Japan

PLOT: A young man struggles to come to terms with his true identity in a remote caste-based village in early 20th century Japan.Read More »

Synopsis: Director Hisayasu Sato helmed this peculiar tale about a woman known as Locker Baby because she was left in a bus station locker as an infant. Locker Baby is raped by a man clad in black leather, traumatizing her still further, and driving her to sensory-deprivation therapy. Unfortunately, she is raped during the course of the therapy and becomes pregnant, leading to a denouement which any reader of the Hot Blood or Borderlands series will see coming a mile away Robert Firsching).Read More »

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Lesbian-themed tale of a schoolgirl who entices her gullible (not to mention slightly warped) female teacher by positing that they are predestined to dance together on the day the world ends. The screenplay was titled “The Gods Have a Nervous Breakdown,” which should give some idea of the symbiotic descent into psychosexual dementia that ensues. Rei Takaki co-stars with Shoichiro Sakata and Asako Shirakawa.Read More »

IMDB:
A mentally unbalanced lab technician who works at a university develops a lesbian crush on her new assistant. The lab tech is also obsessed with becoming a parent and so hires a man to rape and impregnate her young girlfriend. She then plans to kill the man when it comes to collect his reward.Read More »

A family begins to change when they move to a town that was once complete forest.Read More »

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Shukichi is a professor, a widower, absorbed in his work. His unmarried daughter, Noriko, runs his household for him. Both are perfectly content with this arrangement until the old man’s sister declares that her niece should get married. Noriko is, after all, in her mid-20s; in Japan in 1949, a single woman that old is approaching the end of her shelf life. His sister warns the professor that after his death Noriko will be left alone in the world; it is his duty to push her out of the nest and find a husband who can support her. The professor reluctantly agrees. When his daughter opposes any idea of marriage, he tells her he is also going to remarry. That is a lie, but he will sacrifice his own comfort for his daughter’s future. She marries.Read More »

東京物語

They one hot beautiful summer day joyfully left home
She one hot sad day stumbled sideways
He strangely found himself back home
one of those so beautiful noisy hot summer days one saysRead More »

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“Sooner or later, everyone who loves movies comes to Ozu. He is the quietest and gentlest of directors, the most humanistic, the most serene.” — Roger Ebert

It took long enough, but I sampled my first Yasujiro Ozu film, Good Morning (Ohayo), and will soon indulge myself with as many of his works as I can locate. At one time, his films were thought to be “too Japanese” and weren’t available in the West, but if Good Morning is any indication of his craft and appeal, Ozu deserves a much wider audience. It’s a film that works at multiple levels, and only artistic geniuses like Shakespeare have been able to pull off such a universal work that works with both down to earth people and with the upper levels of critical audiences equally.Read More »

Synopsis: The story of a painter, a rich guy who can afford to buy works of art just as easily as any tight butt he fancies, a shy, alienated student, his sister, her sadistic boyfriend and a wire-tapping weirdo. This is a Sato film so you can bet that there won’t be any happy endings for any of them when their fates collide.Read More »