Ichi the Killer

Ichi the Killer (殺し屋１, Koroshiya Ichi^?) is a 2001 Japanese film directed by Takashi Miike, based on Hideo Yamamoto's manga series of the same name.

Plot

The film stars Tadanobu Asano as Kakihara, a sadomasochist yakuza enforcer who enjoys giving and receiving pain in about equal measures. Kakihara's boss Anjo is murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion and a mysterious group arrives to clean up all evidence of the murder, stealing 3 million yen Anjo had in his room while there.

Many of Kakihara's compatriots, including Anjo's English-, Cantonese-, and Japanese-speaking girlfriend Karen (Alien Sun), suspect that Anjo simply took the money and ran, and Kakihara is convinced the man is alive. His investigation leads him to brutally torture a member of a rival clan, Suzuki (Susumu Terajima), by suspending him from a ceiling with metal hooks through the man's back, shoving stilettos through his body, and pouring boiling grease (from a meal of tempura) on him. In an example of the film's extremely black humor, when asked what he is doing, Kakihara responds nonchalantly, "Just a little torture."

The man turns out to be innocent. To make restitution, Kakihara slices off part of his tongue and offers it to Suzuki's boss (Jun Kunimura). However, the man who tipped Kakihara off to Suzuki and may have more real information, a disheveled old man nicknamed Jiijii ("grandpa" or "old man") (Shinya Tsukamoto), is nowhere to be found.

Jijii is, as it turns out, secretly orchestrating events. Under his wing is a young man, Ichi (Nao Omori), a confused and apparently psychotic individual who is normally unassuming and cowardly, but becomes homicidal when enraged (and who has crying fits when committing his murders). Ichi outfits himself in a rubber stuntman suit with shoes that have razors concealed in the heels, and after spying on a pimp brutalizing a prostitute kills first the pimp, then the girl. Jiijii has so manipulated Ichi as to confuse sexual arousal with homicidal lust in him, and accomplished this by creating a false memory in him of witnessing a rape in high school -- which he felt ashamed for wanting to participate in rather than stop.

Kakihara is eventually thrown out of the syndicate for his transgressions, but not before catching word of Ichi. He becomes fascinated with this "total sadist," since perhaps through him he can finally find the ultimate pain he has been seeking -- one which neither his girlfriend nor his boss could give him. In a related plot development, Jiijii attempts to get better control over Ichi by having Karen seduce him, but the plan backfires horribly and Karen is slaughtered.

Kakihara, along with two corrupt police-detective twin brothers, find Myu-Myu, a prostitute connected with Jiijii's gang. In one of the film's more disturbing scenes, they torture her for information. They find one of Jiijii's henchmen and torture him to find out where Ichi is. However, at this point, Ichi shows up at Kakihara's compound. He kills Kaneko in front of his son Takeshi, who then goes and kicks Ichi while he is lying on the floor crying. Kakihara soon realizes Ichi can't hurt him, so he inserts two pins into both his ears, to the extent where he is deaf in a suicide attempt. He then looks up as the camera pans to Ichi, standing up in tears holding Takeshi's head in his hand, with the child's corpse lying next to where he stands. He charges at Kakihara and, following a small fight, embeds one of his razor-bladed boots in the center of Kakihara's head. Kakihara stumbles back, claiming it is the greatest feeling ever and falls off the rooftop to his death. Kakihara is found on the compound floor by Jijii, dead but apparently unwounded by Ichi's final attack, revealing that Kakihara was hallucinating the attack (most likely due to sticking the pins into his ears too far and poking his brain), and thus committed suicide. Jiijii begins to cry, most likely because he realizes that Kakihara killed himself instead of being killed by Ichi. In essence, Kakihara died under his own terms, whereas Jiijii wanted it to be as a result of his doing (in the form of Ichi).

For reasons not made clear to the viewer, Jiijii himself is found hanging from a tree in the last moments of the movie; whether he himself committed suicide, or was killed, is unknown. In the last few seconds, a man turns around to face the camera; though his identity is unclear.

