A businessman is sent to a remote village to investigate a jade mine. He's joined by a debt-collect Yakuza. But what they find is much more valuable. I can't really go into any more detail though. Partly because I don't wish to spoil one single moment of the magic or wander of this great film and partly because even if I were to go into detail my mere words wouldn't do it justice. The is a film you have to watch, nay, experience for yourself. Do NOT go into it expecting over-the-top violence, graphic deviant sexuality, or any of the other ingredients of more well known Takashi Miike films as this is more than that MUCH more. One of, if not THE best film in Miike's quite impressive extensive cannon.

My Grade: A

DVD Extras: Commentary by Miike expert, Tom Mes; Takashi Miike interview; Bio/Filmagraphies; Promotional material; Annie Laurie bio and poem; Theatrical Trailer; Trailers for "Shinjoku Triad Society", "Rainy Dog", and "Ley Lines"

Despite my thinking one of Miike's other films, HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS, is a great film, my feelings about his subsequent films I have viewed just aren't as positive. While this movie is much better than the extremely disgusting AUDITION, CITY OF LOST SOULS or ICHI THE KILLER, I only mildly liked this film. Is it weird?! Yes,...but not so funny or endearing as KATAKURIS. It just didn't gel for me. I think a lot of it was that the first 1/3 of the film seemed pretty disjoint and uninteresting. Once they made it to the distant land they were seeking, the film improved considerably but not enough to make me especially like it. It's funny, but a friend told me I MUST see this movie because he knew I'd like it, but I just was left pretty flat. Mostly because the main character and the nutty Yakuza guy he accompanied on the trip just weren't particularly people I could care anything about or care what happened to them.

By the way, the film in many ways is reminiscent of LOST HORIZON--not an exact re-make but certainly inspired by it nonetheless.

The Bird People in China is one of the most curiously engaging films yet made by Takashi Miike, mainly because it doesn't adhere to a set conventional palette to its characters or to how things will end up. What is for the first half a quest story for a young businessman, Wada (a good actor in Masahiro Motoki) and a grumpily, foul-mouthed gangster, Ujiie (Renji Ishibashi, who's been in several Miike movies and is outstanding here),who are both after a vein of jade that would be worth a lot to both of their employers, is not all it seems to be.

This 'Sierra Madre' type of story gives way to it being a quest really for a psychological relief from the norms, while waiting for safe passage back to civilization, and really delves deep into what it means to find yourself more than happy in the middle of nowhere. The gift of flight becomes a captivating metaphor, sometimes used visually and sometimes kept at a distance, and also what cultural barriers, when broken (the divide between Japanese and Chinese is accentuated just enough, and there's an intelligent way of seeing 'the other' on both sides) can allow for wonderful things amid some previous dark moments.

Like in a number of any given films I could mention, the supporting character- or rather 2nd lead here as case really is- is a little more fascinating than the main lead, this case being the yakuza's transformation being a lot more gripping for the viewer than the businessman. While the young Wada becomes infatuated with a song sung by a descendant of the original 'bird people' who came to and established this remote, primitive riverside village, and ends up (again, the 'other') translating it verbatim for his tape recorder, Ujiie has to face demons that come out eventually through his escapism.

He's actually the first to become delighted into this strange world of these kids who are sort of the "shame" children of the village, possibly because of the past, or something else, and he becomes connected with them (there's a delightful couple of scenes where he has fun playing around with the kids by the riverside). But there's also the nightmares he always has- and once Miike shows us this nightmare it's evident, as an rapidly lit extended shoot-out between Ujiie and others, that it's a truly great dream scene in style and content- and they come out as safe passage seems possible.

Ishibashi plays this man with a level of dark humor early on, albeit with an incredibly ticked-off side to his yakuza nature, and then as life in the village goes on around him, he changes dramatically as his character views not even on if killing is right or wrong or whatever, but that the whole planet is doomed, and that a village like this is as sacred as the possibility to be apart of the bird people. The catharsis, maybe more than any other in a Miike movie (at least a non-satire) is staggeringly good.

But it's not only the characters in the Bird People in China that are compelling, though even the role most limited (the girl Si-Chang) is set mostly to sing her quasi Irish folk song as part of Wada's infatuation, and for most of the first half there's the usual craziness found in practically all of Miike's movies with his characters at one point indulging in toads for hallucination (a very funny scene),and the gimmick of the Chinese/Japanese guide gets knocked out memory-wise only to regain it later on. Miike, with his great collaborator Hideo Yamamoto, crafts his film visually as if he were emulating Herzog, which is never a bad thing if done well and right.

While there isn't that same sense of poetry (with some exceptions of course),it's always wonderful to look at, sometimes with his camera making his characters seem like specks in the village, or in heightening the strange (the dream scene) and the fantastical (the silly CGI shot of the turtles pulling the raft),and in a sort of magnificence when we see quieter moments (Wada pretending to be asleep around the paranoid yakuza) and the power of possible flight.

Beneath Miike's occasional tendencies for tawdry exhibition and ultra-violence in his films, he has a gift for digging into characters that in any other screenplay would be perfunctory or just throwaways, and revealing them in ways that only he can do. This time is also of note because it's not a satire or gonzo exercise either, but something complex about human nature in adaptability to environments and going for something more than the usual (dreams). And as well with Miike, he has one of the great eyes of any Japanese filmmaker, and I'm sure I would count some specific shots in the film as being some of the best from the 90s too. It may have its sentimental lodgings sometimes, and it goes a little long on the section of Wada with the translations, but there's often a lot with it being a superlative tragic-comedy; a very good work that will make you look at the filmmaker just a wee bit differently than usual.