Happy Hour, The Best 317 Minutes of New Directors/New Films 2016
Bad news first: Happy Hour is pretty much a must-see. Given the option of watching 5+ hours on a weekend afternoon, I suspect most of us would rather not, but there are things it’s worth blowing your day up for. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 317-minute drama is a mysterious movie that begins as one kind of straightforward film before mutating into something much stranger — discussing it thoroughly without spoiling it is tough. I’ll try. Happy Hour initially presents itself as something like a shomin-geki, a term Wikipedia snippily notes is a “pseudo-Japanese word invented by Western film scholars”; Donald Richie defined it as “the drama about common people […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 25, 2016