Izo

The latest chapter in Takeshi Miike's continuing essay on humanity and brutality, IZO is a two-hour experimental mind-trip.

If this film were in any way concerned with making sense, the storyline might resemble something like this: A man is brutally murdered in ancient Japan, but, bearing his vengeance, he returns to the Earth and wanders uncontrollably through time and space, becoming the embodiment of mankind's self-destructive nature. Throughout his wanderings, he encounters all kinds of strange and metaphoric characters, and he proceeds to kill them all with his samurai sword.

This film is an elaborate thesis on mankind, but the exact nature of the message is a matter of debate, as is whether or not Takeshi Miike himself even has a clue. There will no doubt be differing opinions as to what the characters represent, but you better make up your mind during the first hour of film. After that, most of the scenes that obviously point out a social message - like black-and-white footage of war - disappear, and what the resolution is depends on your interpretation of the characters.

For those of you not familiar with the works of Takeshi Miike, suffice it to say that he is determined to mine the human subconscious in search of new and exciting ways to make people throw up sushi and tempura on the carpeted floors of Tokyo multiplexes. Among Japan's pantheon of ultra-violent directors, he is notable for being always ready to address the issue of his own sadism. Ever film he makes is like an expansion of Hitchcock's shower scene, forcibly accusing us of being sadists at the same time as he delivers great images of cinematic violence. More than the social commentary, which is confusing and likely uncertain, the most interesting philosophical study in IZO is Miike's self-examination of his own lust for violence, as well as the main character's and the audience's. Is Izo so brutal because he is inhuman, or because he is too human?

You may not get anything from straining at this befuddled movie, but it is still enjoyable and provoking, if not gut-wrenching, experimental cinema. Any violent philosophical essay that features long shots of a folk singer playing guitar and screaming ballads is worth a look. IZO has elements of Kafka, Lewis Carrol, Terry Gilliam, and Seijun Suzuki, but it is undeniably Takeshi Miike.

You can call Miike sadistic. You can call him demented or depraved. Just don't forget to call him an artist.

In the distant past, a great samurai warrior named Izo was put to death in a most heinous manner. But his spirit does not rest, and he now wanders the earth, traveling through time, killing (almost) every living thing he comes across. While most of this film is just pure slaughter (which many fans will enjoy), watch for the deeper messages and symbolism.

The acting all around was wonderful. As usual, unless you're a big fan of Japanese cinema, you'll probably only recognize Takeshi Kitano. This makes it far easier for me to comment on the acting, not having to make running jokes on an actor's past career. Takeshi is pretty much flawless in his film choices, so you should already know this will be good when you see his name (not to mention it's a Takeshi Miike film, which is great).

My expectations for this film were mixed. As stated, Miike and Kitano are a great pair, but I was told this was something of an action film and less of a horror film. And I suppose that's true, although horror fans are going to get more than their share of blood and questionable perversity (incest, anyone?). I came out liking this film a lot more than I had thought I would, thinking there's no way it could out-do "Visitor Q" or even "Audition". But I think it very well may have.

The blood is what's going to attract most people. Izo kills school children, an old warrior with a voice box, businessmen and everyone else. It sprays a lot, and the swordplay is enjoyable. The variety of things killed makes up for the fact that the plot doesn't really have much to offer (besides countless stabbings, slashings and beheadings).

What hooked me was the philosophy and symbolism. We have Izo, who is consumed with rage, slowly turning into a demon as he kills (what appears to be a Japanese oni, though my grasp of Japanese mythology is limited). We have a troubadour who follows him around singing songs (some of them up to seven minutes in length). Is he the narrator, or Izo's soul crying out? We have the snake creature, the mother of all humanity and a board of directors for some big corporation. And, most interestingly, a teacher teaching students about "democracy" and what a "nation" is in the most abstract of terms. Like what John Searle or Richard Rorty would say. And if Izo is killing everyone, we are left to wonder why there remain a few -- very few -- people he leaves alive.

Come for the blood and stay for the symbols. You'll need to watch this one two or three times to really begin to understand and appreciate it. In all fairness, it may be boring for some people (how many times can you stab someone) but I think it's art in the purest, most animalistic of forms. You like "Audition" or "Ichi the Killer"? Give this one a shot.

Izo is a vector-movie: it has a point of origin (Izo is put to death in the opening sequence), direction and speed (arbitrary revenge as determined by the edge of Izo's sword), but no destination. It must be stressed that unlike "traditional" narratives, it consciously avoids the end-point/solution/destination. The movie lets the aesthetics of its form shape the meaning of the story. The aesthetics in question being: hyper-loaded symbolism as conjured in Noh theater; PS2 architecture of the action - labyrinthine violence for its own sake leading up to the next level, which is more of the same with a different CGI background; MTV approach to video editing - Izo's bounces between layers of reality with the approximate speed of a cable channel surfer are spliced with archival footage and several "unplugged" Kazuki Tomokawa performances where the ancient Greek chorus would provide emotional emphasis.

