{"id":18479,"date":"2026-03-14T21:00:54","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T01:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=18479"},"modified":"2026-03-13T17:28:31","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T21:28:31","slug":"bright-future-2003-kiyoshi-kurosawa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/18479","title":{"rendered":"Bright Future (2003, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ugly digital video was the craze that year.  The story of two fuckups working dead-end jobs until the ambitious one (post-<em>Ichi<\/em> Tadanobu Asano) murders their annoying boss and gives his pet jellyfish to the useless one (Joe Odagiri of <em>Princess Raccoon<\/em>).  The imprisoned guy&#8217;s dad (Tatsuya Fuji, star of Oshima&#8217;s <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/2278\">Passion<\/a>\/<a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/2325\">Senses<\/a><\/em>) shows up to figure out what happened, while the useless guy accidentally infests the river with a swarm of killer red jellyfish.  This movie felt unusual back then, and remains so.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/bright1.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p>B. Kite:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The film returns at the end to a gang of teens, earlier rhymed with the fish through an overhead shot of the group drifting through the city streets at night, illumined by their glowing walkie-talkie headsets. Their aimlessness and matching uniforms might not suggest anything spectacularly promising, but Kurosawa places the title under them as a caption &#8211; <em>Bright Future<\/em> &#8211; and has insisted he means it.  Why not?  Like the fish, they&#8217;re adaptable and perched on the point of transition &#8230; <em>Ambivalent Future<\/em>, the fascinating documentary made during the film&#8217;s shooting by Fujii Kenjiro, shows the extent to which indeterminacy is a guiding force at every stage of Kurosawa&#8217;s artistic process.  He expresses an almost Bressonian refusal to either create psychologically defined figures or help the actors find their way into a role.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>The boss interfering in his employees&#8217; personal lives, on his last day alive:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image26\/bright2.jpeg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ugly digital video was the craze that year. The story of two fuckups working dead-end jobs until the ambitious one (post-Ichi Tadanobu Asano) murders their annoying boss and gives his pet jellyfish to the useless one (Joe Odagiri of Princess Raccoon). The imprisoned guy&#8217;s dad (Tatsuya Fuji, star of Oshima&#8217;s Passion\/Senses) shows up to figure [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[369,233,1120,176],"class_list":["post-18479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2000s","tag-digital-video","tag-jellyfish","tag-kiyoshi-kurosawa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18479"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18497,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18479\/revisions\/18497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}