One Missed Call (2008)

One Missed Call is an American 2008 film remake of the Japanese film Chakushin Ari. The film was released in North America on January 4, 2008 and is directed by Eric Valette and written by Andrew Klavan. The film stars Edward Burns as Detective Jack Andrews and Shannyn Sossamon as Beth. It was produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures

Plot

Elizabeth Raymond (Shannyn Sossamon) is terrified by the deaths of four friends, three of which she personally witnessed, after they received chilling phone calls. The calls were sent from a dead friend's phone, but were apparently from the victims in the future, showing the exact time of their deaths and usually containing their last words. After every death, a small red candy is found in the victim's mouth. Beth reports these strange occurrences to the police; however, they think she is delirious. Detective Jack Andrews (Edward Burns), however, believes her, stating that his sister died in a similar way. Together, they begin to unravel the mystery of the chain of calls, but are unsure if they can figure it out before Beth's phone starts to ring the same eerie tune.

They eventually trace the series of calls back to a woman named Marie Layton, who was apparently abusing her children, Ellie and Laurel, for attention, as in cases of Munchausen by Proxy. They learn that Ellie later died of an asthma attack, and that Laurel is in foster care after her mother went missing.

Believing that Marie is the force behind the murders, Beth travels to the recently burned-down St. Luke's hospital, where Marie was last seen, bringing Laurel in for a cut on her arm. After searching the hospital, Beth finds the body of Marie in the hospital ducting, where she apparently burned to death, clutching a cell phone. Marie's corpse moves and assaults Beth while weeping, and collapses when Detective Andrews makes his way into the ducting to help Beth. During this episode, the time of Beth's own phone call passes without her dying.

After contacting authorities, who arrive to collect the body, Beth returns home and Andrews goes to tell Laurel that her mother is dead. While visiting, Andrews finds a video disc in the back of Laurel's teddy bear. The disc is a video of a camera Marie hid in her children's room to monitor Laurel and Ellie. Ellie, clothed in a black hoodie, cuts Laurel's arm with a large butcher knife. Marie comes in and finds the children, realizing that the abuse she has been blamed for has been Ellie all along, and leaves to take Laurel to the hospital, locking Ellie in the bedroom.

Ellie, frantic, tries to force open the door, and suffers an asthma attack. Reaching for her inhaler, she finds it empty, and dies while dialing her mother's cell phone, making Marie the first real victim of the curse, dying in the fire. Laurel enters the room and Andrews says that it was Ellie who hurt her all the time, not her mother. Laurel nods, and speaking for the first time since the death of her mother, says, "But she always gave me candy," and holds out one of the red hard candies found in the mouths of all the victims.

Andrews realizes that the force behind the murders is Ellie, and races to Beth to make sure she's all right. Finding Beth unharmed, Andrews and Beth hear the doorbell ring and a knock on the door. Andrews looks through the hole, only to die of a knife in his eye, as dictated by the last call received. Ellie then reaches out to strangle Beth, but luckily the spirit of Marie appears and grabs Ellie, saving Beth again. Marie's ghost vanishes, leaving Beth to stare bewildered into the distance. Then the phone begins to dial a number showing that the curse has not ended. Ellie is still out there, and there is another victim that is going to die.

One Missed Call 2

One Missed Call 2 (着信アリ2 Chakushin Ari 2) is the sequel to the popular J-Horror film One Missed Call.

Plot

Set a year after the original, One Missed Call 2 introduces us to Kyoko and her friend Madoka. Both women are teaching assistants at a kindergarten in the middle of Tokyo and when the pair aren't working, they seem to spend a lot of time in a Chinese restaurant where Kyoko’s boyfriend, Naoto, works. It is here that Kyoko first encounters the cursed ringtone.

Takako and detective Motomiya investigate the original cellphone murders, searching for Mimiko's grandparents. Takako visits Taiwan and finds Mimiko's grandfather dead, cellphone in hand. She discovers from her ex-husband, Yuting, that similar mysterious deaths are occurring there, and that both he and she are slated to die within an hour of one another. Kyoko and Naoto follow her, and the trio visit a ghost town where nearly all of the inhabitants have been slain by the curse of a girl named "Li Li," who was frequently bullied and abused, and eventually buried alive in a local mine.

The three investigate the town and are assaulted by numerous apparitions resembling both Li Li and the corpses of their slain friends. Kyoko is trapped by the vengeful spirit of Li Li, but Naoto is able to bring her to safety. They are pursued by the ghost, and Naoto sacrifices himself by answering Kyoko's ringing cell-phone.

