Japan

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This movie is completely wacky. Completely. Wacky. It concerns the story of a poor water seller in Baghdad who stumbles his way through ali baba and his 40 thieves, the tower of Babel, sinbad the sailor, the island of the sirens and many others stories that either i didn’t recognise from the 1001 nights stories or were just made up by the animation team on one of what must have been many acid binges. The film was made in 1969 with a crew of about 15 animators and others (the same names pop up in multiple roles) and is thus forced to employ a number of techniques to cheapen the animation, using still frames incorporating live action shots (for such hard to animate things as the ocean) and shooting live action footage of miniature models for the landscape shots.Read More »

There’s a Nobura Tanaka masterpiece lurking behind this lurid title. Today many critics feel Tanaka was the best director in Nikkatsu’s pink film stable, but in the 70s his work was constantly overshadowed by other studio masters like Chusei Sone and Tatsumi Kumashiro. This film was his first major “break-through.” Despite the “objectionable” necrophilia scenes, the movie was applauded by the mainstream press, praised for Hideo Murota’s remarkable performance , and honored by the Japanese Academy of Films and Motion Pictures and Kinema Jumpo as the best film of 1979.Read More »

Sukezo, a farmer manga comic artist, takes up the art rock business by setting up a shop in a shed by the river. He tries hard to be successful, but business does not go well and the family becomes progressively poorer.
Based on the Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge.Read More »

A self-remake of multi-award winning 1982 film by director Obayashi Nobuhiko, “Tenkousei” is about two junior high student switching body. A very unique, experimental film.Read More »

The first of Kawashima’s Daiei Studio collaborations with Wakao centers on the life of a Tokyo geisha named Koen and her relationships with various men. Starting out with no singing or dancing talents, the young, free-spirited Koen is initially eager to please and happy to do what she is told. With time and experience, however, she gradually begins to notice a change in herself and questions what she wants out of life. Played with subtle shifts in emotion, Wakao’s delicate performance earned her the Kinema Junpo Award and Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actress.Read More »

Synopsis:
On 15 August 1955 at noon, on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender, five people gather outside a train station, each of them wearing the emblem of the former imperial army on their chest. On the day of the surrender, an army general had hidden a can of priceless morphin in an air-raid shelter. It had been agreed then that the general and his three soldiers would meet ten years later to share their loot. Outside the station there is now one person too many. What’s more, one of them is a woman who claims she was married to the now dead general. The four men and the woman hire a house, aiming to turn it into a real estate agency. They start digging the ground to reach the spot where the can was buried. As their work progresses, each of them becomes a victim of their own selfishness, distrust and greed.Read More »

Plot summary: (from A Nutshell Review)
Juri (Niko Narumi, you’ll be amazed that she’s only so young, but yet has the capability to take on a character that so layered and yet so subtle in her delivery) plays an ideal girl at home and in school, but this facade is quickly stripped away early in the movie, as we see her loathe her parent’s bickering at home, while putting up a false front of a happy, supportive family to the outside world. In the movie, the spotlight is also shared by fellow classmate Hinako (Atsuko Maeda), a popular girl who in a twist of fate, becomes the victim of classroom politics and bullying. Mere acquaintances, they share a poignant conversation just after junior school graduation, before going their separate ways.Read More »

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In “A Gentle Breeze in the Village,” Soyo Migata (Kaho) is a quirky 8th grade student who resides in a tiny rural village somewhere in Japan. The village is small enough where there’s only 6 students that attends their school (from 1st grade through 8th grade). Soyo’s been friends with her classmates since early childhood and they all hang out together like an extended family. One day, a new student named Hiromi Osawa (Masaki Okada) arrives. He’s a good looking boy from Tokyo and all the other students view as something of a celebrity.Read More »

A movie set in a love hotel, but without a single sex scene? A 59-year-old woman as the heroine? It’s hard to imagine that particular pitch loosening purse strings at major Japanese media companies. A fatally ill teenager? That’s more like it.

Mark Schilling’s review from the Japan Times: No sex at a love hotel
A movie set in a love hotel, but without a single sex scene? A 59-year-old woman as the heroine? It’s hard to imagine that particular pitch loosening purse strings at major Japanese media companies. A fatally ill teenager? That’s more like it.
Director Izuru Kumasaka has incorporated these and other decidedly uncommercial elements into debut feature “Park and Love Hotel” (titled “Asyl” — short for “Asylum” — internationally), which won the Best First Feature Award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Read More »