I've been reccomended The Flowers of Evil for a while now, and before I start it I noticed this short, standalone book by the same author so thought I'd check it out but wow this is absolutely not the sort of manga I have any interest in reading. A slight, middle school-set teen romance centered around body hair or the lack thereof. It's honestly left me less interested in taking my Flowers of Evil omnibus 1 off the shelf now.
I just finished this series and thought I'd use this final volume here to discuss it as a whole.
Although I was a big fan of Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer back in the day, I hadn't checked out this source manga recently and, considering the film's reputation as a landmark in cinematic extremity, it's a little surprising to see that it is, for the most part, a very faithful adaptation. Indeed, basically all of the movie's most notorious moments are taken straight from the books. Even more surprising though, is that it actually toned things down a notch as well. There are a handful of subplots in here, such as one character's necrophile tendencies, that are quite shocking, not in the least as I wasn't expecting them due to their absence in the film. There are also a few sequences of extreme, blackly comic violence that are honestly quite funny here, even if I can see how they would be much harder to pull off on-screen. While the whole manga throughout is very well-paced and gripping, around half-way through I started dropping my star ratings from 4 to 3, for one main reason. Don't get me wrong, I came here for a violent, transgressive experience, but by the time a couple of truly vile villains are introduced, the manga's treatment of its female characters just shifts from enjoyably depraved to just downright ugly and unpleasant. Given how darkly comic and over-the-top most of the violence is, the amount of rape and torture inflicted on literally every female character just serves to make the whole thing start to become a bit too off-putting at times.
This was disappointing in pretty much every respect. It's very short (100 questions), repeats the same question format constantly (who starred in X, who directed Y and so on), and is not remotely challenging. Nearly every question is about mainstream Hollywood movies with only a couple about independent film and none about world cinema. The worst aspect though, is that many of the questions require specific answers when there is more than one possible correct answer, generally about leads in films with more than one lead actor. For example, one asks “Who are the two lead actors in L.A. Confidential?”. There are 3 lead actors in that film and the answers only allow 2 specific ones. Similarly, the answers do not allow ‘Ray Liotta' as an answer to the question of who starred in Goodfellas. A waste of time.