Some time later, Kyoko recovers in a hospital bed. Takako checks her messages and discovers she has one missed call. The call reveals that Detective Motomiya has died in a car crash but not before telling paramedics, "It's Mimiko. Mimiko is here." Some officers from the Taipei Police show up in Kyoko's room and reveal that two bodies were found in the abandoned mine. Confused, Takako goes to Yuting's apartment and discovers his corpse, as well as a video camera which seems to show herself stabbing him, similar to the way she herself was stabbed in the mine by Mimiko. She opens her cellphone, and notices she has a missed call from herself, stamped with the current time, and spits a red candy ball from her mouth.

One Missed Call

One Missed Call (着信アリ, Chakushin ari^?) is a 2004 J-Horror movie directed by Takashi Miike. The trademark "ringtone of death" from this film had become rather popular, and was actually used as a ringtone and background music for unofficial haunted houses.

Plot

Yumi Nakamura (Kou Shibasaki) grows concerned when her friend Yoko receives a mysterious message on her cell-phone in her own voice, with a time-stamp in the future. A few days later, at the time appointed on the cell-phone message, Yoko is thrown in front of a train. Though the police determine the death a suicide, Yumi grows even more concerned when another friend receives a threatening message on his cell-phone, presaging another death.

Yumi is approached by Yamashita Hiroshi (Tsutsumi Shinichi), whose sister's death was also linked to an odd cell-phone message, and the two team up to solve the mystery. They are unable to prevent the death of another of Yumi's friends, but soon trace the calls back to the case of a woman whose daughters were regularly admitted to a local hospital with suspicious injuries. The two investigate the woman's last known whereabouts, an abandoned hospital. Once there, Yumi confronts a vengeful ghost in an attempt to break the chain of violent deaths.

the eye hongkong

The Eye (traditional Chinese: 見鬼; simplified Chinese: 见鬼; pinyin: Jiàn Guǐ; Cantonese Yale: Gin3 Gwai2, also known as Seeing Ghosts) is a 2002 East Asian horror film directed by the Pang Brothers. The film spawned two sequels by the Pangs, The Eye 2 and The Eye 10. There are two remakes of this film, Naina, made in 2005 in India and The Eye, a 2008 Hollywood production starring Jessica Alba and produced by Peter Chan and Paula Wagner.

Plot

Blind from the age of two, 20-year-old Hong Kong classical violinist Mun undergoes an eye transplant. At first, she is happy to have her sight restored, but is soon troubled when she starts to see mysterious figures that seem to foretell gruesome deaths. Her first night in the hospital she sees the blurry image of a shadow accompanying a patient out of her hospital room. The next morning she wakes up to find that patient dead.

She confronts her doctor's nephew (a psychologist) about the strange entities she has been seeing through her new eyes. He seems hesitant to believe her at first, but seeing as he cares about her and admitted to her as being "more than a patient" he trusts her judgment and accompanies her on a trip to northern Thailand where they learn of Ling, the donor of the corneas. They are at first told by a village doctor, when asking about Ling and her family, to not bother with it, but then, when it is mentioned she sees everything that Ling sees, the doctor seems to become more cooperative.

Having the ability to see death causes them to look down upon her as a witch and chase her away whenever she comes near. One day, Ling foresees a huge disaster. Despite her pleas, no one believes her; some even throw water at her to make her leave. Soon enough, the village becomes engulfed in a huge explosion from an unknown cause, killing at least 300 people. Ling and her mother survive because their house was situated far away from the blast. Feeling that it was all her fault, Ling hangs herself.

Ling's mother is both depressed and outraged; during all those years, she had always protected her daughter and had never given up on her. Yet, Ling gave up on herself; therefore her mother would not forgive her. Because of this, Ling's spirit becomes restless, reliving her death night after night. Ling eventually possesses Mun and begins to have her hang herself. Hearing Ling's cries for help, her mother rescues her daughter and the two make up. Shortly thereafter, Ling's spirit leaves.

