journal features

movie review - Kamikazi Taxi

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Vancouver, 2001.05.11

This is - surprise - a Japanese flick. In Japan, there are a number of people who have immigrated from South America. These people are the children of Japanese emigrants who left Japan in the years following WWII.

One of the main characters in this movie is such an immigrant. A half-Japanese, half-Peruvian Indian, he struggles with the language and the intolerance of the Japanese. He's taken a job as a taxi driver, and on one fateful night picks up a young Yakuza lieutenant on the run. It's hard to relate any of the gangster's role without giving away the plot, so I won't discuss that.

I can say, however, that this movie can be a surprisingly subtle and graphically violent. It also wanders through many parts of Japanese life, and struggles with some of the lingering social fallout from the war. In all, very worth watching.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner