Masayoshi Kawajiri’sexperimental short animation depicts thelife of a boyaiming to bea manga artist. It took the Runner-up Award for the Grand Prize at last year’s Pia Film Festival awards (missing out to Orphan’s Blues) but took the Gemstone Award which is given to, “the most progressive and daring film made beyond the common ideas of filmmaking”. A Japanese Boy Who Draws definitely fits this bill as it marries the magic of art and animation and their many different styles to a mockumentary to tell an enjoyable story of someone pursuing their dream.
The film follows the life and career of Shinji Uehara, someone who pursues his passion for drawing, from the age of one to his life as a professional enduring the vicissitudes of the manga industry.
Thegenius of the film is the way that it simultaneously uses the materials and tools and the cultural trends experienced by Shinji at various stages, as well as his level of experience and style of art, to depict his life and environment as well as his development as an artist as he matures. It’s a breathless 20 minute dash through a vast array of styles that are all seamlessly woven together to make a beautiful story of pursuing art as an occupation.
Everything starts off as childish crayon scribbles on newspapers and squiggly lines on an Etch a Sketch before becoming watercolours, collages, and crayon drawings to increasingly refined pencil sketches in school notebooks. The character designs grow insophistication from boyish rough-hewn shounen style moppets to seinen action heroes as he grows and his skill blossoms until he makes it to the pages of a major manga with designs reminiscent of Kengo Hanazawa’s I Am a Hero before Shinji drifts out of the industry and winds up in a grey live-action world.
Every frame segues perfectly to the next and there is a compelling passion that captures the spirit of every image on screen, the collection of pictures in Shinji’s childhood having a wonderful innocence and naivete in their depiction of the world to the more cynical production-line drawings later in his life and there is a daring experimental phase using claymation. Even the jump into live-action is more or less seamless as it uses a match-cut from animation to the drab real life Shinji feels he enters as he quits his dream.
The varied use of mediums and influences is a brilliant reflection of Shinji’s development as well as acting as a tool for tracking his status in society. They also serve as a time capsule that invokes nostalgia in audience members who lived through the 80s and 90s who will recognise characters from Doraemon,Evangelion,Final Fantasy VII and through this the film derives a sly sense of humour.
The film’s playful plethora of styles really hammers home the evolution of an artist and aids the narrative in creating a reflection of the way we perceive the world through media ephemera as well as cherished entertainment. It is all packed together in a breezy narrative that scoops us up as we watch as Shinji’s enthusiasm waxes and wanes as he experiences the reality of drawing for a living. It offers an unvarnished view of the creative life, all of its selfishness and compromises and also underlines how art and memories associated with it help us discover passions that give meaning to life and make the world better, urging us in the audience to keep going no matter what.
My review was first published on July 26th at VCinema.
The organisers behind the Nara International Film Festival (NIFF) have lined up a special event this weekend (September 14-16), or should that be, Pre-Event, as they host three days of films with highlights from this year’s Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) and the Short Short Film Festival and Asia (SSFF).
Opening on September 14th, the fest serves up Catalonian food and films with Franc Aleu’s documentary El Somni shows how creatives from various disciplines (sculptors, bonsai masters, dancers, actors, novelists) team up to create a meal of multi-sensory seduction that captures all five senses and not just the taste buds. Here’s a glimpse with the trailer:
This presages next year’s NIFF which will have a Catalonian feel but auds at the opening ceremony in Nara this weekend will get to go to a Spanish restaurant nearby.
The rest of the fest features the Berlinale and SSFF films on September 15th and 16th.
Berlinale have teamed up with NIFF to showcase their Generation strand by presenting four feature films which will be judged by the Youth Jury. Kids get to say which film is the best and the winner will be revealed at the award ceremony which will be held at the closing ceremony.
Rima Das is a self-taught film-maker from India’s Assam state who typically writes, shoots, and edits her own films (and more) and works with non-professional actors. Her award-winning films have been shot in her home state where she details village life of youngsters in contemporary rural India. Bulbul Can Sing has won numerous awards and toured the world, from Toronto to Berlin and Osaka. Here’s my review from VCinema.
Synopsis: Bulbul (Arnali Das) is teenager who lives with her mother, father and younger brother in Chaygaon, a rural town in Assam. Her closest friends are Bonny (Banita Thakuriya), whose mother runs a cafe, and Sumu (Manoranjan Das), a teenage boy who doesn’t conform to the traditional masculine behaviour as expected by their community. The relationship between the three is chain that keeps the film moving as their lives are sketched out through school and home life, the secrets they share and games they play and also the way they support each other as they try to self-actualize personalities while those around them try to mould their characters. Their worlds come crashing down when they go beyond what is accepted behaviour in the village.
Stupid Young Heart
Release Date: October 12th, 2018
Duration: 102 mins.
Director: Selma Vilhunen
Writer: Kirsikka Saari (Screenplay),
Starring: Here Ristseppa, Rosa Honkonen, Ville Haapasalo, Katja Kuutner, Pihla Viitala,
Synopsis: Lenni (Jere Ristseppä) is a wispy slip of a 15-year-old who loves skateboarding and his girlfriend Kiira (Rosa Honkonen), a dancer with her own troubled home life. When it turns out that she is pregnant, he will become a father and has to reckon with his future. He finds comfort with the leader of a racist gang faces an economically uncertain future and is lured in by comforting rhetoric of the extreme right who are scaring their working-class with racist rhetoric about Muslims as the local Somali community are blamed for taking jobs…
This looks like an eye-opening kitchen-sink drama about the travails of working-class communities across the west that shows how economic anxiety (and just plain stupidity and racism) leads to conflict.
A Colony
Release Date: February 01st, 2019
Duration: 102 mins.
Director:Genevieve Dulude-De Celles
Writer: Genevieve Dulude-De Celles (Screenplay),
Starring:Emilie Bierre, Robin Aubert, Irlande Cote, Noemie Godin-Vigneau, Cassandra Gosselin-Pelletier, Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie,
Synopsis:12-year-old Mylia (Emilie Bierre) lives in Centre-du-Québec and is taking her first tentative steps into adolescence as she navigates social cliques in high school and a fracturing family as she gets to know a boy named Jimmy (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie) of Abenaki descent who lives on the nearby First Nations reserve.
This award-winning sensitive portrayal of a naive girl hesitantly learning to form a personality touches on some of the prejudice Jimmy faces and Canada’s colonial history and expectations of girls in Canada.
My Extraordinary Summer with Tess
Release Date: July 03rd, 2019
Duration: 82 mins.
Director: Steven Wouterlood
Writer: Laura van Dijk (Screenplay), Anna Woltz (Novel)
Starring: Sonny Coops Van Utteren Josephine Arendsen, Jennifer Hoffman, Hans Dagelet, Tjebbo Gerritsma, Suzan Boogaerdt,
Synopsis:10-year-old Sam (Sonny van Utteren) is with his family for a week-long holiday on a Dutch island, but things soon go awry as family-members are plagued by illness and accidents. With nobody to play with, the inquisitive Sam decides to do some “aloneness training” to be prepared in case everyone but him dies. This is when Sam meets 11-year-old Tess (Josephine Arendsen), the daughter of a single mother, and he gets roped into her misadventures that have a background in emotional heartache she suffers.
Winner of a special mention from the Berlinale Generation KPlus, this sounds like the perfect film for adults and young people alike as it focuses on notable performances from its young leads through the relationship between Sam and Tess with clarity and presents life lessons we can all recognise.
The selection of shorts from SSFF consists of five films from around the world and they will also be judged by a jury of children:
Imaginary Bullets (2018, Dir: Sean Oliver)
The Wonderful Flight (2015, Dir: Ian Allardyce, Bat-Amgalan Lkhagvajav)
Nagisa (2018, Dir: Toshiyuki Teruya)
Aya Goes to the Beach (2015, Dir: Maryam Touzani)
Shakespeare in Tokyo (2018, Dir: Genevieve Clay-Smith)
There are a lot of other things scheduled including the NIFF Youth Movie Production Workshop which shows the result of NIFF’s initiative of allowing junior high school students the experience filmmaking during their summer vacation with the advice of professional staff. There is also NARAtive2020, which shows a film which was shot earlier this year that will be premiered at Nara International Film Festival 2020 plus the previous film, The Taste of Rice Flower, last year’s International Competition Winner, will be screened again.
