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68 reviews in total

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25 out of 29 people found the following review useful:
an insane ride, 7 December 2005

Author: joro boro from United States

Miike is probably one of only a dozen directors to make 6-8 movies a year. Yet he is the only one to keep not only a consistent quality at this rate, but also to keep surprising his fans. "Gozu" is a case in point.

A yakuza meeting turns ugly when Ozaki, in a paranoid moment, paints a window red with a chihuahua. The boss puts Ozaki's understudy Minami in charge of taking care of him and sends both of them away.

The tongue in cheek yakuza plot provides only the starting point. From there on, it's a cast of characters that would put to shame any freak show and/or dada event. Just as "Ichi the Killer" is a movie about gangster violence taken to its extreme (yakuza are ultimately masochist), so is this one about gangster loyalty taken to its latent homosexual conclusion. However, one could just as easily read it as a study of a character, lost in the effort of coping with the absurd situations that stand in for the jumble of his own emotions and motivations. Minami spends a lot of time riding around Nagoya in his Mustang convertible. As I watched him, I felt in a somewhat similar situation: sometimes riding along Miike, sometimes being taken for a ride, but ultimately just following the trip for the sheer fun of turning, stopping, accelerating, passing, reversing, having a flat tire...

Miike proves not only that he's one of the most innovative and productive directors of all time, but also that unlike critics everywhere, he can take himself not seriously - watch out for quotes and references to some of his earlier classics (Visitor Q, Dead or Alive.) And don't worry, the ending is sure to surprise you, even if you are a seasoned fan. If this is your first Miike movie, watch any other one mentioned in this review first, then come back to this one.

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29 out of 37 people found the following review useful:
Full of calcium and milky goodness, 30 November 2004
Author: Graham Deans Williamson (gdwilliamson@deathsdoor.co.uk) from Middlesbrough, England

So we've all seen a psychological horror, right? Well, how about a psychological comedy? Or, even better, a psychological horror-comedy? Miike can sometimes be a rather haphazard director - unavoidable considering his amazing work-rate - but this is one of his most rigorously worked-out films since 'Visitor Q' (2001) (with which it shares many similarities). The whole film seems geared towards demolishing the classic horror protagonist - here, a shy, virginal foot soldier in the yakuza called Minami. Minami's sexual purity is one of the things the film takes wild advantage of, stripping back his sexual anxiety to reveal a subconscious wish to return to the bosom of his family - in, erm, every way possible.

Though it doesn't sound it, this is amazingly funny. One of the important things about Miike is that his deconstruction of genres is always fueled by a fundamental understanding of them. The Yakuza scenes here are pitch-perfect imitations of Kitano and others - long takes alternating with hand-held tracking shots, oddly-paced pauses giving off a deadpan air, sudden explosions of violence and paranoia, etc. But after the first twenty minutes or so, the film actually becomes what Sight & Sound accurately described as "a Japanese 'League of Gentlemen'".

Is what happens after this point real? Undoubtedly - Miike always differentiates between the dream sequences and the 'reality'. So we're left with the hilariously subversive notion that Minami has crossed to another plane of reality that is single-minded dedicated to warping his mind and exposing his insecurities. The rules of the game are inconsistent - one staggering late plot twist runs solely by dream logic, with no natural or even paranormal explanation for how it could happen. But it's always funny, and always enjoyable in its none-more-grotesque gallows humour. If nothing else, it makes the Farrelly brothers' claim to be making "gross-out comedies" seem very wide of the mark indeed.

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22 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
"Orpheus and Eurydice" for Miike Fans, 4 November 2004
Author: wordmonkey from San Francisco, Ca.

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

It hit me like a thunderbolt about two days after I saw the film that the plot is that of "Orpheus and Eurydice." I don't know how intentional this connection is, yet for those who think that the film's events are arbitrary or meaningless, I beg to differ, as such is clearly not the case.

{SPOILERS BELOW}

Minami, the young Yakuza, is analogous to Orpheus, and Ozaki, his yakuza "brother," is the Eurydice whom Minami must rescue from the underworld (Nagoya).

Right at the beginning, as the two drive to Nagoya, Minami almost drives into a river, but slams on his brakes just before entering the water. Ozaki is whiplashed by the stop and seems to "die." This is the point at which they hit the river Styx that the dead cross to reach the underworld.

