Cinema Intelligensia: Miike's Minotaur and Extreme Surfers

Gozu: People who know of Takashi Miike’s movies know to expect the unexpected. A horror film musical? An unadulterated look at yakuza violence? A romance gone terribly wrong? Miike has done all of these. His new movie, Gozu, caught festival goers attention at Cannes this year, making them burst into laughter at this yakuza horror movie.

What is Gozu about? The title character is a man with a cow’s head and only appears briefly in a nightmarish sequence. But the main character is a young yakuza member, Minami, whose best buddy, Ozaki, appears mentally unstable. Their leader orders Minami to go to Nagoya and kill Ozaki at a car dump. Before this can happen, Ozaki dies and when Minami attempts to phone their leader and explain, the body disappears.

What follows isn’t a horror movie in the American fright night tradition. Rather the plot winds its way through situations that seem plausible when they begin, but are ever so slightly off. Sibling innkeepers who are willing to offer anything to their guest, Minami, have an odd relationship with each other. Milky white liquid drips from the ceiling of Minami’s rented tatami room. Ozaki reappears as a woman that their boss lusts after. All of this heads toward a bizarrely happy ending.

Miike has directed more violent yazuka features such as Ichi the Killer or Violent Fire and more sickeningly horrific explorations of romance such as The Audition. But he also has directed wacky, horror musicals with dancing and singing dead people and surreal clay animation in his The Happiness of the Katakuris. If you've seen Visitor Q you might suspect Miike has an obsession with breastfeeding and floods of mother's milk.

If you want a view of the real Japan through a maverick Japanese auteur and aren’t squeamish, Miike’s movies won’t bore you and will hopefully be entertaining. Gozu is scheduled to open mid-August to limited release.

Riding Giants: The Beach Boys and Gidget have permanently cemented the image of beach, bikinis and surfing with Southern California. Los Angeles does have a special place in the history of surfing as does California in general. Stacy Peralta has directed a documentary about not just surfing, but specifically the surfers who sought out the big waves and changed the way people surfed.

Local boys like Greg Noll left the California shores to challenge Hawaiian waves.
A generation later, NorCal surfer Jeff Clark would surf in solitude for nearly two decades at what’s now known as Maverick. San Francisco-born Laird Hamilton would help his mother find a mate (17-year-old surfer Bill Laird) and a father-figure/surfing mentor on a chance visit to Hawaii. Locally, this documentary hasn’t been received well.

Article Author: Purple Tigress

Former theater critic for the LA Weekly and Los Angeles Times . For the last five years, an editing slave at a dot-com but recently laid off. Currently an under-employed freelance writer and artist.

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