Japan

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“To see Tokyo in all it’s wacky and scenic splendor, take a long walk with Tenten (a.k.a. Adrift in Tokyo). The latest from director Miki Satoshi (Insects Unlisted in the Encyclopedia ), Tenten is a brilliantly manic road comedy starring the unbeatable tag team of Odagiri Joe (Tokyo Tower – Mom & Me, and Sometimes Dad) and Miura Tomokazu (The Taste of Tea). Both actors are playing roles they could do in their sleep – prickly middle-ager and slacker student with unfortunate hair – and they bring the exact combination of calm calamity and charismatic craziness the film calls for. In the grand tradition of male bonding road movies, Tenten is just the aimless story of two strange guys walking around Tokyo for a few days and the stranger adventures they encounter – and yet, it’s so much more. Underachieving law student Takemura (Odagiri Joe) – on his eighth year and counting – has racked up quite a sizable debt in the name of higher education. The urgency of his financial situation announces itself in the form of hot-tempered debt collector Fukuhara (Miura Tomokazu), who comes bursting into his apartment one night demanding payment and threatening painful repercussions. Short of hitting it big on pachinko, Takemura has no idea how he can possibly pay back the sum. As the deadline closes in, Fukuhara makes Takemura an unexpected proposition: walk with him from Kichijoji (in western Tokyo) to Kasumigaseki (in central Tokyo), and he’ll pay the indebted student one million yen, enough to cover his debt. Bewildered but in no position to argue, Takemura hits the road with Fukuhara who, it turns out, just killed his wife and wants to turn himself in at a specific police station in Kasumigaseki. Getting there will take some time though, because many wacky people (including Koizumi Kyoko as a club madam) and surprise detours await them on the road in between.”Read More »

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Like Imamura and Oshima, Shinoda Masahiro was a university-educated intellectual who was employed by Shochiku as an assistant director in the early 1950s and felt stifled by the company’s conservatism. But Shinoda was less openly rebellious than the other two and took the opportunity to learn a great deal about camera technique, editing and shot composition by working conscientiously as an assistant to all of the company’s leading directors.Read More »

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For a film so widely and indelibly remembered, Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan has confounded a surprising number of critics over the years. Ever since its release in 1965, there have been those who have found it too long, too artificial, too self-consciously exotic, not socially minded enough for the director of The Human Condition (1959–61) and Harakiri (1962), not scary or gory enough to qualify as a horror film. To be sure, this four-part adaptation of four renowned ghost stories by Lafcadio Hearn—not quite comparable to any other film, regardless of genre or country of origin, and unique in Kobayashi’s oeuvre—defies easy categorization. That is perhaps why it has remained for countless viewers such a singular experience, clinging to memory like an unshakable dream, a glimpse into some alternate zone where light falls differently on faces, time moves by a different measure, and terror blends disturbingly with beauty.Read More »

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Welcome to the world of the Fuccon Family, aka Oh Mikey!, a bizarre and amazing mannequin drama that has taken Japan by storm. Based on a popular independent film, OH! Mikey is the bizarre and hilarious story of the Fuccon family, who have come from America to live in Japan, despite the fact that they are mannequins.
Some episodes of the series were a little too spicy to air, and determined unfit for airing and were cut from the broadcast version. However, these cut scenes have been restored in HARDCORE where you get to see cut scenes from 8 different episodes.Read More »

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Based upon a true incident in 1930s Japan, Nagisa Oshima’s controversial film effectively skirts the borderline between pornography and art — making Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris of four years earlier look like children’s programming in comparison. The story concerns servant and former prostitute Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) who becomes sexually obsessed with her employer Kizicho (Tatsuya Fuji), a businessman, after seeing him making love to his wife. After making love to Sada, Kizicho becomes obsessed with her as well. As their love-making becomes more and more intense, they find themselves unable to separate themselves from each other, until every waking hour is spent in more and more dangerous sexual acts with Sada becoming more and more of the aggressor. Finally, for the ultimate in eroticism, Kizicho agrees to be strangled during sexual ecstasy for the ultimate in orgasmic fulfillment.Read More »

When a successful, but tired Tokyo-based playwright who has sworn off easy women and casual encounters takes refuge in the countryside, his plans are disrupted by a horny woman who pedals fast into his life and is unrelenting.Read More »

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When her only relative, her elder brother is accused of robbing and murdering an old woman loan-shark, pretty, young Kiriko (Chieko Baisho) travels from her home in Kyushu to Tokyo to get Japan’s top lawyer to defend her brother. Unfortunately her naive idealism is shattered when the lawyer refuses to take the case based on her insufficient funds. What follows is a long determined revenge plot that sees the heroine become a Tokyo bar hostess and worse to punish the lawyer. The plot thickens with another murder mystery and a sleuthing reporter.Read More »

In 1637, the Tokugawa Shogunate mandated religious orders to severely restrict and contain the spread of Christianity. In Kyushu, Shimabara and Amakusa, the Christian population was particularly large, and the farmers continuously endured extreme pain and suffering under the oppression of the land’s rulers. Unable to pay taxes because of severe famine, Christians watched their daughters taken away by the samurai and waited for a miracle that could save them. People lined up to follow Shiro of Amakusa in the belief that he was the one to lead them out of despair. This is a serious story taken from the pages of history, and exposes what led up to the siege of Shimabara. A tremendous performance by mega-star Okawa Hashizo along with crisp direction by noted filmmaker Oshima Nagisa raise the level of this film to true art.Read More »

A young man and a woman meet in the bath of a resort in Atami one evening. The young man then attempts to swoon the woman while in the meantime enjoying the city sights of the vacation town, all accompanied by a sensual jazz score.Read More »