Vampire Clay is the feature-length film debut of writer/director Soichi Umezawa, a man who has had a long career as a special effects and make-up artist on many doramas and films like those of the Tomie franchise, low-budget sci-fi action flick like Alien vs Ninja, the chilling ghost story Dead Waves and the rather excellent Kiyoshi Kurosawa film Bright Future. That one’s not a horror but it features jellyfish which some may find horrific if stung by one. Vampire Clay is more in line with Umezawa’s horror films and the special effects are pretty good in a goofy way – gooey and creepy dolls made from clay that stalk a rural art school and bump off students one by one a la John Carpenter’s The Thing…
The story starts with Tokyo refugee Yuri Aina (Asuka Kurosawa). She has fled the metropolis and set up an art school in the country after suffering heartbreak and she has five students including Kaori Hidaka (Kyoko Takeda), the school’s star artist having studied in Tokyo, and her best friend Aiko Mochzuki (Momoka Sugimoto), who is hoping to head to the big city with Kaori as they attempt gain entry into an art university. Rivalry runs rife however with Reiko Tani (Ena Fujita) being super competitive and jealous of Kaori but they find that painting pictures and sculpting self-portraits is the least of their worries as they start disappearing one by one and it seems to be connected to the clay statues that they have made… Could there be something in the clay itself?
The answer is yes and the film doesn’t waste time when it comes to dispatching the characters in all ways that clay can get a person. Kills start off small (as in, animals are the first to go) but as the monster increases in size the kills get bigger. Imaginative body horror is exploited for gory effect as limbs get chomped on and turn into different substances that trap the characters who morph into horrendous things. There are rubbery physical effects and lots of geysers of blood as flesh and clay become one and as this happen icky, gloopy deaths with lots of screaming and squelching fill the soundtrack and it is deliberately lo-fi so there is an air of goofiness to the proceedings. Despite the laughs audiences will surely have sympathy for what the characters go through because the camera lingers on things!
The cast are mostly young newbies. Ena Fujita, Kyoka Takeda, Yuyu Makihara and Momoka Sugimoto are young ladies who were recruited from the 2017 run of the Miss iD competition (Miss iD searches for girls who would be unconventional idols in some way and not the traditional fit). They handle themselves well with plenty of screaming and hyperventilating when the horror starts. Ena Fujita captures the coldness of Reiko and you will be thrown as to who will be the final girl.
They are held down by the really experienced actors. Asuka Kurosawa has worked with Shinya Tsukamoto for whom she gave a powerful lead performance in A Snake of Juneand she has also worked with Sion Sono on Cold Fish as a truly memorable sexy psycho who bewitches the main character. She plays the teacher Yuri as a woman balancing on a tightrope between emotional crisis and care for her students. She comes to life when she shows flashes of darkness that bring some emotional depth to the film and we empathise with her situation. Kanji Tsuda is an actor with a huge range and he has has worked with great directors like SABU, Ryuichi Hiroki, Takeshi Kitano, Shunji Iwai, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Tokyo Sonata) and others but he also has a healthy helping of horror titles such as Shibuya Kaidan and Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl as well as a number of unspeakably gory Sushi Typhoon films. He fits in well here with enough pained soul-searching and gurning to get his conflicted character across to help the film bridge a narrative gap between the silliness and serious backstory.
This film has travelled to various festivals in the west and is quite easily available. It could be seen as a fun re-imagining of John Carpenter’s The Thing because it has a body-hopping horror morphing into grotesque things and an 80s score with some synthesizers but it is a lot more fun with deliberately sillier models and special effects.
The trailer I found is a compilation one and the third film featured is Vampire Clay.
Re:Born stars Tak Sakaguchi, a fighter, action-director, director and actor. Since his debut in Ryuhei Kitamura’s 2000 zombie action film Versus, he has been a staple of the cult cinema scene. Even if the films he acts in are comedic gore-fests from the likes of Yudai Yamaguchi (Deadball) and Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police) he tends to make an impact because he has the charisma and martial arts skills needed by a good action hero. He can act and has shown this in works that stretch across genres with Osaka Snake Road: Snake of Violence, Alive, Shinobi: Heart Under Blade and Meatball Machine: Kodoku. His best role was as a failed-actor given one more shot in Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell? which, if you had to watch one performance, is the one I’d recommend. Re:Born gives him the stage he deserves to show his martial-arts skills.
Tak Sakaguchi plays Toshiro a withdrawn guy who runs a convenience store in a small coastal town. He lives a quiet life with his young “niece” Sachi (Yura Kondo) but in the past Toshiro was a super-soldier known as “Ghost” and was a lethal member of a PMC’s special forces unit. He decided to strike out on his own when he got tired of the shady business dealings and war crimes but his ex-comrades want to keep him pinned down and move in on him. To do this they kidnap Sachi and hold her hostage knowing that Toshiro will strike back to get the girl. Toshiro does just that but he isn’t alone and gets help from former brothers in arms and as he unleashes his inner beast to rescue Sachi.
Japanese action movies tend to be housed in genre fare such as sci-fi, horror or fantasy. Think Versus, Returner, Garo, Rurouni Kenshin etc. The films that do go for full-blooded action in realistic contemporary settings tend to be from the indie scene and use the same tropes: foreign agents (typically Russians), lots of fighting in forests, authentic-looking weapons and uniforms found in airsoft shops for weapon porn, flashbacks to combat in jungles, and gunfights that go on for way too long. Most of these elements are thrown into Re:Born but the martial-arts is cranked up all the way and used by experts which makes a major difference.
The plot is serviceable and forgettable. It uses flashbacks to jungle combat to link all of the characters together in the first half of the film. Despite the set up of backstory the bad guy’s intentions are unclear and seem to be to get Ghost to fight. It is unsatisfying but works for triggering action scenes. The second half of the film gets punch drunk with an extended battle in a forest where 200 men and women are taken out by Toshiro and comrades in a range of fights which vary from close-quarters fisticuffs to running and gunning and stabbings. Inter-cutting between different set-piece kills keeps the film pacey for so long before the repetition of stabbings and take-downs becomes exhausting.
Plot isn’t the main draw, it’s the action and most of it is good. Prolific action director and stunt coordinator named Yuji Shinomura has worked on major video games and films like Library Wars, Strayers Chronicle, and I Am a Hero as well as directing Tak Sakaguchi in the action flick Death Trance. All of that experience shows in the way he films many of the sequences in efficient ways with a clear focus on setting up a selection of goons for our heroes to take down and luxuriating in the execution as Sakaguchi and company pull off some audacious kills with fists, knives, and guns at varying ranges but mostly as close as it gets at zero range. Shinomura’s editing and directing is punchy and quick but legible with the actors easy to keep track of and admire as they execute their movements with what looks like grace and skill.
The film showcases Yoshitaka Inugawa’s martial art, the Zero Range Combat System – a series of dynamic techniques focused around extremely quick and efficient movements at close range. It is a fighting style akin to jujutsu to my untrained eye as heavily armoured and armed opponents are taken out by using their own force against them. Whatever the background of the actor, whether a trained fighter or a normal thespian, the athleticism bursts from the screen as the combatants bodies are all loose but compact with tightly controlled staccato movement exploding out from them. Punches, knife strikes and weapon disarms are common while grappling and kicks are thrown in. This list of adjectives and nouns might not be inspiring but watching the film and seeing it in action is pretty thrilling to witness for the most part.
The best action involve short and sharp encounters that take place in everyday settings such as a crowded plaza where Sakaguchi advances directly towards an assailant with a gun in a briefcase and jinks around the crowd which mills about to dodge the shots which strike nearby objects. Oblivious people pass by not knowing they were centimetres from death as Sakaguchi strides through the area towards his would-be killer and dispatches him in a quick and efficient way that conjures up memories of the best of Jason Bourne. Another highlight is the convenience store fight which takes two to three minutes, enough time for a microwave to nuke a bento Toshiro sets up before the clash and then devours after the fight.
There are a set of great character actors brought in to give what are one-note characters spirit so they are exciting to watch. Prolific voice actor Akio Otsuka (Snake in the Metal Gear Solid games) is the main antagonist and puts in a few appearances but his greatest asset is his vocal presence which he uses to give a solid villain for Tak to chase after while the most memorable of his cohort of killers are played by Mariko Shinoda (Newt), Hiroko Yashiki (Eagle) and Makoto Sakaguchi (Casper). Mariko almost steals the show with her brief close-quarters tussle with Tak in a phone booth which takes the Zero Range fighting style as literally as possible. Hiroko (looking good with braided hair) is a sniper and Makoto is a short lunatic killer and both take Toshiro on during the extended forest battle and each shine amidst the 200 man massacre which the film gets bogged down in. Yoshitaka Inugawa also makes an appearance as an assassin named Abyss Walker and gets to look cool with some well coordinated action scenes shared with Sakaguchi which sell his skills.
I think the one downside to the film is that the usually charismatic Tak Sakaguchi tones his presence right down and only cracks a few mordant jokes usually after he has cracked a few skulls but this is fitting for an ultra-deadly special forces guy. He essays a type of cunning and efficiency that leads to some efficient kills and this makes him an intimidating package to watch.
Overall, this is a good action film that should get Sakaguchi and company more work with bigger budgets so they can really explore varied action set-pieces. At two hours, the action can get tiresome but it is well shot and worth watching to see Sakaguchi fight again.
Life has been a bit of a trudge recently. I’m in the middle of a 12-day work week with early starts in the morning. I’ve just started doing film festival feedback forms. The weather is getting darker and colder. I managed to get a good dose of sleep last night and keep up my exercise routine so I’m feeling good. I need to get some dynamism back. Anyways, I posted reviews for Vampire Clay(2017) and Re:born(2017) and my review for Naomi Kawase’s film Vision(2018) went live on v-cinema. I hope you guys have managed to watch some great films.
What is released this weekend?
Lovers on Borders
ポルトの恋人たち 時の記憶「Boruto no koibitotachi toki no kioku」
Running Time:139 mins.
Release Date: November 10th, 2018
Director: Atsushi Funahashi
Writer: Atsushi Funahashi(Screenplay),
Starring: Tasuku Emoto, Yuta Nakano, Ana Moreira, Antonio Duraes, Flavio Hamilton, Alex Miranda, Miguel Monteiro, Valdemar Santos,
This international co-production looks fantastic. It’s by Atsushi Funahashi, a man who works in both documentary and fiction. He has tackled the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami and the resulting radiation crisis from Fukushima in past works. Here he has created a story that spans the ages: Portugal in the 18th century and Japan of the 21st century. The lead actors take on the roles of two people separated by time.
Synopsis: Portugal in the 18th century, after the Great Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Souji(Tasuku Emoto) and Shiro (Yuta Nakano) were brought as slaves/servants from India to work on the reconstruction of the city. Souji may be mute but when meets and falls in love with Mariana (Ana Moreira)she understands and feels the same way butwhen he rebels against an aristocrat is shot dead he loses it all. She seeks revenge. Will she go through with it?
Japan in the 21st century, after the Tokyo Olympic Games. A Brazilian Japanese named Koshiro (Yuta Nakano) is laid-off from his factory job and commits suicide. He leaves behind his wife, aPortuguese woman named Marina (Ana Moreira). Hiiragi Kase (Tasuku Emoto)is the executive responsible for causing his death due to his decision to fire him. Marina wants revenge. Will she go through with it or will they come to some understanding?
Synopsis from ANN: 20,000 years into the future, the Earth is ruled by Godzilla. Pitted against him are the straggling remnants of the human race. The final chapter, GODZILLA:The Planet Eater, finds the Mechagodzilla city, the peak of scientific evolution and mankind’s best hope, burned to cinders. Godzilla Earth reigns supreme but he has one more challenge: the winged creature, KING GHIDORAH.
Synopsis: A group of high school students who live in the same apartment block get into romantic twists and turns. It starts with Rin (Sho Hirano), a seemingly cold guy who makes cutting remarks about others but he has feeling for Yuu (Hinako Sakurai) who carries a flame for him but she is too nervous to say anything to a guy she thinks might not like her. Fortunately a guy appears to help smooth things.
