Midnight@Sunset 2003
Intrigued? Afflicted? Repulsed?
Join us at Midnight@Sunset just to be sure!
LAEMMLE’S SUNSET 5
8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood
3 hrs free parking with validation
Click here to get your official m@s t-shirt!
Last summer we brought you Sharkskin Man & Peach Hip Girl, Longest Nite, Beast Cops and more. This time M@S is back with a vengeance in Ichi The Killer and sharing the love in Visitor Q. Both are Takashi Miike classics—not in the urbane academic sense but in the truly unforgettable and disturbing way that true art forces you to think about what you are witnessing. If you watch these films and come away scared, it has nothing to do with the films. Controversial and despicable, Miike films will always elicit high, often nervous, reactions.
Bring your vomit bags and catch them at midnight this summer.
Ichi The Killer (Koroshiya)
June 13 & 14, 2003
Japanese with English subtitles
129 min
Based on the extreme manga with the same name, Takashi Miike brings the panels of ink to life in this controversial film about warring yakuza clans and a haute sicko killer named Ichi on their tails.
Visitor Q
July 4 & 5, 2003
Japanese with English subtitles
84 min
Rated R for strong aberrant sexual and violent content, language and drug use and that’s just the first ten minutes as a father and daughter have sex. Less gory but much darker and surprisingly—romantic!
“A strong contender for the sickest movie of all time, Ichi The Killer exhibits Miike Takashi’s freewheeling visual imagination nonetheless. It’s an ultraviolent revenge movie based on a Manga cartoon in which a sinister hypnotist manipulates the timid but unstable Ichi to dispatch various mobsters in horrifically violent fashion by invoking false memories of witnessing a rape.”
—Matthew Tempest and Alex King, Guardian Unlimited
“What saves Ichi from being just another violent exploitation film are the moments in-between the acts of violence (and sometimes during) and the context and deeper meaning they hold.”
—Joseph Luster, KFCcinema
“Truly one of the most repulsive films I’ve ever seen. It’s also screamingly hilarious, if you have any energy to chuckle between retching, flinching, and doubting your sanity. ”
—Robert Lewis, MovieForum.com
“Blood doesn’t politely trickle in Miike’s films: it gushes out in improbable fountains, painting walls and filling up small cars. His trademark point-of-view shots are taken from places other directors wouldn’t dream of: the bottom of a toilet bowl (as a man falls into it after being assassinated); within the ear canal (as it is pierced by a metal spike); even from inside a character’s vagina (don’t worry, it wasn’t real). He has depicted incest, drug abuse, teenage prostitution, violence against women and children, sexual perversion and necrophilia – and that was just in one film, Visitor Q, a “family” thriller that draws on Pasolini’s Theorem.”
—Steve Rose, Guardian Unlimited
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