Ichi The Killer (殺し屋１Koroshiya Ichi) Full Film (Extreme)

Ichi the Killer (殺し屋１ Koroshiya Ichi) is a 2001 Japanese film directed by Takashi Miike, written by Sakichi Sato, and based on Hideo Yamamoto's manga series of the same name. The film is notorious amongst moviegoers due to its extremely graphic violence. The film has received widespread controversy and is banned outright in several countries due to its high impact violence and graphic depictions of cruelty. In 2009, The Norwegian Media Authority reacted to the film and later classified the film as Rejected and banned the film due to "high impact violence and cruelty" and the film is still banned in Norway, but still available for home video purchase. The film has been banned outright in Malaysia since the film's distribution date in 2001 due to "very high impact violence and offensive depictions of cruelty" The film is banned uncut in Germany, and classified as "adults only" in a "heavily cut version". The film was released in the United States in a cut version rated NC-17.

The soundtrack was written and produced by Japanese band Boredoms, credited as "Karera Musication", under the direction of ex-guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto and percussionist/band leader Yoshimi P-We. Click on the image above for the full film.

Dressing For Pleasure (1977)

This 25 minute long film is about the mid-1970s British rubber fetish scene. It features a short clip of Sex Pistols Manager and clothing entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren. The film is made by John Samson. John Samson (1946 - 2004) was an extraordinary British filmmaker. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, as a teenager Samson moved to Paisley just outside of Glasgow where he remained for the formative years of his life. Resistant to the constraints of formal education, at 16 Samson left school and took on an apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards learning precision tool making in an engineering firm. Samson quickly became involved as a spokesperson in the first Glasgow apprentices' strike, helping organise visits by Glasgow apprentices to other shipyards in England in order to demonstrate solidarity across the British Isles.

Around this time Samson began to engage with the Anarchist movement, joining the Committee of 100 and participating in a number of Nuclear Disarmament protests including Holy Loch in 1961 where he was arrested with 350 others for demonstrating against the presence of a US nuclear submarine. In 1963, upon meeting his wife Linda who was studying painting at Glasgow School of Art at the time, Samson gave up his apprenticeship and fell in with a bohemian circle that included artists, writers and musicians. He taught himself guitar, took up stills photography and by the early 70s began to make films.

These experiences - Samson's working class roots, his passionate interest in radical politics and bohemia - fuelled what would turn out to be a life-long fascination with individuals and groups operating at the margins of society. If it is possible to pick up such a thing as a singular thematic or narrative running throughout Samson's films, then it is exactly this: his subjects are outsiders, people with unusual lives and obsessions, liminal figures who fail to square neatly with the normative models for identity and behaviour propagated by contemporary culture.

Evident from his very first film Charlie (1973), a 10 minute short film on the merit of which he was awarded a scholarship to the National Film School, Samson was an extremely compassionate filmmaker who never sought to exploit his unusual subjects. Instead he would immerse himself in their strange worlds; his keen eye teasing out motivations while never lacking a dry yet gentle good humour which helped him, above all, to make sense of each and every extraordinary existence he encountered.

Here the subject of fetishism in clothing - rubber, latex, leather - is explored. The film features Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols at the time at SEX, the boutique he ran with Vivien Westwood on the Kings Road. Central to the film is a magnificent studio set constructed mainly by Samson himself in the shape of the fetishist magazine Atomage with actual turning pages all populated by these amazing characters, dressed in thigh length leather boots and chains. The film was banned at the time by London Weekend Television, and has become one of those rare films more quoted than seen. Again, using revealing interviews on the motivation behind the protagonists' choices, Dressing for Pleasure won Outstanding Film Award at the London Film Festival that year. Recently it has toured the world as part of the Vivienne Westwood exhibition and has been an inspiration for many other films including Julian Temple's The Filth and the Fury (2000). 

Dressing for Pleasure is an intimate, candid film about people with a rubber fetish. An interview with John Sutcliffe, the legendary clothing designer who also founded AtomAge, ‘a magazine for vinyl wearers’, is woven through the film, while blown-up pages from the magazine are used as a backdrop to the carefully composed scenes of participants parading their costumes. An interview with a shop assistant at Sex, the King’s Road boutique owned by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, one of the few places that openly sold latex and rubber wear, links fetish wear to the equally scandalous punk scene. There’s nothing deliberately sensational in Dressing for Pleasure, and what emerges is not a film about people into S&M, but a portrait of an alternative lifestyle that embraces pleasure without shame.

