Serdar | Genji Press

At some point in our lives, we all look around and realize that despite whatever success we have, we’re surrounded by people who just seem to be more successful, more popular, more together, more with-it, and just plain happier about life — and if we’re lucky, we laugh. That’s the dilemma that Professor Grady Tripp faces — he’s a fiftyish literature teacher, slightly unkempt, freshly separated from his fourth wife, his successes years behind him and none more anywhere in sight. The affair he’s been carrying on with his supervisor’s wife has ended with her becoming pregnant. His biggest success as a novelist was seven years ago, and there’s been no follow-up. What little relief he gets comes in the form of the occasional joint smoked in the car. Tripp, unfortunately, can barely muster the energy to smile, let alone laugh.

Wonder Boys is about Tripp, and it makes us laugh even if he can’t. Like Sideways, it’s about people who feel like their chance at life has already blown past them, but it has affection for its characters instead of contempt and makes us want to know what happens to them. It features Michael Douglas as Tripp, and it’s a performance so removed from his usual high-voltage, A-type characters that I lamented him not being seen more in this mode when he was younger. See how time passes you by?

I have a theory — perhaps a crazy one, but crazy theories are a favorite hobby of mine: that what science fiction did for the advancement of science, superhero comics may eventually do for sociology and public action. Yesterday’s SF dreams are today’s old news. In the same way, the philosophy that one extremely determined person can make a world of difference is no longer dismissed as naïve. Think about it: If someone with a goal and a mission had a nearly unlimited budget and access to the tools he needed to change things, what could happen?

The Batman comics didn’t start off as an exploration of that idea, but over time they turned into that. It was comic auteur Frank Miller’s take on the Batman mythos, Year One, that brought the genuinely serious undertones of the story into focus. Here was a man who was not superhuman — and for that reason more automatically interesting than his D.C. Comics stablemate Superman — but chose to throw himself into the thick of danger again and again, to make a difference where it mattered most. What he lacked in powers, he made up for in vision and spine and sheer brio.

In anyone else’s hands, Kill! would have been demented nonsense, but Kihachi Okamoto and Tatsuya Nakadai make it into transcendent nonsense. Here is one of the most outlandish and Byzantine plots ever put into a samurai movie, but it’s played for black comedy and gleeful farce rather than the usual self-important seriousness. It freely raids a number of different chanbara film clichés — the disloyal but courageous retainer, the band of rebel samurai, the country bumpkin who makes good, the nobleman with a crush on a girl of a lower class, etc. All of them get lined up against the wall and machine-gunned with anarchic glee.

Kill! is also further testament to the skills of director Okamoto (Sword of Doom, Red Lion) and actor Nakadai (Doom, Ran). Okamoto makes the absurd material not only palatable but riotously funny. Nakadai does something even more impressive: he’s an actor with a haunted-looking, unmistakable face, but in Kill! he manages to look so unlike his previous roles (except, of course, for those frightened eyes) that for minutes on end I wasn’t even sure if I was looking at him.