As you might anticipate, First Love is a story of boy meets girl, but coming from Takashi Miike, the visionary director behind Ichi the Killer, Audition, and 13 Assasins, you might rightly anticipate this romantic-comedy is less flowers and kisses and more yakuzas and blood. There is also a high-kicking revenge killer, a grimacing ghost in tightie-whities, and a pair of gruesome yet pretty damn funny decapitations. [Read more…]
Audition
Reviewed by Elvis Mitchell
The Japanese psychological horror film Audition (1999) has been responsible for throngs of shaken filmgoers staggering out of theaters for the last year or so; it’s Fatal Attraction with a sense of morality instead of a need to pander — specifically, the movie’s theme is the objectification of women in Japanese society and the mirror-image horror of retribution it could create. [Read more…]