I’m trying to get my genki back. I’m posting this on a Friday because I’ve got something else reserved for tomorrow. Anyway, this week I posted a review for the film Sayounara which I saw back in March. I then posted a review for the film A Japanese Boy Who Draws and a news report about the Nara International Film Festival’s Pre-Event where Berlinale and Short Short and Asia film fest films will be shown in Nara.
This is Joe (Mushishi, Adrift in Tokyo) Odagiri’s sophomore feature film as a director and he has hired a good team in getting Christopher Doyle – Wong Kar-Wai’s frequent collaborator – working cinematography and Emi Wada designing costumes – she won an Oscar for her costuming on Akira Kurosawa’s epic Ran and is responsible for costumes in lush historical dramas such asSamurai Marathon 1855, Hero, Gohatto, and House of Flying Daggers. It was at the Venice International Film Festival.
Synopsis:Toichi is a boatman who ferries people across a river. Despite ferrying people across, the only person he really communicates with is his young neighbour Genzo. When a large bridge is begins to be constructed to help people cross the river it looks like Toichi will be made redundant but then he meets a mysterious young girl who appears to be an orphan. Toichi takes her in and from that moment, his life begins to change…
Hit Me Anyone One More Time
記憶にございません！「Kioku no Gozaimasen」
Release Date: September 13th, 2019
Duration: 127 mins.
Director: Koki Mitani
Writer: Koki Mitani (Screenplay) Yutaka Kono (Novel)
Starring: Kiichi Nakai, Dean Fujioka, Yuriko Ishida, Koichi Sao, Yuki Saito, Yo Yoshida, Eiko Koike, Masao Kusakari, Yoshino Kimura,
Japan’s premiere comedy writer Koki Mitani comes up with a political comedy that stars solid actor Kiichi Nakai who is a regular player for Mitani’s works.
Synopsis:Keisuke Kuroda (Kiichi Nakai) is the most unpopular prime minister of Japan in history and during one of his speeches he is struck by a rock. After waking up in a hospital bed he discovers he has lost his memory. The only people aware that he has lost his memory are his secretaries. Not even his family and certainly nor the electorate knows. With all of his memories gone, he thinks about making changes to the country.
No Longer Human
人間失格 太宰治と3人の女たち「Ningen Shikkaku: Dazai Osamu to 3 Nin no Onnatachi」
An all star cast for a raunchy tale about one of the most important figures in Japanese literary history directed by Mika Ninagawa. It’s her second film this year, following Diner and follows her formula of making everything colourful and operatic in tone.
Synopsis:Osamu Dazai (Shun Oguri) is one of the most popular authors in Japan and like most writers in the past, he is absorbed with dames and booze. Despite being married he has two lovers and finds it increasingly difficult to balance his life.
BanG Dream! Film Live
ヴァイオレット・エヴァーガーデン外伝–永遠と自動手記人形–「Baioretto Eba-ga-den Gaiden: Eien to Jidou Shuki Ningyou」
The latest idol craze in town sees Tomomi Umezu move up to the director’s chair after working as an editor on the TV anime version of this. The Poppin’ Party girls reprise their roles.
Synopsis: Kasumi Toyama has always loved looking at the stars but has never found anything that inspires her as much. When she finds a star-shaped guitar in a rundown pawnshop, she rediscovers the thrill she felt when gazing upon stars and then becomes determined to form an all-girl band with four like-minded souls.
I am of the generation that grew up with the anime FLCL being the in thing when I was high school and the band The Pillows provided the music for the show. This year is the 30th anniversary year for the band and the lead singer’s original story is turned into a film starring solid supporting actor and occasional lead, Amane Okayama. Of course, the film features performances by The Pillows and also members of different bands like Straightener.
Synopsis: Yusuke (Amane Okayama) is unsatisfied with life as he works in his uncle’s ramen shop. He dreams of becoming a photographer and he gets his chance just as he meets a woman named Yukari at a concert thrown by The Pillows…
Geki × cine “Seven people of the skull castle” Season Moon
ゲキ×シネ「髑髏城の七人」Season風 「GekixShine Dokuroshou no Shichinin-Tsuki Kagen」
Synopsis: It is early 1590 and Toyotomi Hideyoshi rules the land following the death of Nobunaga but, far away from the capital, in the eastern plains, a mysterious rebel by the name of Tenmao is gathering his “Skull Corps” to launch a civil war. Some troops from this group chase a girl named Sagiri but she is saved by a passing vagabond named Sutenosuke and taken to a nearby brothel town called Mukai village. This place serves as a post town between the capital and the eastern plain and it is where all sorts of people with different schemes and histories bump into each other as is seen in this stageplay.
This is a drama about nurses who provide palliative care and it is based on the experience of Kumiko Shibata.
Synopsis: A retired businessman named Shiba loses his daughter in a traffic accident and tries to commit suicide but is prevented by a friend. He is put in touch with a nurse and decides to enter the nursing profession and care for those who are near death and their families. Five years later, Shiba works in Okayama and supports people who will reach their last moments.
Attack of the Giant Teacher
アタック・オブ・ザ・ジャイアントティーチャー「Attaku Obu Za Jaianto Ti-cha-」
Special effects maestro Yoshikazu Ishii (Godzilla FINAL WARS) creates a film where a teacher at a school becomes huge and fights against invading aliens.
Synopsis: Kenzo Miyazawa is a teacher but with the lack of students it will soon close. He organises the students in a musical version of “Momotaro and Tsuru” at the school festival. On the day of the school festival, aliens crash the party in a UFO and demand the delivery of a couple of Miyazawa’s students. In this emergency, Miyazawa swallows two capsules and instantly becomes huge. He will face the aliens …
The Best of Youth is director Mario Tullio Giodarna’s 2003 film that manages to pack in 40 years of Italian history into six hours of screen time by following three generations of one family. Beautifully lensed and efficiently scripted, it says a lot about how good the acting and directing is that it feels epic yet intimate, that it never strains credibility too much as it charts social changes and that it ensures we care about the internal struggles of a wide cast of characters through the decades.
Split into two three-hour parts, the film follows various members of the middle-class Carati family who seemingly manage to get involved in nearly every significant event experienced by modern Italy from the flooding of Florence in 1966 to the battle against the Red Brigade throughout the 70s and the war against the Mafia in Palermo in the 90s. The narrative propulsion driving viewers to these events is primarily provided by itinerant brothers Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Alessio Boni), both of whom travel around Italy meeting all sorts of people. Younger brother Nicola is the more empathetic one, initially starting as a trainee doctor whose caring bedside manner segues neatly into political revolutionary before he graduates to become a father and a caring psychiatrist battling cynicism. Older brother Matteo goes in totally the opposite direction as he quits being a philosophy student to become a cop contending with darker emotions that signal a death wish. They and other characters seek to effect change for the better in their own ways as they are swept along by the flow of time.
Right from the get-go everyone is efficiently sketched with dialogue and behaviour that ostensibly places them in various competing social classes and philosophical positions but everyone is a complex human alive with ambitions and joy rather than ideologues and the film shows them maturing emotionally under each others influence as they navigate coming to terms with their facticity while participating in society and family and pursuing a hopeful future.
There is an opaqueness to characters which hides inner angst, sensitively brought out by some pitch-perfect acting and direction which allows a glimpse of uncertainty or fear behind the expected Latin hot-bloodedness. The direction focusses on people, their faces in particular, rather than settling purely for poetic visuals and pretty landscape shots. Masterful framing and camera angles as well as Giodarna’s preference for medium shots that segue into close-ups ensure viewers can gaze at the characters and ride the emotional waves the actors project and this works especially well for Luigi Lo Cascio and Alessio Boni as Nicola and Matteo, the former projecting a nicely judged vivacity and reacting to every emotional blow his character experiences with a grace and humanity that audiences will aspire to while the latter’s emotional turbulence provides a hook that keeps the audience wondering just what is going on in the man’s head as he erupts with violence. Indeed, Boni’s portrayal of someone with some sort of death wish which gets subsumed into his work in the state security apparatus is highly compelling as we seek answers to his sometimes irrational behaviour and expect him to come to blows with politically left-leaning characters. The film defies expectations and answers are hard to come by but we watch with increasing tension and sympathy. What burned the brightest for me were his blue eyes that radiated the melancholy and disappointment of someone unable to interact normally with his family and seeing his distance from their love and support is affecting and with his character’s story we come to terms with the idea that life is finite.