In the next scene, they are across, in "hell," and that's when everything begins to get really weird. Minami loses Ozaki, and must find him by passing a series of surreal challenges with demonic or supernatural figures (including a "broken" over-nurturing mother, a minotaur-like cow, several dead men, and gruesome trash compactors who crush bodies and remove their skins). Finally, Minami must rescue Ozaki after Ozaki's rebirth as a woman from their oyabun (boss), the king of the underworld -- who originally wanted Ozaki dead, but now wants him for a "bride."

Through all of this, Minami's "guide" is a man who, with his skin half-whitened, is like a person who can traverse both the living and dead worlds, as he is symbolically half-spirit.

It all fits very nicely. The more the more I examine this film, the more I love it. It's yet another brilliant Miike film laden with dreamlike imagery that gives it weight and power. This makes it a great match with Miike's previous "Visitor Q," another masterpiece of great symbolic kick and potent, unforgettable imagery.

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21 out of 30 people found the following review useful:
Cow head .. hmmmm ??, 6 August 2004

Author: Celluloid_Rehab (lelnu@yahoo.com) from Hell's Kitchen, NYC

If this is your first dive into the realm of Takashi Miike, STOP. GO BACK. REMOVE THIS MOVIE FROM YOU DVD PLAYER. You have to start somewhere less obscure than this movie. You can start out with Audition (or one of the Dead or Alive movies), follow that up with Happiness of the Katakuris and then either Ichi the Killer or Visitor Q. Once you have seen that, then you are ready to savor the flavor of this movie. To try to describe this movie would do the movie and you, the reader, an injustice. This movie just has to be watched and experienced. What can you expect from Gozu ?? Yakuzas. Killer Yakuza attack dogs. Lots of driving. Transvestites. Breast milk. Seance. Horse cropping. Sex. Birth. Ladles. The plot is based on the adventures of a yakuza made-man (Ozaki) and his underling (Minami). Ozaki is going crazy and the Boss has ordered Minami to take care of him. From there on you'll just have to watch to get the point (if there is one). As compared to his other movies, this one doesn't really have much of a story. The sheer obscureness or strangeness (and/or dark comedy) holds the various events together, linking them into a movie. At the same time, you are sitting there waiting to see how much more bizarre things can get. The movie passed by pretty quickly, with little slowdown. Fans of Miike should definitely see this movie. For everyone else, see the movie at your risk.

-Celluloid Rehab

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21 out of 31 people found the following review useful:
Insane, Funny, Horrific, and Awesome, 16 September 2004

Author: Zykron G. Ghoderphest from United States

This is perhaps the first movie I've ever seen that's had me consistently laughing out loud and then nearly creeping me out to the point of p**sing my pants. Don't get me wrong... this movie won't have you shrieking because of frights... but it will quietly nestle itself in the back of your brain and set shop in your nightmares. Did I mention it's also hilarious?

Where to start... Gozu starts somewhat normal (compared to the rest of the movie): Ozaki, a member of the Azumawari Yakuza clan, is starting to go crazy, even paranoid. So it's up to his successor and admirer, Minami, to get rid of him. Now just when you think the movie's going to be a heartbreaker about duty and brotherhood, the s**t hits the fan. Ozaki dies before he's supposed to. His corpse disappears. The dead seem to walk in more than one incident.

Breastmilk is being sold to everyone. Cow demons are handing out pornography in the middle of the night. WHAT THE HELL DOES IT ALL MEAN!?!?

I'm not totally sure. Without spoiling anything, the themes tend to lean towards rebirth, motherhood, and homosexuality, all at once. I've seen the movie three times now, and each time I've got something different out of it. That, my friends, is mastery. I'm not quite sure if Gozu is one for the ages, but even in a year with such movies as Fahrenheit 9/11, Garden State, Ju-on, The Corporation, and

Coffee and Cigarettes, this has to be my favorite so far.

The Final Cut:

Direction: A

Well, gosh, it's Takashi Miike. Do you expect any less?

Style: A+++

Once again, Miike delivers head-on with the style. This movie is so fudged-up, you will probably go somewhat crazy.

Acting: A-

Hideki Sone, who plays Minami, is absolutely fantastic in this movie, as is Sho Aikawa, who has a supporting role in Ozaki. Just plain brilliance.

