"TOGA!"

Full disclosure: I’ve seen a total of two Takashi Miike movies, Ichi the Killer and Gozu.  But based on those and basically every trailer for every other movie of his, I felt comfortable in the assessment that he was a lot like Nuprin.  Little.  Yellow.  Different.  Sorry, I chose a really racist way to say that he’s weird.  Point being, when the new trailer for 13 Assassins hit, I was a little taken aback by how normal it was.

Cult director Takeshi Miike (Ichi the Killer, Audition) delivers a bravado period action film set at the end of Japan’s feudal era in which a group of unemployed samurai are enlisted to bring down a sadistic lord and prevent him from ascending to the throne and plunging the country into a wartorn future. [Apple]

And wait, isn’t “bravado” a noun?  IT’S LIKE EVERYTHING I THOUGHT I KNEW IS WRONG!

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You know what I love about Japan?  Even commercials for children’s toys (or tv shows, maybe?) involve visible erections and terrifying surrealistic nightmare fuel.  Yeah, so… Sorry, but I don’t have any idea what this is.  I tried to look it up, but the commercial appears to be for something called “inochi” and “inochi” apparently means “life, spirit and nature” in Japanese.  Kind of broad. Anyway, feel free to weigh in if you’ve got any knowledge on the subject.  The more Japanese stuff I see the more I wonder if Takashi Miike is just the Japanese Ron Howard.

UPDATE: According to my erudite readers, this is from the most recent Takashi Murakami art exhibition.
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ComingSoon recently debuted a new clip from Sukiyaki Western Django, the new movie from bizarro Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, opening August 29th.  Quentin Tarantino, who features prominently in this one, has an innovative acting style.  He transcends simple imitation, creating characters unlike any you’ve ever seen and delivering his lines without regard to inflection or punctuation.  It’s a method I like to call Alien Vs. Cue Card.

This is the trailer for Japanese director Takashi Miike’s English-language Samurai western, Sukiyaki Western Django. The cast is all Japanese except for Quentin Tarantino, and it’s set in the 1400s, though you’d never know it with all the gatling guns and Union Jack chaps. But time-period discrepancies and Quentin Tarantino not being able to act are small considerations in a Miike movie. Who cares about that stuff when people are giving birth to animals and getting strangled with their own intestines and stuff? I have a graphic violence boner already.

“A set of twins — one a hard-working student and the other a drifter — team up with a dropout to unlock the secrets of the universe and to build one of their own,” 

Thanks to Robo for the tip.