Trevor Writes

Takashi Miike has been a reliable go-to director for Japanese blockbuster cinema since 2010, releasing between two and three films every year of this current decade, equally achieving creative success as well as commercial. He rocked the foreign arthouse world with his samurai epic 13 Assassins (2010), and followed it up with a respectable remake of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 masterpiece in Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011). Likely to be dismissed for remaking one of the all-time greats, Hara-Kiri is a dazzlingly colourful palette of heightened melodrama. Zebraman 2: Attack of Zebra City (2010), a meta-sequel to his 2004 family film, is a Joe Dante-style mockery of superhero and science fiction cinema, set with a black and white striped totalitarian metropolitan wherein a Lady Gaga-like figure rules everything. Ninja Kids!!! (2011) is an energetic children's movie with an onslaught of humourous slapstick and visual gags. Lowbrow humour and family-friendly entertainment...

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...