Emotionally withdrawn strip club dancer Ayako has never recovered from her mother’s suicide when she was young. She begins a relationship with patient potter Daiji, but leaves him behind when she quits her job and returns to her home town after a 10 year absence.

2.25GB | 2h 45m | 704×360 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/1D9FA745F439C50/Hotaru_(2000_-_NTSC_VHSRIP).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/A08D6D97FED343B/Hotaru_(2000_-_NTSC_VHSRIP)_-_05.srt

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Naomi Kawase – Hotaru AKA Firefly (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Twenty years after making his breakout cult hit, “Tetsuo,” and 17 years after its sequel, “Tetsuo II: Body Hammer,” multihyphenate filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto busts out the big guns again with “Tetsuo the Bullet Man.” Contempo-set pic doesn’t bring much new to the half-man-half-machine concept, but with its delirious editing and eardrum-crunching soundtrack, it punches above its weight and musters a certain retro charm with its old-school effects, all done on about one-hundredth of the budget of a “Transformers” movie. Fans of the franchise will have this in their sights and show support, but crossover potential looks iffy.
Half-American, half-Japanese Anthony (Erik Bossick) has always strived to keep a tight rein on his anger by singing nursery rhyme “Hush, Little Baby” whenever he’s agitated, a trick his mother taught him before she died. Now a salaryman in Tokyo, he lives with his wife, Yuriko (Akiko Monou), and son, Tom (Tiger Charlie Gerhardt).

But when a mysterious driver (helmer Tsukamoto himself) deliberately murders Tom by running him over, Anthony starts to get in touch with his anger in a way most bereavement therapists wouldn’t approve of: His body begins to turn into black, living metal, sprouting weapons and all kinds of spiky bits. A huge Gatling gun, for instance, grows out of his chest, which comes in handy when a bunch of uniformed hitmen try to kill him.

Turns out Anthony’s father, Ride (Stephen Sarrazin), a former biochemist, is to blame, a fact Anthony uncovers by digging around in his dad’s basement, where he makes an even more alarming discovery about his late mom.

Thesps deliver their lines entirely in English, and often sound stilted in the quieter moments, but hey, that kind of goes with the machine-people theme. On the other hand, the script’s emphasis on familial, especially parental love makes for a gentler, kinder Tetsuo movie, entirely lacking in the creepy sexual dimension of the first two pics.

Co-editors Tsukamoto and Yuji Ambe show nimble, frenetic fingers in the editing suite as they slice and dice the action sequences and the pic’s frequent trippy interludes into thousands of cuts, all the better to distract from the lack of sets. Sound design pushes the dial well past 11, adding undeniable visceral impact.

2.19GB | 1h 19m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/8675824AFC08579/Tetsuo.The.Bullet.Man.2009.576p.BluRay.x264.mkv
or
https://nitroflare.com/view/3071E014B489507/Tetsuo.The.Bullet.Man.2009.576p.BluRay.x264.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/FB87BF443DF6241/Tetsuo.The.Bullet.Man.2009.576p.BluRay.x264.part2.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/E019A4068D08722/Tetsuo.The.Bullet.Man.2009.576p.BluRay.x264.part3.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, German

The post Shin’ya Tsukamoto – Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
When a single mother suffers a nervous breakdown, she is suspected of child abuse and her child is taken away. Her mental suffering escalates as she succumbs to her darkest fantasies.

