Greatful Dead

Eiji Uchida is currently celebrated as one of the promising talents of contemporary Japanese cinema, which is essentially true, though it’s impossible to escape the impression that he is merely a weak and so far underdeveloped imitation of the leading figures of the past two decades. Greatful Dead stands somewhere among outsider comedies like Funuke and the films of Yosuke Fujita, a focused treatise on the problems of contemporary youth like Ima, Boku Wa, the over-the-top satire of these problems in the mould of the legendary Visitor Q and the films of Shion Son, and the intimate genre experiments ala the Duel Project of 2003. As is apparent from the references to the above-mentioned phenomena, Uchida is attempting to build on the last golden era of Japanese cinema and its trends, which resonated in the West, but at the same time, he avoids the superficial exploitation of fans’ notions about Japan with respect to the trend of excessive projects of recent years, such as Tokyo Gore Police. Greatful Dead thus aims to address the rootlessness and emptiness of Japanese youth and the phenomenon of madness brought on by loneliness. From these motifs, he creates an absurd satire, which, through drawn-out peripeties, leads to a bloody climax and an oversimplified point. Though it cannot be denied that the film offers a number of excellent ideas and supporting motifs and imaginative hyperboles, Uchida will have to sharpen his storytelling skills and style before he is able to match such talents as Miike and Sono. One would hope that maybe someday he will take viewers’ breath away like his peer Daihachi Yoshida, but on the other hand, after so many years and entries in his filmography, it’s past time for that. 7/10 (20.01.2015)