Hey folks, Harry here... This is a movie that Rav has been hating on for a long long time now... no wait... Strike that... Reverse that, Ok.... Anyway I've been hearing nothing but great word on this movie for quite some time now, so naturally I'm delighted that the Alamo Drafthouse is going to be playing it soon! So yippee! Here's Conrad....
Just caught Takashi Miike's The Happiness of the Katakuris over at the American Cinematheque. Basically this was one of the funniest, most delightful films I've seen in a while. And yes, I do mean that despite this being from the director of Audition and Ichi The Killer. Think of this as Takashi's version of a crowd pleaser, a light, breezy musical comedy with just the right amount of death and destruction.
The film is about the Katakuri family who buy a bed and breakfast in a remote area in the hopes that a road will be constructed to make the place more accessible. In the meantime, the Katakuri's are desperate for anyone to stay the night. When they finally have a guest, the family finds him dead by suicide the next morning. Wanting not to cause any negative publicity, they decide to bury him in the woods and make like nothing happened. When a sumo wrestler and his girlfriend check in, they too end up dead when the wrestler dies during sex, crushing the under-age girlfriend. Again, the family buries them. But wouldn't you know it, more guests keep checking in and dying to the point where the family begins to expect the worst whenever anyone new checks in. All the while, the Katakuri's break out into various song and dance numbers, always varying in style from a love song in which characters begin to fly, dancing corpses, and a karaoke number with the words being shown on screen for everyone to sing along. In addition to this are various trips into claymation which come completley out of the blue.
This is a refreshing change of pace for Takashi Miike. Those expecting an outpour of violence, rape, mutilation and bodily fluids will be dissapointed, but only for that reason because Miike's bizzare nature is still front and center. In the end, if you enjoy his work, you will definately be able to identify this as one of his films.
Concord
