Its story begins when one half of a pair of physically identical, but mentally opposite twins (both played by Ichihara) decides to pursue his paramour to India, despite being mere weeks away from his university graduation. Takashi Miike's films have always demanded sacrifices from their audiences, and God's Puzzle, the epic in question, is no different.
Who else could have made The Great Yokai War, in which ancient monsters go joyriding on mushroom clouds and policemen clumsily put bullets in each other's heads? Who else could have made Zebraman, with its Visitor Q-like dysfunctional family and big-screen lead role for video king Sho Aikawa? And who else would have dared to strive for box office pay dirt with a sci-fi disaster action epic with no villains whose first hour consists almost exclusively of classroom talk about physics and the creation of the universe? More power to him, I say, because despite the budgetary inflation, at heart he hasn't changed at all: Miike continues to put the same spin on family-friendly fare that he used to apply to cookie-cutter yakuza scripts. Takashi Miike too has moved on, going from marginal to mainstream and to a succession of hit films. Today it takes quite a search to even find the once prominent 'New Yakuza' section at one's local Tsutaya. If DVD - which caught on with some delay in Japan because of the well-developed laserdisc scene - provided a brief boost that led to more ambitious productions like the Dead or Alive series, competition from other media such as video games and cell phones, and an overall lack of creative marketing on the part of distributors (see our interview with veteran V-cinema producer Yoshinori Chiba for a background on the demise) led to waning audiences, plummeting budgets and diminishing quality. At the start of the new millennium, the video market that was the foundation of this particular brand of filmmaking began to wane.
There simply is hardly any room in the Japanese film business today for the kind of low-to-medium-budget genre quickies that reversed its fortunes in the previous decade. It is not Takashi Miike that has changed, but the industry around him. To wish for Miike to go back to cranking out Dead or Alives and Auditions on a bi-monthly basis is like wishing for tomatoes to still taste the way they did before your country joined the European Union - that era, I'm afraid, has passed.
It forms the first step in a process that can only lead to the just recognition of that decade as ranking among the most fertile and fascinating in the history of Japanese film. And had any director come out of the gate with the bizarre mixture of period fetish torture, extravagant ero-guro stylistics, and sock-puppetry that was Imprint, he would have been hailed the reincarnation of Teruo Ishii and spawned an instant worldwide cult.īut this nostalgia for the genre gems that Miike and so many of his compatriots churned out during the 1990s is a good thing. If Ichi the Killer seems increasingly distant and Audition but a fading memory, a glance at Miike's filmography will set the balance straight: Big Bang Love, Juvenile A was a work of perverse art made on a V-cinema budget Izo was a slaughterfest that dared massacre even its own audience Sukiyaki Western Django was more retro-genrefied than any grindhouse redux.
#Nikasei no pazuru movie#
Zebraman, The Great Yokai War, that TV series about a kid detective and his transforming cell phone - Miike seems to be aiming more for the family matinee crowd than the midnight movie maniacs these days. He who at the dawn of the millennium captured hearts and minds, and turned a few stomachs along the way, with low-budget yakuza and horror pics has these days, say some, answered the lure of big-budget-blockbusterism and neglected his original fanbase. There has been some grumbling from the terraces of late about the recent state of one Takashi Miike, filmmaker.
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