GOZU (DVD) JAPANESE W/ENGLISH SUB/NOT RATED DVD

Gozu
At a yakuza gathering, Ozaki (Shô Aikawa of the Dead or Alive films) unsettles the boss (Renji Ishibashi) when he claims a small dog outside the restaurant is a "yakuza attack dog" and viciously smashes it to death. Minami (Hideki Sone) is assigned to drive the apparently unstable Ozaki to a remote location and kill him. Minami considers Ozaki a "brother," and feels ambivalent about this assignment. After several odd incidents on the road, Minami ends up in the small town of Nagoya, where things get even odder. Unable to get a signal on his cellular, Minami goes into a restaurant to use the phone, and Ozaki, whom he thought to be unconscious, promptly vanishes. When Minami finally contacts the boss, he's told to get in touch with the local Shiroyama crew. Minami doesn't know his way around, and the weird locals seem more interested in animated, interminable arguments about the weather than in helping him find his way. Eventually he runs into Nose (Shôhei Hino), who seems relatively sane, and offers to help him find Ozaki. Minami spends the night at an inn, where the innkeeper (Keiko Tomita) possesses a strange lactating power (which she's eager to demonstrate), and mistreats her mentally challenged employee (Harumi Sone). After another frustrating day searching for Ozaki, during which he encounters the decrepit Shiroyama crew, Minami finds a note from his "brother," and travels to the town dump to meet him, only to find Ozaki (now played by Kimika Yoshino) in a transformed state. Gozu was directed by the prolific Takashi Miike from a script by Sakichi Satô, who also wrote the script for Miike's Ichi the Killer. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Cast Hideki Sone as Minami Sho Aikawa as Ozaki Kimika Yoshino as Female Ozaki Shohei Hino as Nose Keiko Tomita as Innkeeper Harumi Sone as Inkeeper's brother Ryo Ishibashi as Boss

Crew Takashi Miike - Director Yasushi Shimamura - Editor Koji Endo - Composer (Music Score) Akira Ishige - Production Designer Kazunari Tanaka - Cinematographer Harumi Sone - Producer Kana Koido - Producer Hiroshi Tsurumaki - Sound/Sound Designer Sakichi Sato - Screenwriter

Gozu
Takashi Miike is a master of body horror and squirm-inducing sexual weirdness, as he's taken many opportunities to demonstrate. He's also a filmmaker capable of great wit and the cogent dissemination of actual ideas. For those who can withstand the visceral terror of the torture scenes in Audition, there is the reward of seeing an intelligent filmmaker using and subverting genre filmmaking techniques to explore an ugly facet of his culture. Gozu has its memorable moments, certainly, and is not the off-the-wall barrage of weirdness for its own sake to which Miike's work occasionally descends. It doesn't quite cohere, and its story and tone owe too much to Oliver Stone's U-Turn and David Lynch's work, but Miike has a knack for tapping into deep-seated cultural anxieties, particularly male sexual anxiety, that few filmmakers can match. Gozu starts off as a goofily offbeat yakuza story. The buildup is actually less banal and more bizarrely eventful than the omantic drama trappings that set up Audition, and while the payoff is doesn't have the same brutal logic as in the earlier film, it is equal in the visceral way it sears itself into one's brain. There are odd bits and borrowings in Gozu, like the cue-card-reading woman and the yakuza boss' sexual obsession, and the bizarre relationship of the innkeeper and her brother, that could have been invented by some other filmmaker, but the climactic birth scene, perhaps the most disturbingly graphic in the history of cinema, is Miike's and Miike's alone. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
 

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General Specifications: Language Options: Japanese Subtitle Options: English Sound Processing: DD2: Dolby Digital Stereo Additional Features: 16x9 anamorphic video transfer Letterboxed Audio commentary with film critics Andy Klein and Wade Major Interview with Takashi Miike featuring directors Guillermo Del Toro ("Hellboy") and Eli Roth ("Cabin Fever") Making-of featurette Still gallery US and Japanese trailers Biographies On/off subtitles Film notes by author Tom Mes Gozu title theme song DVD Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1: Theatre Wide-Screen MPAA Rating: NR DVD Discs Included: 1 DVD Sides: 1 DVD DVD Region Code: Content Length: 129 min Part of Series: Takashi Miike Collection   DVD Chapters: Side #1 -- 1. Yakuza Attack Dog [5:31] 2. To Nagoya [4:05] 3. Yakuza Attack Car [3:48] 4. Dead Cold Aniki [2:39] 5. Public Telephone [3:29] 6. Coffee and Chicken Custard [2:59] 7. Disappearance [3:56] 8. The Shiroyama Clan? [2:17] 9. White Face Man [2:48] 10. We Are Alike [2:31] 11. Riddle [3:26] 12. Masakazu Inn [6:28] 13. Wash Your Back? [3:04] 14. It's a Service [2:15] 15. Crotchless Panties [4:30] 16. Nose-Chi [5:18] 17. Service Is Our Motto [6:22] 18. He's Been Dead... [3:56] 19. Rice Store [2:28] 20. Liquor Store [1:51] 21. Milk Factory [6:44] 22. Gozu [6:11] 23. Dumping Ground [3:59] 24. Woman Ozaki [2:04] 25. Temptation [4:04] 26. Torada's Daughter [6:16] 27. Ladle [5:22] 28. I'm Ready [8:01] 29. Rebirth [5:28] 30. In a Bath Tub [4:46]