First Love (2019) by Takeshi Miike

[cranefly]

[Seen on Kanopy.]

A young boxer and young woman run afoul of the Yakuza and a Chinese gang.

Pretty much standard Yakuza fare from Miike.  Enjoyable enough, but nothing new.  Ultra-violence?  I don't know.  I seem to be losing my ability to recognize it.  Let me ask an honest question.  If someone gets beheaded, and afterwards the head is making expressions while lying on the ground, does that fall into the ultra class?

Anyway, this is a serious movie.  Occasionally Miike seems to go for camp.  Not here, though there are some funny scenes.

[Drunk Monk]

This has been in my queue for so long that I can’t remember if I’ve seen it or not. Seeing as this is the first thread on it, I’m guessing not.

---

Upon closer examination, I recant my earlier post above.

First Love (2019)
On Hoopla. This is a yakuza noir and it's Miike so it's gonna get sanguineous. A lot of interesting characters, not super deep or complex, but their interactions are tightly woven for one long night of mayhem, and it all comes to a head in a hardware store. There's some fine Miike moments - not as viscerally shocking as he can be sometimes, but nice twists on where things might be going but aren't. Miike's got style. It's yakuza vs tongs, old vendettas, incest, drug addiction, prostitution, brain tumors, decapitations, all mashed together, a slow build into a violent fire fight and some wicked chopping set to some wild free jazz jams. 

Sword fights! A dao vs. Katana finale. DOOM recommended, except for KB, who has lost his taste for gratuitous violence.

[cranefly]

You know, there were a couple scenes that seemed oddly familiar.  So I'm not entirely certain this was a first watch for me.  It's getting very disturbing--taking me longer and longer to know if I've seen something.  And sometimes I just don't know.

[Drunk Monk]

Right? If I didn’t leave notes for myself here, half of my memory would be gone.