There are two challenges in building a life with the help of art.
The first challenge is the matter of finding good art, sorting it out from background noise. Good art is a communication from a transcendent place through a person or group with the skills to deliver it coherently. This is rare enough. All good craftsmen think they are artists and sell themselves that way.
This film is a work of art. Yes, quirky. Yes, some elements are clumsy. He has some paintings he wants us to see, so he shoehorns in a suicidal painter. He needs a suicidal painter, so he...
But we tolerate these misfits because the nature of the story follows the Japanese gangster movie convention of being a bunch of borrowed quotes from elsewhere. Borrowing these from Takeshi's artistic world is as fair as from the pop vocabulary. All these projects reference the outside.
So this is good art. It resonates. I recommend you look at it.
But the second challenge with art is deciding how to relate to it, to use it to build your mind, to work and extend your imagination. You are what you eat artistically. I cannot eat this.
No, it is not the violence. Violence in film is merely cinematic tension, to be used like smoke. It is the world that matters. Art is a gateway to a world and you have to be disposed to the target: can you use it? Will it help?
What's wrong here is that this the flip side of noir. Noir defines a world of random pain, animated by some conspiracy between the viewer and a disembodied fate. But it comes from an intent of humorous exploration, capricious hazard but hazard for mischief, not deliberate pain. Its the deliberate pain we get here, the incessant grinding of the human spirit, and incidentally some valiant tolerance, but only incidentally.
If I clove this into my mind, I would be another half step closer to suicide myself. So watch it... from a distance.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