Synopsis: Michitaro Sano (Masao Kusakari) is a widower who lives with his daughter. He has filled his life with his work but upon retirement he finds he has a lot of free time. Just as he has to start thinking about what to do with himself another momentous change is upon him with his daughter Yumiko (Fumino Kimura) telling him that she has a boyfriend and might be getting married. As Michitaro ponders what to do with himself, he runs into the local radio callisthenics group and finds a new way to keep himself fit and occupied…
This is the second instalment of the Asian Three-Fold Mirror series which brings together three accomplished directors from across Asia to co-create an omnibus films with a common theme. The common theme for this one is “journey” signifying travel beyond time and space. Crew and cast joined forces across national borders to depict the lives of characters who journey in China, Myanmar and Japan. One of Indonesia’s most popular actors, Nicholas Saputra, appears in all three omnibus episodes.
The Sea
Director/Writer: Degena Yun
Starring: ZheGong, Jin Chen,
Synopsis:A high-strung mother and her sullen daughter travelling from Beijing to the sea are enduring an awkward road trip. The daughter has no interest in what is going on but when they talk about the recently deceased father and their relatives, the daughter explodes in anger and the awkwardness continues until they reach the sea. As they sit in a small boat, their anger seems to have dissipated. What happens next?
Hekishu
Director/Writer: Daishi Matsunaga
Starring: Hiroki Hasegawa, Nandar Myat Aung
Synopsis: Suzuki is in Myanmar to help upgrade the railway system of the city of Yangon. To get a feel for the place he watches the cityscape passing by as he rides the circular railway that runs languidly through the city. It is on this trip that he meets a friendly passenger who quizzes him on the purpose of his job. Will upgrading the railway system really ease people’s everyday lives? After this chance meeting he starts questioning his purpose in coming to Yangon and starts to visit local people and places including a seamstress named Su Su and her family, as he tries to find an answer.
Variable No. 3
Director: Edwin
Writer: Prima Rusudi
Starring: Agni Prastistha, Oka Antara, Nicholas Saputra
Synopsis: Edi and Sekar are a married couple from Indonesia. They are travelling in Tokyo and are heading to a B&B that is owned by Kenji (Nicholas Saputra) but when Sekar sees Kenji she gets a shock because he is the spitting image of her former lover, Jati. Edi and Sekar aren’t having the happiest of marriages and so this throws another spanner in the works but when Kenji tells them that he is conducting research on contemporary Asian couples and asks for their cooperation, they accept. Kenji shows them three cards. One of cards shows the words, “Variable No. 3.” What does this mean?
Nunuko no Hijirisen HARAJUKU STORY
ヌヌ子の聖★戦 HARAJUKU STORY「Nunuko no Hijirisen HARAJUKU STORY」
Running Time: 99 mins.
Release Date: November 09th, 2018
Director: Takehiro Shindo
Writer: Manato Hamada (Screenplay),
Starring: Rinne Yoshida, Rinka Kumada, Satsuki Nakayama, Nanaha Itose,
Synopsis: Aoi and Rina are friends and college graduates who love to hang out in Harajuku. They are so close to each other they are more like twins. They get involved in a popular twin talent competition called “Nuneko” where the prize is appearing in a music video of the popular band “Orion”. However, fame and fortune aren’t so easily accessible as dodgy talent scouts and everyday life gets in the way of the girls…
Anemone: Eureka Seven: Hi – Evolution
ANEMONE 交響詩篇エウレカセブン ハイエボリューショ「Anemone: Koukyoushihen Eureka Sebun Hai Eboryui-shon」
Synopsis from ANN: For the first time in the Eureka Seven franchise, the film will be set in Tokyo. The film centers on Anemone, a girl who lost her father in a battle in Toyko seven years prior to the film’s story, leaving her with only her stuffed toy Gulliver, and the AI concierge Dominikids for emotional support. Now she is a key part of a strategy by the experimental unit “Acid” to combat the seventh Eureka, “Eureka Seven,” an enemy of humanity that has killed 2.6 billion people. Driven to the brink, all of humanity entrusts its hope to Anemone as she dives deep into the interior of Eureka Seven.
Synopsis: Hong Kong made action love comedy in which Japanese cast play outlaws on the run in Thailand. Natsuna is a girl named Ai and she has fled to Thailand with her boyfriend to avoid Yakuza but they get mixed up with a local mafia boss…
Synopsis: High school student Koyomi Araragi finds his life changes when he gets involved with his classmate Hitagi Senjougahara who is influenced by supernatural forces. She is the first of a number of other girls who have some supernatural quirk in their lives. A whole series of books and anime have been made of Araragi’s misadventures. In this one, Owarimonogatari, the final season, high school graduation has been completed but his misadventures continue as he gets lost in a mirror world…
Umi ni noseta gazu no yume
海にのせたガズの夢「Umi ni noseta gazu no yume」
Running Time: 90 mins.
Release Date: November 10th, 2018
Director: Tetsutaro Yaguchi
Writer: Tetsutaro Yagichi(Screenplay),
Starring: Erina Kamiya, Ami Miyamae, Naoki Komatsu, Haruka Miwa, Kouji Kominami, Ako Yamamoto, Ayu Uchiyama, Kei Kotani, Akiko Oka,
Synopsis: Kamen Joshi idol Erina Kamiya plays a high school student in Kumano who meets a young movie director. It seems like a match made in heaven because she is in her school cinema club and dreams of being in the movie industry but she may find choosing between her dream and the reality of life in her hometown is a more difficult decision than expected…
SOUNDS LIKE SHIT the story of Hi-STANDARD
Running Time:117 mins.
Release Date: November 10th, 2018
Director: Wataru Umeda
Writer: N/A
Starring: Akihiro Nanba, Ken Yokoyama, Akira Tsuneoka,
Synopsis: A music doc which looks at the band Hi-Standard, a hardcore pink group which came into being in 1991, toured around the world, made five albums and then went on hiatus. Individual members went to work with other bands and on individual projects before reforming in 2015. The members talk frankly about their careers.
Jizo Libido
地蔵とリビドー「Jizo to Ribido-」
Running Time:62 mins.
Release Date: November 10th, 2018
Director: Yoshiaki Kasatani
Writer: N/A
Starring: Yukiko Koide, Edward M. Gomez, Hiroaki Nakatsugawa, Hidenori Mukai,
Synopsis: Atelier Yamanami in Shiga Prefecture is the home of 88 residents, each of whom is an artist with a unique way of expressing themselves through various media. Their work is highly valued abroad and this documentary aims to show how their work is influenced by their mental state and why it is important. Information found on the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival.
Synopsis:Chikuzan Takahashi was a legendary shamisen player. He lost his eye sight due to measles at the age of 3 but mastered the instrument. His raison d’etre was to capture the sound of Tohoku since he is from Aomori. This doc is about him.
Third Window Filmsare back again with the release of a 90s classic Dangan Runnerby the director SABU (Mr. Long, Happiness, Miss Zombie). It is his directorial debut and is the world’s first Blu-ray and remastered DVD release and it contains a treasure trove of extras including an interview with the director. It gets released on November 12th on Blu-ray and DVD. Here are the details.
SABU, born Hiroyuki Tanaka, is an actor and cult auteur of alternative comedies. His directorial career started in 1996 with this film and he worked alongside actors such as Shinichi Tsutsui, Tomorowo Taguchi, Susumu Terajima and Ren Osugi. With these great actors he told black comedies of everyday losers thrown headlong into dangerous situations. His acting career includes work with Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer, Shinjuku Triad Society), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself), Hideo Nakata (Don’t Look Up) and even a stint voice acting on the anime Sailor Moon. as well. It’s exciting to think that Third Window Films is bringing his career to the West with this film.
Synopsis: SABU’s debut feature is a breathless forerunner to the German arthouse flick, Run Lola Run, and features Tomorowo Taguchi (the lead in Tetsuo) as a hapless wannabe bank robber who forgets his mask on his first big heist, and then gets caught attempting to shoplift a replacement by a convenience store, a washed-up rock star (played by real life rocker Diamond Yukai) who chases the thief. The two literally run into a Yakuza named Takeda (Shinichi Tsutsumi from Our Little Sister) to whom he owes money. Thus begins an all-night, three-way pursuit through the streets of Tokyo.
I’m saving a review of this film for a SABU season I have planned but it’s great to see it get a release in the UK. It comes out in a fantastic year for releases of Japanese films with TWF releasing three Sion Sono titles, The Whispering Star/The Sion Sono and Antiporno, and the Osamu Tezuka anime. They followed that withSuffering of Ninkoand we have The Legend of the Stardust Brothers to look forward to. That doesn’t even take into account the run-away success of One Cut of the Dead which has taken the world by storm.
The Japan Foundation have set up a series of free events celebrating the publication of the book Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity. There will be a film screening as well as a book launch. Both will be important for understanding an important figure in pre- and post-war Japanese cinema.
Tanaka is considered a legendary actress not least because she starred in around 250 films from the 1930s onwards. She became something of a big box-office draw working with Ozu, Heinosuke Gosho and Kenji Mizoguchi, Kinoshita, Mikio Naruse and many more and her credits include films like Ugetsu (1952) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) as two examples. Tanaka is also credited as being the second Japanese woman to work as a director, the most famous of her films at the moment being The Eternal Breasts (1955) which was shown during a season of films dedicated the the leading ladies of Japanese cinema in London last year.
To introduce Tanaka to the wider world these events will launch at the end of the month. Here are more details from the Japan Foundation:
Join the Japan Foundation for a series of events celebrating the publication of “Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom, and Female Subjectivity” a look at the legendary actor and of the first prominent female film directors in Japan.
A Screening of two of her films, The Wandering Princess and The Ballad of Narayama will be shown in London will accompany a book presentation event. For this book presentation and discussion, Dr Irene González-López and Dr Michael Smith as well as Dr Alexander Jacoby, Alejandra Armendáiz-Hernández and Prof. Ayako Saito (From Japan) will explore the life and achievements of Kinuyo Tanaka, one of the most celebrated stars in the history of Japanese cinema and as a female film maker.
There will be an opportunity to purchase the book, “Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity” after the event. Payment by cash only
The Wandering Princess (book tickets from Eventbrite) Date: 29 November 2018 from 6:30pm Venue: Prince Charles Cinema, 7 Leicester Pl, London, WC2N 6EZ
Book Presentation: For the book presentation and discussion, the editors of the publication, Dr Irene González-López and Dr Michael Smith as well as Dr Alexander Jacoby, Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández and Prof. Ayako Saito (from Japan) will explore the life and achievement of Kinuyo Tanaka, one of the most celebrated stars in the history of Japanese cinema and as a female film maker.
There will be an opportunity to purchase the book, Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity” after the event. Payment by Cash only.
This event is free to attend, but booking is essential. Book your place via Eventbrite
The Ballad of Narayama (book tickets from Eventbrite) Date: 1 December 2018 from 3:30pm Venue: Curzon Cinema Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Ave, London, W1D 5DY
I have instituted a new sort of learning and writing regime whereby all of the film stuff is done at the start of the week and the end of the week is dedicated to learning languages. This week I posted some news articles about the release of SABU’s 1996 film Dangan Runner and the a series of free events in London dedicated to the actor Kinuyo Tanaka. I watched Triple 9 (2016), Train to Busan (2016) and Inuyashiki (2018) this week and I’m planning on watching something tonight but the list of titles is pretty large so I don’t know what yet. The image above is from Haruneko… I want to watch Seoul Station…
Synopsis: Kaoruko Harima (Ryoko Shinohara) and her husband Kazuaki (Hidetoshi Nishijima) have two children but live separately from each other. Kaoroku takes care of them and they are preparing to divorce after their daughter’s exam for elementary school. However, an accident in a pool leaves their daughter brain dead and with no chance to recover. The couple are faced with two tough choices: donate Mizuho’s organs to others in need or wait until Mizuho’s heart stops beating.
Synopsis: The Suzuki family is pretty modest. There is father Yukio (Ittoku Kishibe), mother Yuko (Hideko Hara), son Koichi (Ryo Kase) and daughter Fumi (Mai Kiryu). Koichi is a hikikomori but at least he’s alive. Then, one day, he isn’t. Without the least warning he drops dead and throws everyone into confusion. Yuko is so shocked by her son’s death she loses her memory which leads Fumi to lie to her in order to preserve her sanity. That lie is pretty big, “Koichi stopped being a hikikomori, got better and now works in Argentina”. How does one keep up that story???