Script: B

A little janky at some parts, but it compliments Miike's insane outlook quite nicely.

Music: A

Koji Endo's creepy cello / nails on chalkboard score scared the crap out of me, while the bizarre ending song broke my heart in a way like no other.

Overall: A

Don't miss this! You probably aren't going to get another chance to see Gozu on the big screen for a LONG time.

Best quote: "You weener looks just like Frankenstein's!"

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14 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
Wonderful creativity, 5 June 2004

Author: Simon Booth from UK

Takashi Miike is a very strange man - I think there's sufficient evidence of that fact that I need not justify it further. So if I tell you that GOZU is probably Miike's weirdest film to date, you will know that we are talking some world-class oddity. Billed as a "Yakuza Horror" film, which is a label that just about fits if you consider that Japanese horror films have always shown a very different sensibility than Hollywood films (Japanese horror is generally of a quite intangible nature, about the horror of the unknown and the incomprehensible - not so much about the big scary monsters). GOZU is interesting in that the "horror" of it comes almost entirely from the way it is filmed - the camera work, the editing and the sound effects all come together to create a sense of foreboding and fear that for the most part is not at all born out by the actual events in the film. Miike is probably making the point that most horror films are just exercises in film-making technique these days, rather than presenting truly frightening content. Or perhaps he just fancied a way to make his latest Yakuza film a little bit different :)

Miike is definitely one of the most creative film-makers working in the world today - quite possibly *the* most, given his insanely prolific output and the fact that almost every film he makes manages to be unique and memorable. Doing that with one film a year would be an impressive feat, and Miike gives us at least 3-4 such films every year. GOZU shows him on fine creative form once more, turning a story that probably isn't all that interesting into a surreal, dreamlike experience. The plot itself is very minimal, and largely irrelevant for most of the 125 minute running time. Basically, a Yakuza is told to take his yakuza-brother (Sho Aikawa) to an out of the way part of Japan and get rid of him, as he been showing signs of going a bit loopy. However, before he can carry out his orders, Aikawa disappears - and most of the rest of the film is concerned with Minami's efforts to find him. But that description really sells short the content of the film, which is really about the strange characters he encounters and the even stranger experiences that he has.

Going into more detail about what happens wouldn't add a lot to this review, so I won't. Just be prepared to "go with the flow" and see what the film has to offer, rather than expecting anything specific from it. Don't expect a nice neat resolution at the end, either, 'cause you'll definitely be disappointed. Miike's films are often films that need to be seen in just the right mood to be enjoyed, and I'm glad I made the decision that my mood wasn't right when I started watching GOZU 6 months ago. The film sat there waiting for me until this weekend, when I figured the time was as good as it was going to get, and it paid off in spades :)

Miike's films often suffer on repeat viewings, and I am pretty sure this will be true of GOZU - at over 2 hours it is definitely too long, and there are sure to be scenes that are a bit of a chore to sit through when you know what's coming. I couldn't say which scenes they are from a first viewing though, so there's nothing that's truly redundant in there, and I hope that the US distributors that recently acquired the film will remember that their viewers would rather make the decision themselves about any scenes that weren't needed. i.e. uncut, please!

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5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
a fascinating nightmare, 17 June 2006

Author: kaoru-mw from Graz, Austria

Gozu is my third miike movie and i have to say that i am again quite astonished. Sure, he didn't wrote the script but the staging of this movie is marvelous (camera angles/lightning/cut etc...). I've never seen a movie with so many scenes which are funny, grotesque and scary at the very same time. This is so fascinating! One moment you could really burst out laughing and then immediately freeze because of the instant turn of events;..and vice-versa. This is also based on the excellent performance of the cast and the very creepy but ingenious sound-design/soundtrack.

Well, it is unavoidable that some might think of gozu as a repugnant and f***ed up movie. But for all those, who would want to take an unique and psychedelic ride: i really recommend to check this one out.

