Takashi Miike’s Crime Wave

For most New York film buffs, the Japanese director Takashi Miike “arrived” in August, 2001, when “Audition,” his date-ending horror show, was greeted with raves in the press (Elvis Mitchell compared him with Yasujiro Ozu). Fans lined up around the block at Film Forum, only to walk out in droves as the movie’s spring-loaded jaws clamped shut on their soft brains in its final 20 minutes. “Audition” was a patient, cruel film about a television executive who decides to hold casting sessions for a new girlfriend — a cinematic provocation that can still inspire one half of a screening room to throw its hands up and cheer while the other half just throws up.Word at the time was that Mr. Miike was a prolific director, but no one was quite sure just how prolific he was. Since “Audition,” he has directed close to 40 films, from the low-budget zombie/musical/hotel management/black comedy “Happiness of the Katakuris” to the glossy, big-budget, English-language spaghetti Western “Sukiyaki Western Django,” which opens Friday (with Quentin Tarantino in a cameo role). But few people realize that by the time he made “Audition,” Mr. Miike already had 32 feature films under his belt.Today, Arts Magic presents eight of the best in the Takashi Miike Omnibus, an eight-disc DVD set.Mr. Miike attended a film school founded by the radical 1960s filmmaker-turned-national-icon Shohei Imamura; his first film jobs were as Imamura’s assistant director. As the home-video market boomed, many studios realized they could churn out straight-to-video flicks helmed by cut-rate assistant directors such as Mr. Miike. If the budgets were kept low and the schedules tight, the films were bound to make money. Between 1991 and 1995, Mr. Miike specialized in V-cinema (the moniker for Japan’s direct-to-video industry), starting with “Lady Hunter,” and he’s never stopped, bouncing between television, V-cinema, and theatrical films to this day.But the huge quantity of films he’s made aside, the real question is: Are they any good? The Arts Magic omnibus scrapes the accumulated legend off the director and exposes the talent beneath the acclaim. Mr. Miike, 48, has long been known as a provocateur and a fanboy favorite, but the three movies that make up his loosely related Black Society Trilogy are the work of a socially committed, ferociously intelligent director — albeit one who still takes time out from raging against the machine for raunchy sex jokes and blunt-force trauma.Because less than 2% of Japan’s population is foreign-born, Mr. Miike frequently focuses his camera on characters who would never be more than background players in other Japanese crime movies. “Shinjuku Triad Society” (1995) is jam-packed with corrupt half-Chinese/half-Japanese cops who police Chinese gangs in Tokyo. On the one hand, the film plays into the Japanese stereotype of illegal immigrants as depraved criminals; but Mr. Miike makes it clear that it is Japan’s racial paranoia that drove his subjects to the margins in the first place. “Rainy Dog” (1997) features the perennial Yakuza actor Sho Aikawa as a brooding Japanese hit man exiled to Taiwan who tries to take care of a son he doesn’t remember fathering. The most technically accomplished of the Black Society Trilogy, “Ley Lines” (1999), centers on a group of half-Chinese/half-Japanese teens who head to Tokyo to seek their fortunes, but quickly discover that Japan has nothing but violence in store for those without pure blood.Movies such as “Sabu” (2002), a made-for-television period flick, show Mr. Miike at his most hack-like, and while “Full Metal Yakuza” (1997) is a funny enough parody of “Robocop,” with a cowardly Yakuza brought back from the dead as an unstoppable cyborg, one can almost feel his mind wandering as he directs it. But “Young Thugs — Nostalgia” (1998) epitomizes Mr. Miike’s directorial development. It may not be considered a classic — thanks mostly to the vagaries of distribution — but it’s Mr. Miike’s favorite of his own films.“Young Thugs — Nostalgia” is suffused with a wry evenhandedness that most directors only acquire after a lifetime of filmmaking, but which Mr. Miike projected before he turned 40. Dry-eyed, it tells the story of the coming of age of Riichi, a sixth grader in 1960s Osaka. His father is a thug, his family is poor, and when the new teacher visits his parents, she winds up watching his mother get abused by his father (Dad will pay for it later).Full of schoolyard rumbles staged like Wild West showdowns, strange boyhood schemes, and surreal odes to masturbation, this is the core of Mr. Miike’s aesthetic: a dysfunctional family unit that stays together out of necessity, and violence as the only way men know how to communicate. The director has added layers of talent and technical glitz to this formula since 1998, but 10 years later, “Young Thugs — Nostalgia” remains one of his most affecting works.

Takashi Miike’s Crime Wave

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