The Crazy Family (Ishii, 1984): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm
The Nickel presents the 40th Anniversary restoration of Sogo Ishii’s (Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001), Crazy Thunder Road (1980)) cult classic, with introduction by film critic James Balmont.
Chicago Reader review:
An ideally symmetrical Japanese family–dad, mom, junior, and sis–moves
into a new suburban home, where rising middle-class expectations (and
gramps barging in for an open-ended stay) cause everything to
deconstruct explosively. Sogo Ishii’s lunatic black comedy seems less
concerned with actual family dynamics than with turning its sitcom
household into an open arena of competing pop-culture images and
energies. Ishii has a keen eye for cultural detritus–the samurai films
and superhero cartoon shows and pornographic comic strips that have
bored their way into modern Japanese consciousness (in much the same
manner as crazy dad’s termites)–and his film at times displays the
antinarrative logic of a TV wrestling marathon: it redundantly
accumulates rather than develops, with outrage piling upon outrage in
baroque profusion (kitchenware samurai mom faces off against Tojo
warrior gramps while martial nymphet sis plots against spacehead junior,
etc). There’s a Woman of the Dunes metaphor lurking about (dad digs a
hole in the kitchen floor and everybody falls in, but the house is
already an entropic pit) and plenty cartoon silliness to push the sitcom
strategies over the subversive edge. Not, shall we say, the shapeliest
of films, but one that packs a raw, energetic punch.
Pat Graham
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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