Funny, but the Nice Guys had better jokes.

This film is better than it has any right to be, and I will forever defend it. Plus, das Album rockt!

As much as I love Seijun Suzuki’s zany yakuza b-movies, this film (the second he made after more than 10 years of being blacklisted by all the major Japanese production companies) makes me mourn the time he spent stuck in and fighting with a studio system that refused to understand him.

Then again - what I find most inspiring about Kagero-za is its almost all consuming rejection of traditional narrative filmmaking techniques... Seijun Suzuki rejects with both a powerful anger AND a measured, thoughtful mastery that I think could only have been born out of a decade of forced conformity with the status quo.

Christopher Nolan might have the longest short attention span of all time.