Late Bloomer, a Handicapped Taxi Driver

Details

Late Bloomer
Directed by Gô Shibata
July 25 through 31, Two Boots

Related Content

• Gore Pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis Gets His Due at Anthology
  March 9, 2011
• Q&A: Philip Glass On Friendship, The Film Biz And Collaborating With Woody Allen And Martin Scorsese
  February 9, 2012
• Xtranormal Animation for Cocktailians: "I Do Not Spend $90 on a Barspoon Just So I Can Make Vodka Sodas"
  November 23, 2010
• Directors Revisit the Past in Anthology's 'Auto-Remakes' Series
  March 16, 2011
• Free Will Astrology: June 1-7, 2011
  June 1, 2011

More About

• Go Shibata
• Stephen Hawking
• Mari Torii
• Herschell Gordon Lewis
• Crispin Glover

"People who grin all the time, you never know what they're up to," says a friend of beer-guzzling, porn-watching, hardcore-show- attending, wheelchair-bound Sumida-san (played by severely handicapped actor Sumida Masakiyo), whose loneliness and repressed rage are about to detonate. Japanese writer-director Gô Shibata's self-described concept of "a handicapped Taxi Driver" subverts the adversity-triumphing disabled character in the same way Crispin Glover's stilted avant-curiosity It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. does, with both films failing to convey how seemingly simple men of limited faculties could suddenly become multiple murderers. The more playful yet misanthropic of the two, Shibata's version is best accepted as black-humored artsploitation, as when Nobuko (Mari Torii)—student caregiver and unknowing object of Sumida-san's erotic fantasies—asks whether our anti-hero ever wanted to be normal (his reply, communicated through a phonetic, Stephen Hawking–like device: "I will kill you"). Cult-classically stylized in low-lit, techno-stuttering DV monochromatics that pixilate and distort as if the film shared blood with Tetsuo: The Iron Man (and maybe a few buckets of horror-shlockster Herschell Gordon Lewis's cherry red), Late Bloomer is strangest for genuinely empathizing with the monstrous Sumida-san as if he were the typical disabled lead in an inspirational heartstring-tugger.