No Matter How Much My Mom Hates Me
母さんがどんなに僕を嫌いでも 「Kaasan ga donna ni boku wo kirai demo」
Synopsis: Taiji (Taiga) hasn’t seen his mother Mitsuko (Yo Yoshida) for years. He loves her but she hates him. His past with her was a difficult issue and he left long ago but after many years of not seeing her he to regain his mother’s love.
Synopsis: Takechi Hanpeita (Ryo Nishikido) was a real person and he campaigned for the expulsion of foreigners from Japan during the Bakumatsu period. Sounds like a fun guy. He had his reasons, namely Commodore Perry barging in but after some political machinations and assassinations, he was arrested, imprisoned and ordered to commit sepuku. Well, in this film he timeslips to modern-day Japan which is awash with foreigners so I bet he’s pleased. Anyway, he is taken in by a kind-hearted elderly man who runs a cram school and he becomes a teacher there. True to himself he makes little effort to conceal his disdain for the Westernisation of his beloved homeland but finds himself slowly adapting to his new life while figuring ways to get back to his wife in the past.
Synopsis: University student Toru Nishikawa (Nijiro Murakami) has one think on his mind and that is Yuko Yoshikawa (Alice Hirose), a pretty girl on the same campus. His attention is diverted when he finds a gun by a river one rainy day. Instead of turning it in to the police he takes it home and becomes fixated by it. He gets a sense of euphoria looking at it and thrills over having it. Then he is visited by a detective (Lily Franky) whose presence pushes him to make a bad decision…
Synopsis:Kenichi Endo plays a former yakuza who now works as a detective. He’s called to meet a new client at a specific place but what he discovers at the location is a corpse and a whole lot of trouble. It seems his only ally is an elementary school girl who he isn’t even related to…
TAKE ME TO THE OH!ITA Kishou Taniyama’s Rocky Holiday
TAKE ME TO THE OH!ITA 谷山紀章のロックな休日2 「TAKE ME TO THE OH!ITA taniyama kishou no rokkuna kyuujitsu 2」
Synopsis: This is a variety movie given a limited theatrical release. Cine Libre in Ikebukuro are going to screen it before the DVD hits stores like ANIMATE on December 05th. Fans of the voice actor/singer Kishou Taniyama get to see him and two friends travel to Oita Prefecture and enjoy delicious food and drink from the area while taking in the beautiful scenery.
Synopsis:The battle of Toba-fushimi began between the Shogunate Army and the Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa Armies and our characters are caught up in the action…
Synopsis: This story is about a young and lonely girl named Maki who left Japan and went to America. She finds herself in the Japanese community in New York but is unable to speak English very well so the type of work that she gets is in a luxury Japanese club as a hostess where she is torn between her bartender and the boss.
Mesaia Maboroshi Yoruno Koku
メサイア 幻夜乃刻「Mesaia Maboroshi Yoruno Koku」
Running Time:87 mins.
Release Date: November 17th, 2018
Director: Hiroki Yamaguchi
Writer: Nobuhiro Mori, Eiko Nishimori(Screenplay), Takamori Yen (Orignal Work)
Synopsis: The “Messiah Project” that is a multimedia franchise stretching from book to stage to screen.It is based on Takamori Yen’s “Messiah Security Bureau Special Public Security Bureau” books and features a setting where a worldwide disarmament agreement has led to a ban on weapons everywhere so information warfare and spycraft are how agencies and states compete. Here, rival spies are ambushed by a powerful foe.
The 15th London International Animation Festival (LIAF 18) returns to the Barbican for a run between November 30th and December 09th. There will be ten days of talks, forums, workshops and over 200 animated shorts and features from around the world. For a second year in a row there is a focus on the on-screen and off-screen representation of women in animation with the section Female Figures which will showcase works by female animation talent that explore female desire, physicality, and more. In the centenary since the end of WWI, there is a section called Aftermath which is dedicated to animation inspired or rooted in that conflict. There is also a lot of British talent getting the chance to show their works and there will be lots of independent animation to revel in. Heck, there’s even a film featuring Conan O’Brien! (trailer)
As the organisers have written on their press release,
The Festival promises to inspire, delight and challenge the notion that animation is merely for the 3D blockbuster genre, or cute cartoons. Independent animation is an art form that continues to thrive and develop as a breathtaking medley of styles, materials, techniques and production – from hand drawn, paint on glass, collage, sculpture, to some of the more interesting developments in CGI – all of which can be seen at this year’s LIAF.
I’m interested in everything Japanese so here’s what’s on offer:
This is a selection of short films aimed especially at children and we find that Japanese animators and their delightful stop-motion and 3D-CG works will be on the screen. I’ve seen some and can recommend them.
Konigiri-Kun: Music Box (2017, Dir: Mari Miyazawa, 5 mins)
Mari Miyazawa turns food art into fun with an onigiri (rice-ball) that gets into adventures. In this adventure, he grabs a music box to show to his friend Kerokke, the croquette, and the two try it out.
Watercolors (2017, Dir: Takashi Yoneoka, 2 mins)
Ever wonder what happens when an artist leaves their room? Their paints decide to come out and play on a canvas. Here’s the film from the artist’s own YouTube channel.
Mogu and Perol (2018, Dir: Tsuneo Goda, 8 mins)
Mogu and his naughty friend Perol are two animals who live on Yummy Island. Mogu is a master chef and makes yummy meals but Perol swoops in to scoff every scrap. This leads to a quarrel between the two…
This one played at the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival and I was sat front-row with some friends. It won the Audience Award in the short film category.
Tokyo-based Sarina Nihei is a graduate of London’s Royal College of Art and now works as a freelance animator and illustrator. She has won awards and her RCA graduate work, Small People with Hats was the first student film to win the Ottawa International Animation Festival’s top prize for short films. She is inspired by entertaining and surreal films and lists the work of David Lynch and David Cronenberg as favourites in this interview. Check out her Vimeo channel.
This section has twelve films from ten different countries and they are aimed at kids 8 and older. The one Japanese-themed one was at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
Neko no Hi / Cat Days「ねこのひ, 2017, Germany/Japan, Dir: Jon Frickey, 11 mins.」
An animated short film directed by Jon Frickey (website)
Synopsis: Jiro, a little boy, feels sick. His father takes him to the doctor’s. She diagnoses a harmless condition. But it shakes the core of the boy’s identity.
This section is a look at emotions such as love and hate, sadness, anxiety, and confusion. World War I and female sexuality are some of the settings animators have made to explore these feelings. There’s a familiar Japanese animator here:
People facing each other in a cafe; ex-lovers. People sucking their hair; people running very hard, a city passing by; a girl walking in a dry riverbed. There are all sorts of people, and all sorts of love.
This, and Rina Okada’s film, were both included in the Geidai Animation Graduate Works 2017 collection which was released on DVD.
For more information and trailers from the films produced by students at the Department of Animation, Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts, check out their YouTube channel. Here’s a full list of films featured on the DVD.
This blog has supported all sorts of animation since I make an effort to cover different titles appearing in various festivals and I also work for an animation festival that promotes different types of styles so I’m happy to see LIAF continue to forge ahead with its yearly celebration of animation!!! There are a couple of specialist festivals I should focus on like Ottawa. I’ll get on it at some point.
Naomi Kawase is a director who translates new age ideas to the screen with ease. Her work evidences an eye for the beauty of the natural world and a knack for getting good performances from her actors. Kawase delivers beautiful paeans to the power of life itself as exemplified here in a story of a French woman who heads to an ancient forest in Japan as she seeks a mysterious herb that can heal many things including, she hopes, an aching pain in her heart.
Vision takes place in and around Nara Prefecture’s Yoshino Forest. Here we find Satoshi (Masatoshi Nagase), a reticent forest ranger who lives and works in the area along with his faithful dog Koh and a wise woman named Aki (Mari Natsuki). Aki claims to be 1000 years old and one can believe it since she is in tune with nature and knows all about the ancient environment and the plants and herbs that reside in it. Aki warns Satoshi of the transformation about to come but he, despite being aware of the stirring energy that is affecting all life in the forest, hides from it by diligently continuing with his work. Little does Satoshi know that he will be directly caught up in the winds of change.
Jeanne (Juliette Binoche) is a French writer who has travelled to Nara to find a rare medicinal plant named “vision” that grows only once every 997 years. It sounds like a legend but she is convinced it does exist and she has a hidden reason for her search. With the help of a translator named Hana (Minami) Jeanne makes her way to Yoshino Forest and runs into Satoshi who initially remains taciturn but the two form a relationship as she ropes him into her search for the plant. Life itself changes for them both as seemingly unexpected events occur but we soon discover that nothing is random as we experience the wonders of Yoshino Forest with Jeanne and Satoshi in their search for “vision”.
The central mystery of Vision comes from discovering Jeanne’s connection to the forest and why she searches for the plant. With the shared present-tense narrative between Jeanne and Satoshi acting as a core, Kawase’s script sprinkles in seemingly random scenes and sequences from other perspectives and times. She cuts between interviews with elderly natives of Yoshino, flashbacks involving golden-hued shots of lakes with a man named Gaku (Mirai Moriyama), the appearance of a mysterious young man named Rin (Takanori Iwata) as well as scenes from Aki and Koh’s point-of-view. These elements gradually coalesce into a coherent narrative that plays into the notions of holism Kawase often has in her films. While not exactly mind-blowingly complex, it features enough talk of the environment to imbue a sense of spiritualism and mysticism to proceedings. This life-force is compelling enough to ensure audiences will stick around and not feel that the later twists are totally outrageous. Patience is required because it doesn’t give up answers quickly but Vision never drags and there is a satisfying ending which links together with the beginning so that a sense of oneness emerges from the film’s daring dream-weaving finale. As is typical with Kawase, it’s all visually engaging as she indulges in location shots so we get a real sensory experience of the forest
Kawase shows off her home prefecture as she explores Yoshino Forest and the chief delight of the film has to be the visual feast she conjures up with cinematographer Arata Dodo. From soaring overhead shots relaying the extent of the forest to low-angle ones gazing at the skies with tall trees swaying all around in the wind impressionistically, the density, height and breadth of the place is captured and it almost feels primordial at times. The quality of the light and the differing shades of the sky are sensitivity depicted with many scenes showing something beautiful like the light blue sky turning to violet as the night closes in with flecks of gold from the departing sun cast upon trees. The sensual nature of physical contact is also highlighted with close-ups of plants and trees, moss and fungus, people and places, to show the textures, contours and movements of all living things. It’s a gorgeous tapestry of life with added aural sensation provided by the echoes of dog barks, bird calls, and the constant sound of the trees and the wind talking.
Almost as engaging are the actors with Nagase and Binoche in particular doing fine, especially individually. The energies of the cast sometimes don’t quite mesh together cohesively, something made obvious by the switching between English, French and Japanese in awkward and occasionally hokey dialogue exchanges where the new age spiritualism can feel trite. This is a minor quibble as everyone, at the very least, convinces in their roles. Still, they are but support for the forest which ultimately steals the show.
My film review was first published on November 08th on V-Cinema.
This week I posted about the 2018 edition of the London International Animation Festival with the many wonderful animated films from Japan. I also posted a review for Vision(2018) which I wrote for V-Cinema earlier this month. I have watched a zombie film from Japan called I Am a Hero (2016). You may have read my manga review which I posted two or three years ago as part of my Summer of Splatter. I also started watching Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind.
Synopsis: Deep in the hills and mountains of Gunma Prefecture dwells a pure hearted man by the name ofUkon Gondo (Takayuki Yamada). Ukon has a handsome brother, Sakon (Takeru Sato), who works for a trading company but Ukon prefers to be free from society and tries to make a living by mining for gold. He finds it difficult to communicate with others apart from another man who joins him in his excavations, Ushiyama (YosiYosi Arakawa). They are soon to be joined by a third teammate, a robot they discover at an abandoned factory that Ushiyama lives in. Once their team is complete, they resolve to change their lives.
Synopsis: Saike (Mahiro Takasugi), Kazuki (Ryo Kato) and Takeo (Daichi Watanabe) are three friends abused and abandoned by their parents. A lifetime spent in juvie saw them grow up to be unconventional, to say the least, but they stuck together and as adults they steal from criminals to make a living.