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4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
A post-apocalyptic, homosexual-psychodrama, 29 December 2007
Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Takashi Miike's stark, "Yakuza Horror Theatre" presentation Gozu (2003) is an infernal cinematic nightmare of fear and anxiety, played out within a sepia-toned subterranean underworld abstracted to the point of outright parody. Like many of the director's more personal and idiosyncratic pictures, the plot is largely secondary to the uncomfortable atmosphere and wild sense of spectacle presented on screen, as Miike constructs an absurd and enigmatic story of a loyal Yakuza henchman struggling with issues of homosexuality, guilt and desire when he is required by his boss to "dispose" of his mentally unstable brother in arms. This incredibly personal and moral dilemma - in which the central character must juggle the greater notions of loyalty to his boss and the loyalty to his best-friend and mentor-like figure that he's obviously quite attracted to - creates a rift within the world of the film that plunges the whole story into suffocating surrealism, horror and the absurd.

As with his other great masterworks, such as Audition (1999), Birds (2000), Visitor Q (2001) and The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), Miike takes the story in so many continually contrasting and self-consciously abstract directions as to render any notion of a single interpretation entirely void. Instead, he bombards the audience with a seemingly endless barrage of repeatedly warped visions, uncomfortable scenarios and bursts of disarming black comedy to continually shock, amuse and perturb us into a sense of ultimate submission. Eventually, the point of the film becomes less important that the sub-textual ideas behind it and the surreal and over-the-top manner in which the director depicts it - with the tone of the film switching continually from the first scene to the last, as the absurdities of the Yakuza genre that Miike knows so well are persistently ripped-to-shreds and turned into fodder for this meta-physical, psycho-sexual conundrum.

With this in mind, it is best to approach Gozu as a prolonged nightmare, complete with personal demons and elements of religious imagery interweaving, as all notions of character and conventional narrative development are done away with in favour of an almost stream of consciousness presentation where the real, the dream and the purely metaphorical are smashed together and left in shards for the audience to reinterpret as they see fit. With Gozu, more so than any of his other recent pictures, Miike takes his personal style further than even the hall-of-mirrors-like surrealism of Audition; creating a dark and distorted recreation of a nameless Japanese underworld that is labyrinthine and claustrophobic throughout, whilst simultaneously jarring us back and forth with Buddhist symbolism, bizarre caricatures and a continual hum of aural, industrialised ambiance. The whole thing is further heightened by the glowing yellow sepia tones of the cinematography, merging with the occasional shards of red and blue lighting, the lingering shadows around the edges of the frame and the often distancing and exaggerated camera angles and choices of location.

With these factors in place, it would be easy to categorise Gozu as a horror film; however, this simply isn't the case. As with many of Miike's more iconic films, Gozu follows no singular genre or style; moving freely between the characteristics of illogical comedy, knock-about buddy picture, gritty Yakuza-thriller, unrequited romance and psychological horror story seemingly simultaneously. Obviously, when we take this approach into consideration, Gozu won't be the kind of film that appeals to everyone, with a certain interest and familiarity with Miike as a filmmaker required by the audience to really appreciate the sense of humour and the continual shifts in tone. Even then, multiple viewing will be needed for the audience to fully digest the film's central message and layers of potential interpretation. However, it's definitely worth it, especially for anyone with a keen interest in the work of similarly minded filmmakers like David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Sogo Ishii, Ken Russell, David Cronenberg and Shinya Tsukamoto.

Gozu takes the surreal horror and ambient farce of films like The Happiness of the Katakuris and Visitor Q to the next conceivable level of cinematic deconstruction, self-reference and meta-textual despair; as we literally submerge ourselves in a homosexual love story played out against a self-aware purgatory-like construction, rife with the allusions to the filmmakers aforementioned, and further applied alongside the desolate use of landscapes, jarring shifts from parody to horror and the freewheeling structure of the narrative itself. Combined with the fine performances from Hideki Sone, Kimika Yoshino, Tetsurô Tamba and Miike regulars Sho Aikawa and Renji Ishibashi, Gozu is easily one of its directors best and most unique endeavours; an arch, dead-pan, deranged and often dangerous sub-textual trawl through one man's despair and Freudian confusion dressed up as a post-apocalyptic fable of ridiculous gangster theatrics, role playing, gender metamorphosis and pure, existentialist angst.

