A totally quirky film that demands more than it gives: The Taste of Tea

I finished watching "The Taste of Tea" and uttered the semi-cliche, there's two hours of my life I won't get back, but that isn't totally true: It's 2 hour and 20 minutes. Okay, that's too harsh. There are things I did like about this unusual Japanese film. I did, over the long course of it, come to understand this quirky, artistic family, in the mode of a Japanese version of a Wes Anderson or Noah Baumbach film - or most accurately of the family in Little Miss Sunshine, with the cute little girl and the sensitive young man and the eccentric grandfather and uncle. But it's very Japanese, a tough go for an American viewer - hard to know how many of the quirks are unique to this family and how many are endemic to Japanese culture (film set in rural Japan ca 2004). The Mother (and grandfather) and anime/manga artists, and the film uses anime and music video as a subtext - the crazy and colorful violence of the anime sequences that the quiet, demure, bespectacled mother designs are an "ironic" contrast to the slow, actually torpid pace of the family life and of this film - achingly long scenes watching cherry blossoms sway in the wind, long narratives, minutes spent watching characters move pieces in a game of Go. This occasionally broken up by some short action scenes (mobster gets beat up and buried alive), moments of really odd behavior (family enjoys group hypnotism), typical teenage angst (boy falls for girl who's far out of his league and pines away), and strange interludes (grandfather remembers his youth, uncle runs across former girlfriend and they chat awkwardly for maybe 5 minutes). A totally quirky film that some may love and has moments of great interest but demands, in my view, much more than it gives.