The unifying bond of family holds the film together so that while the sheer amount of things threatens to overburden the narrative with action, it never feels too contrived thanks to a diverse set of sympathetic characters and their connection to each other. Fate seemingly sets these characters in motion so they go off in different areas and they come together and we see how everyone loves and lives and burns bright with life but some fade away as they age or some simply choose to leave. We become inured to seeing these people disappear but their impact on the story and the other characters is large and passed on to the next generation, how they have tried to make a difference and succeeded or failed and it hurts when there is a failure and someone is lost but we share the joy of life with those who remain and the film ends on a note of optimism and new beginnings as we welcome in a new generation of the Carati family who will surely get involved in the future of the country and we, as viewers, feel the hope that is born with every possibility. Despite early misgivings with the history-heavy first half but as it zeroed in on the family aspects in the second half, I was moved by the story which is a universal one and told through characters we come to care about.
Every May in Annaka city, Gunma Prefecture, a marathon is held that claims to be the oldest in Japan. Its origins can be traced back to when Commodore Perry arrived off the coast of the country in 1854 with his black ships and, through threat of aggression, ended 260 years of Japan’s self-imposed isolation. Leaders across the land reacted differently to his arrival. One cautious feudal lord, Katsuaki Itakura of the Annaka clan, tested the abilities of his samurai by holding a marathon. This story is brought to life by British director Bernard Rose – famous for Candyman (1992) – whoworked fromthe novel “The Marathon Samurai: Five Tales of Japan’s First Marathon” by Akihiro Dobashi. The resulting film, Samurai Marathon will sweep audiences away in its neatly executed adventure that, once it gets running, provides plenty of action and amusement.
The film’s set-up is a sprint to get everyone to the starting line. Opening with the arrival of Commodore Perry (Danny Huston) and his treaty demands it dashesinto Katsuaki Itakura’s (Hiroki Hasegawa) organising a marathon 36 miles long to toughen up his warriors in mind and body for potential attacks from foreigners. The promise of a wish being granted to the winner is the motivation for the ensemble of runners which consists of fighting men of all stripes from lower-class spear-men like Hironoshi Uesugi (Shota Sometani), who dreams of being raised to the status of a higher-class samurai, an aged samurai recentlyput out to pasture named Mataemon Kurita (Naoto Takenaka), to the chief retainer’s son, Heikuro Tsujimura (Mirai Moriyama) who wants to marry Itakura’s daughter Princess Yuki (Nana Komatsu). All are vying to win and all are introduced quickly as are the people connected to them such as wives and children. By the time we get to the starting line at the 40-minute mark we get a vertical view of samurai society and become connected to characters who are all distinctly sketched.
There are a couple of wild cards in the pack not least the lord’s spirited daughter, Princess Yuki, a girl influenced by western culture, who escapes the castle to take part in the marathon in disguise to win her freedom from her father’s domain, and Jinnai Karasawa (Takeru Satoh), a melancholy ninja who has infiltrated Annaka to masquerade as a samurai while remaining secretly loyal to the Shogun and spying on events for his handlers. It is he who initiates the film’s biggest conflict when he mistakenly views what is a simple gathering of samurai for an exercise as an act of rebellion and warns the central Edo government who dispatch assassins to the Itakura’s castle. When Karasawa realises the mistake he tries to stop assassins during the race.
The pacing becomes steadier by the time the marathon is launched but the film still proceeds at a good pace and plot twists are frequent as are action and even comedic scenes as cheating and betrayals emerge. Neat editing cutting between different characters keeps everything coherent as the course of the marathon runs through fields and along mountain paths.
This gloriously natural and rugged landscape with steep, winding tracks bordered by steep slopes andvertiginous plunges down ravines is delivered to the screen through sweeping pans and long shots that give scenes breathtaking backdrops while also clearly tracking where everyone is. The film takes place almost entirely in and around the mountainous terrain surrounding Shonai Village in Yamagata Prefecture and the sets, costumes and props create a feeling of verisimilitude for the era reminiscent of the Rurouni Kenshin trilogy of action films that came out in the mid-2010s which cinematographer Takura Ishizaki also worked on. Bernard Rose’s film is less bombastic in action stakes than those films as the combat here is gritty giving the skirmishes and story tension which heightens as the assassins get closer to Katsuaki Itakura.
Everyone gets a go at a fight and there are many highlights, from combat on horseback to Nana Komatsu’s Princess Yuki proving to be a rose with many thorns as she scraps with men.Takeru Satoh (lead actor in Rurouni Kenshin) gets a really well-shot duel rich with thrusts, blocks, slides, and stabs that will have audiences on the edges of their seats as the twitch movements and sharp blades could spell death for either combatant. Amid the action and adventure is comedy, especially from Mirai Moriyama and Naoto Takenaka who put in slightly overly theatrical performances, Takenaka especially as the camera zooms in on his flexible body and rubbery face as he makes gags about being out of shape.
The film makes a final dash at the end as the marathon closes, as character-arcs and plot points come to a fitting close and as the pages of history turn and westernisation occurs. The ends is satisfying, especially with an overlay of shots from the film and the present-day marathon just to sell the idea that this is real history. All liberties taken with the story are in service of making the film a lot of fun and it is a definite crowd-pleaser with great humour and action.
My review for this film was published on June 27th on VCinema
Film adaptations of stories by the writer Yasushi Sato have slowly been made over the last decade withSketches of Kaitan City (2010) by director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, Mipo Oh’s The Light Shines Only There (2014) and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Over the Fence (2016) joined by Sho Miyake’s And Your Bird Can Sing which premiered at the 2018 Tokyo International Film Festival. All are set in the author’s native city of Hakodate in the north of Japan and all centre on the lives of working-class people, showing them with subtle shades of sadness in slow moving dramas struck through with moments of beauty for some uplift. And Your Bird Can Sing is the least dramatic of the bunch but no less engaging.
The film takes place over one summer in Hakodate and follows an unnamed protagonist (Tasuku Emoto), simply referred to as “Me” in the credits. He is a freeter who works at a bookstore while sharing an apartment with his unemployed friend, Shizuo (Shota Sometani). They pass their time together drinking from dusk until dawn and shambling home in a fit of giggles after some mild caper. “Me” will frequently roll into work with a hangover while Shizuo will potter around during the day in anticipation of the night to come which promises a repeat of their antics. They are young, aimless and content. However, their lethargic days are shaken when “Me” begins dating his co-worker Sachiko (Shizuka Ishibashi). Independent and quietly rebellious, she is attracted to “Me” and his laid back nature. Curiosity turns into companionship as she gets roped into his hang-about life and meets Shizuo.
For “Me” and Sachiko the future appears so far off as to be inconsequential especially with more immediate pleasures at hand which consist long nights spent bopping to beats in clubs or slipping in and out of a lover’s embrace but change will happen because there is an ever so gentle forward motion to the story driven by Shizuo’s growing attraction to Sachiko. Sho Miyake’s camerawork loves Shizuka Ishibashi’s spirited performance as she slinks and grooves through scenes and she imbues a liveliness to her character which naturally holds the attention of the audience as well as other characters, Shizuo especially as his snatched glances and side-eyed stares segue into touchy-feely interactions during their many trips to karaoke bars and clubs.
“Me” seems to just accept the situation with indifference but the subtle shifting of emotions presages bigger changes as the three friends start to slowly slip away from each other at a time when employment and family pressures mount and provide unwelcome pricks of reality that let the air out of the snug and comfortable world they created. Responsibilities avoided come crashing down and it seems like the fun is over as the story forces them to reassess their situation and recognise a general malaise they feel from having held life in stasis for some time.
This is a soft drama rather than something hardscrabble, something that explores the harmony of companionship where the pace of the film is affected by the lifestyle of the three as they while away their time but the emotional fluctuations are there and they lurk under the surface of scenes, usually in subtle movements of the actors. When the pressure mounts, hints of nastiness emerge, Shota Sometani and Tasuku Emoto able to turn their character on a dime and launch into aggressiveness and then reveal a more sympathetic worry to add welcome layers of emotions to characters that initially just seem aimless.
Sho Miyake chooses to use this slow pace to delicately tease out the changes felt between these people in moments of low drama so the film ends up feeling like a tender and caring examination of characters preparing to face complicated feelings rather than something harsher as experienced in other adaptations of Yasushi Sato’s work. Miyake probably captures the freeter lifestyle accurately as he respects and translates the pleasures of their lives, shooting everything with a pleasant light, often during dusk and dawn, giving the image a quality that softens everything and renders their activities and the city of Hakodate more beautiful than it could possibly be in reality. Reality can be harsh but there is some hope at the end of this film as they have to leave behind their freeter lifestyles. As much as they like hanging out, at some point the party has to end but who will leave with the girl…?
