Japan

Saotome is a white-collar worker and he was neglected by his wife and children at home. He met Gen, a blue-collar worker and they became good friends.Read More »

Story about a woman who looks after her father in law.Read More »

The story tells of a group of samurai who were left leaderless (becoming ronin) after their daimyo (feudal lord) was forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) for assaulting a court official named Kira Yoshinaka, whose title was Kōzuke no suke. The ronin avenged their master’s honor after patiently waiting and planning for over a year to kill Kira. In turn, the ronin were themselves forced to commit seppuku for committing the crime of murder.Read More »

Third film in the Maruhi series. Focuses on the life of Buddhist nuns during the Edo Period.Junko Fuji in leading role for the first time.Read More »

Introduction
A dark satire of a contemporary Japan still exhausted from the aftermath of war, hunger, poverty and unemployment.And just as its people are recovering, there is a threat during these Cold War years of renewed militarism and rearm…Read More »

Eccentric film about female reporter fired for writing about police corruption. To make money she hides while a weekly magazine offers a prize for her discovery. A bank embezzler and his underlings take advantage of her disappearance to pin the theft on her, as well as the murder of the weak link in their gang. Meanwhile, the cop she got fired is now a private detective and he gets involved in the investigation. Another example of Ichikawa’s mixing of farcical genre filmmaking with perspicacious visual design. Comic highlights include an intentions of murder scene in which each shot reveals the gap in knowledge between potential perpetrator and victim, and the role of unseen objects in accidentally protecting the latter from the former. Another cynical film that finds in cinema a model for the superficial image society of 1950s Japan.Read More »

A tanker truck is blown to smithereens in the middle of a busy street, and a deadly viral infection is released with the explosion. The Bebop crew – Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, Faye Valentine, and Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV – are instantly after the culprit when the gargantuan reward of 300,000,000 woolongs is announced. But the case gets stranger and stranger as the cold-blooded Vincent Volaju, who supposedly has been dead for ten years, seems to be the prime suspect. Meanwhile, Spike encounters the dangerous Electra, who too seeks the madman. Conspiracies and secrets better left alone are uncovered, and Vincent’s reign or terror is nowhere near over yet..Read More »

Before Yoji Yamada started work on the gargantuan Tora-san (男はつらいよ) franchise, he did a couple of comedies with a comedian called Hajime Hana. Most notably are the “Baka” and “Ippatsu” trilogies. “Vagabond Schemer” is the third entry of the latter, which was the last movie Yamada did before the very first Tora-san in the same year. It’s also the third Yamada movie I’ve worked on, and I think it’s my favorite. Where “The Lovable Tramp” was essentially a proto Tora-san, this couldn’t be more removed from that concept. It’s a very black comedy about a boorish man (Hana) who comes back from Borneo one day to find his best friend’s been hurriedly cremated by his fellow tenement dwellers, so he basically starts pestering them and maybe taking things a bit too far in the end. Chieko Baisho who would play Tora-san’s sister Sakura continues to be Yamada’s muse of choice, but she’s not quite as typecast yet in these earlier movies of his, so that’s always nice to see.Read More »

Kinema Jumpo “Best movie”-winner of 2000.

Quote:
Veteran director Shinji Somai lensed this heart-warming family drama about a shabby looking coot claiming to be the father of an elite salaryman. Hiroshi Nirasaki (Koichi Sato) is a securities broker desperately trying to keep the fact that his company is about to go belly-up from his high-strung upper-class wife (Yuki Saito). One day, while walking home from a particularly bad day at work, he gets accosted by an old bum (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who demands to be taken in by his son. Though his mother told him that his dad died when he was born, the drunken geezer knows enough about him and his short order cook mother (Sumiko Fuji) that he is almost convinced. Read More »