Takashi Miike is one of the few Japanese filmmakers now working, Takeshi Kitano and Hayao Miyazaki being two others, who enjoy a measure of recognition outside Japan's insular film world. Though hardly a household name in Kansas, Miike has long been a favorite with the international Asian Extreme Cinema crowd, who first loved him for his bad-boy violence and black-comic weirdness: The bodyguard with the dart-shooting vagina in "Fudoh: The New Generation" (1997), the psychotic former dancer who saws off her middle-aged lover's foot in "Audition" (1999) or the dancing corpses in "The Happiness of the Katakuris" (2001).
But as early fan and critic Tom Mes argued persuasively (if at time repetitively) in his 2003 study "Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike," Miike was more than the sum of his outre antics and, despite his brutal pace (since lessened) of four or five films a year, was no hack for hire. Instead he had themes and concerns that carried over from film to film, as well as an immediately recognizable style full of brio and invention, however patchy its execution. He deserved to be taken seriously for not only bringing a fresh, imaginative approach to the tired tropes of the horror and gangster genres, but tackling everything from the situation of Japan's Asian minorities to the ancient mysteries of the human heart with surprising (given his bomb-throwing notoriety) intelligence and sympathy.
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