Miike Takashi's `Katakuri-ke no Koufuku' is a wonderfully bizarre black comedy musical highly reminiscent of the music videos and live concert performances staged by the now-defunct 80s & 90's J-pop powerhouse Kome Kome Club. Miike's choice of Sawada Kenji as Katakuri Masao further accentuates this similarity, since he strongly resembles K2C co-front man `Carl Smoky' Ishii Tatsuya. The somewhat unpolished song & dance routines (unlike K2C), along with episodic fits of overacting and self-depreciating man-on-a-wire work combine to create a totally off the wall mix of dark humour and Miike's trademark visual gross-outs.
In synopsis, Katakuri Masao is a downsized urbanite who stakes his family's livelihood on restoring a run-down country inn. Masao, along with wife Terue (Matsuzaka Keiko) and father Jinpei (Tamba Tetsuro) reel in their troubled son Masayuki (Takeda Shinji) and divorced daughter Shizue (Nishida Naomi) to create their family dream. But alas, location is everything, and without a major road nearby, the `White Lover's Inn' waits patiently sans customers. When guests finally do begin to arrive, the Katakuris find (through no fault of their own) that their guests have an annoying habit of dying. Not to be discouraged however, the Katakuris do their best to persevere as a family, and find time for a number of offbeat musical numbers in between.
The most irritating character was the second-rate con man Richard Sawada played by actor/singer Iwamano Kiyoshiro, who also played a deadbeat suitor in the TBS dorama, "Boku no Shusshoku". He actually does a fair job at speaking bad gaijin-sounding Japanese, and he's one of the only actors in the movie (to my knowledge) with a musical background. Oh, and the shot with him wearing the Oakley `OverTheTops' is pretty funny. One of the strangest elements to me (besides the opening claymation sequence) was the fact that the prologue & epilogue narratives were voiced in retrospect by the young grand daughter, for no apparent reason. Some reviewers point out the moralistic undertones of family values and such, but I suspect that even this was thrown in by Miike as part of a cold-cocked slap in the face with regards to anything being morally relevant in the film, or making sense for that matter.
