UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Sam Panico All four generations of Katakuris live on a house built over a garbage dump near Mt. Fuji. It's not much to write home about, but they dream of calling it the White Lover's Inn, a bed and breakfast that will serve the visitors that the road that runs nearby is sure to bring.Finally, after much waiting, a TV personality shows up and the family is overjoyed. Yet he soon kills himself and they find his naked body. So they do what any family would do: they bury it and move on. A second guest, a sumo wrestler, dies having sex with his underage girlfriend.In fact, every guest they get dies, whether by accident or murder or suicide. And the backyard is filling up!Oh yeah - there's also a con man in love with the youngest daughter, the police investigating all these murders and an active volcano.Takeshi Miike (Dead or Alive, Blade of the Immortal, Visitor Q) has directed everything from light-hearted children's films to movies so controversial governments have stepped in to block them. Here, he creates a musical that combines Japanese pop, karaoke and traditional musicals to make one of the most legitimately bonkers films I've ever watched. The film can quickly turn into flashbacks or claymation at a moment's notice, sometimes multiple times within the same scene.The leader of the Katakuris, Masao, is played by Kenji Sawada, who was a crossover pop star at the end of the 1960's. He was nicknamed Julie for his love of Julie Andrews. He's one of only two Japanese artists to ever appear on the cover of Rolling Stone and even had Barry Gibb write songs for him!Shizue's boyfriend, the sailor who claims to be a British relative of Queen Elizabeth, is played by Kiyoshiro Imawano, who was known as Japan's king of rock, even recording with Booker T & the M.G.'s. His funeral, dubbed The Aoyama Rock n' Roll Show, drew 42,000 mourners.The father, Jinpei, is Tetsuro Tamba, who was Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice. And Naoto Takenaka, who plays a reporter, is the Japanese voice of Batman and Nick Fury.This is a movie that demands to be experienced. From animated fairies ending up in people's soup to heroic dogs that surf through lava, this is a demented version of The Sound of Music.

eatfirst An extended family move out to the country to run a B&B, only to find that each rare and sorely-needed guest winds up dead on their property. Naturally this prompts a series of frantic musical sing-along productions before the shovels come out. One of Seven films made in 2001 alone by the absurdly prolific Takashi Miike (best known in the west for his more intense horror works such as the magnificent "Audition" and "Ichi The Killer"), this loose remake of Korean film "The Quiet Family" has all the rough edges and scatter-shot structure you'd expect of a film presumably made over a quiet weekend between projects. But for all that, it's frequently very funny, admirably off-kilter, and features quite the finest claymation soup- sprite that I've seen this year.Should you find that "Les Miserables" simply doesn't have the epic scope and emotional punch you want in a musical, then this combination of "The Sound Of Music", "Saturday Night Fever", "Shallow Grave" and "Shaun Of The Dead" is absolutely what you've been looking for.

weedaymolie Probably the most random thing iv ever seen! First thoughts through my head were what the hell!? and yet its brilliant!The beginning really has nothing to do with the rest of the film apart from that hint of death and some people who turn up for a tiny bit in the middle...it in a way prepares you for the randomness ahead. After such a random start you would expect the randomness to continue but it completely dies for a good 15 mins of introduction of the Katakuri family. Not the most normal of families...A selfish rarely smiling grandad, overly happy dad who is always sure everything will turn out OK. A mum who cooks and is very over the top, a daughter obsessed! with falling in love, a normal son who is disapproving of everyone but changes at the end and the daughter's daughter who pretty much just looks at the camera now and again throughout the film. Poochi the dog is also crazy! This family have moved to the middle of nowhere and built a guest-house. They have never had a guest when a famous person off the TV comes to stay and ends up killing themselves but because the family don't want people to know their first guest died they just bury her away int he woods...a string of deaths follow some amusing situations and again they bury them...its rather comic throughout... When anything goes wrong they sing and dance and everything becomes right again..its odd.With a zombie scene, love scene, fight scene and random other scenes its a great watch! With all the major things being in modelling clay its all rather random but yet you have to see it to the end.BRILLIANT film! Odd...no real plot but humorous and so so random!

Graham Greene The Happiness of the Katakuris is probably Takashi Miike's strangest film (or at least, stranger than any of the others that I've seen so far; which is quite an accomplishment when you consider that some of those films include the equally bizarre delights of Gozu, Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q). Where The Happiness of the Katakuris exceeds the strangeness of those particular films is in the not so subtle blending of genres, styles and influences; making reference to and pastiche of everything from Japanese television and post-war family melodrama, to Hollywood musicals and zombie exploitation.The overall result is like a kind of giddy burst of merry, kaleidoscopic excess; as sounds, sights, colours and textures all blend amidst the barrage of stop-motion horror, live action character development and scenes of Technicolor, all-singing/all-dancing delirium! The basic plot was loosely inspired by an earlier Korean film called The Quiet Family - the first film from Kim-Ji Woon, director of A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life - which was more of a straight horror/comedy story about a typical nuclear family that set up a hunting lodge in the countryside, only to find that their first wave of clients are dying off one by one in mysterious circumstances. Miike transports the action to rural Japan and spins a yarn of staggering imagination; adding broader strokes of slap-stick humour, campy musical numbers and a colourful zombie pastiche.Still, don't come to this expecting a horror film or something that continues the brutality of Ichi the Killer or Agitator (two other films that Miike directed alongside this in 2001); The Happiness of the Katakuris is a comedy at its most satirical and absurd; using the frame-work of the story to look at the backgrounds of three generations of Japanese men and the women that support them, and tying it all into a subtle reference about Japanese culture, from the post war to the present. And even if you chose to ignore the more satirical angle presented in both the humour and the narrative design there's still so much left to enjoy; with the constant barrage of sight gags and colourful musical numbers erupting from the seemingly calm veneer of a "normal" family life.For me, Miike is a genius filmmaker, and The Happiness of the Katakuris is easily one of his must-see works! From the Buñuel-ian tinged opening that descends into a sequence of stop-motion animation that introduces us to both the themes and story of the film we're about to see, to the grand finalé which moves spasmodically from musical, to farce, to high tension; before eventually ending on a dual moment of tragedy and jubilation. The performances throughout are superb, with each member of the family feeling like a proper three-dimensional character that we can really relate to and believe in. It's also worth pointing out that for a director with a reputation as brutal and offencive as Miike's this is the second film he made in the year 2001 alone in which the ultimate point of the film was the importance of family and tradition (the other being the similarly brilliant and outlandish satire, Visitor Q).The Happiness of the Katakuris is masterpiece film for me; inventive, irreverent but also filled with empathy and compassion. I'd place it on the list of essential films by Takashi Miike, with some of the others being the well-known likes of Audition, Gozu and Visitor Q, but also more understated works like The Bird People in China, The Great Yokai War and Shinjuku Triad Society. A must have for anyone with an interest in original, intelligent and highly imaginative film-making!