Having had a great time exploring his works during past best of the year polls on ICM, when a poll for the best films of 2007 appeared,I started planning a "Auteurs in '07" week of viewings,by going straight to Miike's credits of 2007. With Giallo being my favourite film genre,I was excited to read reviews saying that this was Miike's take on the Giallo,which led to me opening the book of this detective story.
View on the film:
Whilst the homoerotic element in his works is here limited to being painted on the rather Camp psychotic nutter, (who has the cackle of psychos from the peak era of Gialli) here directing auteur Takashi Miike reunites with occasional cinematographer collaborator Kazunari Tanaka to crystallize other recurring motifs,with the visceral edges of Giallo and Neo-Noir.
Serving up a fresh mug of gore in the opening scene, Miike cleverly pulls back the pulpy thrill from his gore scenes of the past, to instead drill into the psychological chill with a bleak atmosphere spread on pitch black colours lining the walls of long tracking shots backed by the fantastic Industrial hum from Miike's regular composer Koji Endo.
Dabbing in the ultra-stylisation of the Giallo in the build up to the toured victims being followed by long first-person tracking shots,Miike brilliantly contrasts the murder set pieces with a brittle bones Neo-Noir atmosphere, utterly drained of any primary colours in expertly framed long wide-shots on the investigators surrounded by a grey, sterile world, where they must find the brush strokes of the killer.
One of only 7 credits they have, (the last was in 2010) the screenplay by Tsutomu Shirado makes it a huge shame Shirado has not gotten more work,with Shirado corkscrewing slow-burn thrills on the Neo-Noir loners having to go outside the business management style of the police in order to unmask the wonderfully strange origin roots to the killings,which Shirado pulls up with flamboyant flashbacks to the beginnings of the masked killer painting the front cover to this detective story yellow.
View on the film:
Whilst the homoerotic element in his works is here limited to being painted on the rather Camp psychotic nutter, (who has the cackle of psychos from the peak era of Gialli) here directing auteur Takashi Miike reunites with occasional cinematographer collaborator Kazunari Tanaka to crystallize other recurring motifs,with the visceral edges of Giallo and Neo-Noir.
Serving up a fresh mug of gore in the opening scene, Miike cleverly pulls back the pulpy thrill from his gore scenes of the past, to instead drill into the psychological chill with a bleak atmosphere spread on pitch black colours lining the walls of long tracking shots backed by the fantastic Industrial hum from Miike's regular composer Koji Endo.
Dabbing in the ultra-stylisation of the Giallo in the build up to the toured victims being followed by long first-person tracking shots,Miike brilliantly contrasts the murder set pieces with a brittle bones Neo-Noir atmosphere, utterly drained of any primary colours in expertly framed long wide-shots on the investigators surrounded by a grey, sterile world, where they must find the brush strokes of the killer.
One of only 7 credits they have, (the last was in 2010) the screenplay by Tsutomu Shirado makes it a huge shame Shirado has not gotten more work,with Shirado corkscrewing slow-burn thrills on the Neo-Noir loners having to go outside the business management style of the police in order to unmask the wonderfully strange origin roots to the killings,which Shirado pulls up with flamboyant flashbacks to the beginnings of the masked killer painting the front cover to this detective story yellow.