Synopsis: Ayaka Kisaragi (Miyu Yoshimoto) has lived a life of good fortune, having had rich parents and landing her dream job straight out of university but things suddenly become rough when her dream job turns into a nightmare thanks to her boss. Things get worse when her father’s company goes bankrupt and Ayaka finds herself in charge of an important project at work. Her only option is to work hard now!
Synopsis: Three friends in high school grow up to take different paths. Company drone Takashi (Ryosuke Yamamoto) wants to leave his dull job while Renchi (Kentaro Yasui) wants to get out of a dangerous situation with dangerous people. Last but not least is Kinobu (Myuto Morita) who spends a lot of time online. Looking for some action, they hop in a car and head for Hokkaido and pick up a girl named Tsukiko (Atsuki Tomori) who Renchi met on an online dating website.
THE COLLECTORS Saraba Seishun no Shinjuku Jam
THE COLLECTORS さらば青春の新宿JAM「The Collectors Saraba Seishun no Shinjuku Jam」
Synopsis: The Collectors are a mod band from Japan that has been going since 1986. Their favourite live house is the Shinjuku JAM which recently closed. The Collectors performed the last live show on December 31st, 2017. Many other types of musical acts performed there from garage rock to punks and all sorts of artists including Lily Franky. Everyone comes together to talk about the live house and their testimonies are interwoven with the performance of The Collectors.
Synopsis: Masaki Okada plays Takuya Kobayashi, the son of apple farmers. He lives in Tokyo far away from his parents and is in university but wants to become a professional musician. He experiences setbacks but his family are there for him.
Shinya Tsukamotois back writing, directing, editing and producing his own films after a short spell acting in features like Shin Godzilla and Over the Fence. I’m a big fan of his works thanks to Nightmare Detective(2007),Tetsuo: The Iron Man(1989), Tokyo Fist(1995), and Vital(2003) and his film A Snake of June, whichwas given the Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Venice Film Festival.
Synopsis: The ronin Mokunoshin Tsuzuki (Sosuke Ikematsu) is alive during the end of the Edo period where many samurai like him are finding their way of life losing its edge as the country exists in a state of peace. He lives in the suburbs of Tokyo where he helps out farmers and is acquainted with one farmer’s son named Ichisuke (Ryusei Maeda) who dreams of being a samurai. Tsuzuki spends his days farming and sparring with Ichisuke but, despite the tranquillity, Tsuzuki’s heart is in tumult because he is concerned about the questions of whether he could follow a lord’s orders and kill a man and, more importantly, passions are brewing as he is falling in love with Ichisuke’s sister Yu (Yu Aoi). Passions from further afield are also growing as the country is on the verge of a civil war when a mild-mannered and skilful ronin Jirozaemon Sawamura (Shinya Tsukamoto) arrives in town looking for warriors to take to Edo.
Synopsis: November 25 will be the 40th anniversary of singer-songwriter Mariya Takeuchi’s debut and this film is released to celebrate that. She’s an important person in the “City Pop” movement alongside her husband and collaborator Tatsuro Yamashita. She has produced numerous hit songs as a songwriter and composer and worked on films and recently performed a 30th anniversary commemorative concert which was released as a live album with the title of “souvenir ~ Mariya Takeuchi Live ~”. This is a music doc that takes those performances past and present and creates this commemorative film.
Synopsis: Daisuke Nishidaturns his stageplay which premiered in 2007 into a film with some slight changes to reflect the difference in years for the characters. A collection of people are gathered together in a Western-style building after receiving an invitation and they are madeto play games orchestrated by a mysterious person from their past…
The Reality Behind What We See ~The Poet, Yoshimasu Gozo, in Kyoto~
Synopsis from IMDB:78-year-old Gozo Yoshimasu is Japan’s most reknowned poet. Yoshimasu began composing in his twenties and has since been on the cutting edge of contemporary poetry for the past sixty years. Contemporary Japan seems to be hanging onto the back of a dragon as politics reeks of war, radiation, tsunami, and earthquakes. . . Yoshimasu, who witnessed the devastation caused by the massive tsunami of the Great Earthquake of 2011, was at a loss for words upon seeing the impact of “water” strip everthing away.After the earthquake, and as if dismantling his own “framework of the mind,” Yoshimasu began to cut out words, ruled lines, and notes of all sizes and shapes he kept in his “diary.” He then started to paste Japanese and manuscript paper together to make one large piece of paper, and with pencil and pen, words and colors, wrote whatever what was on his mind onto that paper, collaging onto the paper mailed letters he had received that day. By further adding more color to his work, a new styled diary was born. This was his new “poetry.”Yoshimasu doesn’t simply “write.” He turns on a lamp, burns an incense, plays a cassette tape, and listens to himself “chanting” . . . At times he is blindfolded and at other times he listens to the sound of a rock, pouring ink onto paper.
Synopsis: The war between humanity and kaiju has ended, and a new era of peace has started. That doesn’t mean the kaiju have gone away. Their souls have appeared in the bodies of girls who possess the ability to summon their inner monster forms. They are called Kaiju Girls and they are being collected by an organisation called GIRLS. The film follows rookie members, Agira, Miclas and Windom in their misadventures.
Noriko Yuasa wowed me earlier this year at the Osaka Asian Film Festival with her short film Ordinary Everyday(2017) which was a showcased her fantastic mastery of aural and visual techniques in the creation of a highly atmospheric psycho-thriller. Her earlier films show the same control of texture and form as well as story. With Looking for my lost sunflowers, Yuasa dives into one man’s nostalgia as an office drone tries to touch distant memories.
The man whose nostalgia we embrace is Murakami (Bunki Sugiura), a thirty-something who works as a salesman for a pharmaceutical company in Tokyo. As you can imagine his daily routine is work and then drinks after work. We meet him amidst a whirl of activity around what seems to be Shimbashi Station. The visuals are composed by Yuasa into a clamorous and chaotic impressionistic swirl through slow-motion and blurred images of yokocho and main streets full of revellers and office staff who have spilled out of the workplace after office hours.
In some underground pub is Murakami with his boss and another colleague. The noise of revelry we heard outside continues but the film becomes more focussed. A medium shot shows us the men as they sit around a table. They drink and talk, talk and drink. With no food in sight, the alcohol goes to their heads quickly. Empty platitudes give way to melancholy as they recognise they have shed their youth. A further, bitter reminder is the fact that the pub is specialises in yearbooks from university and school alma maters and Murakami discovers one from his old high school. Written in its pages is a simple line:
“Do the sunflowers bloom in the courtyard, still?”
Murakami considers it then laughs it off as his drinking partners tease him for sentimentality but the line has a profound effect on the salaryman who finds himself in his home-town the next morning, unceremoniously dumped on the open platform of Nebukawa station.
Nebukawa is in Kanagawa Prefecture and, compared to where Murakami was the night before, it is a town in the middle of nowhere. The contrast couldn’t be greater. The night time atmosphere has given way to sunlit tranquillity. The town is placid and has a wonderful sea view. It is a fishing port with a bay where boats slide in and out and from the waterside extends the town into hills marked with narrow streets and climbing stairs with rough hewn steps. The noise of rowdy people gives way to the cry of seagulls and the gentle lapping of waves. The frantic editing slows so the scenes become longer. The odd mini-truck breaks these natural noises.
This break in atmosphere is a smooth transition, like the morning after a hectic night with none of the hangover that Murakami clearly feels as he staggers around Nebukawa looking like a refugee from Tokyo’s business world. He sees familiar faces and places while revisiting important sites from his memory: his family’s old neighbourhood, the family plot in the cemetery, his old high school. It is here that he comes face to face with whether the sunflowers still bloom and when we get to that point, after wandering around with him, we realise the strength of nostalgia. The memories of their colours and the act of rediscovering roots and planting new ones is like the pull of a safe harbour he has found after the rough seas of Tokyo and the sunflowers, like a collective light house, have guided him with their light. That light left an impression in his memory and those memories steady him and allow him a chance to recharge his energies.
Yuasa’s framing of the Nebukawa scenes gives the film a wistful air, a gentle nostalgia and happiness so we feel something of what Murakami does. The place is a safe haven after he has endured the tumult of a high-pressure lifestyle. Tokyo is a place wherelife can be intense. Long hours at work andgetting lost in that metropolis where sensations are endless as seen in the hectic opening. It is both exhilarating and exhausting. The appeal of a quiet home town is strong but is it really Murakami?
Yuasa also addresses the problems inherent to memory which is they are distant and intangible, a past influenced by our present. Our histories are at best half-remembered. Murakami feels the pull of Nebukawa as he endures the hectic life of Tokyo and upon returning he finds the place feels like a time capsule. He understands that he cannot go back but he can now move forward with renewed strength. Immigrants to Tokyo will be able to understand that feeling. Anyone who has travelled will.
Noriko Yuasa followed her directorial debut Looking for my lost sunflowers with this film, a more ambitious tale both stylistically and storywise as she explodes a teenage girl’s life on screen and touches on extremes of emotions.
Mizuho (Kaho Ishido) is a highschooler in a difficult situation: she is the product of a single-parent household somewhere in Tokyo, money is tight and so she works a part-time job at a dating website where she pretends to be a love connection for lonely men and this is added on to the difficulties of adolescence as she struggles to find her path in life. The road ahead darkens when, one day, whilst working at the dating site, she gets a message from a man named Kenzo (Lehman F. Kondo) who asks her to assist him in his suicide. Money is on offer. What will Mizuho do?
What makes Mizuho’s dilemma affecting, apart from the fact that we are dealing with someone’s potential death, is how we are drawn into adolescent pains as she encounters independence in a world beset by unfairness and brutality and this is enhanced through deliberate over-saturation of audio and visuals.
Mizuho might have enough moral grounding to avoid such a situation but both school and home offer no good role models and no respite from emotional pressure that Mizuho deals with. Her mother, a less than stellar support figure, seems to work as a hostess and needs support herself. Mizuho herselfis in a toxic work environment where her boss offers a potential sexual threat. Leading a lie online and seeing both sex and love undermined in real life through other girls her age who are exploited leads her to see artificiality in relationships, the emptiness that can lie at the heart of reality and it shakes her. With nothing to hold her down, or at least make her values and morals stronger, violence and death as legitimate means of making money seems reasonable. Why not? Mizuho has seen people brutalise others in real life and becomes subject to rough treatment.These moments cause her to waver between life and death.
Noriko Yuasa and Takato Nishi’s script deploys somewhat contrived moments of action to spur Mizuho’s tailspin but the visual artifice is on point as we are sucked into a whirlpool of confusing emotions. Hovering camera work which gets close and personal, confined locations and those packed with people, Yuasa’s use of garish colours toupset any equilibrium and to highlight emotional upset and contrast it with emotional deadness of calmer scenes where the fakeness of life stifles Mizuho. There is symbolism, some heavy-handed but some beautiful like two goldfish trapped in tall glasses of water, untethered balloons and the dualism found in people. It all bombards the viewer along with an aural soundscape of urban noises that are heightened to a point where they are suffocating and this clamour stays with us like a noose around the neck until it tightens at the fateful moment that Mizuho makes her choice whether to push on with assisting a suicide and then the release as she experiences a moment of catharsis. Getting there is tough and the ending is enigmatic but Mizuho, through trials and tribulations, gains freedom and adults can only look on as she becomes her own person.
This week has been good for me. I’ve had to take charge of a VR lounge where I work and that was okay. I’m arranging a trip to see Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film Shoplifters (2018) with friends from work and a trip to see Tampopo (1988) with my mother and sister. There’s also a night at a Japanese restaurant with friends from work at the end of December.
In between all of that, I’m continuing to study Japanese, watch and review films and exercise. I watched a couple of titles from the early 2000s called… I posted reviews for Looking for my lost sunflowers (2014) and Girl, Wavering (2015), both from Noriko Yuasa, the director of Ordinary Everyday (2017) which wowed me at this years Osaka Asian Film Festival. My review for Wasted Eggs (2018), a drama examining the social pressures that affect Japanese women – specifically the expectation that they get married young and have kids – was posted on V-Cinema on Monday.
What films are released this weekend?
jam
Running Time: 102 mins.
