Go get it. Pretty damn good–great for an hour, then it kind of veers too much into the quirky conventional road-movie romance fantasy it so adroitly avoids and disrupts before that, but… I was sold by then. It’s anchored by a(nother) great performance by Lou Taylor Pucci, as a kid taken by an urge to get unstuck, so he steals a car… everything else about the plot emerges en route, so I won’t spoil up front. But there’s some dialogue and supporting performances that are sly, strange, occasionally idiosyncratically wonderful–particularly Bill Duke, as a traveling liquor salesman. And besides Pucci the film boasts a great M. Ward soundtrack.

We (or maybe mostly I) have talked about Takashi Miike before (here, among other places), and let it be said: even at his goriest, and by god he can be gory, he’s among the most astonishing–and astonishingly sloppy–stylists working. His Western goes in the greater pile. It begins on a soundstage so resolutely, beautifully drawn and shot in such high-contrast saturated colors that when you see Quentin Tarantino putting on a lousy Southern drawl, then a Japanese actor accosting him in an almost-phonetically-pronounced English, and then later have Tarantino intone phrases from an alleged story of a Japanese temple in an English mimicking that strange Japanese-inflected pronunciation… well, let’s say the artifice is not mere surface ploy but is emphatically and for this viewer wonderfully central.

The story is a neat mash-up template of various generic influences both Western and Japanese (one of the characters even jokes that the protagonist shouldn’t try getting all Yojimbo), and there are some great lovely gun battles, and a few tricky technical games (one lovely bit when a man jumps out of his second-story window onto his horse) — all in all, not a movie to watch to sink into the plot but a movie which delights in–and produces the delight of–genre and aesthetic form. I REALLY enjoyed this.