Asian

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It is often said that comedy is the most untranslatable element from culture to culture. This is perhaps even more the case with surreal mixed genre films like this. In Shindo Kaneto’s film (his 101st!) the old sensei has given us a strange meditation on male lusts and women’s struggle for independence. It is like a play in that the action takes place almost exclusively in a small cabin in a deserted region of Western Japan. A mother and daughter are stranded in a ghost town and are starving to death. They hit on a plan to get them out of their plight which involves exploiting the few men who stray into their cabin. They offer sexual services and then bump off the happy customers. All goes well until a local cop shows up and, then, a relation of theirs from way back.Read More »

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The fifth directorial effort and the first in around six years from film director and actor Okuda Eiji. This drama, set before and after the Great East Japan Earthquake, offers a delicate depiction of a man and woman forced to leave their hometown in Miyagi Prefecture due to the ‘sins’ they have committed.Read More »

Ai Weiwei studio production “LAO MA TI HUA” is a documentary of an incident during Tan Zuoren’s trial on August 12, 2009. Tan Zuoren was charged with “inciting subversion of state power”. Chengdu police detained witnessed during the trial of the civil rights advocate, which is an obstruction of justice and violence.Read More »

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Ostensibly a fiction film about a foster mother (Cherry Pie Picache) in the outskirts of Manila spending her last day with her latest foster child (Kier Segundo), Foster Child is actually a home movie tour de force. It takes a Dziga Vertov or Hou Hsiao-Hsien to make sense out of every aspect of quotidian living, and so Foster Child is merely content with a strong sense of cluttered, bustling place: children running everywhere, playing everywhere, peeing everywhere, and parents wrangling them together for dinner, dances, school, appointments, and trips around the neighborhood. Like Cristian Mungiu did in his recent 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Brillante Mendoza attempts to take the camera from the opening shot of Touch of Evil to quotidian life in the slums.Read More »

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Though John Woo’s lifelong admiration of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick are also evident in this stylish actioner, the film is essentially a tribute to Jean-Pierre Melville and his cult thriller Le Samourai. During a restaurant shootout, hitman Jeff (Chow Yun-Fat) accidentally hurts the eyes of a singer (Sally Yeh). Later he meets the girl and discovers that if she does not have a very expensive operation very soon, she will go blind. To get the money for the surgery, Jeff decides to perform one last hit. The cop (Danny Lee), who has been chasing Jeff for a long time, is determined to catch him this time. The film’s number of victims makes The Terminator or Rambo pale in comparison, but its brilliant visual style and bravura direction earned accolades even from non-action fans.Read More »

Juliette Binoche finds rapture in the forests of Yoshino

Jeanne (Juliette Binoche) travels to Japan to search for the rare medicinal plant ‘Vision’, which according to legend only appears once every 997 years under special conditions. On her trip, she meets Tomo, a forest ranger, who joins her in her quest and helps retrace her past. Twenty years earlier, in the same forests of Yoshino where Jeanne now hopes to find Vision, she experienced her first true love.Read More »

Two girls experience anxieties of their own in a story set in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan. One girl is a professor studying the dreams related to the earthquake. The other is a student who has a nightmare while rehearsing for a play about the disaster.Read More »

Eiga Wiki wrote:
Harmful Insect follows a girl named Sachiko after her father dies, her mother attempts suicide, and her entire class is gossiping about her possibly having an affair with her sixth grade teacher who recently moved away. Because of all this, Sachiko stops going to school and hangs out with a street-dweller named Takao and his mentally disabled friend. When Takao is beaten to death Sachiko is forced to return to her former life, only to face more unwanted trauma at the hands of adults who never seem to have her best interests in mind.Read More »

Hani’s subsequent work, Morning Schedule , combines his interest in contemporary youth with his continued interest in modern women. The story deals with two high school girls who decide to take a trip together. The fiction feature, which is narrated, was filmed in 8mm and each of the major actors was allowed to shoot part of the film. Further, the audience is informed of who is shooting, thereby acknowledging the filmmaker within the context of the work. The use of 8mm is not new for Hani. More than half of his fourth film was originally shot in 8mm. Likewise, the use of a narrator dates back to A Full Life. Throughout his career, Hani has concerned himself with people who have difficulty in communicating with one another. His documentaries, narratives on social problems, and dramas on emerging women have established his reputation as one of the foremost psychologists of the Japanese cinema.Read More »