ICHI THE KILLER

[Pier Maria Bocchi]

I disagree with Fabio.

Gore, cartoon, excesses, blood: sure, there's all that.
But I think the spectator has not to be embarassed or confused from that,
but from the extreme abstraction of the movie itself. This is quite odd.

It's a film about loss, the desire of love that's pain and masochism
nowadays, and the impossibility to reach it, the heredity of violence and
its ineluctability (as seen in Rainy Dog and City of Lost Souls), the
failure of everyone's role.
And it's a great film about the futility of violence: when the most powerful
man in the world is a poor guy that cries and acts in a hypnotic state, and
the ones that WANT and pretend and live like the thoughest men around (the
yakuza) are small chickens compared to him, it means that's a world where
the roles are completely wrong, and pure surface.

The last 20 minutes are incredibly sad.

This is not a cartoon, or a splatterfest. It's a sort of an accomplishment
of Fudoh, and a film that's genetically pessimistic and universally tragic.

Also, of course, it's technically outstanding: Miike is the proof of how use
different technical 'tools' with meaning in the sense of the lot, without
sounding cool or up-to-date or anything to please the young arthouse crowd
(read, for example, Iway Shunji), and being simultaneously beautifully cool,
in a very 'right' way.

Cheers,
Pier Maria Bocchi






> I'VE JUST SEEN "ICHI THE KILLER" AT THE "COURMAYEUR NOIR IN FEST", AND I'
VE
> FOUND IT PRETTY INTERESTING, GORY, ABSURD, AND ABSOLUTELY TECNICALLY WELL
> MADE, AS USUAL FOR MIIKE...
> MAYBE , SOME ABSURD-VIOLENT SCENES(I THINK THAT IN THIS MOVIE, THE
> BOUNDAIRES BETWEEN VIOLENCE AND MOCKING ABSURDITY IS QUITE THIN...)COULD
> EMBARASS SOME PEOPLE, BUT I'VE TO SAY THAT ICHI GOES FURTHER ALL THE
> INVENTIONS AND VISUAL IMPACTS(ON THE CONTRARY COMPARED TO WHAT HAPPENED IN
> "CITY OF THE LOST SOULS").THE PLOT IS QUITE COMPLEX , COADIUVATED IN MY
> OPINION, BY THE LEAD ACTORS GOOD PERFORMANCES (ESPECIALLY TSUKAMOTO AND
> ASANO...). THE MOVIE COULD BE SEEN AS AN INTERESTING PRACTICAL JOKE, IN
> WHICH THE SPECTATOR IS QUITE CONFUSED FROM THE BEGINNING, AMAZED OR
> EMBARASSED FOR THE GRANDGUIGNOLESQUE EFFECTS ALL OVER THE MOVIE,'TILL AN
> ENIGMATIC AND EXPLANATORY EPILOG ARRIVES. NOTHING ELSE I WANT TO ADD, AS
IT
> COULD INFLUENCE WHO HASN'T  SEEN IT!
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Prova MSN Messenger per conversare in linea con i tuoi amici:
> http://messenger.msn.it/
>