Release Date: December 01st, 2018
Director: SABU
Writer: SABU (Screenplay),
Starring: Sho Aoyagi, Keita Machida, Nobuyuki Suzuki, Shintaro Akiyama, Mariko Tsutsui, Yuta Ozawa, Kanta Sato,
Synopsis: Members of the entertainment group EXILE take the lead roles in a film. The first is Hiroshi (Sho Aoyagi), an idol who wows his non-existent fans on the stage and feels empty inside. One fan named Masako doesn’t care about his psychological condition because she captures him and takes him home. Then there is Takeru (Keita Machida) whose partner was in a terrible accident. He prays for her recovery and performs good deeds every day in the hopes she will wake up. Last but not east is Tetsuo (Nobuyuki Suzuki), a man who wants to take revenge on the yakuza who sent him to prison. Due to the fact that they live in the same city, their stories will cross from time to time.
Our Departures
かぞくいろ RAILWAYS わたしたちの出発「Kazokuiro RAILWAYS watashitachi no shuppatsu」
Synopsis: Akira (Kasumi Arimura) is lefta widow and single-motherwhen her husband dies. She has a pre-teen stepson to look after and decides the best thing for them is to travel to her late husband’s hometown in Kagoshima Prefecture where she meets her father-in-law Setsuo (Jun Kunimura) and is inspired by the man to join the local railway company and train as a driver, something her husband had dreamt of ever since he was a child. Akira, her father-in-law and stepson start a new life together.
Synopsis: Hosei (Ren Ozawa) is 22-year-old guy with a punch perm and a goofy grin. He’s a bit of dog when it comes to women but hasn’t had sex yet because he lacks the knack. Well, the best way to learn something is to get involved and he becomes a scout for a hostess bar in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho, the world famous red-light district of Tokyo. At his club he meets Rumi (Aoi Yoshikura) and falls in love with her at first sight. To bad she has a partner, Takashi (Katsuya Maiguma). He works at the same bar and treats her badly. Hosei steps in to help Rumi…
K SEVEN STORIES Episode 6 「Circle Vision Nameless Song」
Synopsis: This is the sixth film to be released. Adolf K. Weissman, the first Silver King, surrounds himself with loved ones as they gather at a dining table under five “Swords of Damocles”. The story is about to meet its climactic end as various characters enter the battlefield. No, I have no idea what is going on either.
Synopsis: A school girl named Yo makes a connection with a nurse named Yayoi when she is hospitalised but they lose contact. Some time later they meet again and things have changed: Yayoi is depressed and earns money as a prostitute while Yo suffers abuse from her step-father. Yo seeks refuge with Yayoi and a friendship develops as the older woman becomes a friend to her young house-mate. Things become complicated when Yayoi develops feelings for a paraglider, who can take her away from the harsh realities of life and soar through the skies…
I saw this psychological chamber piece at the Osaka Asian Film Festival 2017 and it all hinges on the central performance of lead actor Chise Ushio and the cruel world that Koji Segawa crafts for her. Don’t worry, it’s not all bitter and angry. There’s black humour and a neat ending.
Synopsis: Mariko, a seemingly normal housewife, has been together with her younger husband named Tomoharu for six years and has been dissatisfied every day. Despite having a son together, Tomoharu is often absent from home and she suspects he might be having an affair. Her workplace, a batting center, is also a miserable environment because the sleazy manager chases after her and the customers are rude. With constant pressure bearing down on her in public and private, Mariko becomes dominated by a certain obsession that eats away at her perception of reality.
Synopsis: U.C. 0097. One year since the Laplace’s Box was opened. Despite the revelation of the original charter for the Universal Century, which acknowledges the existence of Newtypes and their rights, the world remains largely unchanged. After the destruction of the Neo Zeon remnant force known as the Sleeves, the event that has come to be known as the “Laplace Incident” seems to have drawn to a close. In the final battle, two Full Psycho Frame mobile suits displayed power beyond human imagination. The menace of the White Unicorn and the Black Lion were sealed away from public consciousness, and were consigned to be forgotten by history. But now sightings of the RX-0 Unicorn 03, long thought lost two years ago, are being reported. Its name is Phenex, an immortal golden bird.
Synopsis: A documentary exploring the unknown truth of the Rice Riots that occurred from Uozu in Toyama Prefecture during the Taisho Period. This was during 1918 when rice prices hit normal people hard. Rice merchants, the government, and other elements allowed the prices to rocket so it was increasingly hard for normal people to buy a decent amount of rice and this documentary shows how housewives from Uozu, a fishing town in Toyama Bay, raised their voices and instigated something unprecedented during the period: a riot. These mass protests and actions led to thousands getting arrested. Investigating this extraordinary situationare students from Uozu’s high school who examine the materials and legends connected to it, they visit their descendants, and come to an understanding of the crisis that became the biggest public uprising in Japan.
Synopsis: Lee Komaki ran for political office in 2015 and he wanted to represent Kabukicho. What made him different from other politicians washe came from China in the 1980s and started a tourism business guiding people to restaurants and shops in Kabukicho. He felt he could make history as a Chinese person who became a naturalised citizen in Japan and became a politician but the documentary shows that his path to office was fraught with challenges.
Neko Kafe
猫カフェ「Neko Kafe」
Running Time: 90 mins.
Release Date: December 01st, 2018
Director: Hikaru Okita
Writer: Nanako Otake, Hiroshi Yamashita, Tomoko Anzai, Aya Satsuki(Screenplay),
Synopsis: Popular seiyuu Yurika Kubo takes on her first live-action role in an omnibus movie where customers visit a cat cafe where customers share their problems and regain some form of happiness while being surrounded by cats. Cats are awesome.
On the surface, Japan is hyper-modern but underneath the shiny shell is a society sticking steadfastly to certain aspects of tradition. Nowhere is this more evident than with gender roles. This is what Ryo Kawasaki’s debut feature examines through a light and witty drama surrounding little-explored issues and indignities suffered by women who don’t adhere to society’s demand to have children at a young age.
The film takes place around Christmas. The religious aspect of the season is irrelevant for most people in the country who consider it a time for lovers to be romantic. Rather, the New Year period is the biggest celebration in the winter when people return home and pay a visit to a shrine. That said, various aspects of Christmas are impossible to escape such as decorations, chicken dinners at KFC and Christmas cake. In the past, this seemingly innocuous confection proved to be a powerful metaphor for wealth and, derisively for women who are unmarried after the age of 25, someone who is past their prime. For some of the characters in the film, the season is a sad reminder that they are nearing their romantic expiration date.
One such woman is the film’s lead, Junko (Mitsue Terasaka). She lives in Tokyo and works as an office lady and she is on the verge of turning 30. She is a quiet and pretty woman, not too tall and not too gregarious, and she seems to be in control of herself. However, underneath her shell, she is wracked with doubt. Unsure about marriage, children, and her future and with no partner in sight she feels increasing pressure to act, not least because her mother pesters her about getting married and she isn’t getting any younger. Indeed, her birthday is at the end of the year, so the clock is ticking. In a bold move, she decides to become an egg donor. If she won’t have children herself then at least some part of her will go on into the future with someone else. If her eggs are chosen by a couple, she will receive a free trip to Hawaii to undergo the procedure and 500,000 Yen. What she doesn’t count on is meeting her cousin at the same fertility clinic.
Aoi (Sora Kawai) is a young woman in need of money. Having just split up with her girlfriend and without a place to stay, meeting her cousin is fortuitous and they are soon cohabiting. However, it isn’t exactly smooth since Aoi is a messy youngster who some might consider selfish and irresponsible while Junko is a little uptight. Kawasaki teases multiple inter-generational misunderstandings in a montage but resists making a comedy out of proceedings and shows how the women are united by their femininity.
The film compares both women by briefly cutting between their routines, Junko with friends and co-workers and Aoi with her ex-lover, but their shared interests, travails and time together are what really mark them and a gradual accumulation of scenes crescendos in an extended outing around Shibuya. Both Junko and Aoi’s voices give their thoughts and feelings in narration that compliment each other, although Aoi has the added complication of being a lesbian in a conservative country. This invites the audience to engage with and enjoy female companionship as we understand that society’s expectations of women cut across class, age, and sexuality.
Still, hidden tensions soon hatch as the year reaches its end. With the expectation of a predictable clash undermined we see that something more insidious lurks under Junko’s calm surface. An anxiety based on the social conditioning demanding women have kids young is shaking her psyche and the closer she gets to Christmas the more violent it becomes and prompts an unhealthy competition that fractures Junko and Aoi’s relationship.
By the end we feel for the two ladies. Kawasaki’s concise direction positions us in the viewpoint of modern women through well-written characters. Junko is something of an every-woman and easy to sympathise with. Aoi’s background is a little darker, her romantic history sketchy, but she is equally a sincere person, as seen in the moments when she expresses genuine sorrow and resentment over prejudice experienced, moments which make the viewer deliberately uncomfortable in her presence and sympathise with her. Ultimately, anxieties over their inability to conform to some idealised femininity and other issues are discussed throughout in conversations that never feels contrived or like a diatribe. We are immersed in what it is like to experience the constant demand to conform, the pressure it exerts on individuals, and how it shapes their perception of themselves.
A graduate of Waseda University’s Theatre and Film Arts course, Kawasaki has worked steadily on various television dramas and films and she has made several short films. Wasted Eggs is an assured debut feature with good performances from the leads that allow the viewer to experience the world from a different point of view. In this case, it is a distinctly female one where all of the major roles go to women and only one man gets a line of dialogue. Through this entertaining and quietly affecting story, we understand the difficulties faced by women searching for their own identity in a conservative society.
My review was originally published on V-Cinema on November 26th.
Rina Tanaka is a directing talent to watch out for based on the short Filled With Steam (2017) which I saw at the Osaka Asian Film Festival 2018. It was a film that had breathtaking moments of painful loneliness that were skilfully shot that I still remember clearly even as the year draws to an end. Snake Beneath the Flower Petals was at Nippon Connection 2017 and is one of the works she made in order to complete the master’s degree course at Tokyo University of the Arts’ Graduate School of Film and New Media where she studied under Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Nobuhiro Suwa and here she captures the isolation of people in a filmwhich displays a superb sensitivity for translating emotions onto the screen.
Yamakita village (I’m assuming in Kanagawa)is located by a lakeside between heavily forested mountains. It is a picturesque and tranquil place as we can see from the panning shots that Rina Tanaka starts the film with but there is a big and noisy event going on.After seeing the setting from a distance we get up close with the opening ceremony of a new bridge and people are gathering to walk over the structure. This is a symbolic as well as physical act because it is known as the “first-crossing ceremony” and it involves having families with three generations, something meant to signify a strong family bond,cross the bridge in order to usher in an auspicious future but the women of one family are undergoing a period of strife where the bonds are fragmenting.
Amidst the happy faces is that of 50-something Yumi Misono (Mika Kuroiwa)and her appearance is of a tired and fed-up person suffering this event when she has something else on her mind. Stood to her side is her mother Kazuko (Midori Kimura) who seems to be genuinely happy but one can tell it is something of a performance as fleeting looks of concern appear every so often and her words are shadowed with dark meanings. Yumi’s daughter Yoh (Hikari Shinoda) brings up the rear and she beams with a bright smile but this newly wed is also putting on a facade and there is something going on with her.
The film jumps back in time to take us into the lives of these three women, each of whom have different secrets which isolates them and acts as a weakness.
Yumi is lonely. She lives with a husband who no longer looks at her and there is a massive lack of affection on his part as seen in multiple exchanges and dialogue where he values Yumi as caretaker alone. When an old flame from her college days enters the picture, she becomes a new person with a grin and a potentially dangerous passion takes root and slithers around in her mind.
If home life can be empty for a woman, a career can be a trap for someone unprepared for hardship. Koh’s luminous smile masks the fact that her life as an illustrator is tough because her career doesn’t live up to her hopes. Dialogue from other characters full of praise about her success primes us for the gritty reality that market demands ignore her artistic talent but she maintains her facade.
Both women lives a fantasy of some sort and it helps them keep their sanity. We learn their lies and anticipate some disaster but this story is less about dramatic fireworks and more about meaningful change and this comes from Kazuko who has a secret herself, one that allows her to be open, blunt, ignore custom and be real, and she exercises her experience and genuine love for her family to bring her daughter back to reality and make her aware of Koh’s struggles.
