It’s better than the book – the movie only sucks away 2 hours of your life. The book took me about 20 hours, and I want it back!
Sit-com
I saw a movie over the weekend that now qualifies as the single most non-sequitur-laden film that I, personally, have ever seen: Takeshi Miike’s Izo.
It’s about–I think–a samurai, killed by crucifixion, who wanders through time and space killing as many people as he can, as some kind of retribution or penance or something. He finds himself in each new place and time by falling through a wall or climbing up a ceiling or something–like an extended version of the chase dream in Being John Malkovich. As he wanders and massacres, he finds himself in one nonsensical situation after another. (For example, he falls through a wall into a gradeschool classroom. As he falters in his resolve–should he really kill all these young children?–the teacher quizzes her pupils, who respond with the most radically cynical definitions of such words as “love,” “freedom,” and “democracy.” Izo makes his way to the hallway outside the classroom, to find it blocked in both directions by an army of nubile young teaching assistants. These slowly open their mouths and let out a moaning scream–Bodysnatchers-like–and he hews them all down with his sword like a bloody field of corn. And *then *the young teacher from the previous scene, dressed in a suit and hair in a bun, exits her classroom and makes her way down the hallway, never losing her absent-minded smile as she steps over the bloody bodies of her colleagues.)
Plus, as he continues on his murderous journey, he seems to be corporeal: he feels it when he takes a bullet or is cut by a sword. But, Kenny-like, he just can’t seem to die. He just gets back up and drops into the next surreal setting. (At one point he and the woman who seems to be following him–ghost? demon?–find themselves in a modern office; she even answers a ringing telephone.) And as his journey continues, *he *is slowly being transformed into a demon.
Vintage Miike, and then some.