Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Sam Panico All four generations of Katakuris live on a house built over a garbage dump near Mt. Fuji. It's not much to write home about, but they dream of calling it the White Lover's Inn, a bed and breakfast that will serve the visitors that the road that runs nearby is sure to bring.Finally, after much waiting, a TV personality shows up and the family is overjoyed. Yet he soon kills himself and they find his naked body. So they do what any family would do: they bury it and move on. A second guest, a sumo wrestler, dies having sex with his underage girlfriend.In fact, every guest they get dies, whether by accident or murder or suicide. And the backyard is filling up!Oh yeah - there's also a con man in love with the youngest daughter, the police investigating all these murders and an active volcano.Takeshi Miike (Dead or Alive, Blade of the Immortal, Visitor Q) has directed everything from light-hearted children's films to movies so controversial governments have stepped in to block them. Here, he creates a musical that combines Japanese pop, karaoke and traditional musicals to make one of the most legitimately bonkers films I've ever watched. The film can quickly turn into flashbacks or claymation at a moment's notice, sometimes multiple times within the same scene.The leader of the Katakuris, Masao, is played by Kenji Sawada, who was a crossover pop star at the end of the 1960's. He was nicknamed Julie for his love of Julie Andrews. He's one of only two Japanese artists to ever appear on the cover of Rolling Stone and even had Barry Gibb write songs for him!Shizue's boyfriend, the sailor who claims to be a British relative of Queen Elizabeth, is played by Kiyoshiro Imawano, who was known as Japan's king of rock, even recording with Booker T & the M.G.'s. His funeral, dubbed The Aoyama Rock n' Roll Show, drew 42,000 mourners.The father, Jinpei, is Tetsuro Tamba, who was Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice. And Naoto Takenaka, who plays a reporter, is the Japanese voice of Batman and Nick Fury.This is a movie that demands to be experienced. From animated fairies ending up in people's soup to heroic dogs that surf through lava, this is a demented version of The Sound of Music.

Bodo Takashi Miike's oeuvre is quite mixed. He has a base of devout fans but also quite a few haters. THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS is one of his most lovable and least offensive films, filled with charming characters and tacky music and dance scenes.The movie focuses on a Japanese family, the Katakuris, that tries to run a guest house in the mountains, but with little success. Unfortunately, their very first few guests after opening already spell disaster...This is the overall plot, but then there's also just a whole bunch of sheer randomness. Mystic dream sequences, claymation death scenes, and a Japanese spinster in a navy suit trying to fool the family's daughter into thinking he's both a member of the US navy and a member of the Royal family. The nonsensicality of a lot of the movie's happenings just adds to the overall lovability: It makes everything seem quirky and weird.

Paul Magne Haakonsen When I bought "The Happiness of the Katakuris" from Amazon it was under the impression that it was a musical with zombies, plus it is a Takashi Miike movie, two good things combined, or so it would appear.First of all, you had to wait 76 minutes into the movie before the zombies make their appearance, and then even so, you see them for less than 5 minutes. So don't acquire this movie under the impression that it is a zombie musical, which I did. You will be sorely disappointed.I do enjoy Takashi Miike's work and have most of it on DVD, this however, I will say it not amongst his best work. Sure the movie in itself was entertaining enough, it had a perverse dark comical touch to it, which is one of Takashi Miike's trademarks. But the movie was fairly slowly moving with very little actually happening, which in my opinion weighed the movie down.Also, the DVD cover has 'the hills are alive with the sound of screaming!' boasted on the front cover. Yeah, that was false advertising of a grand scale. And on the back of the cover it boasted 'The Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead" ... yeah, right!The story itself was entertaining, especially since all those people tragically died at the family's guest-house, which was kind of strange and coincidental. And the family itself was quite interesting and weird at the same time. The characters in the movie were nicely portrayed and had lots of depths to them, which really worked in favor of the movie. And the make-up of the zombies was actually quite good, I enjoyed that quite a lot, even though it was less than 5 minutes of screen time.If you enjoy Asian musicals, then "The Happiness of the Katakuris" is perhaps a great choice for you, personally, I enjoyed the Korean musical "The Fox Family" a lot more than I did this movie. But hey, it is all a matter of preference.

gothic_a666 'The Happiness of the Katakuris' may be a remake (to the very sober and also amazing 'Quiet Family' from the highly talented Ji-woon Kim) but it does not rehash the original. Instead it turns it upside down to create a movie that manipulates the same plot with very different results. Miike adds his trippy aesthetics to the story, adds more characters and takes the viewer on a very strange journey that can only be described as a dark musical comedy. Dead bodies keep piling but that is precisely the thrust for the family to break into song and dance routines, at times even with karaoke lines. Hilarity is never absent and lends an aura of surrealism along with the odd clay animation sequences.The movie is exuberant and completely over the top with parodies aimed at plenty of conventions such as sugary love declarations (including a very gullible young mother) and final last words speeches. Somewhere along the line there are even singing and dancing zombies neatly in tune with the family, all joined in a jarringly positive song that seems to poke fun at the obsession of being upbeat that seems so prevailing in Japanese culture.And yet throughout the insanity emerges a surprisingly moving story about family bonds. The end confirms this even as it takes the movie to a whole new level of pure weirdness. 'The Happiness of the Katakuris' is a genuinely original take on family centered cinema and for mingling such disparate elements it deserves respect.