Trevor Writes

I have a relationship with Takashi Miike dating back nearly 10 years, when I first opened myself up to Audition and Ichi the Killer in my mid-teens (back then, those were virtually every person's first Miike films; by far his most well known in North America). The morbid teen in me was drawn to his reputation as a shock master, but just a couple films in I realized he was so much more. He played with form in ways nobody else was doing. He was (and well, still sorta is) a director-for-hire, so not an auteur by the strictest of definitions (which is sorta why I don't take the auteur theory very seriously or look at it in narrow minded view), yet his films are so undeniably coated in his own unique aesthetic, sensibilities, and he frequently chooses scripts and film projects that carry with them a thematic consistently across his filmography (Tom Mes' fantastic book Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike is thus far the definitive text on Takashi Miike and makes the best ar...

Four blog entries in and I'm already straying from the Comics in Comics Communion to talk about a movie; talk about my jumping the shark moment. As an avid fan of comics for several years, and an active cinephile for even longer, my relationship with films (and television shows) based on comic books is fractured, to put it lightly. The comic fan in me is delighted by the prospect of seeing the beloved costumed heroes from my books standing tall on the big screen, even more-so when the movies actually adhere to the text and borrow from existing comic storylines. The film goer in me is frustrated by how visually lacking comic book movies tend to be; how they get sabotaged by my least favourite Hollywood directors (Christopher Nolan and Zach Snyder, to name a few); and how directors I like are handcuffed to the overarching house style of the company that employs them. I knew I was never going to get it, but I liked to fantasize what a Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron woul...