2.63GB | 1h 31m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/95D1A406584FB09/Kotoko.2011.576p.BluRay.x264.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English (muxed)

The post Shin’ya Tsukamoto – Kotoko (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Mother love gets the Shinya Tsukamoto treatment in the Japanese auteur’s latest mindfuck, a boldly abrasive, sometimes overwhelming tour of an unbalanced psyche. Said psyche belongs to a young, single mother (played by J-pop star Cocco) who imagines sinister doppelgangers lurking everywhere, stabs potential suitors with forks, lacerates her skinny arms with razors (“I cut my body to confirm it,” she muses in voiceover) and, above all, turns any activity involving her toddler son into grueling bouts of hysteria. Only singing seems to soothe her, and one of her songs catches the attention of a masochistic novelist (Tsukamoto) who’s willing to let her beat him into a bloody pulp in order to forge a relationship with her. Filmed with a reeling, zooming camera, scratchily edited, and set to a deafening cacophony of enfant shrieks and industrial noise, this virtuoso bit of grisliness may have something to say about violence-saturated societies nurturing Medea fantasies, but any thematic exploration plays second fiddle to Tsukamoto’s insistence on sheer sensory overload.

1.37GB | 1:31:32 | 720×406 | avi

http://nitroflare.com/view/033A3EE573F0B6B/Kotoko_%28Shinya_Tsukamoto%2C_2011%29.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/85733A4B37C0AB1/Kotoko_%28Shinya_Tsukamoto%2C_2011%29.part2.rar

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Shin’ya Tsukamoto – Kotoko (2011) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

IMDB user Review:

Artifacts Don’t Move

The idea of this, and the ideas of how we might watch it, are more engaging than the thing itself.

Japan is a collection of notions about what it was, perhaps more-so than any other culture with visibility. Both Japanese and the west look on that collection of cultural relics, sometimes to mine for expressive power.

(Arabia and Persia have a similar dynamic which differs in being based on knowledge rather than refinements in society. It also differs in that it destroyed what they had themselves — and deliberately, so only the anger at loss remains and none of the reference to introspection.)

As I watch movies and think about them, I’ll see this mining dynamic at work. Kurosawa, of course, took some of the notions of watching and examining too far for most Japanese. While he was rejected in Japan, he was celebrated in the west for being truly Japanese, because he was dramatic with these cultural relics. That is to say, he handled them with distance, literally spatial distance, and so exaggerated their qualities that in the process of entering our minds, the exaggerations were normalized so they seemed real.

Its why theater needs to amplify certain qualities in embodiments, so the conveyance matters.

Now what happens when an artist forgets that and takes these Japanese target stories as if they were real, and mines them as if they directly mattered? What if the artist is non-Japanese and so automatically outside but has no sense of that fact? What if that artist is tuned to a subconscious guilt associated with otherness. If that otherness is the to some repellent notion of whaling, you get “Drawing Restraint.”

If those notions are associated with immoral war, then the topic is Hiroshima, and you’ll get this. But in this case, matters get thoroughly confused, because what we see is the destruction of a culture, creating images that no longer live. And yet it is conveyed through those very same images as if they do live. And yes, we have quotes — many — from Kurosawa and subsequent Kurosawa-influenced filmmakers. (In a double irony, most of these are Chinese — no, triple irony if we really are talking about war and genocide.)

This is often lovely, but rarely emotionally engaging. There’s that cognitive disconnect I just mentioned.

But something else. Dance. The humans here are dancers. The choreography is supposed to complement the visuals, which as I said use fragments of a society and an anime form. But it faux drama. Bodies writhe in pain, are poisoned by acid, then radioactive rain.

Can dance be dramatic? Can it work in the same way that acting does, to provide deep connection at this level? Or is it intrinsically placed in another deep center?

I have no answer. But here it fails. The manner of the dance-drama doesn’t fit its container, and neither of them do as much for the visceral connection as an effective advert might.

Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

http://nitroflare.com/view/F905A30BF7E66AF/The.Tale.of.the.Floating.World.2001.DVDRip.XviD.AC3.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/83154C0445DA42A/The.Tale.of.the.Floating.World.2001.DVDRip.XviD.AC3.idx
http://nitroflare.com/view/AFC8ADBF25C08D2/The.Tale.of.the.Floating.World.2001.DVDRip.XviD.AC3.sub

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English, French (vobsub)

The post Alain Escalle – Le Conte Du Monde Flottant AKA The Tale of the Floating World (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.