Bright Future (2004)

Um, WTF mate? The other Kurosawa takes youthful disaffection, out-of-date electronics, trips to Death Row, a band of hooligans and lots of pretty jellyfish, throws them all into a bowl and attempts to make a cake out of them. The end result is... well, it's something. What it is exactly has yet to be determined. Kurosawa's formidable filmmaking chops get a thorough airing-out; unfortunately for the audience, so does his attraction to the senseless and inexplicable. Gorgeous and poetic, yet totally incomprehensible, this is best left to completists and jellyfish fetishists. (Note, though, that I saw the Japanese version; the American version, which runs a full twenty minutes shorter, may very well be a different film.)

Grade: C

[Addendum, 12/1: So I thought about it, and it's pretty obvious that, like the other Kiyoshi Kurosawa works I've seen, this film's about disconnection. The problem isn't in the themes but in the explication -- it seems to be as disconnected from itself as its characters are from each other. Pulse and Cure had their problems, but at least they seemed to emanate from a rigorous mind with a clear thesis and an orderly (if elliptical) presentation. Bright Future, on the other hand, just seems haphazard. I think md'a is right when he posits that K. needs the discipline of a genre framework.]