Kamikaze Girls

A glorious blend of kitsch, grit, humor and uplift.

Fukada captures the stubborn individualism of a girl who embraces an unpopular lifestyle.

The yummy Japanese confection Kamikaze Girls deserves both a better title and an audience to go with it.

Nakashima does his best to keep the flimsy enterprise afloat, mostly through whooshing camera movements and headlong dives into the grotesque extremes of Japanese kitsch. By the end, the effect is like eating a bellyache's worth of cotton candy.

But it's all done with such high style and whizzes along at such an exhausting pace that you probably won't have enough time to notice how little you care.

Wears out its welcome at 100 minutes, but could find an audience in the West as a latenight attraction at gay fests.

If you value plausibility in movies, skip Kamikaze Girls; this is the sort of picture where getting run over by a truck gives a character gorgeous hair instead of a broken hip.