Rina Tanaka patiently sets up how Yumi and Koh’s secret/lie acts like a delightful delusion and defensive behaviour through dialogue and dream sequences, intercutting between stories and allowing the camera to settle on actors who show different shades of emotions and then takes the characters on an easily understandable journey to a positive change of sorts through a script that builds up to an intriguing ending. The revelations are real and relatable and there is no sentimentality in the way Tanaka depicts them. Her camerawork patiently watches Yumi run the house solo and it is an emotionally barren space. For Koh, home life is good but Tanaka’s script shows the facade she puts on when talking about work quite neatly by contrasting a dream sequences with reality and we see that facade crumble as her frustrations bubble up. There are other examples especially through the actors whose body language speaks volumes, one example being sight lines which are noticeable when we realise they barely look at each other. When they do look at each other, characters are pushed out of their comfort zones.
One of the loneliest places to be is in a relationship where nobody knows or understands you and Tanaka shows the little lies and the barriers people throw up in order to get through the day. We see that truth on screen in this story and there is some catharsis at the end of the narrative despite the open ending, the sense that the characters will find the right path.
I’ve had a busy week but it has been good busy with work progressing well, getting
I posted a review of Wasted Eggs (2018) on Monday, a week after it was first posted on V-Cinema. I then posted a review of Snake Beneath the Flower Petals (2016) from Rina Tanakawho I interviewed along with some of her cast and crew at the Osaka Asian Film Festival after a screening of Filled With Steam (2017).
Get hyped for this one! Excellent director and excellent cast. Tetsuya Nakashima is back after making The World of Kanakoand he brings some of the stars from that film, Satoshi Tsumabuki (Rage, Gukoroku) and Nana Komatsu as well as Takako Matsu (Dreams for Sale). The trailer looks intense and this is a film that many Japanese film fans are anticipating.
Synopsis: Newlyweds Hideki and Kana Tahara are awaiting the arrival of their first child, a girl they plan to name “Chisa” and life seems to be going smoothly but everything is thrown out of whack when a mysterious person visits Hideki’s workplace and leaves a note with the cryptic message, “about Chisa-san case”. Now, Hideki and Kana are the only ones who know what they plan to name their daughter so that’s odd but stranger things happen when the colleague who passed Hideki the note is killed and Hideko and Kana’s home is attacked… To protect his family, Hideki asks for help from a journalist named Nozaki and a prestigious exorcist because what they are dealing with is something totally unnatural and mind-blowing...
Synopsis: 7 young people from Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, find themselves on the cusp of adulthood and they take different directions. Some remain in their hometown and get married, while others go to Tokyo to pursue their dreams and become celebrities. Three years elapse and they meet again in Maebashi.
Synopsis: The part in the omnibus suspense “Shukatsu” series that depicts the psychological warfare that young people engage with when they are job hunting.
Synopsis: Fuyuki Shimazu (website) is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer who is famous for making things from cardboard. A graduate from Tama Art University, he loves all things cardboard and travels the world to harvest the material to turn into things such as wallets. This documentary is at the South by Southwest Festival.
Synopsis: Part of the Local Origination Project Filmsthe story follows… Aimi Okusaki who decides to quit Tokyo and return to her hometown of Hiroshima where her grandfather runs an independent movie theatre. Unfortunately, it will soon close after encountering financial difficulties and they aren’t the only ones struggling as other shops in the neighbourhood could do with a hand.
The day before they give up on the theatre, a man from Tokyo named Tokuzawa appears and inspires residents with stories of the baseball team, the Hiroshima Carp, which was born when Hiroshima was picking itself up from the ruins of war. Tokuzawa tells tales of when they first started and Aimi and the residents use these stories as ideas to help revive their area.
Play Room
プレイルーム 「Purei Ru-mu」
Running Time: 94 mins.
Release Date: December 08th, 2018
Director: NARIO, Matsukage, Mayu Nakamura, Makoto Sasaki, Takuya Fukushima,
Miho Wakabayashi, one of the stars of Suffering of Ninkogets a film dedicated to her.
Synopsis: Actress, stripper and stage performer Miho Wakabayashi stars in an omnibus film where five directors portray Wakabayashi with their own world view. Stories include a musician who encounters her in a live house and the two roam the streets at night. Another story portrays her as anoffice lady and another as a woman abducted by someone as a baby and raised as a terrorist. Different stories and different styles.
Synopsis: This captures a stageplay. Set in Osaka and Tokyo, the story looks at how disability draws prejudice and discrimination from others. A high school student living in Osaka finds her life changes overnight whenher mother collapses and becomes disabled. Her family, who seemed to be happy, begin to display selfish and hurtful behaviour.
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is regarded as one of the finest documentaries ever made. It derives its power from its subject, a World War II veteran and political agitator named Kenzo Okuzaki who is on a quest to expose a possible war crime as well as the irresponsible actions ofEmperor Hirohito, the military, and post-war governments who carelessly tossed away the lives of their people and have imposed a sort of nation-wide amnesia over the wrongs committed during the war including thekillingof their own soldiers.
Okuzaki is quite a character to follow. Within the opening five minutes we learn he isan anti-authoritarian who served jail time for murder, for hurling pachinko balls at the Emperor and for distributing pornographic flyers outside the Imperial Palace. He also has a history of assault and has developed a mean moralistic streak. He shows no signs of slowing down at the age of 62, which is when we join him, as he sidelines his plot to assassinate a prime minister to search for the truth of a dark chapter in his past.
He was in the 36th Regiment in World War IIwhich was stationed in New Guinea. It seems he was always something of a rebel even during his time in the army where he claims he beat up his superiors and states resistance helped him survive.Good fortune saw him captured by Allied forces a year before the end of the war while the rest of his fellow soldiers who continued to fight were crammed into a small area and almost completely cut off from food and water supplies. At a time when soldiers were suffering from starvation there were dubious “executions” including those of privates Tetsunosuke Yoshizawa and Jinpei Nomura who were shot 23 days after the Emperor gave his radio address telling the Japanese that hostilities were over.
Okuzaki wants to find out the truth and so with Kazuo Hara and a documentary film crew in tow he shuttles from his home in Kobe to various places the length of Honshuu.The camera unflinchingly records him travelling from Hyogo Prefecture to Hiroshima, Tokyo and Saitama and interviewing ex-NCOs who may have been involved in the killings. What he gets are excuses, equivocations and elusiveness as the former soldiers lie and demonstrate a convenient collective amnesia and dodge responsibility. Lines like, “it was a military order. Orders always came first”, and, “for the sake of these souls, we shouldn’t dig up the past”, are uttered which infuriates Okuzaki who unearths evidence that cannibalism may have taken place and wants someone to take responsibility.
Okuzaki’srebelliousness and violence hovers over each interview and with the truth just out of grasp he becomes more single-minded and resorts to bizarre tactics and violence as his own nasty streak emerges.He works with relatives of the victims to force out confessions and then actors to trick interviewees and goes as far as to slap and punch them while the camera crew continues to recording everything. Watching men in their sixties fight each other in bursts of violence is alarmingand yet as the awful details of the privations of war and the crimes committed come to light (and we’re talking cannibalism and murder), audience members may find themselves willing Okuzaki on to continue shaking shocking confessions out of men bound to the more socially acceptable action of forgetting and parroting a sanitised version of events.
Many moral quandaries emerge from the film such as how the filmmakersbecome part of the action and help Okuzaki search for his truth. It was shot over a number of years but it is raw and immediate thanks to the way Hara edits the film and this editing is used to almost lionise Okuzaki and make him seem like a righteous avenger even though he is clearly unpredictable and violent. At some points he starts a fight, the action slows down, the camera zooms out while others awkwardly watch on. He clearly uses the camera crew to get into people’s lives and the camera crew use him for material but we begin to wonder if he is goaded on to more extremes due tothe presence of the camera and question whether the filmmakers should step in at points to stop the fighting. They do, towards the end, and the most violent parts of the story happen off-screen as we are told with title cards. However, could the filmmakers have facilitated Okuzaki’s obsession that lead him to those fateful actions?
What stands out more is how uncomfortably funny some scenes are. The flashes of violence can be funny as we see a formal Japanese greeting upturned by some wrestling as tempers flare or polite language used as people punch each other. The camera records everything without bias and so the absurdity comes out naturally. Seeing the reactions of families and nonplussed police officers standing around scuffles comes off as amusing as they ask in a typically polite Japanese way for Okuzaki to stop. The length Okuzaki goes while surprising can also be amusing such as enlisting his wife Shizumi and a friend to do some acting after he is abandoned by relatives of the victims. Seeing him give a briefing to them about their characters as they meekly look on and then act with the domineering man is funny. Shizumi also emerges as a hero as she puts up with her husband’s actions with the patience of a saint. More importantly Hara, through Okuzaki, shows that the Japanese character is not the quiet and calm stereotype and he has exposed some uncomfortable truths that the Japanese state would rather forget with regards to the way the military brutalised and cannibalised its own people. For this, however violent he is, Okuzaki does come across as a hero for trying to get someone to take responsibility.
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is a powerful film about violence and obsession.Both Okuzaki and the filmmakers are unethical and unkind at points but we feel their mission is important.With intelligent editing to create a focused narrative and exact staging and interactions to make it as visceral as possible, both the filmmakers and Okuzakiroot out the truth from a horrific episode in Japan’s past and pose difficult questions for the audience watching their work forcing people tofully confront the horrors of war. Their work will always be relevant because armed conflicts, unthinking obedience and blind nationalism are ever present threats for humanity.
Earlier in 2018 I had the chance to see three of Kazuhiro Soda’s early films which he made as a student at New York’s School of Visual Arts in the 90s and was surprised to discover he started out making a comedy and dramatic short films with well-contained stories and acting. He is still based in New York but is now renowned for observational documentarieshaving produced works of the cinema vérité variety that look at communities in Japan starting withDemocracy(2007).The Oyster Factorywas one I first encountered in the 2015 run of the Vancouver International Film Festival. This 145 minute film looks at life inside an oyster factory and as Soda explores this environment he discoverswider issues about the generational divide through the lack of young people entering the industry and Chinese-Japanese relations as Chinese workers are brought in to help keep two oyster factories running.
Kazuhiro Soda, along with his wife and producer Kiyoko Kishiwagi, takes audiences into the town of Ushimado inOkayama Prefecture. Herehe finds the Hirano oyster factory which is run by Shinsuke Hirano. It is one of a number of small placeswhere local men and women have traditionally shucked oysters in modest conditions over many hours of trying physical labour but due to population decline and a lack of fresh blood entering the industry the workers are drying out. There has been a recent influx of workers from China flowing into the area and although Hirano has never employed any outsiders he finally decides to bring in two young men. We meet them as well as other workers at other factories and get a snapshot of the production chain and life in a fading fishing community.
With a handheld camera Soda gets close to his subjects and lets them be themselves. Although they are aware of his presence and interact with him, they are natural and so is he. There is no narration or music to influence us, we simply observe a set of characters over a series of long takes as they go about their days in the tranquil port town. Situations involving the mirthful fishermen and their families unfold quietly as Soda follows interesting characters and listens to them as and when they appear. While there is a lot of the daily grind and repetition, a given since we are watching people at work, there is some drama as the charmingly amusing and active fishermen have to rescue a man who falls into the sea.
Through Hirano Oyster Factory, the outfit hosting Soda, we see the chain of oyster fishing from hauling in oysters to shucking them to market and we see that the industry is dominated mostly by middle-aged and elderly people, the ladies delightfully spicy in their language and the men a little more blunt. As such we get all sorts of views of the Chinese, outright prejudice from one chap to the older ladies offering gentle encouragement to new starters. The quayside is where we see charming elderly people who are open and amusing and tell a little about the area, Soda is also in on the act, engaged and friendly with the people, probing and he allows the workers to put their own personalities on film, some even teasing Soda about his constant filming of them in one amusing sequence full of miming and laughter.
One person we follow at length is Koichi Watanabe from Miyagi Prefecture, astout and good-natured “tsunami refugee” who has a wife named Yukiko and three daughters. Although not related to Hirano he takes on the responsibility of running the factory and we come to learn, through hearing his experiences and those of other people, how inheritance taxes make sustaining a family business tough and also see having seen the laborious process of shucking, understand why sometimes kids don’t want anything to do with oysters which makes it doubly hard. One cannot imagine Koichi’s cute kids sailing the seas to haul up their catch as they tumble around deck intent on having fun instead of learning.