The experience is not exactly rewarding but definitely unparalleled.

Apart from some questionable world-conspiracy and misogyny moments, an overall entertaining, extreme, and cryptically new take on film storytelling. Miike in his radical element.

Izo is the sort of movie-thing that straddles the line between awesomeness, pretentiousness, and an as of yet unidentified third sector that cannot be described with human language.

So this time-traveling samurai dude kills a ton of people, and along the way this other dude sings nonsensical things for ten minutes at a time while sounding like he's just eaten a cat who was itself gargling nails. There's also some possibly gratuitous nudity and some certainly gratuitous scenes of swords appearing from places where they should probably not appear from.

I only have about half of an idea what Izo is about, but I think it means that Takashi Miike hates everything except slimy grown men being forced out of tiny female orifices at the ends of movies. And personally, I love him for it.

After watching perhaps the most reckless, surreal, mystical-style take on the ultra-bloody grind-house samurai epic, I'm not too sure who is more relentless, its main character- the unstoppable un-dead/spirit Izo (Kazuya Nakayama, likely in the performance of a career, for better &/or worse) or its director Takashi Miike. It's been compared to both Greek mythology and Jodorowsky's El Topo, and I can definitely see credence in both examples. In the first half hour to forty five minutes, actually longer if you account for, um, story, you're not sure precisely what the hell (no pun intended) is going on. Izo, at the start, gets crucified, and then we learn after a while (err, it's pretty obvious) he was quite the warrior and swordsman, who is out for vengeance as he comes back as an un-crushable spirit. Later on, we get a view into what tags along with him, in a female form, as a 'fragment', but for the most part one can only try to assume that Izo is on a collision course to nowhere, a pure embodiment of nihilistic anarchy who could be the Terminator in blood-eyed samurai garb if he/it actually had the mission.

I can't deny that Miike deserves an 'A' for effort on this sort of thing, but it's also the kind of project that veers the closest of all the work I've seen of his so far to that most overused of terms- pretentious (albeit I haven't dug deep enough into his oeuvre to make that definitive). I mean, really, what are we to make of cut-aways at varied, completely random times of newsreel footage of dictators and famous world wars and atom bombs going off in black and white, sometimes in reverse mode, or in sped-up mode? What about a guy who comes in and out of the (very loosely laid) story to do acoustic-guitar musical numbers? It does all connect, I suppose, to the sort of random madness and almost Superman-like ability to not get really that harmed, unless around his quasi-kryptonite of the order of the 'Soul-fragment'. A lot of what ends up popping up as sort of the history of Izo, before he was turned into the ultimate grudge with a sword, would be really interesting on its own, but strung together like this with the rest of the picture made it frustrating for me. Perhaps I wasn't ready enough for all of this, but for all of the virtuosity that Miike is going for with his bloody, full-blown surreal odyssey, only some of it works well while the rest falls into 'huh' mode.

But the rest of this picture is what's almost teasingly ironic about Izo. As a swordplay movie, the kind that delivers the goods on action set-pieces and violence galore, doesn't disappoint, and if anything it shows Miike knows this kind of picture, which is why in a sense he's probably trying to lampoon it underneath the very dark and Gothic exterior. Nakayama is a real force to be reckoned with, and he works well in his all-too-limited role. It's always hard to do variations on the same style of killing- slicing a sword in the blink of an eye, and sometimes seeing the (appropriately) blood-soaked and flesh-torn aftermath, or in an immediate cut-away- and Miike pulls out his entire arsenal of tricks, including a set piece with the one American actor- Bob Sapp- who barely puts up a front either despite his huge size. But even with the creativity in many of Izo's murder sequences jarring and excitingly outrageous, the repetition becomes a little tiresome. And it wasn't that the picture was too confusing, though it does contain that side of the El Topo, where it's basically intentional for it to go in circle's around people's heads.

The messages that barrage the viewer though through the content (like in one scene where Izo is at a school and you-guess-what happens and there are cutaways to classrooms where kids are asked to define 'love', 'nation', and other ultra big words taken for granted) are what become fuzzy or just too off-kilter for their own good. For someone who is usually so sharp on the edge with satire, Miike here is trying to scrape up enough with the action to justify it being there, because, of course, Izo's world is in some otherworldly plain of Greek tragedy, Buddhism, and other factions that are also connected to the true depravities and horrors of the world. But it's too much on one plate, and there's definitely the sense of overload. It's the kind of picture where the director does, more often than not, stumble on his face with his own ambitions; that being said, I'd much rather see a movie by Miike that only reaches up so high to its ideals than for a lesser filmmaker to just churn out typical product. Izo is anything but typical product, and it follows no rules (and destroys much like its character), which becomes part of the problem, at least on a first viewing.