Japan

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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 »

Maya Grohn wrote:
This film is based on the book Heaven and Maiko by Yoshiya Nobuko.

It is a story of two girls with totally different family backgrounds. The family of Eiko was in the okiya business, which handled geiko (geisha), one of the highest rank okiya in Osaka. Eiko was attending the girls’ school, modeled after Wilmina Girls School (currently Osaka Jogakuin).

One day a new girl, Sada Mitsuru moved to the school from Tokyo, Mitsuru’s father was a successful businessman and her mother a pious Christian.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 »

Colourful, wildly stylised, immense captivating fable, including animation, kabuki and butoh and collapsing sets. About a soothsayer at court who was driven to insanity by the murder of his lover and will marry her likeness. And indeed, she’s a fox in human form!Read More »

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This is an excellent piece of cinema, about life of yakuza (gangster) and his family. Ryuji tries to quit yakuza and spend a decent life with his wife Mariko and daughter Aya…but as he’s used to getting easy money, it’d become hard for him to work hard and get little. Eventually he’s back to where he belongs.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 »

Mai bakku pêji (2011)

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Based on Saburo Kawamoto’s autobiographical novel My Back Pages: Aru 60-nendai no Monogatari (A Story of Life in the 60s), the film is set during the student protests at Tokyo University. At the time, Kawamoto was working as a journalist covering the protests, which were in reaction to the Japanese government’s tolerance of US involvement in the Vietnam War and the use of Okinawa as a staging ground for that war.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 »