djores

Opening shot: Red light hanging above the streets of NJ. Pan down to street level and jump into the back seat of a Mustang convertible hysterically zigzagging its way towards a bicyclist. "12 hours earlier"

Viewer's reaction: 'You gotta be kidding me.' This reaction is methodically sustained and amplified throughout the 122 minutes of shootings, beatings, pedophilia, shootings, beatings, full-frontal nudity, shootings, stabbings, shootings. The movie's 'child=gun' drive is filtered through the hip existentialist denim blues of indie productions circa year 2000 and the cliché (like all others in the story) becomes an exaggeration of itself in a torture-hockey scene under black light where ice, skin and blood all look "ultra-violet"?

Not-quite family entertainment, this seems like a fairy tale without a moral and for a good reason - stay for the filigreed credits sequence that sums up the entire movie.

I pray instead of a sequel the makers release a series of cartoons with the same title.

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.

The look: wallpapered, mortgaged, wife, 3-daughter, and a mustache domestic reality show.

The conflict: marital infidelity evolving in a cadence slower than the geological impact of a glacier.

The extra: Denis Leary doing his own trumpet rendition of Tyler Durden (aka Bradd Pitt).

Total: XXX - exquisite, excruciating, exemplary;

Bonus: The 'Last Scene' - seismically intense tableau vivant of a classicist dentist office pastoralia (Vermeerian light diffused in Leonardo's hyper-perfect composition/perspective of Adam and Eve sharing an oral procedure)