My review for this film was originally published on July 21st at VCinema
I ended last week with a review of The Best of Youthand then proceeded to go back into my Japanese film reviews with Samurai Marathonand the Sho Miyake film And Your Bird Can Sing. I’ve also been manning the SNS of an animation festival and surveying coverage on other sites and it’s going well.
What’s released this weekend?
Blind Witness
見えない目撃者「Mienai Mokugekisha」
Release Date: September 20th, 2019
Duration: 128 mins.
Director: Junichi Mori
Writer: Kiyomi Fujii, Junichi Mori (Screenplay) Sawao Yamanaka (Novel)
Starring: Riho Yoshioka, Mahiro Takasugi, Koji Ookura, Kodai Asaka, Jun Kunimura, Tomorowo Taguchi,
Synopsis:Natsume Hamanaka’s (Riho Yoshioka) has just graduated from police university and she should be celebrating but she is involved in a car accident which robs her of her vision, her police career and her younger brother who dies.
Three years later and Natsume is a civilian who is still traumatised by what happened that night but when she gets involved in another car accident, her life takes a turn as she hears the cries of a girl and senses that she might be a kidnap victim. Natsume reports what happened to the police who are sceptical but she believes a serial kidnapper is on the prowl and begins investigating.
Synopsis:Sato (Haruma Miura) is lonely 27-year-old singleton who has been demoted at his job at a market survey company and is pining for a partner. He is reduced to handing out questionnaires outside Sendai Station but nobody bites until a woman named Saki walks into his life. She is wearing a black suit and has the word “shampoo” on her hand. Sato feels like this is fate and a relationship starts but as 10 years pass, they question why they are together. This is more than just their story as others in their lives have their own dramas and happy family lives.
Synopsis:Takashi Aiba (Mizuki Itagaki) is a ronin student hoping to get into university so that’s not too unusual but then there’s the fact that, every day at 12:05 PM, everything, including people and objects, suddenly stop moving. Everything EXCEPT Takashi Aiba! He can move around and he can do so while this phenomena continues for 1 hour. Sounds like a cool time exploit. Maybe he could rob a bank… but, just after the more cynical members of the audience think that, Takashi encounters a girl named Tokine Shinomiya (Sakura Kiryu) who can also move when everything else has stopped and they soon spark up a fun relationship in this time they call “loss time”. However, a secret exists behind loss time and it will be revealed by a third person…
I interviewed Momoka Fukuda after seeing her film Slowly at the Osaka Asian Film Festival and we talked briefly about this film which is based on an NDJC short she made a few years back.
Synopsis:Toka (Honoka Matsumoto) pauses her corporate career in Tokyo to return to her home island for the 3rd year anniversary of her mother’s death. When she gets back to her hometown she sees her father Seiji (Itsuji Itao) wearing her mother’s clothes. Toka is shocked and more shocks are in store as Seiji introduces Kazuo (Kenta Hamano) as the man he will marry. Toka slowly overcomes her initial feelings as she hears out her father’s reasons.
Hello World
ハローワールド 「Haro- Wa-rudo」
Release Date: September 20th, 2019
Duration: 98 mins.
Director: TomohikoIto
Writer: Mado Nozaki (Screenplay),
Starring: Minami Hamabe (Ruri Ichigyo), Takumi Kitamura (Naomi Katagaki age 16). Tori Matsuzaka (Naomi Katagaki age 26), Haruka Fukuhara (Mirei Kadenokoji), Rie Kugimiya (Karasu), Minako Kotobuki (Ii Shizuka),
Synopsis:In Kyoto in the year 2027, male high school student Naomi Katagaki, encounters a person who claiming to be him from 10 years in the future. Together, they must change the future and save a classmate, Ruri, whom the younger Naomi will start to date in three month’s time!!!
Atsuko Maeda (Seventh Code) and Kengo Kora (The Story of Yonosuke) team up to make a film based on a Yasunari Kawabata novel and set in Ibaraki City, Osaka, the place where the writer lived as a child.
Synopsis: Yukiko (Atsuko Maeda) is a single-mother who sees the obituary of a high school classmate and decides to go to the wake where she reunites with people she hasn’t seen in the 10 years since graduating. The wake is the moment where secrets are revealed about the living as well as the dead.
Synopsis:The time: 1570. The place: sengoku-era Japan. The people: Ujinori Kanbara (Masahiro Takashima) who is chasing after Nobunaga Oda. He capture not one, but three men who claim to be Nobunaga. Ujinori has to work out who is telling the truth.
This one takes inspiration from the legend of the slit-mouthed woman.
Synopsis:Miyu travels to Seoul to look for her older sister who has gone missing and meets Hana, a famous plastic surgeon who attracts Miyu because she looks like her older sister. Then there’s Hana’s lover, Hyo-shin who also causes mixed feelings in Miyu who discovers a terrible tangle of emotions captured her missing sister and caused a terrible accident…
A 16-minute short drama based on the experience of director Toshiaki Toyoda, who was arrested for illegal possession of a pistol (which turned out to be an antique passed on by his father) in April 2019 and was held in jail without charge while the police orchestrated a media circus. It stars long-time Toyoda collaborators Kiyohiko Shibukawa and Ryuhei Matsuda who appeared Toyoda’s debut movies Pornostar and Blue Spring and they showed up in his latest movie, The Miracle of Crybaby Shottan.
Synopsis:A girl finds an old handgun in her house and the history of the gun is traced.
Synopsis:Satoshi (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is a newspaper reporter and he has an idyllic life with his wife Mitsue (Mao Inoue) and their son Shota. That life is snatched away when Shota dies in an accident and this leaves Satoshi and Mitsue seeking a reason for what caused their son’s death.
Synopsis:Dr. Shinichiro Kobori and his team run a care home/hospital in Saitama Prefecture. His patients are at the end of their lives and they face this moment along with the physicians, nurses, and families. This documentary looks at them, having been recorded over 200 days.
The Tears of Malumpati
セカイイチオイシイ水 マロンパティの涙「Sekaichi Oishii Mizu Maronpati no Namida」
According to the IMDB page, this first premiered in the Philippines earlier this year.
Synopsis:A drama based on the true story of the Pandan Water Pipeline Project on the remote Filipino island of Panay where Japanese and Filipinos worked together while overcoming various hardships to build a 10-kilometer water supply in a country town. The main character is Asuka, a female college student, who is invited by a friend to become a volunteer on the project. As Japanese and Filipinos work together, they overcome the regrets of the war and create bonds of friendship.
Ikebukuro’s Cinema Rosa is showing the next two indie films from the 21st
Synopsis:Three stories about finding modest happiness in everyday life where different sets of people come into contact. The stories include a high school girl who failed to commit suicide and a freeter who lost his life trying to help her, a woman with an unwanted pregnancy and a filmmaker who has lost his purpose.
Synopsis:The film follows three factory workers in a rural city who are leading ordinary lives marked by the melancholy of everyday life and by small, meaningful gestures.
Orphan’s Blues was the winner of the Grand Prize at the Pia Film Festival 2018 and was screened at last year’s Nara and Tokyo international film festivals where it earned some critical buzz. It makes its North American debut at Japan Cuts 2019 where its narrative dissonance will either capture imaginations or leave audiences bewildered.
The world seems to be ending. Grim pronouncements about rising temperatures and global warming are made on the radio and it seems to be true considering the sights and sounds of a sun-soaked stifling summer scored by cicadas provide the backdrop for a road trip taken by characters to find a missing man. Initiating this journey is a young woman named Emma (Yukino Murakami). She lives a lonely life working as a bookseller on a dusty roadside patch and she is furiously fighting against her fading memory. It is a battle she wages by creating canopies of post-it notes at home and writing in notebooks. Her present-tense thoughts are scattered around but dominated by her memories of her past in an orphanage with her best friend Yang. When she gets a painting of an elephant from Yang (elephants’ never forget), Emma decides to drop everything and search for him.
