Friday, November 06, 2009

Netflix Friday #2: AUDITION

Ahhh, Takashi Miike. For a long time one could just assume that if you were a horror fan or geek, you'd already seen this. But it's been ten years now. Newer and shinier Japanese horror has come, gone, and been mulched into tweener entertainment. Newer Japanese horror conforms to standard plot structure and pacing.

Takashi Miike thinks standard plot structure and pacing are for little girls.

The first time I saw this movie was during a Japanese Horror Film Marathon on DirectTv. I'd just gotten a big-screen, my friend Mike and Lovely Wife sat down to grab some late night horror.

For a while it's ... kind of a romantic comedy. A Widower, still devastated by his wife's death a decade earlier, is urged by his teen-age son to start dating again. His cheerfully amoral TV producer friend concocts a cunning plan. They'll hold auditions for an imaginary TV series in order for our sweet, likable but socially awkward Widower to meet young women.

Hijinks ensue!

If by hijinks, you mean staring at the screen, screaming "What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK?"

It happens in a moment, in one shot, a tectonic shift in the movie. The train goes off the rails. And the train is on fire, and full of dynamite and naked clowns who live under your bed.

Be aware -- the pacing is glacial, and this is not a shock-horror movie. It's a slow accretion of creepiness. Do not even bother to watch this while there's daylight. This is meant to be watched at midnight, uninterrupted, to let it wash over you. For a good half the viewers, it'll be a "meh." For the half who find just the right night, it's a mood, a tone poem of unease.

No spoilers in the Comments, but feel free to recommend some other horror fun.

69 comments:

Danny said...

Your mind is broken and you aim to break many more. Kudos, Rogers.

Unknown said...

It's a seriously good movie. Although I did learn not to describe it as "kinda scary, a bit graphic" to those not familiar with the genre. Specifically, my new boss. oops.

wcmartell said...

I was almost killed by a very tall actress while on a film festival jury when I said that Miike's VISITOR Q was my 2nd favorite film in competition, and she passionately disagreed and charged me while I was standing in front of a 4th story window... which was open. Next day's paper's would have said Famous Actress Kills Unknown Screenwriter.

Rook said...

I'd really like to know what movie you are talking about.

ita said...

kiri kiri kiri!

I refuse to watch this movie again unless I'm watching it with someone who's never seen it before. I'm more than willing to pass the experience on. That's why I watched it the second time.

I came to it because on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie moments Rob Zombie looked so disturbed by it, even though it placed around 11. I needed to know. Now I can never unknow.

I'd also like to recommend Oldboy. It's what my sister suggested I watch when I told her I'd...ahh...appreciated Audition. Did me worse.

kjp said...

I've heard so many people recommend Miike, but I'm not sure I get it. My only experience with his films was watching Izo at the Seattle International Film Festival a number of years ago.

It's honestly the worst film I've ever sat through. At least a dozen people got up and walked out. At the end a friend turned to me and said "Oh, thank God." Oddly, he's a friend who liked Audition, but your mention of "glacial pacing" doesn't inspire me to check it out.

(Seriously. How can you screw up "angry Samurai ghost gets revenge on people"? Miike might be a genius in that he turned out such a boring film from that concept. Then again, I was somewhat surprised by how boring Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter was, too.)

John said...

As I wrote...

http://whatsthatedgar.wordpress.com

The Ring, now and forever. Brutal.

Joshua James said...

And then there's OLD BOY, of course ...

PsuedoNoise said...

Rook:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235198/

I watched it having just gotten over a cold and not had a lot to eat that day. I literally had to step outside for air to keep from passing out.

Unknown said...

Audition is classic. But, I disagree on watching it late at night. Subtitles put me to sleep. Better to draw the curtains to dim the room and have a cup of coffee in the early evening/late morning.

Karl Ruben said...

I'm not sure I'm going to have the stones to watch something like Audition - if the horror gets to be too unrelenting, I'm prone to start hugging my knees, rocking back and forth and muttering "whywhywhywhywhy" to myself (cf The Hills Have Eyes).

