Graveyard of Honor

Who said only Americans had the right to remake, defile or reinterpret, their crime classics? By adding a new 40-minute third act on Kinji Fukasaku's original 1975 film Takashi Miike firmly leans towards the second option. A reinterpetation faithful in spirit and gritty hardboiled realism to the original yet still as much a Miike film as anything else he's done, this reflected in the Japanese title of the movie ('New' Graveyard of Honor), in itself perhaps a tribute to Fukasaku's sequel series 'New' Battles Without Honor and Humanity, and the numerous gonzo stylistic flashes that fully complement the hand-held hyperkinetic style Fukasaku pioneered and which Miike here reintroduces, not in an attempt to ape the original film and not to the extent that Fukasaku used that style nor with the same deftness, but as a visual technique Miike makes his own for the duration of the film.

As with the original film, the emphasis here is not on a Scarface-like rags-to-riches arch but on downfall, one long unbroken fall from grace, an ode to self-destruction and alienation as only the Japanese know how to do them. The brooding yakuza protagonist finds himself in a vicious endless cycle of violence as meaningless as the catalyst that kicked it into motion (a two-hour visit at the dentist by his boss) and there's no bottom or depth low enough for him to sink to.

Miike follows all this in a sombre distanced way, allowing the brutal stabbings and shootings to take place without either glorifying or shying away from them, this helped to a good degree by a languid jazzy score and a lack of depth or dimension to the supporting characters or indeed the protagonist. We don't know these people. We don't know any more about the protagonist after two hours than we did after he first stops a yakuza hit-man by breaking a chair on his head. He goes about killing people and shooting dope, stopping only long enough to rape his girlfriend or signal to the cops that he's out of bullets.

Miike being Miike, the movie is still crazy and OTT, as though he doesn't want us to take it anymore serious than we need to. I'm a big fan of yakuza pictures and Miike's Graveyard remake ranks highly among them, quite possibly the best of the several he's done. More than two hours long, the movie feels epic without ever calling attention to itself as such. Miike is not doing THE GODFATHER any more than he's doing SCARFACE. Curiously for a remake and especially compared to slick Hollywood gangster movies or quirky crimedies, Graveyard is original above all else. If I have a problem with it, is only in the hard edge of the video look on which Miike (probably for reasons of budget) insists on shooting, and that 15 minutes could've been trimmed for tightness.

Most of Miike's yakuza movies include alot of humor and over the top gore, in which I love. I was sort of expecting that with this movie and had my hopes up high, but I was introduced to a new style of Yakuza movie.

Ishimatsu is a dishwasher at a resturaunt who saves the life of a Yakuza boss when a assassin was ordered to kill him at Ishimatsu's resturaunt. Ishimatsu is let into the family at a high rank and but he isn't what was expected. He starts p***ing people off in the family by starting a little gang-war, and after theres a settlment between the two gangs, they are all trying to get rid of Ishimatsu. He also gets pretty wound up with heroin.

Alot of character develoupment in this movie. The movie has a low tone but glossy color that sets and really good atmosphere with a slow jazz soundtrack.

The blood in this movie isnt very abundent but the violence is strong a realistic. Not very many bloodsprays like in most of Miike's movies, but you dont really look for that because IMHO this movie is so stylish without the need of strong blood or gore.

It doesnt seem like to many people like this movie but when I got done watching this movie I felt really good like I have never felt after a movie.

If Japan is "perfect", how does "imperfection" look like? The protagonist in this movie embodies exactly that. Which takes away a lot of the "Scarface"-like thriller elements. There is a story about a guy stepping up in a mafia environment, but his stoic anti-will, the fact he hurts EVERYone - helpers, supporters, lovers and foes - is meant to be allegorically political.

It's stated somewhere and in fact, there's some few scenes that appear very illogical. Not so, if you watch the movies "the right way".

Movie is calm, depressing, melancholic, bloody painful, sometimes crazy (in one scene he shoots at everyone: police, bypassers etc., then going "SORRY, OUTTA AMMO!" and delivers himself).

Good, disturbing, mature Miike-movie. Not as cartoonish as most of his films.

Anyone expecting "just another Miike flick" might get very disappointed, as I'd claim this remake, of Kinji Fukasaku's 1975 success, to differ quite much from Miike's other works. There's a lack of comic events here, while the amount of violence is steady and non-compromising straight throughout the movie. While Miike's other works may have a sort of balance between the cold terror of Yakuza violence and fun punchlines, dark and light or whatever you'd like, this piece is leaning way more to the darker side. No one gets away with anything, women and men, they're all facing their dramatic paths down the line.

As I've mentioned above, the piece feels quite different, and at the beginning I thought it may even be bad. However, such a case didn't await me and afterward I thought it was all good. Different, but good. I prefer the other works of Miike, but that didn't disqualify this one to be a good view. Shattering, touching and filled up with non-sympathy. 7/10.

Takashi Miike has a knack at Yakuza thrillers. Some might not be very good, some might be some odd sorts of deranged masterpieces. But with Graveyard of Honor, I can only imagine how fantastic the original Kinji Fukasaku film from the 70s was if this might possibly be Miike's best "serious" Yakuza movie. This is to say that Miike turns down a somewhat typical level of madcap gore and humor for an approach that is kind of staggering, as though Cassavetes had some input on the screenplay (or Abel Ferrara ala Bad Lieutenant for that matter). It's a solid piece of drama of a man, Rikuo Ishimatsu (in a performance that, within the range, is one of a lifetime from Gorô Kishitani ala young Mifune), who unwittingly becomes apart of a crime family after saving its boss while working as a dishwasher. He serves some time for attempting to kill another gangster, he gets out, the years pass and he gets bitter, and in a fit of panic he bites the hand that feeds him - he shoots his own boss.

From here on it's a path right to hell that Ishimatsu takes. Already one has seen him as a character with some demons he has trouble quelling. He's tough, maybe too tough, and doesn't have much of a sense of humor (which includes around his woman, a timid creature who soon gets into the dank mess that Ishimatsu puts himself into). He also turns into a full-fledged junkie, and burns more bridges than one could ever fathom. What Miike crafts here is something that might not be his most inventive work, but it displays him as someone who has the range to plunge into real bloodshed and tragedy. It's almost the reversal of the cartoonish mayhem of Ichi the Killer - where that you almost were given permission to chuckle at the carnage and excess of violence, in Graveyard of Honor it's grim, ugly, the blood flowing hard and with bodies writhing in total agony. It's a rare instance for the director to present things about as realistic as he'll get, in edgy hand-held and compositions.

But there is some style that Miike puts, appropriately and with an creative sensibility, on the material. The music crooning on and off is like that of New York jazz from the late 50s and early 60s, and I'm almost reminded of some lucid nightmare of a beatnik on junk ala William S. Burroughs and pulp fiction. As the downward spiral continues for this character, even if it starts to seem unlikely that it would go this far (the escape from prison alone, intense for the self-inflicted horror done to himself, is just enough to swallow), we go right down with this character in his oblivion. It's hard to turn away, and there are moments that are gruesome not so much for what's shown, which can be a lot, but the emotional impact. Not to sound pretentious, but I'm almost reminded of some damned Shakespearan king or something, only here it's a sensibility of total unadulterated nihilism that propels Ishimatsu to his horror of an end.

On the surface, it doesn't feel a whole lot different from other Miike Yakuza fare. Yet it's a little maturer, a little more tightly crafted and developed with the characters, and it has the mood of a filmmaker working outside of his reputation as a showman or provocateur. It's a real movie, one of the best in the Yakuza realm.