- Rather than a plot, Ugoku develops an undiluted visual and sonic drama instead. Pounding rhythms and over a thousand elaborately altered and hand-colored clips rise to crescendo after crescendo in a Himalayan range of peak experiences.
- Heads and torsos jerk, dip, nod, dance, huff and puff, superimposed over an explosive catalog of mandala-like, kaleidoscopic changes. The effect is hypnotic and mildly intoxicating, as if one's mirror neurons were being massaged, stroked along an emerging behavioral scale. Politically loaded snatches of dialogue soon begin to pop in and out of view, and paranoia plucks its baseline early-on. A woman says, "We're just as confused as you are," and another character speaks the Rod Serling-like line, "How can I prove my innocence if I don't know what I'm accused of?" Kasumi inserts her audience into a Twilight Zone of psycho-melodrama and autonomic response, rubbing Ugoku's ambiguous messages into the brain with the dubious aid of a motley company of C-list actors, casting-favorites for filler programming in and around the early 1960's. "Psychotic behavior!" observes a trim, familiar-looking character with a neat mustache. "I'm hot," whines a young woman seductively. A garbled phrase that sounds like, "Empty your wallets!" echoes for several seconds - a long time in Kasumi-world. Toward the end an older, alien-type man tricked out in a harlequinesque, futuristic tunic casts his eyes aloft and warbles unconvincingly, "We come from a planet called LOVE!" Ugoku pants into a terminal condition of distortion hypermix, threatening a cosmic-orgasmic explosion...but for better or worse a rendition of the ultimate big bang is beyond the reach of any art form. A clip shows two bored-looking, mildly disgusted technicians ignoring a cancer-like burgeoning of angry round sun cartoon faces, ricocheting within the borders of a vintage TV screen. Soon these are replaced by blinking Chatty Cathy heads (these were shown at various points earlier in the video, at one point spilling over a desolate horizon with auroral fervor) as successive clips are taken over by pulsing, mandala-like [geometric] abstract motifs. Various personae blossom from the center of these prismatic forms, at last shrinking and spinning into black nothingness.—Douglas Max Utter for Kasumifilms
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