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Reviews
Koroshiya 1 (2001)
Good/evil?
The interesting thing about this film is the amorality of it. The two characters who battle are both psychopaths of different stripes, and although we feel some kind of sympathy for Ichii, he's hard to respect because he's such a coward.
His power is strange and unexplained, like in the Tetsuo series.
Does anyone know where in Japan this 'anger leads to metal spikes coming out of my body' thing comes from?
Is it just these two films, or is there some earlier series or Myth that they reference?
I consider Ichi the killer essential viewing.
Urchin (2007)
Saw in progress version
I saw a work-in-progress version of this movie at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference earlier this year.
It was a wonderfully strange story with cool effects and locations. Basically, it's about a homeless boy who does petty crimes for a living, and lives underground with an old 'Fagan' type character, who is called "The Old Man" in the cast list, although no one says his name in the movie. The Old Man is trying to lead them to "Paradise", as he keeps saying, which is somewhere deeper in the tunnels than where they live.
The bad guy is a dirty little man who coughs up blood and cuts peoples heads off, and he is trying to get to paradise before them.
It's hard to describe the rest of it without giving too much away, but there's a normal family that the homeless boy finds as he's doing a drug deal, and he has a little sister to protect, and he fights everyone with an electric fork that shocks people to death and lots of people die.
It reminded me of The City Of Lost Children but with more action, but it still had that contemplative feel that that film had. It was a complicated story too. I feel like there's more too it that I missed.
The director talked for a bit first, and the fact that they shot in the underground tunnels and in the subway without permission added to it for me. I also was very surprised by how good the acting was, even by the hackers Phiber Optik and Emmanuel Goldstein who played weirdly formal gangsters.
I want to see it again, especially if many things have changes. The film looked done to me, but the director said he had a few months of work left.
Anyone know when it is coming out?