challenging him to something as simple as a game of chess?
Visitor Q has been a long time coming for yours truly. I’ve followed Takashi Miike’s twisted career from his Audition days to his “Masters of Horror” debauchery, proving with each movie that his name is one to watch. But Miike goes above and beyond in providing fans with the finest in WTF? with Visitor Q. Stepping onto this film’s grounds is to abandon normality and embrace the monsters within its walls.
Hayao Miyazaki, Japan’s own Walt Disney, is at it again! Traps, tricks, curses, sorcery, copious amounts of imagination — if you’ve ever seen a Miyazaki film, you know to expect these and much more. Miyazaki’s reputation is built on the eye-poppingly odd and cuddly cute, which often come to a head in the very same scene. Spirited Away is widely renown as one of the man’s best, but with all this hype behind it, is the flick really all it’s cracked up to be?
Watching film at its weirdest never gets old. You can never prepare yourself for, say, Eraserhead, or any other movie that dares to shake the senses. Paprika has just the strangeness for the job, a work of trippy, experimental art that could only come from Mr. Perfect Blue himself, the great Satoshi Kon.
Takashi Miike has been making some of the most weirdly entertaining films of the last decade. Between Ichi the Killer and the overtly taboo Visitor Q, one would think that all the corpse-sodomizing and S&M would have drained his artistic abilities. But 2004’s Izo is yet another staple of Miike’s string of mind-scratching motion pictures. While it carries much of what the man’s fans have come to expect, viewers will find themselves divided into factions of either the satisfied or sorely let down.