I did get around to watching Cold Prey - which you recommended a good while back - plus its sequel. Both very good formulaic slashers, the second one being the rare sequel to actually improve on the original.

Cunningham said...

"This is meant to be watched at midnight, uninterrupted, to let it wash over you."

Unlike ICHI THE KILLER which erupts out of you...

I'm going to claim Miike as a pulp filmmaker as he made his mark in Japan's V-cinema which is much like our D2DVD market. Low budget, crank-em-out cinema that is a symbiosis of camera and id... or at least that's how Miike has evolved it to suit his tastes.

Unknown said...

...naked clowns that live under my bed? Wow...my clowns were never naked. You must have had an interesting childhood.

I'll give it a shot, I love horror, especially turn on a dime, what.the.fuck horror. I saw From Dusk til Dawn with no foreknowledge on what it was about and it was an awesome ride that way. Vampires out of nowhere.

Unknown said...

I'd also like to 3rd Old Boy.

moleboy said...

LOVED this movie.
BTW, thats really her vomitting.

scared the damn crap out of my wife, made me feel uneasy to be alive every time I thought about it for days.

moleboy said...

Re: The Ring
I got thoroughly terrified from that.

But more interesting was watching the japanese version.
I wasn't as scary, but it very much illuminated some real differences I'd been struggling with.
A couple things
1. Theres sort of an accepted language of horror movies. If A is happening, then you know something bad/horrible/scary is about to happen. Those queues are different for the japanese, so watching their horror movies is a very strange experience.
2. I adore the casual relationship they have with the paranormal. In one scene in Ringu, the male lead mentions that his mother had psychic powers and the female lead is all like "Oh, thats interesting". As if he's said "Oh, and my mom was a really good skier"

I love them so much

Reuter said...

My girl first heard about this movie on one of Bravo's 50 Pants-Crappingest Scenes / Movies / Film Stock shows. At the time, the film wasn't in print in Region 1 DVD, so she asked me to... "obtain" it. Which I did (I have since proudly purchased the legal disc, after it was reprinted in the US)... and it turned out to be a 25 frame-per-second PAL copy. Dubbed in German.

So I "obtained" a set of English subtitles... which were timed in 24 frame-per-second NTSC, so they didn't sync up.

At the time, I was working in radio so I had a lot of free time, so I figured I'd grab a subtitling program and re-sync the subs in my spare time. Which meant hours upon hours of fast-forward / rewind / fast-forward to sync the subs with the lip movements. I was able to do about 20 minutes of film per day in four-hour "shifts."

So I spent two or three days thinking, "The only scary thing about this flick is that it's a shitty Asian knockoff of Sleepless in Seattle"... until I saw that FUCKING. BURLAP. SACK.

And I realized that something very bad was likely coming my way... and that if I wanted to really know what happened, I would need the subtitles... so it was going to two or three DAYS before it was all over for me.

So I went like hell after that to get it done so I could see what happened... although I distinctly remember having to stop for a three cigarette break after syncing over "kiri, kiri, kiri" (Fun fact! "Kiri" in German is apparently "Schtickum!"). *Awesome* flick.

Anonymous said...

Old School English - The Woman in Black. This is out of print but great if you can find it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098672/

Emily Z. Chen said...

Echoing everyone here who've said Oldboy.

Billiant awesome, ridiculously hilarious mindfuckery that'll leave you dazed for at least a week.

Incidentally the same director (Chan-wook Park) made a vampire romance movie by the name of Bakjwi (Thirst).

It...

It's special.

I went to his panel at Comiccon and he basically said, to paraphrase: "I wanted to make a movie about a priest; so I tried to figure out what would break him the most."

Also: "I wanted my vampires to have no fangs; 'cause getting to the blood then becomes a far more interesting process."

It's a romantic comedy, if a romantic comedy got pantsed, frenched, zombified, then kidnapped for wild and kinky sex. (In that order.)

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