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wodnerdog
Reviews
Mysterious Skin (2004)
Contrived shock drama
At the outset I thought this had a lot of promise by virtue of how challenging and uncomfortable the subject matter is I like being made to squirm but the film is poorly put together and fairly trite. The film is held together by voiceovers and weirdly edited, and although the shift between miserable and grimy scenes and scenes of innocent exaltation might be challenging if "misery" and "innocence" were pulled off well, this film did not seem self-aware enough to make it happen. This is a fairly daring film in terms of subject matter but not pulled off with enough honesty to really challenge. Not an awful movie, but I would avoid it.
Kishiwada shônen gurentai: Bôkyô (1998)
Obscure gem
Until very recently this one's been hard to find outside of Japan and impossible to find with English subtitles, and it's remained quite obscure as a result. Now that a bootleg version of the Japanese DVD with subtitles has been made available this will change, and it's a good thing, because this is one of Miike's finest. There's little of the violence which some people mistakenly assume is a given in Miike's work, but the director's unique sense of humor and reductionist approach to storytelling are fully intact. It's almost a coming-of-age film, but the same could be said of any of the Dead or Alive films in regard to the yakuza genre, and it still wouldn't be true. Miike cuts everything but the guts of the story from his scripts. This film's most painful moment is not even there just a cut to black. It hurts. Apparently Kishiwada Shonen Gurentai is a series (also known as Boys Be Ambitious, a phrase which will be familiar to anybody who payed close attention to the beginning of Gozu) which several directors have participated in, and Miike has directed another film in the series which or may or may not be adapted from the same novel as this entry.