Using addresses on envelopes, she heads to various locations and encounters people connected to Yang such as Van (Takuro Kamikawa), a fellow orphan who also finds himself also haunted by the man, and Van’s girlfriend Yuri (Nagiko Tsuji). The two are on the run from Yakuza and decide to follow Emma who makes her way into the countryside to an inn run by a mysterious tattooed woman named Luca (Tamaki Kubose) who has a single guest named Aki (Sion Sasaki). It seems like a dead end as Yang isn’t there but the inn proves to be a place of broiling emotions as both Luca and Aki have connections with Yang that run deep and as Emma’s memory further fragments various secrets are revealed that boil over into anger and sorrow as everyone tries to piece together where Yang is…
And so we are wrapped up in the mystery of Yang and the tempestuous relationships of the searchers thanks to Riho Kudo’s script and atmospherics and the performance of the cast which paint a powerful, perhaps malevolent picture of the man’s influence.
The film feels like it takes place in a world on the verge of disorder because of the intense heat which has an apocalyptic feel. There is also the strikingly odd lack of anyone like an authority figure. There are just young adults wandering around, perpetually lost with nothing and nobody to guide them except for a trauma caused by Yang and his absence as indicated by the character’s sometimes violent interactions, Emma’s sometimes ominous memories and their permanent physical scars.
Their desire to find Yang becomes all-consuming for audiences as well as Emma and her cohort as we see characters who are so preoccupied by chasing their memories they forget the future until all avenues away from their shared past are closed and they are left to wander around in the shadow of a man nobody will ever really know.
Emma’s increasingly fractured perspective brought, on by memory loss, dominates the way the film is presented to audiences as uncertainty is built up through varied narrative framing – temporal and spatial shifts happen at the drop of a hat and characters jump in and out of moods with little warning.
These stylistic choices may be wearing for people with limited patience and it is an uncomfortable ride as we try to make sense of what is going on in all of the gaps of understanding (and there are many gaps) but, thanks to this, we feel a lot like Emma who is losing her bearing on the present and it is this atmosphere of doubt and an ever-tightening grip of a silent desperation and an “end of the world atmosphere” that drives her and the film forward and makes the story unique and compelling until the film finds release in the end.
The atmosphere allows a certain leeway for the actors when it comes to their febrile performances which goes from understated to raw in a moment. This won’t be for everyone and it is slow to reveal itself but there is something here that has justified the film winning the Grand Prize at the Pia Film Festival.
As the past and present collapse in on themselves and these broken characters are left vulnerable and floating in uncertainty, we feel it almost viscerally thanks to the ambitious storytelling and potent atmospherics from writer/director Riho Kudo. Disorientating and obtuse might be two words used to describe this film but stick with it and it becomes an absorbing trip into memories.
This year’s Busan International Film Festival is the 24th in the series and it runs from October 03rd to the 12th. This is the first time that I have covered Busan but it has been on the cards for a while because, much like Tokyo and Osaka, it’s a good place to scout out Asian films. There is a great slate of titles from some soon-to-be-released mainstream films to indie movies and there are familiar titles featured at other festivals.
Inspired by the #MeToo movement and the salience of identity politics in current political discourse, director Takashi Nishihara, who I interviewed, has created this semi-fictional work which looks at the lives of young women in Tokyo. Here’s my review from the Osaka Asian Film Festival.
Synopsis: To capture the shifts going on in gender relations in Japan, Nishihara blurs the bounds between fiction and reality by merging footage from a documentary he has been shooting over the last few years and casting real life actors and models such as Nina Endo and Mika Akizuki, SUMIRE and Manami Usamaru, and the musician BOMI, and making them play fictional variations of themselves. Each gives a portrayal of a young woman going about their lives. We see them modelling, studying, performing concerts, each desiring to be treated fairly as they chase their dreams and question their role in society. These questions emerge thanks to a link character, a middle-aged male documentary film director named Ikeda, played by Ryo Iwase, who interviews people for a documentary about feminism.
Ryutaro Nakagawa has been making films for a while now (I first wrote about him with a Kickstarter for Plastic Love Story) and each has been a quiet success on the festival circuit. He has two out this year and this one isn’t listed on IMDB.
Synopsis: Bio-archaeology sounds like hard thinking work and one bio-archaeology research assistant named Yukisuke (Taiga) often buys taiyaki (a fish-shaped pastry) at a taiyaki store near his university to power his brain. He is served by the owner, s young woman named Koyomi (Misa Eto) and the two build up a rapport as they begin to talk regularly but, one morning, Koyomi gets into a traffic accident and falls into a coma. Yukisuke continues to visit Koyomi at the hospital and, eventually, Koyomi regains consciousness, but she soon realises that she has problems with her memory. She remembers everything up to the accident, but her short term memory can’t remember anything beyond the present day.
Synopsis: It is the era of the silent movies and benshi (narrators who appear live in the cinema) are in demand. Shuntaro lives in a small town and he has had dreams of becoming a benshi ever since he was a child and his dreams are about to come true just as (it gets better) he is also reunited with his first love. He is, however, tasked with pleasing tough crowds as well as doing the chores and he also gets involved in a police case where they are tracking thieves and political activists…
Starring: Koji Moriya, Haya Nakazaki, Yusaku Mori, Shugo Nagashima, Natsuko Hori, Ena Koshino, Chun Yip Lo, Toko Narushima,
Director Takuya Misawa was responsible for Chigasaki Story, and he’s back with a noir-like film.
Synopsis: Oiso is the seaside town where this film is set and the protagonists are Four young people, Tomoki, Shun, Kazuya, and Eita, who have been friends since their childhood but when Tomoki’s uncle, their former teacher, is found dead, their relationship is threatened as a hidden figure emerges along with the truth of the killing.
This is based on the short stories “Aota Y Jiro” and “Yorozuya Zenjiro” by Shuichi Yoshida. His novels are popular for adaptations with Rage, The Ravine of Goodbye, The Story of Yonosuke, Villain, and Parade already getting the big screen treatment.
Synopsis: A little girl is kidnapped and the only witness, Tsumugi (Hana Sugisaki), is left traumatised. With the kidnapper never having been caught, paranoia runs high and it breaks out when, 12 years later, a girl goes missing along the same road. Takeshi (Gou Ayano) is a lonely young man who sells recyclable products with his mother and he is suspected of the kidnapping. Fearing the situation, he flees.
One year later, another man named Zenjiro (Koichi Sato) is accused. He lives with his pet dog near the road where the two kidnapping cases took place but is he guilty? Horrifying revelations soon emerge from the case…
Not much is known about this film apart from Sae Suzuki made it while at Geidai.
Synopsis: Ray is a girl in her mid-teens and also a runaway from home. While on the streets she meets Aoi and ends up staying overnight in her apartment but, the very next evening, the two run away from the city after Rei kills someone trying to hurt Aoi and they head to a deserted rural village…
Takeshi Kogahara was at last year’s OAFF and Japan Cuts with his short film, a visually and aurally resplendent tale of first-love named Nagisa. This is his latest short and it looks to be equally moving.
Synopsis: An old man near the end of his life spends his days on his bed, occasionally visited by a carer. When he sees snow outside the window, he contemplates certain strong memories from his past.
Bunbuku director Nanako Hirose follows her critically-acclaimed feature His Lost Name with a documentary on books!
Synopsis: Nanako Hirose spent three years (2015-18) following a world leading book designer named Nobuyoshi Kikuchi. He has been active for more than 40 years and has worked on more than 15,000 books. By following Kikuchi and the way he designs books by touching and understanding physical materials, the film looks at the manufacture and status of paper books in the digital age.
I first saw wrote about this one for my post about the Rotterdam Film Festival and it has remained in my memory despite me not having watched it. I like the concept and really want to see it.
Synopsis:Ethnic and cultural nationalism, xenophobia, and other racist and discriminatory sentiments are on the rise around the world as we build walls and shout angrily at each other. Kyoto-based film-maker Koki Tanaka made this film to challenge the trend of increasing hatred with the idea that people need to talk to each other to overcome differences.
In this film, Koki Tanaka and a camera crew follow two people living in Japan who are different from the norm: Christian, a half-Swiss, half-Japanese-American man and Woohi, a Japan-born third-generation Korean (zainichi) woman. We see them travel to various places and discuss the rise of prejudice and hate speech as well as the lack of protection for people who are targets for hatred. The subjects dictate the course of the conversation and through hearing their experiences and ideas on identity politics, we begin to understand that Japan isn’t simply a homogeneous country and that there are many issues not discussed in public.
This has been screened in art galleries and there were workshops connected to the film so audiences are encouraged to voice their views.
Synopsis: The filmmaker, Yoshifumi Tsubota (The Shell Collector), who has suffered from mental illness, records what happens when he is diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at a psychiatric hospital. He tells his mother who informs him that he has an uncle who has Pervasive Developmental Disorder and lives alone. Tsubota goes to see him.
