MILOCRORZE: A LOVE STORY (Japan, 2011)
Directed by: Yoshimasa Ishibashi
Starring: Takayuki Yamada, Anna Ishibashi, Mieko Harada, Eiji Okuda, Maiko, Seijun Suzuki

When platinum redhead Ovreneli Vreneligare was just a little boy, he fell in love in the park.  Sharing a juice box with the stunningly gorgeous Milocrorze, he took her home to his cat, Verandola Gorgonzola, and made her his girlfriend, until fickle beauty abandoned him, and he covered the hole in his heart with a pot lid he found lying on the ground.  This is only the beginning of his story but it’s not the end of his heartbreak.   MILOCRORZE: A LOVE STORY is a candy-flavored anthology of hopeless l’amour, and it has many victims.

Cut to: Besson Kumagai, the worst and most famous youth counselor in the world, with a ridiculous moptop ‘do and a propensity towards doing the “Thriller” dance.  His pro-tips include tweaking a lady’s nipples on the first date.  “I give great advice to wimpy assholes,” he snarls, spitting out chauvinistic tirades about “the enemy” (read: women) and filtering all potential interaction through a paranoid male gaze as he and his girltoys prance through vivid macho fantasies.  Then it’s on to lovelorn swordsman Tamon, trapped in a dystopic samurai hellscape, searching for his lost soulmate in a futuristic geisha house.  Milocrorze herself is in neither of these stories, yet she is in all of them.  She is the joke, she is the loss, she is the sadness and anger at the heart of the world.

Headlined by Star Asia Rising Star Award recipient, Takayuki Yamada (13 Assassins), playing all three male leads, MILOCRORZE is the mutant brainchild of Yoshimasa Ishibashi, best known for his insane The Fuccon Family TV sketch show, featuring an all-mannequin cast.  He’s spent years as a wigged-out video artist and his first feature film is unlike anything we’ve ever shown, or perhaps ever will show again, an alternately hyper-gory and melancholic love parable, featuring both an elongated, time-twisted swordfight rivaling the climax of Harakiri and a synchronized dance number that looks like Jacques Demy just topped Neil LaBute.  Tones and stories shift in the blink of a masculine doubt, making this one of those gems that cannot be fully described, only experienced.  MILOCRORZE is the romantic heart on LSD therapy: everything is epic, everything is mind-bending, everything is unbearable.