The Bird People in China & The Twilight Samurai

The Bird People in China takes a lot of the bad taste from Izo out of my mouth, as it's a vastly different Takashi Miike film. And it's actually quite good. It's still sort of strange, but then again, so was Audition, the other "most normal" Miike film I've seen, but it's really still about the same themes that his other films seem to be about: trying to find a place to fit in, usually foreigners in a different land, this time a yakuza and a young office worker traveling to Yunnan, China (the subtitles kept splitting it into Yun Nan, confusing me for a bit, for some unknown reason (both the splitting and my confusion)) looking for a rich vein of jade, but instead finding... well, I don't want to ruin it, except that they do find the Bird People in China. And it's about the danger of bringing technology into an area that doesn't know it. That it's restrained is a nice touch, but that's what's amazing about Miike, because he is actually quite talented, if you can get past the enormous grafted penii, the severed feet, extreme torture, zombie musicals, an assassin who shoot darts from her vagina, and lots of sexual taboos... Wait, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah, Miike's talent. Well, he is quite capable of making a touching film.

The Twilight Samurai made me really sad. Another movie that year better than the shit that was The Barbarian Invasions, and yet somehow lost to it. I know I'm somewhat biased (both towards the Japanese and against the damn French Canadians), but this film was really quite good. The two fight scenes are both filmed extremely well, and the ending one is one of the most depressing fight scenes I can imagine. The Foreign Film Oscars are so much of a joke that it's painful to think of how many great foreign films don't even get nominated let alone win when so much crap wins. Life Is Beautiful still causes me to hate Italy. Well, that and their tendency to dive. So, anyway, pretty much it was a couple of sad but excellent Japanese films for me this weekend.