There are reviews out for this one from when it played at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes but I’m avoiding them so I can go into the film fresh. The actors includeMasataka Kubota, who worked with Miike on13 Assassins (2010), Nao Omori, the titular Ichi in Miike’s classic Ichi the Killer (2001), Shota Sometani, who appeared in Miike’s As the God’s Will (2014) and Lesson of the Evil (2013). Forget those recent films, from the details and the trailer this one looks to harken back to his late 90s/early 2000s output of the man.
Synopsis: Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a boxer whose career and life have hit the rocks. Losing fights and with a developing brain tumour, he is almost out for the count but then he meets his ‘first love’ Monica, a call-girl and an addict who is unwittingly caught up in a drug-smuggling scheme. Fate places them at the centre of a night-long chase where the two are pursued by a corrupt cop, a yakuza, his nemesis, and a female assassin sent by the Chinese Triads.
Following on from his win of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival with Shoplifters, Kore-eda graces the Competition Section of this year’s Venice Film Festival with a film based in France and starring some of the luminaries of French cinema with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ludivine Sagnier as well as Ethan Hawke, a truly talented American actor. This is the director’s first work set outside Japan but it features the sort of family narrative he is famous for as a clan is reunited in Paris and go through a cycle of lies, resentment, love and reconciliation.
Reviews have painted this one as another good Kore-eda film.
Synopsis: Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) is a star of French cinema with the power to charm the men around her. When she publishes her memoirs, her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) returns from New York to Paris with her husband (Ethan Hawke) and their young child and a reunion between mother and daughter kicks off a confrontation that leads to truths being told, accounts settled, loves and resentments confessed.
This is Joe (Mushishi, Adrift in Tokyo) Odagiri’s sophomore feature film as a director and he has hired a good team in getting Christopher Doyle – Wong Kar-Wai’s frequent collaborator – working cinematography and Emi Wada designing costumes – she won an Oscar for her costuming on Akira Kurosawa’s epic Ran and is responsible for costumes in lush historical dramas such asSamurai Marathon 1855, Hero, Gohatto, and House of Flying Daggers.
Synopsis: Toichi is a boatman who ferries people across a river. Despite ferrying people across, the only person he really communicates with is his young neighbour Genzo. When a large bridge begins to be constructed to help people cross the river it looks like Toichi will be made redundant but then he meets a mysterious young girl who appears to be an orphan. Toichi takes her in and from that moment, his life begins to change…
That’s it for now. I’ll update it if any other films are added.
This is based on a manga by Hideki Arai which was published from 1990 to 1994. It was turned into a television show and now has this movie spin-off.
Synopsis: Hiroshi Miyamoto has a job at a stationery company as a salesman. He’s clumsy and has no idea what he wants to do with his life but a nice guy which is part of what attracts an older lady named Yasuko Nakano (Yu Aoi). When Yasuko tells her ex-boyfriend that she has slept with Hiroshi to get the guy to stop chasing her, Hiroshi finds himself becoming a target of the man…
Splatter film specialist Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl) continues with adaptations of manga by taking on Shuzo Oshimi’s Aku no Hana (already subject to an anime adaptation – Aku no Hana First Impression) He has assembled many of the cast and the writer from the movie Dark Maidens to bring this story to life.
Synopsis: Takao Kasuga (Kentaro Ito) is a high school student who loves Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection, “The Flowers of Evil”. He also loves Nanako Saeki (Shiori Akita), a classmate. One evening, just before leaving school, he gives in to the temptation to steal her gym clothes. He is witnessed by the class renegade Sawa Nakamura (Tina Tamashiro) who exploits Takao.
Ninkyo Gakuen
任侠学園「Ninkyo Gakuen」
Release Date: September 27th, 2019
Duration: 119 mins.
Director:Hisashi Kimura
Writer:Masaaki Sakai(Screenplay), Bin Konno (Novel)
Synopsis: The Akimotogumi yakuza group leader Shigesato Akimoto (Toshiyuki Nishida) is an old-school gangster who believes in honour and humanity and wants to save a local high school which is performing poorly. He sends his deputy Seiji Himura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and other mobsters to restore order at the school but it might be tougher situation than being a gangster.
Gekijouban Soshite, Ikiru
劇場版 そして、生きる「Gekijouban Soshite, Ikiru」
Release Date: September 27th, 2019
Duration: 135 mins.
Director:Hisashi Kimura
Writer:Masaaki Sakai(Screenplay), Bin Konno (Novel)
Starring:Kasumi Arimura, Kentaro Sakaguchi, Eriko Moriwaki, Amane Okayama, Kaho Minami, Kang Ji-young, Ken Mitsuishi, Masato Hagiwara,
This is a re-working of the same-named television series which finished earlier this month.
Synopsis: It is March 10th, 2011, and Toko Ikuta (Kasumi Arimura) is a girl chasing dreams of being an idol in Tokyo and about to make her debut but when the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami strikes, she puts off an audition. She is originally from Morioka. She was raised by her uncle following the death of her parents but she had a happy childhood. Toko, allong with her Korean friend Han Yoo-Ri (Kang Ji-Young), head north to do volunteer work in Kesennuma and this is where she meets a university student named Kiyotaka Shimizu (Kentaro Sakaguchi) and the two develop feelings for each other.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These Chapter I
銀河英雄伝説 Die Neue These 星乱 第一章「Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu Die Neue These Seiran Dai Ishhou」
Starring:Kenichi Suzumura (Yang Wen-li), Mamoru Miyano (Reinhard von Lohengramm), Yuichiro Umehara (Siegfried Kircheis), Kana Hanazawa (Hildegard von Mariendorf),
This is the second season of the anime remake of the original work and it hits the cinemas. Each cinematic version will be the length of four episodes.
Synopsis: Two interstellar human states – the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance – are locked in a seemingly never-ending conflict and two leaders emerge, Reinhard von Lohengramm from the Galactic Empire and Yang Wen-li from the Free Planets Alliance. They will become Galactic Heroes.
Ryutaro Ninomiya is back with another original film following Sweating the Small Stuff (2017). It’s a female-led drama made with Enbu Cinema and set in the seaside town of Kamakura. Why are seaside towns so depressing?
Synopsis:Minori is a 21-year-old woman who lives in Kamakura and she has a part-time job at a small tourist spot by. Minori seems like a normal woman, but she is not normal …
Shunga and the Japanese
春画と日本人「Shunga to Nihonjin」
Release Date: September 28th, 2019
Duration: 87 mins.
Director:Atsushi Ogaki
Writer: N/A
Starring:Tadashi Kobayashi, Hideyoshi Asano, Naoyuki Kinoshita, Aki Ishigami, Mitsuru Uragami,
Synopsis: This documentary looks at the relationship between Japanese and the erotic art of Shunga by contrasting reactions between foreigners and Japanese as witnessed during the creation of an exhibition at a small private museum in Tokyo which followed a much larger exhibition at the British Museum in London. It seems that while many in the UK were fascinated by this form of art, few public museums in Japan wanted to know about Shunga and it was left to a private museum to hold the exhibition and they got great visitor figures. Expect interviews, shots of Shunga and newspaper headlines.
Synopsis:Keita Taguchi was in Cinema Rosa in Ikebukuro showing Ko Sekai, one of his latest films, last week and this is his second work to be screened. Not much information on this one except it has a room and it may or may not be empty…
Synopsis: This is a special edition of the “Cinema Kabuki” series where a collaboration between famed Onna-gata actor Tamasaburo Bando and the taiko drum performance group “Kodo” has been recorded in the play “Amaterasu”. Here’s a piece in the Japan Times for around the time it was recorded.
Horror Channel
ホラーちゃんねる「Hora- channeru」
Release Date: September 27th, 2019
Duration: 80 mins.
Director: Takashi Ohashi
Writer:Fumi Kimura, Akiko Kaiho, Tomoko Anzai, Daishi Yamashita, Risa Nishino, et al.(Screenplay), Bin KonnoYasutoshi Murakawa (Screenplay Supervision)
Synopsis: This is an omnibus horror movie based on the popular YouTube channel “Horror Channel” and the link story is one student at a girl’s high school who uses “Horror Channel” to contact a friend who died in an accident a month ago…
Synopsis: Ahead of an October DVD release, there’s a cinema screening at Cine Libre Ikebukuro of three popular voice actors, Shinnosuke Tachibana, Takayuki Kondo, Yuuki Iwai, drinking at a pub in Shimbashi. They have “50,000 yen for liquor” and audiences will see the true nature of the three revealed at the sake table.