Koichi’s conversations with fellow oyster farmers provide a lot of background not just to the local industry in and around Okayama/Hiroshima but also the situation in the Tohoku region both in terms of fishing and also in terms of the continuing fallout from the Great East Japan Earthquake as we understand Koichi’s reasons for being there and the plight of others who have fled Miyagi. On the opposite end we learn of the Chinese and part of the process of recruiting them. At 150,000 yen for travel and training it isn’t cheap for the factories to bring these people in and we hear tall tales of their behaviour but also get to see the Chinese at work. They welcome being filmed and are relaxed and natural and so we see the good-natured side of them which belies the fear some of the older people had expressed.
Perhaps the biggest sense the film managed to imbue was of longing. There is a longing for the vitality of an earlier age when the industry was a bigger draw but there is also a competing longing to escape. The wife of a fisherman about to take over a factory asks Soda about life abroad and in one revealing line she says, “It’s better to see the world than be stuck in Japan.”
Communities which the young have fled are increasingly common. There is an oddly stifling atmosphere where time moves slowly and there is a tranquillity that can be experienced in the pace generated by the long sequences. This isn’t to say places like this are boring. They are not. They are full of lively people with experience and thanks to the film we get to know the community who teach us about life in their part of the world and that includes Shiro, a cat who hangs around the film crew and provides delight as he gets familiar with his new friends from America, sort of returning the gaze of the filmmakers.
We made it to another one and we are half-way to Christmas (YAY!)
I’ve finished another 12-day work week and I’m feeling dandy. I’ve started my Christmas shopping and card writing late but it is under control and I’m looking forward to having time off work to relax and eat and play games. I hope everyone is going to be doing something fun as well.
Synopsis: Keita Shimabukuro and his older sister Aki are both involved with the Kimura gang. An evil plot by Sachi, the daughter of the head of the gang, results in Keita getting beaten and dumped into a river. He ends up crossing over and makes it to heaven, where he meets his father Mitsuo, with whom he has lost touch for many years. Their reunion won’t last long because an unexpected twist of fate sees Keita getting resurrected in the body of his sister. Now they have to share the same body with each other.
Synopsis: Quiet high school studentMitsuki Haruno (Tao Tsuchiya) finds her life changes when she begins to hang out with four handsome members of her school’s basketball team. She grows close to one player, Towa Asakura (Takumi Kitamura), but when her childhood friend Aya Kamiyama (Yuta Koseki) arrives on the scene as a basketball player at another high school, a love triangle forms.
Synopsis: Following the events of the Universe Survival Saga depicted in Dragon Ball Super TV anime, Earth has regained its peace but Goku and Vegeta keep training because they know the universe has more strong people to fight. One of them appears on Earth and his name is Broly and he is a Saiyan. How is this possible when Planet Vegeta was destroyed by Frieza and the Saiyans thought to be almost extinct? Audiences will discover more about that incident and the history of the Saiyans as a stupendous battle is about to kick off.
Synopsis: It is the 1960 and Shin lives with his mother in Sakura Motomachi in Tokyo but when she dies he is all alone and becomes sad. Thankfully, a boy named Itsuki comes along to save him. He lost his older sister and understands some of the pain Shin feels. They are joined by a girl named Tae and the three discover they can see yokai including Shin’s guardian spirit Suu-san, a “Nekomata” cat. This new family get involved in a mysterious incident.
Synopsis: This is the sixth in a series of documentaries dedicated to theYokohama DeNA Bay Stars baseball team and it looks at their 2018 season where they had big successes but suffered major injuries. It is directed by one of the actors from Tokyo Sonata.
Yume koso ha, anata no ikiru mirai / Dream is the future you live in
夢こそは、あなたの生きる未来 「Yume koso ha, anata no ikiru mirai」
Synopsis: This documentary looks at the entrants of the 2016 Miss Japan contest, looking at their training and the activities they get involved in such as volunteering in the disaster-hit Kumamoto region after the earthquake.
Synopsis: Ryoma Sakamoto, the major figure at the end of the Edo period, gets involved in a modern-day dorama based on his life thanks to a time-slip. Takeda, the principal actor of the film, Takeda, is desperate to learn more about the real man and the two get into “adventures”.
Synopsis: A single-mother named Kaori Hanazawa supports her daughter Kiriko on the wages of her cleaning job. One of her few pleasures in life is her cigarette break but the rise in tobacco prices and the prohibition on smoking in various public places make it hard to find a place to light up and puff out their stresses. If she feels like she is being unfairly ostracised for ruining the atmosphere for others, well, one day she will be a big hero because when unknown alien parasites land in the area, it turns out that they are week to smoke and the people trapped in the building Kaori cleans rely on her and her fellow smokers to get them out of trouble…
Synopsis: The story follows an ex-salaryman named Itto Tsuruoka who gets a job as a janitor at a school where he meets Sayaka Asahimura, a naive high school student and a member of the school’s public morals committee. He gets bitten by a pink frog and gets its abilities… This is gravure idol Jun Amagi’s movie debut.
Ishikara Takahiro (Snake of Violence) teams up with Sion Sono and Tak Sakaguchi and his Re:born team to make a ninja action film.
Synopsis: Mako (Yuka Ogura) is a school girl whose parents were kidnapped by yakuza. As a result, her life has become hard as she has no support to protect her from bullies except manga depictingthe actions of ninja. This becomes the new reality she escapes intowhen she finds herself recruited into a ninja clan and trained by a master ninja (Tak Sakaguchi) in order to take on the villainous Harada (Joey Iwanaga).
Wachigaya Itosato kyojo-tachi no bakumatsu
輪違屋糸里 京女たちの幕末 「Wachigaya Itosato kyōjo-tachi no bakumatsu」
Synopsis: Real events are turned into a beautiful spectacle of violence, love, and loyalty. 1863 and it is the Bakumatsu period and Japan is riven with conflict as the Shogun’s government crumbles and the Emperor and his forces are manoeuvring into position for the final battles that would decide the fate of Japan. As competing factions of samurai inside the Shogun’s and Emperor’s forces, the people continued with their lives, including one young geisha by the name of Itosato who resides in Kyoto’s Shimbara area. She, alongside other women in the area, find themselves drawn into the politics and conflicts that would result in one of the biggest assassination conspiracies Japan has even seen.
The Japan Foundation have announced the details of their next Touring Film Programme and it is full of fantastic films! The tour lasts from February 02nd to March 28th and the theme that connects them all is “love”. The stories address that emotion in a variety of ways through a broad variety of relationships. Love can be found in all shapes and sizes and it can also be an absence. What cannot be denied is that it is a powerful emotion and there are many powerful films that display this.
Amidst the works are stories of couples struggling to relate to each other, a father and his children overcoming differences, brothers and sisters who barely get along, a wife struggling with a husband that has no affection for her, a gay couple who run a law firm who support those on the margins of society and more.
Expect to understand the complexities of Japan, from Tokyo to Osaka and Aguni (an island off Okinawa) and further afield. I’m definitely going to see some of these before I jet off to Japan again.
Hikaru Toda is a documentary director/editor based in London and Osaka who has had her worked screened on BBC Storyville, France Televisions, NHK, The Guardian and at major international film festivals, including Hot Docs, CPH DOX and Melbourne International Film Festival. Hikaru moved back to Japan for the first time in 22 years to make Of Love & Law. Here’s my review. This is a truly wonderful film and one of my favourites of the year.
It was premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival last year before it went on its global journey, heading to Ireland, the Philippines, Germany at Nippon Connection, America at Japan Cuts and now London. Here’s the Kickstarter trailer I used for Tokyo:
Here’s a trailer:
Synopsis: Fumi and Kazu are partners in love and law; they run the first law firm in Japan set up by an openly gay couple. Together for 15 years, the lawyers want to raise a family of their own in a country where their partnership has no legal recognition or protection. Driven by their own experience of being ‘outsiders’, they attract a range of clients who reveal the hidden diversity of a country that prides itself on its obedience, politeness and conformity. Tired of being silenced and made to feel invisible, the lawyers and their misfit clients expose and challenge the archaic status quo.
Synopsis: Midori Mantani (Kikuchi) and Masao Minamisawa (Nakajima) have been dating for years, but their relationship seems stale to the point that they think about breaking up. They change their minds when Midori becomes pregnant! They decide to marry.
They now choose this as the time to truly get to know each other and explore their backgrounds. Masao comes from a wealthy family of artists and doctors who lived in Tokyo and Midori grew up with parents who ran an iron factory in a provincial city that didn’t offer much in terms of culture.
The more they get to know each other the better their relationship gets.
Toma Ikuta, the lead in Close-Knit(2017) takes on the role of a failed journalist whose newshound instincts fire up once again and get him dragged into a darker murder mystery.
Synopsis:Junichi Masuda (Toma Ikuta) is the new guy at a factory in a small town. He’s pretty honest about his background. He failed in his attempt to become a journalist and isn’t sure what to do next. His co-worker Hideto Suzuki (Eita) is the complete opposite. Secretive and a bit of a loner, Suzuki doesn’t open up about his past. However, he slowly becomes friends with Junichi. This happens around the time that a child is killed in a nearby town. Masuda researches into that case and a series of child murders from 17 years ago and stumbles across an image of a boy who looks like Masuda... He decides to write an article on Masuda while befriending him and discovers a disturbing story.
This film was originally a short before being expanded into a feature film. It explores the “senkotsu ceremony”, an Okinawan custom involving the cleansing of the bones of the dead by relatives and loved-ones in seawater or sake after burial in the ground or open air, and then re-burying the bones. This ceremony passes on life from the dead to the living and the film uses it to show how a matriarch unites a family even in her death. Here’s my review.
Trailer for the feature:
Here’s one for the short:
Synopsis:Yuko Shinjo (Ayame Misaki) has taken a vacation from her job as a hairdresser in Nagoya to head home. She is pregnant and alone but that’s not going to stop her journey to Aguni Shima, a small island which lies to the west of the Okinawa. It is here that Senkotsu is still performed even though it is a tradition that has largely died out. Her mother Emiko recently passed away and so she will perform the ceremony with her family, her father Nobutsuna (Eiji Okuda), who is quietly devastated and nursing his grief with alcohol while living alone, and her argumentative older brother Tsuyoshi (Michitaka Tsutsui). Rumours swirl around the family but friends come to their defence as the trio find the time to face each other and themselves and overcome their individual hardships.
A person obsessed with ammonites? How quaint. However, I can’t ready the synopsis for this and not think about the Junji Ito manga Uzumaki. This one was at the Tokyo International Film Festival where it won the Audience Award.
Synopsis: Yoshika (Mayu Matsuoka) is 24-years-old with a fairly unique hobby: she likes researching ammonite fossils and collects them. Perhaps this explains why she doesn’t have a boyfriend in her life. Or maybe the lack of a man is down to the fact that she pines for her first love, a guy from school named Ichi. One day, Ni, a guy who works at the same company, confesses his feelings for her.
Keisuke Yoshida is good at dramedies featuring mismatched people or awkward individuals. Sankaku, The Workhorse & Big Mouth, and My Little Sweet Pea which I saw at an earlier instalment of the Japan Foundation’s Touring Film Programme. His latest looks really good.
Synopsis: Hard-working and smart Yuria Ikuno (Keiko Enoue) runs a small printing company. Despite her best efforts, she can’t seem to attract the attention of a polite but aloof client named Kazunari Kanayama (Masataka Kubota). Kazunari really likes Yuria’s younger sister Mako Ikuno (Miwako Kakei) who is attractive and outgoing and a little ditzy. Meanwhile, Kazunari has his hands full with Takuji (Hirofumi Arai), his rough-hewn brother who was recently released from prison and is crashing at his apartment.
Synopsis: Tsuchida (Asami Usuda) lives with her boyfriend Seiichi (Taiga). He is an aspiring musician but he has no job and is struggling to write new songs. Tsuchida decides to work at a hostess club to support them both but doesn’t inform Seiichi. Things blow up when she gets herself involved with her customer Yasuhara (Ken Mitsuishi) and Seiichi finds out. Arguments ensue and he decides to get a job but around this time, Tsuchida runs into her ex-boyfriend Hagio (Joe Odagiri)…
This is a hard-hitting family drama where the actors consistently build up characters who offer a fascinating portrait of a patchwork family in modern Japan and offers up a lot of nuance for its characters. It’s held down by standout performances by Tadanobu Asano (Bright Future, Survive Style 5+) and Shinobu Terajima (Vibrator). Here’s my review.