On the way back, Mun's bus stalls in a traffic jam. As she looks out the window, she sees hundreds of dark figures lumbering about in the street. Horrified, she runs out of the bus. Knowing a huge catastrophe is imminent, she runs through the stopped cars yelling for people to get out. Suffering the same fate as Ling, no one believes her, thinking she is crazy (for they do not understand anything that the Chinese-speaking Mun is trying to tell them).

Meanwhile up ahead, the cause of the traffic jam is a huge tanker truck that has toppled over and is blocking the entire road. Unknown to everyone, it starts leaking natural gas as it spreads along the ground; a driver, who had turned off his engine earlier, restarts it, triggering a fire. The fire reaches the truck and it explodes, causing a chain reaction as other cars blow up and knock over a telephone pole. Dr. Wah runs forward, realizing that Mun is missing, and saves her from possible death; however, shards of glass pierce her eyes, blinding her just before Dr. Wah jumps to cover her as she falls onto the pavement, which saves her from being scorched by the fire. Afterwards, the dark figures lead the souls of the deceased away as Mun lays unconscious. In a flashback, Ling, observing, stands alone as the village burns around her. She breaks down and starts crying.

In the epilogue of the film, we are shown a scene similar to the beginning of the film - that of Mun (now blind, once again) walking the streets of Hong Kong. She admits that she does not want her sight, after seeing all she was meant to have seen, and seeing it through Ling's eyes. However, now she isn't alone, and has the friendship and support (and possible love interest) of Dr. Wah.

the eye

The Eye is a 2008 film starring Jessica Alba. It is a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong-Thai-Singaporean film of the same name. The film was rated PG-13 by the MPAA for "violence/terror and disturbing content

Plot

Sydney Wells, at the start of the film, is a successful classical violinist, although blind since the age of 5. She and her sister, who was seven years older, had been playing with fireworks, and they had been set off too close to her face, damaging her eyes.

Now, nearly 20 years later, Sydney undergoes a cornea transplant which causes her vision to begin returning, albeit blurry. At first, she is confused and disoriented, unable to understand if what she sees is "real" or not. During her first night with her new eyes, her bedmate at the hospital dies, and Sydney, not understanding, watches her blurry figure being led away by someone else. During her stay, she also becomes friends with a young girl named Alicia, who is there undergoing surgery for a brain tumor.

As time goes on, Sydney's vision begins to clear up and she struggles to understand the new world around her. She explains to her ocular therapist, Paul Faulkner, that she sees visions of fire and death and people dying. Her bedroom walls keep changing to stone and back again, and she sees what appears to be the ghosts of people around her, including a young woman who walks right through her in the street just before she sees her body lying on the ground. The young woman stares at her dead body in disbelief before being led away by a shadowy demonic form. Although skeptical at first, Paul later feels that her strange visions are her mind's way of interpreting what it was never able to before.

When a Chinese diner suddenly explodes around her, she finds herself in the charred remains. She learns that the accident that burned the diner down occurred weeks prior, revealing that her visions are of the past. Fleeing back to her apartment, she viciously smashes every light source and covers her windows (and eyes). Days later, her therapist forces his way in and removes her blinds, telling her to return to the real world.

Upon discovering that the face that appears in the mirror is not her own (which she finds out through photographs of her in the past), she becomes desperate to figure out who and what is sending her these visions. She begs Paul for help and finally convinces him to drive her to Mexico (at the risk of losing his medical license), in order to find out what happened to her donor, Ana Cristina Martinez.

They go to Ana Christina's house where they meet her mother, Rosa Martinez, whose face looks slightly burned on one side. Rosa recognizes her daughter's eyes in Sydney. Sydney says that she has been having visions that she can't explain. Rosa states that her daughter could see death and that as a child she would look at houses and cry, and later in the day somebody in that house would die. The villagers believed that she was causing death instead of predicting it, and they branded her as a witch. The conversation ends when Sydney suddenly sees a shadow behind Rosa, so she quickly tells Paul to call an ambulance. Rosa immediately after suffers a heart attack. As Rosa is laying on the floor suffering from the heart attack she murmurs to Sydney that she must save her daughter. As Paul drives her to the hospital, Sydney walks into Ana Christina's room and sees more images. She sees a concealed compartment in the floor open and then close, after she fights with the door to open it she witnesses Ana Christina hanging herself, she knocks down the bar she is hanging herself from and tells Ana Christina that it she believes that she is not a witch and that it is not her fault that she had the visions. In the end Ana Christina still dies. It turns out that the girl had committed suicide after failing to stop a factory fire that killed many of the people in the village and severely injured her own mother. Ana Christina had rushed into the factory and yelled for everyone to leave because they were in danger. The factory workers believed she was crazy and she was forcibly taken outside by two men who chained and padlocked the door from the outside to stop her from entering. Moments later, a furnace inside the factory exploded and most people died trapped in the fire by the padlocked door. After the fire, the deeply superstitious villagers, who had seen her crying outside the homes of people who were to die, believed she caused the disaster, and drove her to hang herself, calling her a witch and throwing stones at her.

