2000s

NY Times:
The notion that our sexual behavior is the purest expression of our deepest selves is delicately explored in “9 Songs,” Michael Winterbottom’s lyrical, graphically explicit chronicle of an ordinary love affair between two attractive people. The movie isn’t the first art film to show real as opposed to simulated sex, but it’s the first to scrutinize at length one couple’s bedroom etiquette in a search for their identities. If anything, “9 Songs,” conceived and directed by Mr. Winterbottom, the British filmmaker responsible for movies like “In This World” and “Welcome to Sarajevo,” that boldly enter the topical fray, proves that showing what people do in bed may not reveal all that much. The truth lies hidden in their minds.Read More »

This film was seen at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Film Comment Selects series, February 2006

Sloppy, silly, and incoherent writing mars writer/director Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s moodily detailed atmosphere in Loft, a story of mummies, cloying book editors, a haunted archeologist, and a hodgepodge of other, random horror paraphernalia. The film starts out with prize-winning novelist Reiko (Nakatani Miki) suffering not only from writer’s block but also from hallucinations and fits that involve coughing up viscous black mud.Read More »

~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide wrote:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa grabbed worldwide attention with his 1997 masterpiece Cure, a horror film that was actually horrifying. Sandblasting away all the campy cliches of 1970s quickies, Cure employed intelligent camera work, lighting, sound design, and a good story — and very little special effects — to prove that horror flicks can also be art. Kurosawa shows that he has lost none of his abilities to scare in this film. The first 30 minutes of Kairo is perhaps some of the most unnerving, frightening sequences to come down the pike in a long time. And Kurosawa accomplishes this with admirable economy, using little dramatizing music or flash camera trickery.Read More »

A documentary was made during the production process of Bright Future, called Aimai Na Mirai (Ambivalent Future). It was released in theaters in Japan and it’s available on the Japanese DVD release of Bright Future. The documentary was not so much a making-of as an interpretation of your work, with Bright Future functioning as a case study. What did you think when you saw it?

I didn’t watch it so attentively, because I felt a bit embarrassed about watching myself. I kept thinking “What a liar this director is!” (laughs). And I understood the difference between documentary filmmakers and fiction filmmakers. Documentarists shoot elements of reality, and after that in post-production they try to turn it into a lie as much as possible. Directors like me who make fiction – and I’ve never made a documentary – we deal with fictional elements such as the script, but after that we try to make them as close to reality as possible, and try not to lie as much possible. It’s the complete opposite.

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Cult director Koji Wakamatsu (famous abroad for titles such as “Go, Go Second Time Virgin”) returns to helm the sixth in this perversely entertaining series. A Kabukicho gigolo with a gambling debt Mikio Osawa agrees to bump off a rich wife’s husband for a bundle of cash, but botches the hit. On the run in the snow-covered hills of northern Japan, he holes up in a shuttered, deserted house. But the house is not empty: a timid, traumatized girl Mika Ito lives there, in the thrall of a sick, hot-tempered trucker Shiro Sano who has kept her there since she was a tiny girl. Osawa tries hard but looks out of his depth here, as veteran Sano and 23-year-old ingenue Ito build an all-too-believable, monstrous relationship as sadistic paternal pervert and terrified tremulous child. File under guilty pleasure.Read More »

The Isle is a case in point. Based around a primitive fishing community on a lake, it’s beautifully shot though morally bankrupt, far too eager to visually astound one moment then deeply shock the next. It focuses on a pseudo sado-masochistic relationship between a mute woman and a murderous ex-cop and, seemingly, is out to break almost every taboo available. There’s animal cruelty on a grand scale. There’s at least one rape scene, and one scene in which sexual violence towards women is almost justified by the filmmaker. There’s self-mutilation; a myriad of bodily functions; and, perhaps only a hundred lines of dialogue in the entire movie. It’s almost as if Kim is setting himself up to be Korea’s Takashi Miike, only with better cinematography.Read More »

The 9th Century tale of a young boy whose destiny is to complete the legendary Book of Kells, the Cartoon Saloon film Brendan and the Secret of Kells looks to be a marvelous display of creativity in animation, both in terms of compelling visuals and articulate storytelling.
Nominated for Oscar.Read More »

PLOT – short version
A Thai tale of the legendary Krasue (also known as the ‘P’ Graseau, or the Penanggalan in Chinese), a Southeast Asian Ghost, composed of a disembodied witch with a flying head and entrails dangling beneath. Political intrigue, black magic, unrequited love and disembowlment all fit together perfectly for an evening of family fun with the witch with the flying head. Written by J.W. CaseRead More »

From VILLAGE VOICE:
A shuddering, flickering tribute to two lost compatriots, Ken Jacobs’s Two Wrenching Departures took its original form in 1989 as one of Jacobs’s live “Nervous System” cine-improvisations on dual 16mm projectors. Earlier that year, his former collaborators Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith died within a week of one another—an ironic conjunction, as the pair had been at odds for years, long after Jacobs, Fleischner, and Smith had chaotically joined talents in the late ’50s to create Blonde Cobra, a grimly glamorous rummage through trash-pile transvestism that was one of the most celebrated titles of the pre-Warhol underground scene.Read More »