Starring: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland, Liv Tyler, Kimmy Shields, John Finn, LisaGay Hamilton, Bobby Nish, Sean Blakemore, Kimberly Elise,
Following on from his sure-footed performance as a cocksure stunt-double in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, Brad Pitt takes the lead in another of 2019’s biggest films but dials down the flashiness to portray an ace astronaut who must confront a hostile environment and emotional states as he goes to the far edge of the Solar System in search of his father to stop a civilisation-ending disaster.
Pitt gives an understated performance as Major Roy McBride, a skilled but buttoned-up military man famous for having a pulse that never goes above 80 bpm.
His character is cool and controlled as shown through taciturn speech, precise and confident movement. This is put into spectacular effect in the stellar opening sequence as he clambers around a space elevator and then plunges to Earth with nary a raised voice or flailing arm after a cosmic surge shorts out electrical systems and causes explosions up and down the super structure. It is a sequence of stomach-churning vertiginous and virtuoso visual effect that takes place at a great height as Roy is thrown into the stratosphere amidst clouds of explosions and debris showers that consume the other, lesser, astronauts who are obliterated.
Danger is everywhere and yet Roy never panics. Roy’s got this. He’s an elite spaceman.
Roy’s cool reactions come from the fact that he is self-disciplined and inspired. After all, he is the son of famed astronaut H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a grizzled space pioneer who went missing in the final frontier when his “Lima Project” mission to search for intelligent life reached Neptune and went M.I.A. but it isn’t easy being good and he faces a reckoning over the personal cost he has endured when he is recruited by U.S. Space Command to help stop the power surges which Clifford may be responsible for causing. In order to save mankind, Roy will have to track down his father but this also means confronting the emotional inheritance of someone who has defined his life and wounded him in so many way.
It seems that in the near future where space flight has become routine and humanity has colonised the Moon and Mars, people still labour with the same man-made problems that we face today: resource wars and rapacious corporatism, manipulative governments and masculinity.
Anyone hoping for an action movie with moon-buggy chases and pew-pew lasers best check their expectations at the door as the film eschews loud and flashy explosions for some soul-searching in a Heart of Darkness tale. It does come with occasional scenes of peril and paranoia but these serve to up the pressure on Roy and get him closer to breaking point as the film’s languid pace and quiet disposition allows the audience to contemplate its themes around the strictures of masculinity and the sins of the father affecting the son.
It all plays out in Roy’s mission as he enters the inhospitable realm of space, which never feels as threatening as seen in recent space films Gravity and The Martian. It does paint a world that feels lived in and full of exploitation that we would recognise from our own reality as Roy goes from a Disney-fied moon base and an outlaw lunar landscape, gets caught up in political machinations on Mars and is lied to at every turn by his government all while he faces situations ever more fraught with danger but as spectacular as individual sequences are, there’s no real build up of tension to the narrative, rather a breaking down of character because we see that the closer Roy gets to his father, the more his mental state, which is already shaky at the start, comes apart at the seams in ways that his self-discipline cannot help.
The biggest battle Roy faces in space comes from mental health which is plagued by emotional damage which has its roots in Clifford. Unable to talk to anyone for fear of failure and being seen as weak, he deals with what is eating away at him through adherence to his work ethic, automated psychological evaluations (which sound like a cheap way of doing things as necessitated by insurance) and “comfort rooms” that display projections of nature to ease his emotional state.
In space no-one can hear you cry and the Roy keeps his emotions in check but we feel the gravity of them through the psych-evals and in the detached philosophical narration/self-critical analyses delivered by Brad in his most sombre voice. Roy peels back the scabs over his emotional wounds and reveals that living life in the shadow of his father has been a burden and created a well of emotional issues from feelings of rejection and anger to fear of failure – there are terse flashbacks and narration that suggest Clifford was abusive as well as uncaring towards his family – and that the only way Roy can cope is to create an emotional black hole to swallow everything up, something he has created through self-discipline and compartmentalisation.
This is what masculinity demands rather sharing emotions. Stoicism. Roy feels as if he has nobody to talk to and so wears the false mask of confidence which has led to space-faring superiority for him but created distance from those most important to him including his wife Eve (Liv Tyler playing the thankless role of the girl back home) which has left him isolated and unable to adequately deal with those emotions lest he appear weak. When he confronts the dragon that is his father, an Ahab-esque man who represents the most callous masculinity, he understands the futility and emptiness in living a similar life and, breaks out of his prison of stoicism and seeks to share himself with others. With this understanding, he can detach himself from his past and share his troubles.
This is more character study than action movie. A deconstruction of masculinity. There are moments of peril and tension but these are few as the film settles back into a quiet atmosphere of contemplation and thoughtfulness. This point is made through Max Richter’s disconsolate score which feels disconnected from the action and more intent on highlighting the isolating quality of space and Roy’s lonely emotional battle. The set design is akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey which feels like a realistic depiction of how we will colonise space. There is also some great use of colours to accentuate emotions: the blues of Neptune radiate coldness and isolation, the red of Mars danger and anger, while Earth has more comforting oranges and browns. The direction is tactful and allows the exploration of character through great nuanced acting from the cast, especially Brad who carries the film.
Cardiff’s Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival and the Japan Foundation have teamed up to host award-winning stop-motion animator Takeshi Yashiro and his producer Satoshi Akutsu on a tour of the UK as they take part in talks and a stop-motion animation workshop.
On October 05th, the two men will show their latest collaboration, Gon, The Little Fox (2019) at a Masterclass and will talk about their careers as Yashiro explains why he chooses to work in stop-motion and how he makes his movies. Satoshi Akutsu presents an equally interesting talk considering he has extensive experience in the role of producer for a variety of projects in Japan and America, having worked with Japanese broadcaster NHK, animation production house Madhouse, and DVD distributor Geneon Universal.
Here’s a trailer for their latest work Gon, The Little Fox, an adaptation of the classic 1932 children’s story about the fateful encounter between a farmer and a mischievous fox.
On October 06th, Yashiro will lead a stop-motion workshop where attendees can animate their own scene with actual puppets used by Yashiro in the film. It is open to people from the age 8 and up at the cost of £27 (for booking please contact the festival info@kotatsufestival.com).
Following their stint in Cardiff, the two men will be in London for a special talk.
Takeshi Yashiro is a graduate from Tokyo University of the Arts who got his career started making CMs and studied different stop-motion techniques in his spare time until he decided to go full-time with the style in 2012 with his debut Dear November Boy (2012). He’s had a string of award-winning films like Norman the Snowman The Northern Light and Firewood, Kanta & Grandpa (both 2013) and Moon of a Sleepless Night (2015), which won the Japan Competition Best Short Award at the Short Shorts Film Festival 2016 (source).
Commenting on the win, Yashiro said about stop-motion,
“The best thing about using stop motion animation is that the characters and the set really “exist” in front of the camera. Though technology has enabled CG to create brilliant images these days, it is still worthwhile using stop motion pictures because the audience can feel everything being there and sense the texture of the materials. In this sense, stop motion films are developed from art design. While sculptors interpret the world by capturing single moments of objects, I like to animate figures to show my interpretation of the world. I hope you will enjoy the story and I’d be glad if you could spare a few moments to think about the art design in the film.”
The Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival is on and I’m locked into doing that. It has been good getting back into anime and watching the films with the audience and then chatting about them in the lobby of the cinema. Titles include Tamako Love Story, Fate/Stay Night Heaven’s Feel Presage Flower and Birthday Wonderland, A Silent Voice and Penguin Highway. Expect to see some reviews. Due to the festival, this post will be split into two so expect more trailers later this week,
This week I reviewed Ad Astra (2019) and ran a news report about the stop-motion animation workshop being run by Takeshi Yashiro.
What’s released this weekend?
The Other Home Mukou no Ie
向こうの家「Mukou no Ie」
Release Date: October 05th, 2019
Duration: 82 mins.
Director: Tatsuro Nishikawa
Writer: Anna Kawahara (Screenplay),
Starring: Ayumu Mochizuki, Mai Ohtani, Denden, Wan Marui, Mahiro Ueda, Miki Takemoto, Toru Kizu,
Made by students who studied at Tokyo University of the Arts under Kiyoshi Kurosawa, this is a laidback family drama which breezes through its run-time thanks to a charming performance by Ayumu Mochizuki who was last seen on the big screen in the drama 5 Million Dollar Life.
