The 1999 Japanese horror movie Audition (オーディション) will play at Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville on August 12. Film critic Robin Wood wrote of the Miike Takashi film:
In general, his reputation (or ‘cult’ status) appears to rest on his readiness to push further and further the boundaries of portrayable violence, ‘grossout’ cinema, which doubtless has its sociological interest within a civilization (and I don’t mean only Japanese) that seems to be in the process of accepting (and rather enjoying, even celebrating) its headlong race towards extinction: a kind of Japanese Tarantino, perhaps marginally less complacent and self-congratulatory [. . .].The movie will play at midnight, and tickets are available online. The single-screen theater is located at 4115 Butler Street in Lawrenceville (map).
To put it concisely: The other Miike films are disturbing for what they have to tell us about the state of contemporary civilization; they are not in the least disturbing in themselves, operating on some fantasy level of annihilation, with ‘comic-book’ violence. Audition, on the other hand, is authentically disturbing, and infinitely more horrifying: the first time I watched it – on DVD, at home, after warnings I had received – I was repeatedly tempted, through the last half hour, to turn it off. It is one of those few films, like Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1975) that are almost as unwatchable as the newsreels – of Auschwitz, of the innocent victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Vietnam, victims of Nazi or American dehumanization, which today, under President Bush, seem not so far apart.