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4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
THE wild goose chase of Takashi Miike's career; enough to give Freud a hemorrhage, 2 April 2007

Author: MisterWhiplash from United States

Let it be known that Gozu won't be for everyone. This recommendation is not for a mass audience in the slightest. This is not Takashi Miike, filmmaker behind the modern cult hits Ichi the Killer and Audition, as you'd might expect. And yet, if you've seen these films, to an ironic extent, you should know what to expect. Gozu is a fabulous act of surrealistic tastelessness, a peering into filmmaker and screenwriter into what can f*** around enough in their psyches to have it blasted back into these characters here. So much can be read into everything that goes on, though I wondered at first if the bulk of film could do better than the first twenty minutes, where a psychotic yakuza- who sees little dogs and cars as specifically "Yakuza killing"- is being taken to be offed by his 'brother'. Whether it's really his brother or not AT FIRST doesn't seem important, until he loses him while stopping at a restaurant. From there on in, we're given a near shaggy-dog story, as if done in the ideals of reaching Lynchian proportions even still with a unique attitude and sense of humor.

If I tried to say too much of what goes on in Gozu one might just stop reading altogether - or be anticipating it, depending on the fan. Miike's style here is stripped down to essentials this time, which is very fitting for the story and characters he's relaying. Not that he's one to skimp on atmosphere, far from it, and if there's one thing he succeeds at in homaging/parodying Lynch it's in the use of sound, and how much varied colors in the lighting can make a difference for the psychological effect. Then again, one would need such a heightened sense of reality, or rather in Gozu as it's sort of not rushed, taking its time with its backwoods gang: the guy with the half-white face dazed out of his gourde; the lactating woman who, forgive me for actually writing this, isn't quite as effective as the lactating woman in Visitor Q; the various owners and hanger-ons at the places Minami, our protagonist, goes around to find his brother. It finally leads him to a woman, who says to him something unbelievable that, somehow, he buys without a second thought (at this point, as Jodorowsky used to say on his film sets I'd wager, 'why not'?) By now someone watching this will have said more than once "alright, this is starting to get weird", but there's more in store on the side of the personal side, and something that happens that, as Miike can only do, actually softens the much more disturbing implications of the shock before the BIGGER shocker.

Gozu is somehow, through all of its deliberate sideshow irregulars, ominous signs and the little knife-stabs of circumstance encountered by the wandering yakuza, very funny throughout because of something elemental Miike knows about this: it's the only way it could work, if it does at all. Other reviewers have and will continue to argue the pointlessness, the meandering, and how it goes too far over the line of decency in films. The first two can be arguable, but the last part is what Miike works best at here: take the audience over the line, and still say "it's only a joke." I'd have to imagine that, if only out of the little behavioral bits in Gozu, that Miike was behind the camera laughing silly. He means for it to be a serious presentation, to be sure, but what are we to make of a brother and sister who can conjure up dead spirits by one constantly thwacking the other with a fly swatter and chanting incantations? Or a classic dream involving a cow head and some sexual jealousy? The opening to the movie, in a sense, sets up the first litmus test, as some might want to turn it off right away. Yet its the nature of a surrealist, as Miike goes for here, to get away with vicious, wicked pranks that get the audience in an uproar, and since its never done too draggingly, and the thinking gets richer in the nature of the characters as it goes along, it's a successful work.

It's maddening and about societal madness, with enough U-turns and carefully composed visuals for two Miike movies, and it's one of the true like it or don't films of the past several years. For me, Miike and his writer Saito have not-so-subtly hit it out of the park.

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5 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Miike's Crazy Ideas Are Fun To Watch, 17 January 2006

Author: Hal-900 from WA, USA

This is the third Miike movie I watch, and it is so far my least favorite movie of his, but the film is definitely a lot of fun. The film's plot is very silly (something about a yakuza member looking for the missing dead body of his "brother"), but it's filled with crazy ideas. It would be pointless to try to analyze what Miike is trying to do here because it all seems meaningless anyway. I'm sure the film makes sense to Miike (and to his fans), but I do not think this is the kind of movie you watch for its performances, etc. I had fun watching this film because I could never predict what kind of nonsense Miike was going to come up with. There is something compelling and very satisfying about watching a film merely for its shock value. I'm not sure if this film could be considered an artistic triumph, but the movie's great parade of bizarre twists and turns satisfied me and gave me a lot to think about. Many directors try to engage viewers with a non-traditional narrative, but Miike is one of the few directors who makes this kind of film-making fun to watch. The movie cannot be taken seriously, but its silliness is irresistible. Highly recommended!

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