Doppelgänger, Kurosawa Kiyoshi

Michio Hayasaki, a brilliant developer of medical instruments, is working on a robot chair, equipped with artificial limbs, for people who are completely paralysed. He feels he is being pressed by his employer Medical Cytech to come up with a successful design at short notice and he is in danger of burning out. Then, one evening, he thinks he sees his double. Hayasaki has the shock of his life: superstition suggests that meeting your double means you will soon die. But, after a confrontation with his maladjusted doppelgänger, it becomes clear that Hayasaki could take advantage of his violent tricks. The double reduces Hayasaki’s lab to rubble, clears another double out of the way, hires an assistant for Hayasaki and comes up with a new lab. But in the end, one of them will have to perish…
In Doppelgänger the productive Kurosawa Kyoshi made a stylish horror film with supernatural apparitions and jet-black humour. Where his Bright Future is more philosophical, Doppelgänger is a delicious combination of macabre horror and comic misunderstandings. Yakusho Koji, ‘regular’ actor in Kurosawa’s films, plays a wonderful double role and never leaves the viewer -at least not on purpose -guessing about the identity of his two protagonists. Kurosawa greatly enjoys the Mephisto theme and revels in inventive plot turns and a surprising use of split screen.

Doppelganger.2003.DVDRip.x264-!.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 46mn
Size:	1.88 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	712x480 ~> 853x480
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	2 277 Kbps
Audio
Japanese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/A596146EDF724A2/Doppelganger.2003.DVDRip.x264-!.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Dopperugengâ AKA Doppelganger (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

SYNOPSIS
Something‘s wrong and Etsuko is one of the first to notice. It‘s not just the sky that looks different, Etsuko suddenly begins hearing strange noises and an increasing number of inexplicable things are happening around her: mirror surfaces are distorting and people‘s behaviour is changing. They keep dropping things and their arms seem to be aching. When Miyuki thinks she sees a ghost in her father and newscasters begin predicting incessant rain on a global scale, all the signs seem to indicate that the end of the world is nigh.

Foreboding.2017.720p.BluRay.DTS.x264-HDH.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 20 min
Size: 	5.33 GiB
Video
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Resolution: 	1280x538 
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Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 917 kb/s
BPP: 	0.237
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 5.1ch DTS @ 1 509 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/EFCA00F6EB6A0D8/Foreboding.2017.720p.BluRay.DTS.x264-HDH.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:Chinese

The post Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Yocho AKA Foreboding (2017) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

It is a talker of the Keirin who has risen from the bottom by making the first escape cut to my good technique. But before him, Prince seirabara, Prince of Keirin, always stood, and Wataru felt sorry. Kiyohara, who was synchronized with Wacoal at the Keirin school, made an invincible streak record in the school and won a series of consecutive wins in the race in this season. Although he tried to fight against the defeat of Kiyohara, he was the ozoshi of the zaibatsu, and Kiyohara, who left the real world due to his sudden illness, lost his enemy.

Otokotachi no gekijo.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 20 min
Size: 	11.1 GiB
Video
Codec: 	MPEG-2
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	29.430 fps
Bit rate: 	19.7 Mb/s
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#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/B2B3E0AACDC8744/Otokotachi_no_gekijo.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:None

The post Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Da kane otoko-tachi no gekijô (1994) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Though he has made terrific mainstream dramas, such as Tokyo Sonata and Shokuzai/Penance, when Asian film lovers hear the name Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the first thing they’ll likely think of is the gifted Japanese director’s ghost and horror movies (Pulse, Journey to the Shore). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that for his France-set Daguerreotype (Le Secret de la chambre noire),a feature with a lot of firsts — Kurosawa’s first project shot abroad; his first in another language; his first with a European crew… — that he falls back on a familiar genre.

The result is a film that feels at once familiar and different and, surely not coincidentally, it would be hard to find two words that better describe the ghosts of people we know have passed on.

Beautifully made, though with just a faint hint of mothballs about the project, this Platform premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival should find be of interest to fans of the director but also to a slightly wider, Francophile audience.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the most versatile and in-demand French actor for international directors in recent years has been A Prophet star Tahar Rahim, who since his breakout in 2009 has worked with such renowned directors as Fatih Akin, Ashgar Farhadi, Kevin Macdonald and Lou Ye. In Kurosawa’s film, Rahim plays Jean, a Parisian who has difficulties making ends meet but then stumbles into a job as the assistant of reclusive photographer, Stephane (Belgian veteran actor Olivier Gourmet in a role that would’ve been for Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho had this film been in Japanese).

