Youth of the Beast

What a treat 2 awesome yakuza flicks in a month! Youth of the Beast is easily the coolest most coherent gangster film I have ever seen come from Japan. Violence and jazz splash across the screen with style years ahead of its time. I want to put a real emphesis on how well the story flowed. Seijun Suzuki's later and more popular Tokyo Drifter was a bit too sporadic, while Takashi Miike's yakuza movies with a few exceptions tend to be strongly influenced by 80's and 90's American action movies thus ending up a bit lite on story. Youth of the Beast on the other hand shares elements of more traditional story telling bristling with all the turbulent energy of the 1960s. There is such an awesome sense of anarchy in Seijun Suzuki's movies that very few Japanese directors have managed to emulate.
Fantastic entertainment
9/10

Dead or Alive

There has been little time for movies lately, Tatsunoko vs Capcom and Megaman 10 have eaten my soul. I made one last run to the Hollywood video and found two Takashi Miike films sitting next to each other in the back as if hidden away waiting just for me. Dead or Alive is far from Miike's best work, its 99 minutes and few things are worth mentioning except the last 5 minutes but holy crap, what a last 5 minutes. This is more than a wtf moment its a carefully constructed scene where Miike continues to top himself slowly pulling the viewer in with one intense act of violence after another until quite literally they blow up the world. Note that until this point there has been a fair amount of shooting, stabbing and punching but nothing too far removed from reality, which is what makes the ending so freaking fantastic. This is for Miike fans only.
7.9/10