Viewed on DVD. Restoration = ten (10) stars. Director Nagisa Oshima's embarrassing exhibition of incompetence. The film's title is unrelated to the film, and likely picked out of a hat. If there were drunkards involved with this movie, they may have been the on-set Director and script writers (plus the head of production for the releasing studio)! Far from a comedy as claimed in studio press releases, this is a morose version of a what modern viewers would call a "ground-hog-day movie." The film keeps repeating itself, often scene by scene (you may think for a minute your disc player has restarted by itself!), to stretch out what is really a 12-minute short to reach an 80-minute release time. Acting is all over the map and nonsensical, but always hyper energetic with the supposed nationality of characters altering back and forth from scene to scene. (The Director seems to be making a ham-handed political statement that Japanese and North Koreans are interchangeable--wow!) Line readings by the principal characters indicate they realized they are trapped in a movie from which there is no escape (fortunately, disc viewers can always press the eject button on their remotes). Cinematography (wide screen, color) is fine except for prolonged, static beach scenes where lighting seems to fluctuate with the passing of clouds. Score is okay, but the playback speed of the theme song has been altered to produce an irritating "chipmunk" sound (in an attempt to be "Japanese cute"?). Titles are often too long and could benefit from some serious grammatical scrubbing. Recommend you use your remote's eject button early on--things do not improve with further viewing. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.
Review of Three Resurrected Drunkards
