One Missed Call

First, I strongly disagree with some other posters at the board who weren't bothered by Chakushin ari facing a Hollywood remake. Why can't Hollywood keep their dirty fingers away when they fail in their own miserable creativity. Anyhow...

I've just started to dig deeper into the works of Takashi Miike and I have no problems admitting that his movies are awesome. Chakushin ari is another ghost tale but it gets a bit special when Miike-san is in charge of things. What you get in Chakushin ari is, besides the beautiful surroundings and awesome camera work, tension, thrills and a plot which does quite good for being in this genre. It has its moments of originality and compared to the works of Hideo Nakata, I'd say Miike here accomplish a heavier load of tension throughout the whole movie, while Nakata's movies have tension coming in waves, sort of.

I have really nothing to whine about here or rant at. The actors are doing a good job and the piece kept me interested throughout the entire playtime. Thumbs up.

A high school student named Yumi Kamura finds with a group friends in a coffee bar,while her pal Yoko receives a cellular call with a rare tone which she had heard before.Into screen phone appears one missed call.The message is sent for her cellular and contains a horrible shout that sounds like her voice.Besides the call is from three days after.A time later young people receive the call are dead for terrible killing.A strange curse causes a criminal rampage among various adolescents.

The picture gets suspense,horror,shocks,grisly terror and several eerie scenes.The film displays hair-rising and horrifying images with a bit of blood and graphical gore.Mysterious and sinister atmosphere is well made by the photographer Yamamamoto. Takashi Mike(Ichi the killer) direction sometimes is actually creepy and frightening like proves the first entry ¨Dead or alive¨with the execution starring by a mobster and much more in ¨The audition¨.This horror film is inspired by ¨The ring¨with certain remembrance more even storyline coincidences.Like that and in fact happen in the most part of recently Japan horror cinema deals about an urban legend.It's the initial argument for introducing the terror in the ordinary life by means a phone.While the look is suitable spooky and eerie the plot spread to the breaking point and the final resolution results to be a little confused.The flick will like to Japan modern terror cinema enthusiastic.

Even fans of Takashi Miike (I'm one) should be honest. He's made some bravura masterpieces like Audition and 13 Assassins but he's also churned out a lot of overlong, incoherent stinkers, of which this is one.

The premise - that people receive cell phone messages from their future selves recorded just before the moment of their deaths - had a lot of potential but Miike spaffs all that up the wall by drowning the film in slow, boring exposition and skimping on the many inventive and creepy deaths this film should have contained.

The biggest problem here is that the backstory behind why all this is happening is uninteresting and revealed in tedious chunks throughout. Instead of making the main events in the present scarier they actually make them seem more mundane. There's also a lack of clarity around how and why these events can be stopped.

Another thing that bugged me was characters behaving irrationally. The victims heard their own words recorded at the moments of their future deaths but didn't appear to make any concerted effort not to robotically repeat those same words when the time came. You'd think that it might occur to them that to be in a hotel room or a cop shop at the predicted instant of their death while definitely not uttering the words on the premonitory recording might keep them safe. But no. No one tries this and they all shamble into the jaws of doom like the pathetic, suicidal sheep they are.

This could have been a great film but it was an opportunity badly missed. Still there's plenty of other Miike to check out. It's not like the man hasn't given us anything else to choose from.

Most Japanese movies are considered as low-budget compared to their Hollywood counterparts. This is because their production costs are so high. However this factor does not deter Japanese creative production teams to come up with movie gems, in different genres.

In the realm of Japanese horrors for example, a studio working with a limited budget has to resort to Jaws-style direction, in which you hardly see or visualise the ghosts/monsters.

And it is through the movie's simplicity, or by not showing/explaining too much, that J-horrors have turned up the notch on the haunting and horror levels through movies such as Ring and Dark Water. Of course there are the still plenty of gorefest movies such as Suicide Circles and Ichi the Killer, the latter being a courtesy of that notorious but prolific J-director, Takashi Miike.

So it is remarkable and truly rewarding to see how Miike toned down his tastes for the twisted and perverted in One Missed Call. Furthermore he implemented his flair of storytelling through symbolisms and graphic metaphors quite nicely. Any shock/gore elements were used in such a way that they serve the movie, instead of downgrading it to a cheesy flick.

In conclusion, One Missed Call satisfies on many levels, providing you keep an open mind and just enjoy the ride. Another plus of the movie is the appearances of several gorgeous J-idols, such as Kazue Fukishii and Kou Shibasaki. Nifty!

