I hear he is working on a 3D movie now.
Most people I know in Japan don’t even know who he is until I mention Zebraman or more so, One Missed Call so I don’t know that he’s going mainstream.
He’s been extraordinarily, insanely prolific and always pretty inconsistant. No one can keep up that pace for long.It looked liked with Juvenile A he was hitting an interesting point in his career and maybe heading towards thoughtful art cinema but that didn’t last very long at all.
I haven’t seen 13 Assassins or Zebraman 2 yet, but I will say, out of faith, no. He’s one of cinema’s truest radicals at this point, and I trust he is not nearly done producing wild, unkempt, and masterful work. This is coming from a big fan though.
He’s gone down, up, left, right, and every which way (sometimes all at once). Few careers have been so gleefully erratic.
^That.
Has he ever been uphill?
^ I’m a fan too. Blues Harp is one of my favorite Miike films but it’s impossible to find a good hard copy – it is generally underrated and underdiscussed. Very good though.
Depends on which hill you’re standing on, Allan.
He’s the same Takashi as always. Still lovable.
Fare enough, I guess I am the only one. It’s just that it has been awhile since I have seen anything he has released that has really personally interested me such as Gozu or DOA2.
@Kyo That’s very interesting. I thought it may have changed in recent years. Glad in a way but sad because he deserves to be known as a filmmaker. I was just reaching for evidence of a trend that apparently I am the only one who saw. Thanks for setting the record straight there.
What are some of you guy’s favorite newer Miike films?
-It’s just that it has been awhile since I have seen anything he has released that has really personally interested me such as Gozu or DOA2.-
For me if there’s a single highest point it’s somewhere around 1998-2001 when he did _The Bird People of China, Ley Lines, Audition, Dead or Alive trilogy, MPD Psycho, Visitor Q, Ichi the Killer, and The Happiness of the Katakuris
I definitely second that, his thematic and stylistic explorations likely reached their peak in the late 90s, and his two films about displacement, “The Bird People of China” and “Ley Lines”, stand out for me as his masterpieces. His subsequent films with the aim to shock the audience were less mature works, but “Audition” and “Ichi the Killer” are nevertheless interesting films in terms of psychological delineation and striking visuals. His remake of the Korean film “The Quiet Family” which was called “The Happiness of the Katakuris” is his last work which I didn’t regard as thoroughly disjointed and flawed (though “Gozu” and his Fukasaku-remake “Graveyard of Honor” still had moments of brilliance), and I stopped caring about his oevre when it became almost entirely commercial. So I would second the notion that his career has been going downhill for about a decade. He doesn’t seem to handle any further material to which he can relate, and became a filmmaker like many others with a dissolving personal trademark.
I think he’s done exactly what he wanted to do. Take on an insane workload for several years while he’s young and fit. Become internationally renowned. Become famous in Japan (almost always need to be internationally renowned first for some reason!), then conclude by making Django and Crows and take both number 1 and number 2 at the box office at the same time. Happy, rich, famous and having proved some kind of point he can dance off into the sunset singing I did it My Way. (And maybe make a couple more films).
Japanese directors don’t tend to make much money – in film anyway. The ones who bank do a lot of television work on the side or multi-task like Iwai Shunji.
Why is that Kyo?
Well I should clarify – since the breakdown of the studio system over there anything other than a straight genre pic, manga or anime adaptations to film and the occasional big budget national epic is done fairly independently and with relatively low budgets. Also, historically even during the time of big studios filmmakers were looked at as craftsmen for hire and not really artists that rated high salaries or fringe benefits. Usually an auteur designation came after foreign film festival success. I remember reading interviews with both K. Kurosawa, Miike and Kitano (who was already a TV star) where they all say that working in TV and Vcinema helped them fund their artsy projects and support themselves.
EDIT: ah, here are some of the sources <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_2000_Oct/ai_66495268/>
Donald Richie’s 100 Years of Japanese Cinema and a book called Contemporary Japanese Film by Mark Schilling.
Ahhh I see. I guess it also helps that Kitano is (allegedly!) a Yakuza.
I always thought he was an overrated buttom pusher, yet still continued to watch his films out of morbid curiosity.
The western put me off. that was terrible.
-The western put me off. that was terrible.-
I’m afraid it might me as well. I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to watch it.
As a die-hard Miike fan, I just watched Yatterman recently, and it’s now one of my favorites of his. I think if you only like him for his extreme violence and yakuza films, you’re going to be more disappointed with his newer stuff. And if you look at his technical abilities, he’s definitely improved in recent years.
D. Voluntaryist
Has Takashi Miike gone down hill as a director since he started being promoted in America by other directors. It seems to me that he has not made anything good after 2007. 2007 is the last year he made more than two films in a year. Two films for most directors would be a hefty load but until that point Miike had continually made 3-5 films a year. 2007 was also the year that he put QT in his Django remake.
However, he may just be going trough some sort of dry spell. He has always been hit or miss. From the 3-5 films he used to do a year 1 or 2 would be good. It feels to me that he has gotten more money now and takes less risk because of it. Has he gone “mainstream” in Japan? What do you guys think?