The Bird People in China is probably one of the worst Takashi Miike films. It’s slow and boring as hell. The basic plot is of two foreigners in a different land forming a friendship. One of the men is a yakuza with a bloody past, the other is a quite business man. They go to a small village in the mountains of China and are trapped there. They both go a bit insane. In the interview in the special features, Miike says that the point of the film was the create a unique world, which is actually accomplished. I just wish more would have gone on. I guess some people would call this film haunting and tragic but I just found it tedious.

On my Netflix que I put all of the Takashi Miike films that I haven’t seen at the top. So if you aren’t into Miike you should probably not read this blog for the next couple of days.
Yakuza Demon is a good film. Riki Takeuchi stars as Seiji a member of a small yakuza family trying to stay alive. But this film was directed by Takashi Miike so you know everything isn’t going to go well. The rival yakuza gang Tendo has crossed the lines and pissed off the Date family. He puts his boss in jail so he doesn’t go through with a plan that would have gotten him killed, and then he does the plan himself. The plan was to kill a high ranking member of the Tendo gang to punish them. But Seiji instead goes on a rampage and angers both of the gangs. I think this is one of Takashi Miike’s best straight forward yakuza films. It has a very sad feel to it. This film is violent but not gory. Definitely worth watching.

Directed by Wong Kar-Wai In The Mood For Love is an incredibly boring film. I had a hard time paying attention to it and it almost put me to sleep. It is about two people almost having an affair in Hong Kong in the 60’s. A man and a woman move in on the same day next to each other in a small apartment building. Both of their partners are away for long periods of time and they become close.

I just simply couldn’t care about them or their situation. Cheating is not a subject that matters to me, because as a polyamorous woman I believe in having sex and/or relationships with whomever I choose. Monogamy is just so tedious and soul destroying. It’s an absurd though that you can find sexual satisfaction with only one person. The concept of monogamy always just reeked of ownership more than love to me.

There seemed to be more emphasis on the wardrobe, cinematography, and on the irritating music loop than on the plot. There were no sex scenes, no nudity, and no real reason for me to watch this film.

I wish that I could have seen some of my favorite films in the theater. I think that a film that Audition or Ichi the Killer would be great to see on the big screen. i try to see as many films as I can in the theater but it doesn’t happen very often. Money is one of the main reasons. Time is another. I also lived in a small city in Ohio, and didn’t help much because nothing came to that pit. No one is going to bring cool cinema to the Midwest. It would just be waste of their time.

I now live in Seattle now so I may be able to see more films the way that they were meant to be seen. They have a film festival that happens every year here and I’m hoping that I can ketch it. They also have an erotic film fest that looks fun too. Then I have to deal with the money problem.

I don’t buy films that often. I love to rent. I just don’t have deep enough pockets to spend twenty dollars every time a film looks good. I used to rent from video stores but I now use netflix. Everyone knows how fond Blockbuster is of censorship and their rental prices were always sky high. Local stores never had a good selection and the major chains like Hollywood tend to mostly buy shitty American indie films to fill their horror section. Do many people actually like these films where these idiots are just redoing old films? I get so mad that so much of the space is taken up by horrible films. I used netflix because it’s cheap, reliable, and the selection is better than any store could have. For twenty bucks a month I get to watch all the films that I want to from across the world. The only bad thing that I’ve had to deal with is neighbors stealing my mail, but you get problems like that wen you live in bad areas.

This probably just sounds like a bad commercial but I love netflix and always recommend them to any film fan I meet. Besides, I’m not selling subscriptions to netflix so what would I have to gain by saying how great they are, if I didn’t think so? I do buy films, but only films that I know I already love or films that are on sale for an absurdly small amount. You don’t lose much on the dollar deals.

This rant went everywhere. my point is that I love films and I spend quite a large part of my life watching them. Seeing films on the big screen is cool, but renting and watching movies at home is just as fun to me. I want to this site to be as interesting and personal as I can, so anyone reading this will have to suffer through these silly rants as well as my half-assed film reviews.

Imprint was directed by Takashi Miike for the Master’s of Horror series that runs on Showtime. It was banned from airing on television for being too graphic which it definitely is. But the Master’s of Horror series should have thought of that before they allowed Miike to direct one of their episodes if they were going to be so touchy about it.

The main plot is about an American who goes back to Japan to find a woman but the story is a bit more complicated than that. The movie is drifting and strange as a deformed prostitute tells the man the tale of his lost love.

The movie slams in so many taboos that I was pleasantly surprised. A great torture scene, a mother who is an abortionist, infanticide, incest, rape, prostitution, and patricide all fit in this awesome and sick movie. Not many movies has the balls to show graphic depictions of late term abortions or scenes where a dead baby’s corpse is washed down a river. If you want to watch something very messed up pick this movie up and don’t forget your puke bag.

Kill Your Idols is a documentary about the no-wave music scene of late 70’s and early 80’s New York City. It’s cool film that anyone with an interest in music culture should see. It has interviews of people/bands like Lydia Lunch, J. G. thurwell, Glenn Branca, Yeah, Yeah Yeahs, and Sonic Youth. It doesn’t feel too long or go too far in depth with the subject. This wouldn’t be worth watching to the average music fan.

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the best loved horror films of the late seventies. It’s a great film that I always felt could have been perfect, if someone would have tweaked it a little. (This is a review of the original film, not the remake, for the slow folks who can’t follow along.)

The story is basic but effective. Five friends on a road trip run into scary inbred cannibals and are hunted down. The gore is nice but the violence of the film is what makes it good. You believe that these people are actually getting hurt and if you watch the behind the scenes you find out that they were. So many films only care about making people like good, and not about the gritty dirty reality of pain. Give me a actress who isn’t afraid of looking ugly and insane over the blonde goddesses any day in a messy horror film.

I just wish Hooper could have showed some restraint at times. It just makes me cringe when I re-watch the film and see the dining room table scene. It’s just so unnecessary to display her breakdown in such a goofy way. Of course the girl is messed up, she just watched her friends get cut into pieces. I think the film could have been better if someone would have just edited some of the sillier shit out.

Overall it’s a great film and well worth any horror freak’s time.

Last night I watched I Can’t Sleep which I thought was an okay film. Not great but not bad either. It’s about the lives of three young people alienated and alone in a big city. The first is a young woman who has to depend on the kindness of her relatives to get by. The other two are a black musician with a young child and a flaky girlfriend and his cross-dressing brother. His brother is gay and a junkie. There’s also a subplot about the true story of the grammy killer of the 80’s mixed in.

The film is somewhat formless and slow. It’s easy to drift off while watching it because it just seems like not much is going on at times. The film doesn’t get too heavy handed with the subject matter but it also doesn’t make you care one way or the other.

Mobster Confessions is a fun yakuza film. Japanese director Rokuro Mochizuki has made a slow but violent film that is also rather funny. Jiro is small time conman who lives off of scaring small businesses out of there money. He gets involved in an abusive relationship with a damaged young woman who he is able to control. A yakuza gang decides to start taking Jiro’s money and he moves on to conning people with more cash and also pimping his girlfriend.

This film is slow but still enjoyable. It has a decent amount of sex and some good violence too. If you like yakuza films this is a good one to try out, but it isn’t an insane gorefest if that is what you want in a film.