Gozu

If there's one thing you can count on Takashi Miike to do, it's to provide truly bizarre filmmaking. He's outdone himself with Gozu, though.

After increasingly erratic behavior (which includes a hilarious attack on a Pomeranian dog, whom he insists is really a yakuza-eating pooch), Yakuza goon Ozaki proves to be too much of a liability for his organization. The boss orders Minami, another goon who happens to be best friends with Ozaki, to take him to the city of Nagoya to be disposed of. After some comic mishaps along the way, Ozaki is accidentally killed and his body goes missing; Thus poor minami is left to search the city of Nagoya, which looks like a mixture between an abandoned strip mall and a giant truckstop (with a scrapyard thrown in to add some color). Things get weirder from there; from hyper-lactating inn keepers to soup ladles stuck in unlikely places to shitting ghosts (I kid you not... That scene is one of the funniest I've seen in ages), the bizarre factor just increases until the final, unforgettable twenty minutes or so- which are a prime example of both Miike's fondness for stretching an uncomfortable scene to almost unbearable extremes and his knack for nailing shots that are impressive both in concept and execution.

There is a lot of David Lynch in the plot, and a bit more of David Cronemberg at his most carnal (although neither of them have ever been even remotely as weird or explicit as this). The pacing is a bit slack here and there, and while a theme gradually emerges, it never even remotely makes sense. Which is just as good, as it doesn't really need to (and I suppose it was never intended to, either). Overlong at more than two hours, it's still thought provoking, engaging and a damn hoot as well.