Synopsis: Dear Etranger is based on a novel by Kiyoshi Shigematsu and tells the tale of 40-year-old Makoto Tanaka (Tadanobu Asano), an assistant manager at a company trying to balance two families and be an ideal father at a time when others give him or are going through crises. Free from melodrama and idealism, it paints a believable picture of the stresses and strains of maintaining a loving family unit built from the scraps of past relationships.
Synopsis: Kamakura is the ancient capital of Japan and the place where ghosts, demons, and youkai appear on a daily basis. Akiko (Takahata) is the freshly-minted wife of the mystery writer Masakazu Ichimoku (Sakai) and she gets a surprise every day with her supernatural neighbours. She also sees her husband help the police investigate difficult cases involving monsters and ghosts and she soon gets caught up in a case of her own…
Based on a true story, this takes a story of a man who refuses to be an absent father and tries to connect with his daughter while taking on a role that is seen as something women do. Rena Takeda (Poetry Angel) is the daughter.
Synopsis:Based on a true story, or should that be a Tweet which was re-Tweeted by 80,000 people and liked by 260,000 people on Twitter, this is a tale of a father (Watanabe Toshimi) who made a bento lunch for his daughter Midori (Takeda Rena) every single day of her time in high school. It’s bad at first but as his skill grows, so does her appreciation and the two busy people bond over this important meal.
Synopsis: Aoyama is an elementary school student who makes notes in his diary every day. His town is quiet but his heart races every so often because he has a crush on a mysterious older woman who works as a dental assistant. One day, a group of penguins appears in his quiet suburban neighbourhood and Aoyama and the older lady want to discover the reason for their appearance.
WebsiteIMDB
Daihachi Yoshida of The Kirishima Thing fame is back with this murder mystery which is a strong dramedy about secrets and redemption. It has a fantastic cast such as Mikako Ichikawa (Rent-a-neko) and Ryuhei Matsuda (Gohatto, Before We Vanish) but Ryo Nishikido is the big draw for many because he’s an idol. Here’s my review.
Synopsis: Thanks to a government program, the small seaside town of Uobuka gets six strangers into the community. They include a scary fisherman (Kazuki Kitamura), a methodical cleaning woman (Mikako Ichikawa), and a simple-minded deliveryman (Ryuhei Matsuda). All are under the supervision of local government official Hajime Tsukisue (Ryo Nishikido) who gets reports of suspicious behaviour. When he finds out who these people are and their criminal backgrounds, a body is discovered in the harbour and Tsukisue suspects one of the newcomers committed murder…
I saw the trailer for this a couple of months back. It’s blend of romance and drama looked interesting primarily because of the two leading characters, one who is an introvert and the other who is blind. Around all of the shouting and crying looked to be a story where and it has some great comedy moments as the trailer reveals. It stars Gen Hoshino (Why Don’t You Play in Hell), Kaho (Puzzle), Ren Osugi (Exte), Hitomi Kuroki (Kaidan, Dark Water), and Kanji Furutachi (The Woodsman and the Rain, GFP Bunny).
Synopsis: Kentaro Amanoshizuka (Hoshino) is a 35-year-old with no friends and a modest job in city hall. His life seems stuck in a rut as he still lives with his parents and there are of signs of him getting a promotion in work or socialising with anyone. His parents (Hiraizumi and Moriyama) worry and so they go to a parental matchmaking event hoping to find a woman for their son. Only one couple approaches them. The husband is Akita Imai (Osugi), a man who runs a successful company and after exchanging profiles with Toshi Amanoshizuka he believes that Kentaro is not worthy of his daughter who is blind. Kentaro and Kaho still meet up one fateful day. Can they be together?
This one was at the Vancouver International Film Festival 2015 and I have seen one review but it’s a glowing one that talks up the great characters, drama, and originality. The three central characters on screen are a frumpy put-upon housewife, a gay lawyer, and a repairman/widower and their stories interconnect. Non-professional/untried actors are in the lead roles but they are surrounded by character actors such as Tamae Ando (OrdinaryEveryday), and Ken Mitsuishi and also Lily Franky.
Synopsis from Japan Foundation: The film is made up of three vignettes that tell very different stories of love.
Unfulfilled and exploited housewife, Toko (Toko Narushima), is trapped in a loveless marriage with a husband disinterested in how his mother treats his wife. An encounter with a sympathetic scam artist offers respite from a life lacking all affection.
An intuitive bridge inspector (Atsushi Shinohara) had been widowed in a brutal and random murder of his wife three years prior. Grief-stricken and obsessed with fantasies of revenge, his heartbreak sends his life in a downward spiral.
Shinomiya is an elite lawyer with an inflated ego who enjoys mistreating his younger male lover. But when his life comes crashing down, he seeks refuge with a school friend he once loved.
This was at the Tokyo International Film Festival last year and reviews like this one paint a picture of a great family drama thanks to the actors Rie Miyazawa (Pale Moon, Twilight Samurai), Joe Odagiri (Bright Future, Mushishi), and Hana Sugisaki (Pieta in the Toilet).
Synopsis: Futaba and her daughter Azumi live in a house connected to their family-run bathhouse in a small town. Their used to be three people in their family but husband and father Kazuhiro left them for another woman and since then, the bathhouse has been closed. Everything changes when Futaba is diagnosed with terminal cancer, giving her only months to live. The approach of death fires her up to make the most of her remaining time. She develops a head of steam and becomes determined to reunite her family, reopen the bathhouse, and take care of her daughter. Her journey will uncover new friends and secrets as she makes peace with the world before leaving it.
Haruka Ayase (Our Little Sister) plays a screen legend popping off the screen and into the life of a wannabe director in this charming fantasy which is an ode to Japanese films.
Synopsis: It is the 1960s and television is sucking away the audiences for Japanese cinema. This does not deter Kenji (Kentaro Sakaguchi), a struggling assistant director who is looking for his big break. He uses his free time at a theatre watching long-forgotten black-and-white films and he is a big fan of The Tomboy Princess, with the heroine Princess Miyuki (Haruka Ayase) being a main attraction. A power outage hits one screening and fate steps in to cause Princess Miyuki to step off the screen. True to her on-screen persona, she is feisty and physically monochrome and shakes up Kenji’s world and it seems a romance might be in their developing narrative…
Synopsis: Everything in life is on track for Ryosuke (Tori Matsuzaka). He has opened a restaurant and it has become a hit and and he is about to be married to his beautiful fiancée. Then his father declares he has late-stage pancreatic cancer and his girl vanishes. Ryosuke is shaken and goes through his father’s belongings and discovers a diary and within its pages he reads a seemingly incriminating entry: “Without remorse, I take a life…” Is the passage a fictional account or the biographical memoir of a murderer?
Synopsis: Based on Rinzo Shiina’s absurdist novel and winner of a special prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1953, the film is set around 1950s Tokyo. Ryukichi (Ken Uehara) and Hiroko (Kinuyo Tanaka) are a married couple who live in a ramshackle house. They have lodgers living with them but they are desperately poor and go to complicated lengths to avoid unwanted pregnancies especially because Ryukichi works in a low paid job. Hiroko, a war widow before she met Ryukichi, is a survivor and so she secretly takes on a part-time job which aggravates Ryukichi who senses that his wife is hiding something from him. The couple and their lodgers find their lives turned upside down when someone who claims to be Hiroko’s first husband leaves a child on their doorstep.
A variety will be screened in the following cities from February 02nd to March 28th, 2019:
The biggest surprise hit of 2018 is a low-budget zombie movie which has become one of the biggest box-office hits in Japan. International film outfit Third Window Films are bringing this “one-in-a-million success” to UK cinemas and homes early next year!
This is a workshop film with non-professional actors made with a budget of just $27,000 which has grossed $30 MILLION domestically despite opening on just 2 screens and with an advertising budget of $0! Since then it has toured the world and won lots of awards and has earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Every day on Film Twitter sees more news of its popularity and success so everyone should be getting hyped for this one as it comes to cinemas from Scotland to Wales and England. Here are the details:
Following the theatrical release, there will be a home format release. Here are the details:
There is a standard edition DVD with just the film and trailer and there is also a limited edition 2 disc Blu-Ray with over 2 hours of extras which include:
• Interview with director Shinichiro Ueda
• Making Of
• “Take 8” – short film
• Outtakes
• Go-Pro version
• POM TV Instructional Video
• Slipcase
This was released by the ENBU Seminar guys last November and it looks like the Romero film Diary of the Dead.
Synopsis:A film crew shooting a zombie movie in an abandoned warehouse in the mountains finds that their work turns real when honest to goodness zombies start showing up and chowing down on the crew. Does the director stop? Hell no! He keeps on shooting.
One Cut of the Dead has been praised for a non-stop one-take 37 minute shot that presages a switch in direction for the film so it turns the zombie genre completely upside down and into a charming, audience-friendly comedy!
It comes from director Shinichiro Ueda and his cast of non-professionals. He was born April 7th 1984 in Shiga, Japan and he has been making films since his days as a junior high school student when he was making short films with his friends. In 2010 he formed the film company PANPOKOPINA（パンポコピーナ）and to date his films have received 20 grand-prize awards at various film festivals. In 2015 he made his commercial film debut with a short film in the omnibus film project Neko Manma.
With his personal slogan of “Making films which will still be fun after 100 years” he strives to make entertaining films. They have been getting more screen time thanks to One Cut of the Dead collected on various trailer posts both here (5 trailers) and here (1 trailer – Dreaming Novelist).
Works to date: 2017 – One Cut of the Dead「カメラを止めるな！」(Feature Film) 96 minutes 2015 – Take 8 「テイク８」(Short Film) 19 minutes 2015 – Neko Manma 「猫まんま」(Omnibus Film) 24 minutes 2014 – Girlfriend’s Confession Ranking 「彼女の告白ランキング」(Short Film) 21 minutes 2014 – Dreaming Novelist「恋する小説家」(Stage play adaptation of his own short film)
2014 – illhiss clover-SOS (Music Video) 6 minutes 2011 – Dreaming Novelist「恋する小説家」(Short Film) 40 minutes
Here is a list of the accolades One Cut of the Dead has collected:
Fantastic Fest – Winner – Audience Award / Best Director
Fantaspoa Film Festival – Winner – Best Film
Bifan Fantastic Festival – Winner – EFFF Best Film
Vevey International Funny Film Festival – Winner – Grand Prix
Fantasia Film Festival – Runner Up Audience Award / Special Mention – Debut Film
Motel X Lisbon – Winner – Audience Award
Singapore Film Festival – Winner – Audience Award
San Sebastian Horror Film Festival – Winner – Audience Award
Camera Japan – Winner – Audience Award
Abertoir Film Festival – Winner – Audience Award
Tohorror Fest – Winner – Audience Award
Leeds Film Festival – Winner – Audience Award (Fanomenon Section)
San Diego Pacific Arts Film Festival – Winner – Audience Award
Reel Asian Film Festival – Winner – Audience Award
Yubari Fantastic Film Festival – Winner – Audience Award
Asian Pop-up Cinema – Winner – Audience Award
Udine Far East Film Festival – Winner – Silver Mulberry Audience Award
New York Asian Film Festival – Runner Up Audience Award
La Roche-sur-yon Festival – Special Mention Award
LA Japan Film Festival – Winner – Best Film
Morbido Film Festival – Winner – Press Award
Fancine Film Festival – Winner – Cencerro Award
There is a standard edition DVD with just the film and trailer and there is also a limited edition 2 disc Blu-Ray with over 2 hours of extras which include:
It comes from director Shinichiro Ueda and his cast of non-professionals. He was born April 7th 1984 in Shiga, Japan and he has been making films since his days as a junior high school student when he was making short films with his friends. In 2010 he formed the film company PANPOKOPINA（パンポコピーナ）and to date his films have received 20 grand-prize awards at various film festivals. In 2015 he made his commercial film debut with a short film in the omnibus film project Neko Manma.