Graveyard of Honor (Takashi Miike, 2002)

For this week's Shelf Life piece at Movie Mezzanine, I took a look at the Takashi Miike film that, more than the few others I've seen, makes me want to really explore his vast filmography. A stylish but muted yakuza thriller, Graveyard of Honor leaves the criminal element choking equally on its own blood and hypocrisy as they bring into their fold someone who shows just how absurd their codes of honor really are. One of the best gangster films ever. My full piece is up now.

13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, 2011)

It's a shame that Takashi Miike's reputation in the United States is based almost solely on his double whammy of extreme gore, Ichi the Killer and Audition. Those of us without the constitution for such horrific displays of excess turn away from the director, walling off the considerable corpus of one of the world's most prolific, varied and stylish filmmakers. Able to work in seemingly every genre and put a unique stamp on such worn tropes as the yakuza movie, the detective film and even the spaghetti Western, Miike guarantees to have at least one movie in his vast catalog for everyone.

13 Assassins, a remake of Elichi Kudo's 1963 film of the same name, may be one of his most broadly pleasing efforts. Spotted with a few examples of Miike's twisted imagination and caked with blood, 13 Assassins nevertheless proves engaging enough not to wallow in its occasional dips into the hellish realm Miike established with his two most famous films. Clocking in at just over two hours (in the version released internationally, at least), the film covers considerable ground, introducing the 13 characters plus supporting players and antagonists in half the time before unleashing Miike's pent-up ferocity for nearly a solid hour.