Stephane lives and works in a beautiful if somewhat rundown old mansion on the outskirts of Paris with his 22-year-old daughter, Marie (Constance Rousseau, Simon Killer), an otherworldly blonde who reminds the outwardly stoic but not-so-secretly melancholic Stephane of his dead wife. Marie poses for the daguerreotypes of the English title, which often require hours of standing still, with creepy constructions of metal bars behind her back and limbs helping her keep her body in place.

Though the film is set in the present, there is a distinct — and often slightly eerie — pull from the past that permeates every frame. When Jean first visits the old mansion, doors squeak and he thinks he sees a woman in an old-fashioned dress in the monumental staircase, as if the home’s first inhabitants were still around. And Stephane not only seems to mourn his wife, Denise, but there’s the distinct sensation that he’s trying to make her come back to life again in the life-size, silver-plated copper plates he shoots of their daughter (daguerreotypes were the first type of “photos” available, some 175 years ago). As if to underline the point he’s stuck in the past, it’s made clear in a chuckle-inducing interlude (which features Mathieu Amalric), that regular fashion shoots, on which he has to occasionally rely for money, are something Stephane abhors.

Adding to the sensation that the contemporary story lives at least partially in the past is the classically elegant camerawork of French cinematographer Alexis Kavyrchine — who, coincidentally, also shot the documentary Kurosawa’s Way, about Kiyoshi’s colleague and namesake, Akira Kurosawa — and Gregoire Hetzel’s ditto, occasionally swelling score, with its harp and violin solos.

The refined and feather-light haunting quality of Kurosawa’s best ghost movies is certainly present here but the narrative in the second part isn’t streamlined enough for constant character identification. The events that unfold after Jean falls in love with Marie create a kind of parallel narrative that feeds into the film’s final act though the specifics of this aren’t always clear. There are also several subplots, including one with a realtor (Malik Zidi) with designs on the house and Marie’s plan to move to Toulouse where she could work as a botanist, that feel like they’ve been boiled down from more novelistic and thematically relevant stories to snippets that aren’t always entirely legible anymore.

That said, Rahim delivers another self-effacing performance as a working-class man sucked into a world that’s not his who has to try to find his bearings. It is thanks to his work that audiences will remain hooked. A double-take scene in an empty church is an especially strong moment because of Rahim’s (and Kurosawa’s) tacit understanding of understatement. With her alabaster skin and strawberry blonde hair, Rousseau has no problem incarnating a timeless beauty and her scenes away from the mansion imbue her puppet-like character with a real joie de vivre. Gourmet, finally, is reliable as a man who not only clings to his work when life no longer makes sense but actually tries to find some kind of salvation through his art.

Technically, the film is impeccably controlled.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa - (2016) Daguerrotype.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 6 min
Size: 	2.80 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
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Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
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Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/B03A02850754053/Kiyoshi_Kurosawa_-_(2016)_Daguerrotype.mkv https://nitro.download/view/37DB807704B70F2/Kiyoshi_Kurosawa_-_(2016)_Daguerrotype.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Le secret de la chambre noire AKA Daguerrotype (2016) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

An early TV film by Kurosawa, one of two for the Dramada (1990-1993) series. Stars Kurosawa regulars Ôsugi Ren and Suwa Tarô.

	
Wordholic.Prisoner.1990.DVDrip.x264.AC3.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	54 min 38 s
Size: 	669 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
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https://nitro.download/view/019AEF05F23BD19/Wordholic.Prisoner.1990.DVDrip.x264.AC3.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/168B75BDD7D9045/Kiyoshi_Kurosawa_-_Wordholic_Prisoner_ENG_02.srt

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Dramadas: Modae kurushimu katsuji chûdoku-sha jigoku no miso zô AKA Wordholic Prisoner (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Yoshii, a young man who resells goods online, finds himself at the center of a series of mysterious events that put his life at risk.

Cloud.2024.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-MagicStar.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 4 min
Size: 	8.64 GiB
Video
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https://nitro.download/view/61829373E3EAD9D/Cloud.2024.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-MagicStar.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English here

The post Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Kuraudo AKA Cloud (2024) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

An early TV film by Kurosawa, one of two for the Dramada (1990-1993) series. IMDb lists runtime as 47 minutes – this is only 23

Whirlpool.of.Joy.1992.DVDrip.x264.AC3.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	23 min 22 s
Size: 	594 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
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#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/9346410CE0DD78E/Whirlpool.of.Joy.1992.DVDrip.x264.AC3.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/C3EA15F48DF97C3/Whirlpool.of.Joy.1992.DVDrip.x264.AC3_-_eng_03.srt

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Dramadas: Yorokobi no uzumaki AKA Whirlpool of Joy (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.