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On the anniversary of the death of the mother of a hip and happening Tokyo-based photographer, the son returns to his hometown for the funeral. What follows is a return to the past that is more than just a trek home. Old relationships, love, conflicts and memories resurface and collide. Apparently, old perspectives don’t wither.

2.54GB | 1h 59m | 1024×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A265EABDEC7F405/Miwa_Nishikawa_-_(2006)_Sway.mkv

Language:Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Miwa Nishikawa – Yureru AKA Sway (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Director Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s young protegee debut, an obscurely low key drug drama.

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Iseya enrolled on a film course at New York University in 1998, which he funded through modelling work, and has gone on to direct this feature under the patronage of his early mentor, Kore-Eda, here acting for the first time in the role of producer.

Kakuto, a composite word made-up from the kanji meaning “Awakening Person” by the director to describe the shock sensations that inspire a young adult’s initiation into maturity is an unashamed piece of fun, charting the course of its clutch of clueless slackers through the three days leading up to and including the 21st birthday of Iseya’s university student Ryo. Nerdish Naoshi (Hassei), a childhood friend of Ryo’s has just got his girlfriend pregnant. A one-off TV appearance when he was five has stirred unrealistic expectations of an acting career in him, but it’s a far cry from the reality, toiling in his father’s garage. Meanwhile Makoto (Ito), a university buddy, has just been dumped without warning by his girlfriend, Kyoko.

The three are in definite need of something to lift their spirits, and so set off to meet an acquaintance of Ryo’s, Suzuki (Kameishi, who co-scripted with Iseya) connected with the yakuza to score some dope for the evening. Somewhere along the line, Ryo gets spiked with LSD and the drugs, stashed away in an empty Marlboro packet, are misplaced. Meanwhile, an ineffectual cop, first seen being given a dressing down by the prepubescent teenager he attempts to avert from buying cigarettes from a vending machine is keeping a beady eye on the apartment of Tezuka, the scrawny fresh-out-jail yakuza they just scored from (Terajima, one of the most charismatic actors working in Japan today, trotting out the usual comedic gangster shtick he’s perfected in dozens of roles for the likes of Kitano or Sabu). If this wasn’t enough, a confused young tearaway associate of theirs, the kleptomaniac Shinji’s just-for-kicks “eat and run” shenanigans in the local cafés have escalated into joy-riding in unlocked cars, and a local duo of drug-dealers are the first to fall prey.

“What does it mean to be born in Japan?”, is the question posed by director Yusuke Iseya in the catalogue for Tokyo FILMeX 2002, where the film received its World Premiere. “In few countries do the citizenry so lack a national confidence as in Japan.” Yes, Japan has had a hard run of it over the past ten years, and Iseya is most certainly not the first to muse over this lack of identity, connection and purpose – Shinji Aoyama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hirokazu Kore-Eda to name but three have all held up their films up as mirrors in order to explore this void. Meditative, metaphorical, or metaphysical, whatever the approach, there’s only so many films to be made about feckless, alienated youths groping for the abstract before audiences begin to tire, and judging by the state of the industry at the moment, it would appear that they already have a long time ago.

Kakuto clearly has no such philosophical axe to grind, and works precisely because Iseya comes from that generation of financially well off, aimless young suburbanites out for nothing but a good time, and thus his characters come across not just ciphers, but fully rounded characters. His approach is not an attempt at observation or insight, but immersion in the unhampered innocent hedonism of this amoralistic world, and as such it is more likely to nudge knowing smiles from those who have found themselves in such situations as being stripped to their underpants lying face down on the street outside their local convenience store than the chin-stroking cappuccino crowd. Kore-Eda has stated that it was the lack of didacticism in the script that attracted him to the project, fitting in with his stated mission for his production work to put into motion the kind of film that he himself couldn’t make – following Kakuto is the family drama Wild Berries / Hebi Ichigo, the first offering of 28 year-old Miwa Nishikawa.

Charting a now familiar terrain that has run from Trainspotting to the likes of Justin Kerrigan’s Human Traffic and Doug Liman’s Go, Kakuto perhaps most resembles this last film in terms of its feel and form, particularly its use of visual trickery – fast-forward/rewind time manipulation and the creeping spirals that swirl over the car interior as Ryo first succumbs to the effects of the acid – to evoke memories of those sketchy nights which from a simple intention to get off your tits rapidly spirals out of control.

