SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Ley Lines is the third and last instalment in Takashi Miike's Black Society Trilogy that focuses on foreign gangsters with inner struggles trying to find a purpose in life. Ley Lines both shares similarities and differences with Shinjuku Triad Society and Rainy Dog. Despite overall positive critics, I think this movie is the weakest part of the trilogy even though it's still slightly above average.Just as the first film, Ley Lines focuses on Chinese-born Japanese that have to face a lot of prejudice and racism which is made clear right from the start in a beautiful and surreal opening sequence. Just like in the second movie, the main characters team up with a prostitute that is also looking for a purpose in life. The main characters clash with local gangsters that also have a foreign background which is also typical for the trilogy.On the other side, Ley Lines focuses on three characters instead of a lone wolf. It tells the story of two brothers and their school friend who leave the countryside on a train and hope to become rich, famous and accepted in Tokyo. Upon arriving, they get tricked and robbed by a prostitute but she gets beaten up by her pimp and crosses the path with the trio again and decides to accompany and help them this time. The trio first sells petroleum-based inhalant toulene for a weird local low-level criminal. When they realize that they are still living like outcasts, they plan on moving illegally to Brazil on a cargo ship. In order to finance such a resettlement, they rob a local gangster clan that chases them down until the final showdown at the port. Ley Lines has a few brutal and explicit scenes like the other two movies, for example when the prostitute gets beaten up by her pimp and when she has to serve two weird clients which are events that convince her to change her profession, life and identity. On the other side, the film has some situation comedy as well. The brothers' friend is weird, overenthusiastic and eccentric which adds a lot of humour and pace to the film but also feels somewhat exaggerated and redundant at times. The prostitute is also quite quirky and has sexual intercourse with all members of the trio to cheer them up which is portrayed in a surprisingly neutral way as this doesn't provoke any conflicts between the four characters. The film is overall less brutal and intense than the first movie and less melancholic and solitary than the second instalment. It's somewhere in between those two films and feels directionless at times when weird situation comedy and uplifting moments are followed by rather depressing or boring sequences. Despite a few solid ideas like showing the constant shift of ups and downs in the lives of the three outsiders, Ley Lines is somehow missing its own distinctive identity and has a few minor lengths.In conclusion, Ley Lines is still a slightly above average movie and if you have watched Shinjuku Triad Society and Rainy Dog, you won't regret watching this third and last part of the Black Society Trilogy either. If you haven't watched the other two films, there are numerous other Japanese gangster movies of much better quality you should watch first. Let me suggest you Another Lonely Hit-man, Gozu and Outrage.

