When asked to contribute a film to the ongoing LoveCinema project, Takashi Miike must've sat down and had a good hard think about it all. Love, he may have pondered. What in the hell might that all be about, anyroad?
For Shakespeare, love was a many splendored thing. For Aerosmith, it was something what went on in an elevator. For Miike, the director of Audition and Ichi The Killer, and who averages four flicks a year, it involves incest, lactation, necrophilia and folks getting killed with screwdrivers.
God fucking bless Takashi Miike, is what.
Visitor Q, or LoveCinema Vol.6, is concerned with "the family", and through a series of highly inventive vignettes we are invited to muse upon this radical redefinition of just what "Family Love" might entail.
The film opens with the question, "Have you ever done it with your dad?"
Thankfully, the viewer doesn't have to ponder this too much, since a second later, a naked woman appears onscreen, captured via a handheld camcorder, enticing the fella off screen to come ahead and get it on with her.
The fella yacks about "No, no I can't, it's wrong", but she wants him to get the trousers off and get on with the sexing.
It is revealed that this young lady is a prostitute, and the fella in question is her father, a television journalist who is attempting to make some kind of film about "the youth". Simultaneously, the daughter is snapping away with a digital camera, so the sequence plays out via three mediums; Miike's camera, the dad's camcorder and the daughters digital photography.
As an opening scene, it's enough to grab a motherfucker's attention, for sure.
We next see the father sitting by a window, when for no apparent reason a fella leans in and smacks him in the head with a rock.
Next thing we know, this gravel-flinging motherfucker is invited to stay at the victim's house, with no discernible motive, and he wanders around in and out of the various melodramas what ensue, be it the bullying of the teenage son, or the fact that the teenage son takes out his anger on his mother, whipping her with some kind of wooden rod whilst she screams about "I told you, not the face" and he yells about "This is the wrong kind of toothbrush! Do you want me to get bleeding gums?"
Ten minutes have scarcely passed, and already you feel like someone just crawled onto your shoulders and shagged you in the earhole. It lurches so violently from the deeply disturbing to the genuinely hilarious that a motherfucker could get whiplash just from watching the damn thing.
Article comments
1 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Hi folks.
Please note;
I've been informed of a controversy arising from the Works De Duke, involving not only his fantasticly incisive critique of Popular Culture, but also the time-stamp on mine posting. The reason the posting-time appears much later than anyone elses who might post at the same time, ie, this one says 17:40 or whatever when if others posted now it might say 13:00, is because most contributors to the site are American, and i am over here in the UK, so my time stamp is right by me, but maybe not by someone in, say, Wisconsin or Zimbabwe. This has absoloutely no effect on posting as far as i can see, and if someone were to post in the video section now, it would push mine down even if the time was "earlier". So, i apologise for any confusion, although the thought that The Duke might be technologically gifted enough to have even considered such a diabolical cheat on purpose does, indeed, fill me with orgasmic pride.
Thanks folks.
By the way, this review sucks, The Duke, i mean seriously.
2 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Amendment to above comment - I just notice now that it does indeed make a difference to the posts afterwards. I will amend the time-stamp on my MT Client thingy to US Time (someone suggest a region?). This will be implemented as of my next post. I honestly didn't know this was having an effect. Thanks to Eric for letting me know
3 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Just doing a time-check, folks