Preterition

But I gotta say, the best and most inscrutable movie I’ve seen in a long, long time is about a Japanese family named the Katakuris. I’ll acknowledge up front that my vocabulary of Japanese film is so embarassingly atrophied (my particular and predictable favorites are Ran and Akira and Hana-bi and Tampopo and Iron Man Tetsuo) as to show me as a blinkered western bigot, which I don’t want or mean to be. That said, my best capsule description of The Happiness of the Katakuris would be as follows: it’s American Psycho meets The Sound of Music on amateur night in Japan. It defies genre and is, at times, so profoundly banal as to be absolutely and embarassingly hilarious. Hyper-violent, sexy, hallucinatory, funny karaoke clichés. Claymation violence. Overacting as the rule. It’s like the Marx Brothers do a family sitcom Noh vamp on Beckett via Tarantino. Mike sez check it out: people love it or hate it, and you know which camp I’m in.