Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake) (Fantasia Fest 2012)

Presenting a comic romantic over-the-top ultraviolent musical, wherein bourgeois values resolutely seek to pacify a versatile tumultuous rogue, the undying and overpowering intensity of love unwaveringly guiding their reformative resolve, streetwise unconditional consistent combative tenacity governing his, Takashi Miike's Ai to Makoto (For Love's Sake) does not refrain from elaborately executing every consummate class cliché ever created, sensationally synthesizing quixotic and hardboiled extremes, relentlessly reproducing unerringly awkward amorously explosive motifs, in the implacable pursuit, of emancipated co-dependence.

Group dynamics repetitively insist that young Makoto Taiga (Satoshi Tsumabuki) obediently pay his respects, but as their challenges are uniformly discombobulated, his limitless disenfranchised individuality, and consequent unwittingly seductive magnetism, remain intact.

Attaching a monetary value to the ability to maintain specific ideological viewpoints, while catastrophically choreographing their constructive affects, Ai to Makoto pugnaciously parodies the domain of rehabilitative reckoning, while chaotically kitschifying the practice of revenge.

For love's sake.

Crows Zero 2 (Fantasia Fest 2010)

A vindictive gang war has erupted between two rival Japanese high schools in Takashi Miike's Crows Zero 2, after the former leader of Suzuran Sho Kawanishi (Shinnosuke Abe) is released from a juvenile detention centre. Members of the Hosen Academy come to Suzuran seeking vengeance for their murdered leader whom Sho killed with a knife 2 years previously (the using of weapons being forbidden in their street wars). But their pleas fall on deaf ears as Suzuran grants Sho sanctuary and pseudo-leader Genji (Shun Oguri) infuriates them with his insolence. Thus, the truce between the two schools is broken, and the divided Suzuran must do their best to prepare for the onslaught of violence eagerly and efficiently unleashed by the scorned Hosen.

Takashi Miike's expert directing immediately resituates us within the hardboiled world of Crows Zero, wherein respect is won through direct physical confrontation and one must be resiliently ready to battle. The plot is dense and each thread skillfully and intricately woven into its fabric receives carefully crafted attention. Genji must learn to lead if he is to defeat Hosen and Serizawa (Takayuki Yamada) reminds him that leadership requires more than a swift and precise knock out punch. Genji also contends with his Yakuza father whose defences he is still unable to penetrate. Hosen leader Tiger Narumi (Nobuaki Kaneko) runs a tight ship while keeping the renegade and limitless Ryo (Gô Ayano) in check. And after discovering the grave of former Suzuran student Ken Katagiri (Kyôsuke Yabe), Sho discovers that becoming a Yakuza is not as easy as he originally believed.

The ways in which Miike builds Crows Zero 2 make it an effective sequel as he successfully expands the Crows Zero universe's historical, cultural, and symbolic dimensions. Miike also doesn't forget that he's dealing with high school students and intermittently includes embarrassing coming-of-age distractions which effectively subvert the film's serious nature. Underprivileged students doing their best to get by, studying the only subject at which they excel, Crows Zero 2 salutes and ennobles the dog-eat-dog code of the young adult underground Japanese gang, providing their trials and tribulations with sincere reflection, while directly interrogating conceptions of masculinity. With original music by Naoki Otsubo.

Sukiyaki Western Django (Fantasia Fest 2008)

With enough intertextuality to rival an Angela Carter novel, Takashi Miike blitzkriegs his way into the traditional American western, blasting through its chest to lacerate lungs, spleens, livers, pancreases, hot-pumping blood-frothing black and white hearts, leaving enough blood viscidly slithering in its reels to satisfy legions of cinophiliatic sadists, masochists too, craving construction, conflagration, annihilation, irons, flowers, prurience, self-indulgence, honour, death, love, viciously and communally feasting upon one another, in a beautiful beastial banquet of carnally re-formulated comedic and romantic horror, leaving no trope untethered, in a search for individual purity (whose owner wants nothing to do with it). If you are searching for another Western, and only seek to see one and only one ever again, ensure that your pick is Sukiyaki Western Django: there's more artistry in 35 seconds of this searing bloodbath than 56 minutes of 3:10 to Yuma or The Assanination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, although these films seek to achieve objective reverberations of a different breed.

Two Japanese clans meet. In Nevada. They fight, they forage, they flicker and fuck, ravaging culture for idyllic muck, breaking through history's presence in stone, growing a bleeding, convulsing, pulsing, impoverished, unleashed, brazen, tome.