I watched the film because Kitamura Kazuki was in it, his sexy beautiful perfect self. And Takashi Miike directing it was the added incentive. But I ended up discovering a film that was rich with emotive content, scenery and symbolism. And Kitamura. Basically the film is about Chinese gaijin (Japanese word for "foreigner"), and their strife to survive in the land of the rising sun. You have an average guy called Ryuichi, his soft-hearted, soft- spoken younger brother called Shunrei, and their less than wily childhood friend Chang. They end up befriending a prostitute from Shanghai called Anita, even after she quite easily mugs them their first day in the big city. If it weren't for Shunrei feeling bad for her looking badly beaten up, she might not have been taken along for their dangerous ride, down a perilous path rife with triad and yakuza gangsters and pimps. Ryuichi actually beats the mess out of his brother for slowing them down with his sentimental ways. At first and throughout the whole movie, his temper might have seemed contemptible, but when they all meet their sticky end honestly because Shunrei decided to make a fateful pit-stop on their way fleeing out the country as scheduled, everyone should understand why Ryuichi was so hard on the guy. There is also what I would call symbolism, specifically with nursery rhymes and childhood fables. Especially for tribal people, religions and ethnic groups, fables and songs are important. They (are meant to) teach values, morals, community... The movie even begins with Japanese kids singing a Japanese nursery rhyme, in red lighting. And Ryuichi and Shunrei as kids were racially bullied in the middle of their singing, then the kids continued along their path singing in Japanese, leaving the two brothers by themselves, looking on longingly. Miike being Korean originally probably understands this. And yes I repeat Ryuichi and Shunrei are Chinese; their Japanese names either is from being "hafu" or half Japanese, or the pressure on the non-Japanese of Far East Asian descent to try to convince Japanese people that they are Japanese, through a name change.Furthermore, throughout the movie there is a gangster from Shanghai on their tail. He's not exactly nice but he did forewarn the brothers and Chang that they weren't too cut out for hard survival on Shinjuku's streets, particularly as Chinese foreigners, and under-educated, broke and rural on top of that. And this gangster on the outside is someone who can make you follow a command with not even the point of a finger lest what he would do, but in private, he still locks and shields himself in a dark cellar of a bedroom, like a scared little boy, with many candles for lights as a meditative atmosphere, and no electricity to entertain him like a TV or a radio. His sole entertainment is fables originating in Shanghai, preferably told by attractive Chinese women exclusively from Shanghai, even if they're a prostitute like Anita. Or he literally will go into a manic depression. These scenes are also told in red lighting, like the opening scene with the schoolchildren singing. Red in film as I understand is a symbol for bad luck or impending doom. So I feel there is a negative connotation with nursery rhymes, because it is a reminder of their adversity as non-Japanese children, and homesickness for their motherland. The film even ends with them singing while covered in blood, which is red. This whole film is one depiction of how hard it can be to live in Japan from overseas.There's other things in the film to hammer down the message of racial prejudice, like a black gaijin, whose character doesn't last long before ill fate meets him, even though he speaks more than good Japanese, and can even use chopsticks, despite the Chinese gangster telling the brothers that they can survive in Japan if they perfected their Japanese accents. Apparently even doing that doesn't help a black foreigner, at least in his field of work: They experience a brief stint in substance dealing (I wouldn't call it drug dealing because the substance they were selling looked to be a cocktail of chemicals and gasoline to huff). There's some comedy though I'd call it dark comedy, such as how silly Chang looks and talks while bleeding, or how angry yakuza get about simple backtalk, or how naughty Anita is and talks before, during and after a beatdown. There's not too much sex and just enough asskicking and blood (and Kitamura) to keep you, or at least me, going. Oh yea, nothing good happens in this movie. Nothing. But the movie is great. It's certainly not like modern Asian film, especially the ones set in big East Asian cities. This movie is quite contently 90s Asia. There's nothing glamorous at all, anywhere. Not in hair, wardrobe or backdrop, nor soundtrack. Basically this isn't for date night or kids who like Jpop and Kpop. This is for people who like and who can handle a mature punch to the nose of reality, particularly in Japan's post bubble economy, or when many of their richest and poorest citizens lost everything; the Japanese Great Depression of the 80s and 90s. I'll be thinking of this movie for a while. And Kitamura (wistful sigh).

Anyone who gets tired of Miike's over-the-top style would do well to watch the Black Society Trilogy, three movies with a shared theme of transnational alienation in the underground that stick out as some of his more sober and effective films. Ley Lines is the story of three friends, half Chinese, half Japanese, who run away from home to try to survive in Tokyo. Needless to say, their lives in the underground aren't too successful, as through various run-ins with a Shanghaian prostitute, a drug dealer, and a crime lord named Wong, most of them end up dead.Labeled on the back of the ArtsMagic DVD as being an exploration into racism, that aspect covers only about a third of what is going on here. There are many discussions in the movie, indeed, about race, oftentimes with racial slurs bleeped out (Miike is not one to censor himself, so someone else must have censored him; on the other hand, not all bad words and slurs are censored, so maybe the censorship was purposeful to provide a bit of ambiguity as to what the characters are actually saying. I can't tell). The Black Society Trilogy, however, is about the underground and undercurrents, something that may not seem all that different than Miike's larger oeuvre but which is covered through entirely different concerns. Alienation is the biggest aspect; dangerous self-destruction another. The characters in Ley Lines escape small-town bullying and rivalry to include themselves in something much larger, much more dangerous, and completely out of their ability to handle.Ley Lines pops up in essays and descriptions of Miike as one of his finer works, and I have to say I agree. At first I wasn't too taken by it because most of it is under-exposed and dark and it took a while to build. However, both of course were the point: I'ven't seen a Miike movie take its time to build like this since Audition, and the cinematography is a sickly saturated primary color scheme that foreshadows Miike's later Big Bang Love, Juvenile A. Big Bang Love, Juvenile A gets compared to Lars Van Trier from time to time, and if that's the case, I'd compare Ley Lines to a Michael Haneke movie: each scene is built off of a particular, isolated pastiche.--PolarisDiB

I just completed Miike's Black Society trilogy and I found each and every movie to be very enjoyable. The opening film Shinjuku Triad Society was a bit over the top, but I'm still glad I took the time out to watch it. The jewel in this trilogy of movies however easily is Rainy Dog with Ley Lines coming in as a close second. Both of those films were so hauntingly beautiful and yet gritty in its depiction of the character's lives and their struggles. And although the stories in this group of movies are nothing original, they are a testament to the fact that the way a story is told accounts for a lot.Shinjuke Triad Society - 7 Rainy Dog - 8.75 Ley Lines - 8 Can anyone recommend movies similar to this?