Best Movie Of The Year!
I hadn't planned to write a review of the new Japanese fantasy film Yôkai Daisensô ("War of the Goblins," I guess), directed by the brilliant and freakishly prolific Miike Takashi. Anyone who's seen Audition or any of the movies in the Dead or Alive series probably already has a pretty good sense of Miike's cracked cinematic vision.
In Yôkai Daisensô, which got a great response from the audience with whom I saw it in Ikebukuro the other day, Miike follows the adventures of ten-year-old Tadashi, who has to rescue his pet goblin and ultimately all humankind from the forces of darkness. The most important thing to bear in mind that it's a Miike movie for kids, which means that it's goofy and yet strikingly mature in terms of its presentation of children's fears and feelings. At crucial moments, it moves much closer to the openly erotic than any American family film would. You can get something of a sense of its sensibilities from this preview.
I'm not what one would call a "kid person," and I generally despise movies and books for kids. Yes, this includes the Harry Potter series. No, I haven't read them, and please don't tell me that I can't really judge the books without having read them. You probably haven't met me, so -- by a logic similar enough to leave me vaguely content -- you can't really judge whether or not I'm aware enough of my own tastes to be sure that four pages into Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Uzbekistan or whatever I would finally swallow the cyanide tablet I've got taped to the roof of my mouth. Please also bear in mind that because I don't have children, I don't have to rationalize reading children's books by saying that they're "good for grown-ups too." You know what other books are good for grown-ups? Ones that are actually written for grown-ups.
This just makes my own completely gleeful reaction to Yôkai Daisensô that much more surprising to me. The final shot of the preview linked above is a doozy. But so is the last minute of the film, which has a completely different feeling, one that I think no American movie (certainly not one for kids) would try.
I have no idea when this will come to American screens; it might simply go straight to DVD in the US. But I hope it'll be available on the big screen. It's without question the most entertaining film I've seen this year: hilarious, beautifully structured, and it even has Sugawara Bunta (star of of Fukasaku Kinji's Battles Without Honor or Humanity) series as Tadashi's alcoholic grandfather, and Kill Bill's Kuriyama Chiaki dressed in skin-tight white leather, with a white beehive hairdo, and using a white whip.
Unless someone releases, between now and December 31st, something surreal like Mark Wahlberg and Andre 3000 playing brothers who want to avenge the death of their mother, this will be my choice for Best Film of the Year.