This just might be the most interesting psychological drama that I've seen since Miike's own masterpiece Audition (1999), and one that it seems has sadly been misinterpreted by many critics and viewers as being a work of simple J-Horror by numbers. Though it has elements of this, the characteristics of J-Horror, which are very much rooted in standard social and spiritual taboos that many Japanese people take incredibly seriously, are used as window dressing here, intended to distract the audience from the more important and subtle ideas at work behind the surface of the narrative.

It certainly isn't a pastiche or a spoof as some viewers have indicated, though you could argue that it works on a certain satirical level, with the odd hint of benign humour that we've come to expect from Miike woven throughout. However, judging from much of the stylistic tone of the film, with its deeper allusions to child abuse and the murky and alienated tone that the director attaches to it, I honestly can't imagine that this is meant to be laughed at. Those who claim that the film is a comedy or a spoof are more likely to be Miike fans that are unfamiliar with the broader aspects of his work and the way in which he puts his films together; instead judging his films simply on the shock-value and tongue-in-cheek triviality of projects like Ichi the Killer (2002) and Dead or Alive (1999). Yes, he does accept any film that is offered to him, and more often than not chooses work that he feels he can do something interesting with; experimenting with the form and content and occasionally adding his own touches that are often subversive and somewhat attention seeking, but he always has in mind an approach that best suits the material.

He doesn't condescend to his work; there's no cynicism here. As ever, Miike is fulfilling the wishes of his producer whilst simultaneously bringing something else to the film that may have been missed by a lesser filmmaker, more interested in the superficial quality of the story. In this case, a sly comment on the media and how it manipulates tragedy for profit; turning horror and pain into spectacle. It also continues the theme of lost youth; something quite prevalent in Japanese cinema, with films like Battle Royale (2000), Visitor Q (2001), Pulse (2001) and All About Lily Chou-Chou (2002) documenting the recent struggles in both social environments and education, with the idea of a generation of Japanese youth overwhelmed by expectations of family and society and cast adrift in such a way as to leave them ultimately more venerable to a greater evil (be it drugs, gang violence, suicide or crime). It's all done metaphorically of course - with the J-horror elements used to mask these ideas - though certainly, in many of the scenes, we see characters, kids even, isolated and with no one to turn to.

Think about the presentation of both the film and the narrative; the absence of responsible adults creating a ghost world that these kids drift in and out of, turning only to each other for solace. The creation of a nocturnal world where school children hang out on railway bridges in the early hours of the morning, watching scenes of abject horror in a way that suggests tragic familiarity. The way that the background characters - the everyday people on the street - huddle under umbrellas watching a televised exorcism in the centre of Shinjuku completely cut off and detached from everything that is happening, becoming an almost representation of the audience even; eating up the pain and suffering as dismissible entertainment and completely missing the personal horror and exploitation of the abuse itself. Likewise, look at the scenes shot during the day. The streets are mostly empty, save for the presence of the adult media, the police (who have a complicated role within the film) and the students who are at the centre of the whole thing.

Those claiming that this is a comedy seem uneducated when it comes to Miike and his work; looking for the vapid cartoon character and his torrents of gore and depraved sex, and not the finely nuanced filmmaker who gave us excellent, multi-layered works like Shinjuku Triad Society (1995), Rainy Dog (1997), The Bird People in China (1998), Audition (1999), Dead or Alive: Birds (2000) and Gozu (2003). As a horror film, this is effective. The scenes in the abandoned hospital, although clichéd, work incredibly well at ramping the tension. However, there's more to the film once we dig beneath the surface. The final act of the film takes place on at least three different levels; taking in the real, the imagined and the abstracted memory of both. The way Miike brings the various elements together - using stylised production design and skewed perspectives - creates a hall of mirrors like sense of abstraction familiar from the final act of Audition. Think about it. Is Gozu simply an absurd spoof on the latent homosexuality of the Yakuza sub-genre, or is there a more interest sub-textual argument about identity and gender being woven within? One Missed Call works on a similar level.

Those who make the effort to watch Miike's work will know that there is always much more to his films than it initially seems, though you really have to work at it. To suggest that this is a spoof because you fail to appreciate the subtle, sub-textual storytelling and ask simply for mere cartoon-like abstraction is a discredit to a great filmmaker and those of us familiar with Miike's work beyond that of Ichi the Killer. With One Missed Call, Miike gives us a multi-layered film; shocking and satirical in equal measures and tied to a truly tragic depiction of loss, abuse and alienated youth.