FIRST LOVE (2019)

 You could call this one director Takashi Miike's version of TRUE ROMANCE where you take a couple and drop them into the middle of some mobsters fighting over drugs. Miike seems to have gone the David Cronenberg route where he starts out making really strange oddball cinema and then ends up making more straight forward gangster movies. Of course Miike has made way more fims then David so he's really ventured outside of any strict genre guidelines over the years. A bit overlong at almost 2 hours but it does manage to maintain a high energy level throughout. Heads roll, arms roll and lots of gun-fu commences.

 

YOUNG THUGS: INOCCENT BLOOD (1997)

  Japanese director Takashi Miike has made some enjoyable extremely violent films that I've enjoyed like FUDOH and ICHI THE KILLER and then there are the weird films(VISITOR Q for one) that I found interesting even though they seem pretty pointless beyond just being weird. A film reminiscing about youth in Japan with tumultuous relationships is probably not exactly what I would want to see from him. It is mixed with the usual hyper-violence so things don't fall too much into the romantic chick flick mode  but still one of my least favorite Miike films so far. 

 There was a follow-up to this called YOUNG THUGS: NOSTALGIA the following year, which is actually a prequel, but I'm in no hurry to see that one. There's also s 1996 film titled BOYS BE AMBITIOUS which is supposed to be part one except it takes place in the 70s and wasn't helmed by Miike.  

MPD PSYCHO (2000)

 Japanese director Takashi Miike is kind of hit or miss for me.  There's some stuff by him(AUDITION, ICHI THE KILLER, FUDOH) that I really love a lot and then there's a bunch of his other stuff(GOZU, VISITOR Q, DEAD OR ALIVE) that's at least visually interesting but doesn't really have anything else going for it.  He's basically the Asian equivalent of David Lynch(another guy whose output I find totally uneven). This here made for Japanese TV series would definitely fall into the "it's interesting to look at" category for me but I have no idea what it's about or why I should care about any of the characters.  It's based on a comic book that I've never read and it's a TV mini-series where they optically censor out the gory bits.  Even with this it still seems like something way too bizarre to ever be on public TV in America.  The closest thing here, to carry on the Lynch-comparision, probably would have been TWIN PEAKS but I don't remember that show having women dying with things jammed into their vaginas(at least I think that's what happens, it's all very blurry thanks to Mr. TV-censor).  Only recommended if weird-for-weird's-sake is your cup of tea.