Quote:
The hero, Prince Siegfried, is out riding one day with his friends when he spies amidst swans on a lake a particularly eye-catching one with a crown on its head, the familiar Princess Odette. The princess is charmed by an evil wizard Rothbart who is crazy about marrying Odette. Handsome Prince Siegfried together with two merry squirrels struggle to defeat the evil wizard to complete this classic fairy tales. The movie features original Tschaikovsky music. Written by Lucky-16Read More »
Plot:
A dramatic account of three women and their lives, seen through the looking glass of sex, words, madness, death, and family, Guilty of Romance — the new crime noir from the award-winning director Sion Sono (Love Exposure, Cold Fish) — tells the tale of three women entangled in a mystery…a mystery that is the gate to a hell-bound love like no other!
Set just before the turn of the 21st century, a grisly murder occurs in Maruyama-cho, Shibuya — a love hotel district — a woman was found dead in a derelict apartment in the pouring rain. Whilst the police investigate, the story interweaves with that of Izumi, the wife of a famous romantic novelist whose life seems just a daily repetition without romance. One day, to break away from the loveless monotony, she decides to follow her desires and accepts a job as a naked model faking sex in front of the camera. Soon she meets with a mentor and starts selling her body to strangers, whilst at home she hides behind the facade that she is still the wife she is supposed to be.Read More »
Criterion Collection wrote:
Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. Originally filmed and released in three parts, the nine-and-a-half-hour The Human Condition (Ningen no joken), adapted from Junpei Gomikawa’s six-volume novel, tells of the journey of the well-intentioned yet naive Kaji (handsome Japanese superstar Tatsuya Nakadai) from labor camp supervisor to Imperial Army soldier to Soviet POW. Constantly trying to rise above a corrupt system, Kaji time and again finds his morals an impediment rather than an advantage. A raw indictment of its nation’s wartime mentality as well as a personal existential tragedy, Kobayashi’s riveting, gorgeously filmed epic is novelistic cinema at its best.Read More »
The film traces the growth and friendship of two very different high-school ping-pong players. “Peco” Hoshino is a brash, arrogant player, determined to turn pro. He taught his quiet, nerdy childhood friend “Smile” Tsukimoto. Smile frustrates his coach and rivals, who recognize his talent for the game since it is just a game to him. To teach him, his high-school coach learns that coaching is more than just training the students to be good ping-pong players. Ironically, as Smile begins to develop his game, Peco undergoes a severe crisis after his defeat by rival players and is unable to play well until he rediscovers the original reasons why he plays ping-pong. Written by nakataohana Read More »
Synopsis
Prolific Japanese filmmaker Koji Wakamatsu’s Go, Go Second Time Virgin tells the tale of two Japanese teens brought together by sexual violence, revenge, and rebellion. A girl (Mimi Kozakura) is forcibly carried to a rooftop and gang-raped, as a boy of similar age (Michio Akiyama) stands to the side watching the events unfold. The boy remains on the roof until the next morning, waiting for the girl to wake. When she does finally rise, the two teens begin sharing intimate details about their lives, including the fact that the boy has recently killed four people that forced him to take part in an orgy. As the two kindred spirits sink lower and lower into depression and delusion, they exact revenge for the crimes against the girl and take a bold, tragic step to end their misery once and for all.
~ Ryan Shriver, All Movie GuideRead More »
A cult film master, Koji Wakamatsu, reveals the Japanese taboo!! Shot by 35mm film.
Various tortures have been executed in the Japanese history. Director, Koji Wakamatsu has put together a collection of these tortures to reveal its bloody history….Read More »
Description
Tokyo’s Valentine Call is a special kind of phone club. Older salarymen pay to wait for calls from teenage girls, discreet meetings are arranged, and handfuls of yen are exchanged for a quick session of enjo kosai, or paid sex with a high school girl. Plenty of girls are doing it—some to make money for fancy, fashionable clothes and accessories, others to set a trap to rob and brutalize the old perverts. But the Valentine Call staff, horny young Ogisu and the vaguely sinister, makeup-coated Mr. Kuni, have a nasty plan of their own. Listening in on the enjo kosai calls, they conspire to trick the girls into giving them free sex. Mr. Kuni even has a twisted concept behind this scheme. He calls it enboku, his campaign to humiliate the teenage girls, drive them away from prostitution and purify Japan. The enboku plan goes great at first, but then the girls start to wise up to the pair’s tricks and plan their revenge, while Mr. Kuni sets out to take his cruel campaign to even more diabolical extremes…Read More »
Golgo 13 (Sonny Chiba) is a callous, calculating assassin working for a violent U.S. drug syndicate who’s in Hong Kong to carry out his latest mission: murdering the most powerful gangster in the city. The only thing standing in Golgo’s way is a dogged detective (Callan Leung) who’s determined to stop the killer at any cost. This stylish, hard-boiled action thriller from Yukio Noda is based on the best-selling manga comic book.Read More »
Roland Domenig, Vital flesh: the mysterious world of Pink Eiga
Koji Wakamatsu is one of the more important directors to have worked in the pink film (pinku eiga), a genre of softcore, dramatically charged films which were dominant on the Japanese domestic scene in the 1960’s and 1970’s (the roman porn were a more radical and explicit subset of the pink film). The Japanese studios who produced these films, including Nikkatsu, were reluctant to distribute these films abroad, for fear of the sort of image the films would project of Japan. Seeing these films today one must conclude that it was not the more obvious sexual display that worried the Japanese, but the radical anarchist politics of the films, perhaps above all else, often compounded by violent sadomasochism, and the undercurrent of misogyny.Read More »