| The Guys From Paradise |
| Rating: * * * 1/2 Director: Takashi Miike Running time: 114 minutes Language: Japanese Now showing at Shibuya Cine Palace and other theaters |
Takashi Miike may end up as the Seijun Suzuki of his generation. In the 1960s, Suzuki was a toiler on the Nikkatsu B-movie assembly line, grinding out formula gang films. Bored with his repetitive labors, he began to inject puckish, surrealistic touches into his work.
The culmination was his 1967 film "Branded to Kill," whose hit-man hero botches a job because a butterfly lands on the scope of his sniper rifle, and whose femme fatale client decorates the rearview mirror of her sports car with a dead bird. The film got Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu and became a cult classic, endlessly revived and stolen from (Jim Jarmusch used the famous bullet-through-the-water-pipe shot in "Ghost Dog").
Miike, who toiled for years as an assistant director of TV dramas and a director of straight-to-video genre schlock before making his feature debut in 1995, is, if anything, even wilder and harder-working than Suzuki. Having put himself on his own assembly line (he now turns out four films a year) Miike claims that he fuels his creativity by the adrenaline rush of his frantic pace.
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