Asian

16 year old orphan Tomi (played by Hideko Takamine) was a wild and unsettled girl. The juvenile court punishes her to be sent into the mountains of Aoyama for reeducation. Here she is taken care of by the teacher Miss Yamada, which is kind but has troubles getting along with the girls that are sent to her…
The director Aoyagi, wo directed a number of entertainment films during the war, deals with the topic of punishment and problematic youngsters. The film is very different and much more dramatic from films by Hiroshi Shimizu or Hiroshi Inagaki dealing with similar topic. The film depicts the roughness of the young girls and the brutality amongst them in a more realistic way. He takes a rare approach by not having Tomi say anything at all during the first half of the film. The film is also interesting from a historical point of view in putting the focus on the attitude of the Japanese state towards problematic young people during the war.Read More »

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Few novels were filmed as many times as Shiro Ozaki’s famous Theatre of Life . So rich and appealing is this roman fleuve about chivalrous yakuza that, over the decades, it was rendered in “youth”and animated versions, as a lavish epic or omnibus film (including one by Kinji Fukasaku), and indeed was initially made by Uchida in 1936 as a highly regarded “social tendency” film. But Uchida’s later version is considered the gold standard, partly because of his mastery at visual storytelling, partly because of his superb ensemble cast. The yakuza Hishakaku kills someone in a dispute over a barmaid, but turns himself in at the urging of Kiratsune, an old gangster who has just returned from eight years in Shanghai and has become his protector.When he gets out of prison, Hishakaku finds himself once again torn between his sense of duty to his gang and his sense of humanity, and is drawn back into the bloody clan feuds.Read More »

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Ding Bo (Chen Po Lin) and his friends Nan Feng (Fan Bingbing) and Fei Zao aka Fatso (Fei Long) are a trio of 20-something outsiders who have no intention of sitting exams and getting into universities.Read More »

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Ogata’s first leading role was in Masumura’s Sex Check — the Second Sex (1968). Here, Ogata plays Shiro Miyagi, a sprinter with Olympic aspirations whose dreams were shattered by WWII. A broken man, he leads the dissolute life of a gigolo until a chance meeting with a fiery young athlete named Hiroko (Michiyo Yasuda, who also plays Naomi in A Fool’s Love). Realizing that she has talent as a sprinter, Miyagi sees a second chance at Olympic glory in becoming her coach. Following Miyagi’s unconventional, military-style training, Hiroko sets a record for the 100-meter dash, but her greatest hurdle proves to be a “sex check” which all professional athletes must pass. The Second Sex shows the love-hate relationship between athlete and coach as a means to explore a hypothesis about gender, androgyny, and human potential. This is, simply put, an unclassifiable film.Read More »

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This brilliant motion picture is also based on the writings of Yamamoto Shugoro. It tells the story of Young Lord Takenaka who stands to succeed his father until a series of violent actions lead his retainers to think that he has gone mad with blood-lust. Never offering any explanation, he continues his seemingly unprovoked attacks until he is sent away from his domain. The secondary title “Mondo Muyo” translates roughly as “no need for questions and answers” or in effect “Don’t waste your breath asking why”. There is superb action throughout and regardless of his bloody actions, Takenaka presents a sympathetic persona. The grand finale brings the reasons for his crimes out as a revelation unlike anything ever seen in a samurai film. This is Japanese cinema at its finest.Read More »

A small-time con artist gets word that his mother will come see him in Edo. To avoid her finding out that he’s been wildly exaggerating his success, he enlists his buddies in a wild scheme to impersonate a samurai lord.Read More »

From All Movie Guide:
“Suicide has long been used as a form of social protest in Japan. In this film, set in 1703, samurai culture is being transformed by the emergence of a new merchant class. Elements of the social contract are beginning to unravel, and some unscrupulous people took undue advantage of these changes before the social order was re-created. In this story, a rich merchant gives his clerk an I.O.U. instead of wages. When the impoverished clerk presents the paper to the merchant at the agreed upon time asking for payment, the man flies into a rage and pretends he never wrote it and claims the clerk is trying to defraud him. Then he sets his henchmen on the clerk to administer a beating. Though similar in story and period, this is a different film from the 1969 Double Suicide by director Masahiro Shinoda.”Read More »

There is usually only one full moon every month, but occasionally there are two – and that second full moon is called the “Blue Moon”. It is said that when a person sees a blue moon and makes a wish, he will be granted a second chance in things. This film is about two young men and a woman who are granted not only a second, but 120 chances. This is because the film is structured in such a way that its five reels of footage can be projected in random sequences every time it is screened and the story will still make sense – the number of possible combinations adds up to 120 times; each time there is a different story, different rhythm and different atmosphere.Read More »

Bara no hyôteki (1972)
A gunslinger is hired to kill a news photographer. The young ward of the shot photographer discovers the set-up behind the killing – that a laboratory is being set up by a Nazi organization to capture and train talented youth and that the photographer was about to expose it.Read More »