Sydney and Paul return to the United States to discover the border is closed due to a high-speed chase on the other side. Dozens of vehicles are left stranded behind the closed gates. In the middle of the group of cars is a gas tanker with the number "106" on the front and a camper with a young girl in it; at the same time, many shadows move into the bus and take positions behind the people in it. Sydney then realizes that the images she keeps seeing — the number 106, bells, and a girl trapped in a fire — aren't of the past, but of the future. She rushes out of the car, shouting at everyone to flee, telling them a terrorist bomb is on the bus (although there isn't really a bomb — she just says this to get them off). The people listen and flee, just as a car smashes through the police barriers coming from the American side, and collides with the gas tanker. The tanker begins to leak gas and a spark causes the tanker to explode, destroying every vehicle in a chain reaction down the highway. While protecting the young girl, Sydney's eyes are injured by flying glass, turning her blind once more. In the next scene we see Sydney playing in a concert, and she tells us how okay she is about being blind, and how she was able to save many lives that night and bring Ana Cristina her eternal peace. Then we see that her eyes are clouded over, as they had been at the start of the movie.

my love

My Love (Russian: Моя любовь, Moya lyubov) is an Academy Award nominated paint-on-glass-animated 2006 short film directed by Aleksandr Petrov, based on A Love Story (1927) by Ivan Shmelyov. Work on the film took place in Yaroslavl, Russia over a period of three years at the studio DAGO Co. It was funded by Russia's Channel One and Dentsu Tec in Japan

History

Some time after the completion of the Oscar-winning The Old Man and the Sea (1999), Petrov returned to his hometown of Yaroslavl in Russia to work on his next film. My Love was finished in spring 2006 after three years' work and had its première at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival on August 27, where it won the Audience Prize and the Special International Jury Prize. On March 17, 2007, My Love was theatrically released at the Cinema Angelika in Shibuya (Japan) by Studio Ghibli, as the first release of the Ghibli Museum Library (theatrical and DVD releases of Western animated films in Japan).

In January 2007, Petrov announced that the film would eventually be released in theatres in Russia, combined with his other short films.

Artistic style and technique

The film's style is similar to that used in Petrov's other films and can be characterized as a type of Romantic realism. People and landscapes are painted and animated in a very realistic fashion, but there are sections where Petrov attempts to visually show a character's inner thoughts and dreams.

Because of Petrov's insistence on accuracy, especially where human emotions were concerned, about 20% of the film was made with a technique similar to rotoscoping.

Critical reaction

My Love has gathered many top awards at film festivals, and was called the "undoubted leader of the festival" at the 12th Open Russian Festival of Animated Film (Russia's most important domestic animation festival). The Japan Media Arts Festival jury called it "indisputably a masterpiece" and at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, it was called an "exquisite impressionist vision with a very poetic narrative and profound psychology"

At the same time, it has faced criticism from some of Petrov's colleagues, including Ivan Maximov and Yuriy Norshteyn, who have accused it of putting technical achievement ahead of true artistry. Mikhail Tumelya, who accepted the awards at the 12th ORFAF for Petrov (who was not able to come either on account of illness, or because of worry about the audience reaction to his film^], summed up the criticism in the following words, attributed to a Buddhist monk: "there are more interesting things in the world than banal perfection".

My Love was noticeably snubbed at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, receiving no awards despite being one of the "flagship" films.^[2] Some of the heaviest criticism has come from Chris Robinson, Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, who accused Petrov of wasting his talent on "trite, sentimental stories" and thanked him for not sending the film to Ottawa