1970s

Cinderella traces the misadventures of our heroine, who, via the help of her “fairy” godmother, is granted heightened sexual prowess to win over Prince Charming.Read More »

Quote:
It is the story of a young man and a young woman who, despite suffering and tragedy, find their way to each other. Kumai tells the story with such sensitivity and intelligence and emotion to move everyone to the very depths of his soul. The music by Teizo Matsumura is perfect.Read More »

Quote:
With Danish imports, purporting to be documentary sex films, burning up the box office in 1970, Zoltan Spencer/Spence Crilly cashed in on the craze with the obviously phony DANISH & BLUE, which is neither.
Gimmick is a guy named Johnny (William Howard) vacationing in Copenhagen for two weeks, anxious to see how they get it on in a freewheeling place where pornography has famously been made legal. After a pre-credits tease with a sex therapist (the scene duly repeated in sequence later in the film where it belongs), we see Johnny attending live sex shows and buying obscene photos in a bookstore. Lame construction has endless travelogue shots of Copenhagen intercut with shots of Johnny “looking” or reacting – he never left Hollywood. Whether this is stock footage or second unit shots is irrelevant; the entire film is patently bogus.Read More »

Shuji Terayama and J.A.Seazer’s phantasmagoric folk-psych-symph-prog-rock opera. Historical Tenjo Sajiki performance from 1978. A brief synopsis (for a somewhat different version of the play) is given below. Much of the symbolism of Shintokumaru is shared with Terayama’s earlier masterpiece motion picture Pastoral: to die in the country (also known as Pastoral hide-and-seek).Read More »

“The Dancing Hawk” refers to the son of a peasant who senses he can climb to the job in troubled times by playing his cards right. His slavery to work match his ambitions, and gradually he reaches the social position he desires. But the costs have included a dehumanized soul and a loss of a moral conscience. People have had to pay for his advancement, including those nearest to him. The downfall is equally painful: either imprisonment or the easy wasy out are offered as the alternatives.Read More »

Storyline
After attending her father’s wedding, innocent Peaches crashes her jeep in the forest only to awake with complete amnesia. She is quickly rescued by two manipulative men who hope to sell her back to her family for a hefty ransom. Their adventures introduce Peaches to a crazy doctor with very unusual treatment methods, a sleazy show promoter and more, but nothing helps. Poor Peaches doesn’t know what to do…until she remembers Daddy!Read More »

Ishmael Bernal’s opus recreates the quality and slow pace of life in a dying village surrounded by the sea as it is caught in the eternal cycle of love and hate, of fertility and pollution, of birth and death. A bold and successful attempt to depart from the usual commercial fare, it cryptically paints a large, bleak canvas showing rural fold and how their chances at redemption and happiness are irreversibly decimated by poverty, ignorance, neglect and the dark side of big business.
The only existing 35mm copy (with Japanese subtitles) of the film was found in Fukuoka City Public Library Archive, thus the Japanese hardcoded subs.Read More »

Tokoku Kitamura (1868-1894) is a Romantic poet and an advocate of liberalism in the Meiji era. This biopic is centered on New Year’s Day of 1894, when Kitamura is recovering from a suicide attempt. Japan is then under the spell of fervent patriotism because the government wants to build up public support for a war with China. Kitamura’s literary friends and militant comrades come to visit. They wonder why Kitamura wants to kill himself. Kitamura at first refuses to receive them, then he sits down with them and looks back on his days as a civil rights militant, his stormy love life and his ardent but destructive desire to live literature to the full.Read More »

Synopsis:
Inside an apartment, a young woman suffers from widespread distress. She lives alone in an attic with a skylight in the ceiling that is her only contact with the outside of Paris.Read More »