My Name is Albert Ayler

With his documentary My Name Is Albert Ayler, Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin pays unbridled homage to the titular musician, one of the most innovative and electric but least-known figures in contemporary jazz. Ayler's obscurity is at least as attributable to his short lifespan as it is to his musical iconoclasm -- he died under bizarre and inexplicable circumstances in late 1970; on November 5 of that year, Manhattan police found his 34-year-old body floating in the city's East River, possibly (though not definitively) a victim of suicide. Collin approaches Ayler's life as a straightforward narrative, segueing smoothly from touchstone to touchstone. The picture thus covers the musician's upbringing in Cleveland, OH; his performances on the saxophone and oboe in a military band; his critical, shaping experiences in touring R&B groups across the U.S.; and finally, his decision to spin that R&B music off into an unprecedented form of experimental jazz on the landscapes of New York City and Stockholm, Sweden. Collin's narrative ends, of course, with speculation on Ayler's death. Collin devotes much screen time to an exploration of Ayler's friendship with the legendary John Coltrane, and to the sad reality that during the 1960s, truly groundbreaking jazz by African-American artists could only flourish in über-progressive Europe. Throughout the picture, the documentarian works in extremely rare archival footage of Ayler, and roots much of his narrative in interviews with such key figures as Ayler's Sunday school teacher father (in his nineties at the time of this production); Ayler's brother Donald, also a musician, and one with a history of severe mental disturbance; and a number of Ayler's nonfamilial musical collaborators including Sunny Murray and Gary Peacock. (Ayler's romantic partner and sometime musical collaborator, Mary Parks, declined to appear onscreen, though Collin works in extracts from a telephone interview with her.) It goes without saying that My Name Is Albert Ayler represents the only documentary portrait to date of the wondrous musician. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Ram Dass ◦ Fierce Grace ◦ Full Movie (2001)

Mickey Lemle's documentary Ram Dass, Fierce Grace is a portrait of Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), author, 60s guru, spiritual teacher, cohort of Timothy Leary, & author of Be Here Now, one of the most influential books of the 1970s. The film begins in the present, as Ram Dass deals with the effects of a massive stroke he suffered in February 1997 that left him physically incapacitated, & with impaired memory & speech. Interweaving current conversations, interviews with people in his life, & archival footage, Lemle then looks back at his childhood, the controversy surrounding his research with Timothy Leary in psychedelics at Harvard, his studies in India with Neem Karoli Baba, who renamed him Baba Ram Dass (Servant of God), his work with the Seva Foundation in social action projects dedicated to relieving suffering in the world, & his impact as an author & guru to millions of followers.

Several examples are shown of his compassion & his ability to feel the pain of others. In an early sequence, his beautiful "Rachel's Letter" comforts a family after their daughter was murdered. In the final sequence, Ram Dass listens to a young woman struggling to overcome her grief at her boyfriend's violent death. She brings him to tears when she tells him about a dream she had in which her boyfriend speaks to her from beyond with a reassuring message.

When Ram Dass received the "fierce grace" of being "stroked," he admits he did not have any unusual spiritual epiphany. He recalls, "Here I am, Mr. Spiritual, & in my own head I didn't orient toward the spirit. It showed me I have some work to do." He has written about the stroke in his latest book, Still Here in which he talks about slowing down, & finding out about the "everything" that is out there. For Ram Dass, aging has become a gift. "I was galumphing through life before the stroke," he says. "I'm at peace now more than I've ever been. The peace comes from settling in to the moment."

Enhanced by the music of Krishna Das, the documentary is more than just a bio-pic or a meditation on the process of aging, it is an inspiring portrait of a man whose life can be summed up in one word -- service. Ram Dass has said, "What one person has to offer to another is their own being, nothing more, nothing less." In Ram Dass, Fierce Grace, Lemle has given us Ram Dass's being, nothing more, nothing less. That is a gift of love.

Beyond Life with Timothy Leary (full documentary)

Timothy Leary: The Man Who Turned On America is a 2001 British television documentary (from the BBC's Reputations series) examining the life, career, and complex legacy of the 1960s counterculture icon.