I’m not going to make any overstated claims that this is a perfect film. Whilst it kicks in straightaway, builds up nicely to a peak and keeps you there for an admirable duration of time, the comedown is perhaps a little too long, and its appeal is most definitely reserved for the lads – the female characters barely get a look in here. However, ultimately Kakuto’s fresh-faced exuberance, slick repartee and street-savvy cool are hard to resist, and quite frankly, for a first film effort from so young a director, this knocks the socks of some of the recent efforts of its more grizzled competitors. I think we can safely say that Kore-Eda’s pet project definitely delivers, and will undoubtedly find an audience with the type of people it portrays whichever countries it plays in.

Kakuto.2003.DVDRip.x264.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 47mn
Size:	1.51 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	680x460 ~> 817x460
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	1 553 kb/s
Audio
Japanese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/6B293CB3993EDE7/Kakuto.2003.DVDRip.x264.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Yusuke Iseya – Kakuto (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Midnight Eye review:
Serpent’s Path and its companion piece Eyes of the Spider (Kumo No Hitomi) both start from the same premise: a man taking revenge for the murder of a child. Kurosawa used this premise as the jumping-off point for the two films rather than their definition, resulting in a pair of works which are not so much occupied with revenge, but with the mental processes of human beings in situations that have placed them outside everyday life.

As Serpent’s Path opens we see two men, named Nijima (Kurosawa regular Sho Aikawa) and Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa), drive their car to an abandoned warehouse on the edge of town. Out of the trunk they drag a man, who they take with them into the building and chain to a wall. Miyashita is out for revenge against the killers of his eight-year old daughter. Nijima, a schoolteacher by trade, is helping him, though exactly why and how these two men decided to team up remains unclear. They proceed to subtly torment their victim, a low-level yakuza, into a confession. Miyashita, himself a former yakuza, is grief stricken and about to lose his sanity altogether. He laments over a perpetually looping extract of home video footage of his daughter, which is played on a tv set in front of their captive. Nijima on the other hand is calm and collected, his detached air of professionalism keeping Miyashita’s smouldering rage at bay.

But the confession they hope for doesn’t come. Instead they get the name of another possible culprit who ends up in the same situation. He in turn gives them the name of another and pretty soon the two avengers find themselves in more trouble than they bargained for and nowhere nearer the identity of the actual murderer.

1.16GB | 1h 25mn | 832×468 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/B9AE5CCB3A052FB/Hebi.no.michi.AKA.Serpents.Path.%28Kurosawa.-.1998%29.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/CB855B8FBCA2FE1/Hebi.no.michi.AKA.Serpents.Path.%28Kurosawa.-.1998%29.part2.rar

Language(s)Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Hebi no michi AKA Serpent’s Path (1998) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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After a retreat to the atmospheric and spectral Loft and Retribution that reinforce Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s reputation as a horror filmmaker, Tokyo Sonata continues in the vein of his idiosyncratically personal (and arguably, more interesting), yet equally unsettling films that began with Bright Future. As the film begins, the family patriarch, middle-aged senior administrative manager, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) has been notified that the company has outsourced his job to China (where his salary would pay for three language-fluent office workers) and, without portable skills that could be applied to another department, will be immediately laid off from work. Reluctant to tell his family for fear of undermining his authority, Ryuhei continues the pretext of leaving for work with his briefcase each morning, spending his days alternately lining up at a job placement office and a charity lunch service on the park.
Meanwhile, his stay-at-home wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), has begun to feel trapped in her unappreciated role of keeping the household together, her newly obtained driver’s license symbolizing her liberated, if guilty step away from the familiar routines of domestic life (a search for identity implied by her intended use of the license as a form of identification). Their university-aged son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) is similarly adrift in his part-time job distributing flyers on the streets, and sees a provision for foreigners enlisting in the U.S. military as a means of asserting his independence. Younger son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), having been caught passing a manga book in the classroom, stages his own minor rebellion: exposing the teacher’s own penchant for reading erotic themed manga on the train, and subsequently, taking piano lessons against his father’s objection. Inspired by the four-movement structure of a sonata, Tokyo Sonata is a humorous and incisive modernist (and globalist) evocation of the shomin-geki salaryman picture popularized by Yasujiro Ozu, chronicling the increasingly divergent lives of the Sasaki family who, like the families in Ozu’s cinema are on the verge of disintegration. However, while both filmmakers reflect the inevitability of this dissolution, Kurosawa paradoxically sees the rupture as a necessary trauma towards rebuilding – a sense of renewal that is reflected in the parting image of the family leaving the stage, figuratively stepping away from the performance to forge their own path in the uncertain darkness.

1.81GB | 1h 59mn | 1024×554 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/B66B007B658B783/Kiyoshi_Kurosawa_-_(2008)_Tokyo_Sonata.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Kiyoshi Kurosawa – Tokyo Sonata (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.