Tuesday, January 6, 2009

In short: Uncle's Paradise (2006)

Pinkus, being softcore pornography and all, aren't not everybodies cup of tea, which often does not lead the pinku detractor to miss much. After all, much of the genre really is not worth much as films, as delightful as its love for every kind of perversion might or might not be.

But the pinku, as any other genre, should be judged by its best films and not by its worst. Uncle's Paradise is definitely one of the good films. It possesses a kind of ultra-low-budget magical realism with added soft-core charm I find as difficult to resist as is its humor - the kind of laconic shrug in the face of the supremely weird that is the other side of the more well known (in the West) hyperactive screaming and running around of Japanese humor.

Everything here is of a charming and rather melancholic low-key eccentricity that is best explained through the way the film pictures hell: as a cheap hotel where some not-very-attractive people will be nibbling on you for all eternity unless your girlfriend wins a game of rock, paper, scissors against its concierge/king.

What more could one want?

 

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