Welcome to Blu-Steel.
This blog works the mean streets of HD video — the places where men are in bad need of a shave, the femmes are all fatale, and someone just might have an axe with your name on it.
I’ll be writing about down-and-dirty genre films on Blu-ray, making the Blu-Steel blog unique in its oddball specificity: B-movies, films noir, crime thrillers, horror movies … whatever oddities are lurking out there in HD.
Low-rent movies on a high-tech video format. Yeah. That’s it.
I hear this HiDef web site is gearing up for the big Jan. 5 Blu-ray release of “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.” I’m bracing for dark and dismal with a probability of meat cleavers.
Let’s kick off the festivities with “Audition,”
“Audition” is no routine J-horror movie, although it certainly helped popularize that genre in the West. Modern torture-porn movies such as “Hostel” have nothing on this film, yet it remains a work of art.
Miike’s film has plenty to offer the serious movie lover — but even the director feels a need to warn off viewers of gentler sensibilities:
“You may regret watching it,” Miike humbly says in the Blu-ray’s introduction to “Audition.”
The movie somehow blends mind-bending horror and lonely-hearts drama.
The tale is of a handsome yet lonely widower who uses a movie audition as a ruse for meeting women. He’s soon obsessed with a long-haired beauty who, as it turns out, comes with plenty of baggage — stuffed full of instruments of torture.
“She didn’t want to be mean to guys,” says actress Eihi Shiina, who played the part. “It was her way of expressing her love.” Yikes.
This 10th anniversary edition is a welcome update of the title, even though the wear and relatively low production values are apparent on Blu-ray. Certainly this is one of the best horror Blu-rays of 2009.
Devotees no doubt wanted to go kiri-kiri-kiri (deeper-deeper-deeper) with a definitive anniversary edition, but Shout’s Blu-ray (and DVD) editions are by far the best to date. They include a feature-length talk by Miike and his screenwriter, as well as more than an hour’s worth of cast interviews.
Leading man Ryo Ishibashi and supporting actor Renji Ishibashi sit for interesting interviews, but you’ll want to start with the talk by actress Shiina, a chatty Kathy who tells about living in this famed movie’s shadow.
As a result of “Audition,” “I’m on bloody sets all the time” (doing horror movies),” she says with a laugh. “This is not good.”
As for “Audition’s” horrific finale, she says filming it “wasn’t as shocking as most people (would) think.” Miike directed it “in a cute way.”
Actor Ryo Ishibashi agreed: “Miike was having so much fun with the scene.” Especially when the leg was sawed off.
Renji Ishibashi, who has appeared in numerous Miike films over the years, has this to say about his friend and director: “He is strange and I hope someone stops him.”
Glenn Abel has no intention of stopping Takashi Miike. He writes the blogs DVD Spin Doctor and Download Movies 101. Glenn is the DVD/Blu-ray columnist for Moving Pictures magazine.