Synopsis:Hagi Morita (Ayumu Mochizuki) is an amiable highschooler in the coastal city of Zushi. He decides to play hookey because he figures that he can learn something new by not going to school and he does when he finds out his father has a secret second house and there’s someone living there…
Synopsis:Kana Sakurai (Akane Hotta) is, if you can believe it, a singleton who heads to a matchmaking party to find true love. She’s approached by ten different men, but according to a fortune-teller she sees, nine of the ten have one thing in common: they are liars. Actually, all men are liars, but for the sake of the story, there’s one guy who isn’t a snake and Kana has to figure out which one of the ten it is.
Listen to the Universe
蜜蜂と遠雷「Mitsubachi to Enrai」
Release Date: October 04th, 2019
Duration: 119 mins.
Director: Kei Ishikawa
Writer: Kei Ishikawa (Screenplay), Riku Onda (Novel)
Starring: Mayu Matsuoka, Tori Matsuzaka, Oji Suzuki, Rila Fukushima, Win Morisaki, Takeshi Kaga, Ken Mitsuishi, Asami Usuda, Yuki Saito,
Synopsis:Four young pianists with different lives find themselves competing in the preliminary round of an international piano competition. Masaru C Revy Anatoru (Win Morisaki), a star musician who attends the Juilliard School in New York, is the hot favourite to take the top prize but there are three other competitors to consider:
Aya Eiden (Mayu Matsuoka) was a child prodigy of a pianist but when her mother, the person who understood her the most, passed away, Aya lost her will to play. She rediscovers it at the age of 20…
Akashi Takashima (Tori Matsuzaka) is a family man having graduated from a music university and finding work at a musical instrument store but he cannot forget his desire to play the piano and so he enrols in the competition.
16-year-old Jin Kazama (Oji Suzuka) (not the Tekken character) who is a wildcard entry who has a letter of recommendation from a late pianist who was recognised as the best in the world.
Tokyo Wine Party People
東京ワイン会ピープル「Toukyou wain kai pi-puru」
Release Date: October 04th, 2019
Duration: 102 mins.
Director: Hideki Wada
Writer: Mika Hayashi (Screenplay), Shin Kibayashi (Novel)
Synopsis:Shino Sakuragi (Sayuri Matsumura) is an OL who has been invited to attend a fancy wine party by her boss. Sophisticated people gather there, people such as handsome businessman Kazushi Oda (Hayato Onozuka). Shino becomes attracted to him but then he gets arrested for accounting fraud which leaves her confused by the situation. While men are unreliable, wine is always there and so she keeps attending the wine parties and becomes hooked on the stuff. Will she become an alcoholic? Wait, no, I don’t think that’s where this film is going.
Synopsis:Kunio Hikita (Yutaka Matsushige) is a 49-year-old-writer and he is married to Sachi (Keiko Kitagawa). They had initially decided not to have a child, but, one day, Sachi tells him that she wants to have a child. Despite their best efforts, the couple cannot conceive a child and it is revealed that Kunio Hikita is infertile…
Strike Witches: 501st JOINT FIGHTER WING Take Off!
Synopsis: Yoshika Miyafuji has returned to her hometown after the 501st Joint Fighter Wing break up but her former superior officer Mio Sakamoto has arranged for Yoshika to study abroad at a medical school in Europe and she will be joined by Shizuka Hattori, Sakamoto’s former student at the naval academy. They arrive just in time because new signs of Neuroi emerge and this means that the 501st Joint Fighter Wing will have to regroup for a new fight!
Synopsis: Early 1590, after the death of the ruler Oda Nobunaga, the Land was taken over by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Far away in the Eastern Plain, a mysterious rebel by the name of “Tenmao” was gathering for a civil war with its Skull Corps.
One day in the plain fields, a loner “Kirimaru” is chased and cornered by the Skull Corps. He tries to fight them off in vale, is saved by a bunch of rowdies and a passing vagabond, “Sutenosuke”. Wounded from the attack, Kirimaru is taken to a nearby brothel town “Mukai” village.
Mukai serves as a post town between the capital and the eastern plain. It is always busy as its open to everyone and anyone. The village is run by the geisha, “Gokuraku Tayu” and “Ranbei”.
All sorts swing by including a ronin samurai by the name of “Mamiana Jiroemon”. When Sutenoske, Jiroemon and Ranbei all come together in the middle of the village, a strange moment passes hinting some kind of a history between them.
This is the second part of my trailer post for last weekend’s releases. A lot came out and I was busy with a film festival so I kept putting it off until now.
Synopsis: The Makai Knights are an ancient order of warriors who have long protected humanity against creatures known as Horrors. Assuming the mantle of Golden Knight Garo, Raiga Saezima has vanquished one such demonic creature, but his magical armour has been tainted with evil. Furthermore, a Knight of the dark has materialised, and taken hold of a woman named Mayuri, someone so dear to Raiga that he sets off to rescue her. Raiga must board a mysterious train destined for the netherworld. As he advances through the cars of this train, Raiga comes ever closer to confronting his own hidden truths…
Synopsis: This is a documentary about John Kaizan Neptune, a California surfer who travelled to Japan in the 70s, learned how to play the shakuhachi, a traditional instrument often heard at shrines, mastered it and innovated the musical world. The documentary is told through his son’s perspective.
Last Ninja: Red Shadow
下忍 赤い影「Genin Akai Kage」
Release Date: October 04th, 2019
Duration: 88 mins.
Director:Yoshitaka Yamaguchi
Writer:Ichiro Ryu (Screenplay),
Starring: Kanichiro, Kosei Yuki, Kanji Tsuda, Mayu Yamaguchi,
The first of a two-parter ninja movie series, it features action direction from Tak Sakaguchi (Re:born).
Synopsis: It is the end of the Edo period and both samurai and ninja are facing becoming obsolete. Despite this, those that remain live true to their way of life. Ryu (Kanichiro) is a lowly member of a ninja clan and lives as a fugitive in Edo. Desperate to escape that life, he takes on a dangerous mission for a big reward. His mission is to capture Shizu (Mayu Yamaguchi), a princess of the Satsuma Domain who is due to be wed to a samurai, something she is trying to escape. The strong-willed Shizu and the lowly ninja Ryu find themselves pursued by Sho (Kousei Yuki), a Ryukyu martial arts expert hired by forces in Satsuma…
A late edition to the Cannes Film Festival post I wrote back in April; it was at Critics’ Week. Directed by Katsuya Tomita (Bangkok Nights) and he makes documentary and fiction combine as we get a look at where Buddhism fits in modern Japan as two priests react to the 3/11 disaster.
Synopsis: Chiken and Ryugyo are both Buddhist monks and apply their vocation in different ways with Chiken manning a suicide helpline, teaching yoga and healthy eating in his temple in Yamanashi while in Fukushima, Ryugyo – whose temple was wrecked by the tsunami – lives in a portacabin and works on construction sites in an effort to repair communities.
LET IT BE -You Exist to Be You-
LET IT BE 君が君らしくあるように「LET IT BE Kimi ga kimi rashiku aru you ni」
Synopsis: A group of people connected to a teacher look back on his influence as they search for him in this story where the friendship and love of young people intersect.
Synopsis: A documentary on the last days of actress Kirin Kiki a figure who was synonymous with contemporary cinema, who sadly passed away on September 15, 2018. It captures the spirit of the lady on film and CM productions and does a little delving into her past.
This is a slasher movie made in tribute, and as a parody, of those 80s titles that just don’t get shown anymore. You know, a bunch of babes get lost in the wilderness and encounter a psycho.
Synopsis: A group of friends are enjoying their last summer in college by heading into the wilderness. They picked a the worst location going: a death forest where there is rumoured to be a chainsaw-wielding murderer prowling around…
Louis Kurihara (Black Butler) and Kurumi Shimizu (The Kirishima Thing) star in this “MOOSIC LAB 2018” film which sees filmmakers collaborate with musicians.
Synopsis:A youth drama depicting the story of three men who head to Tokyo to film a documentary about a band performing a live tour. Along the way, one of their number encounters a woman who looks exactly like his first love and follows her. In parallel with them, the three-person band, The Wisely Brothers, go on a live tour.
JAPAN CUTS Hollywood is a 3-day film festival organised in cooperation with JAPAN CUTS in New York. There is a unique slate of titles different from the New York fest (except for Melancholic) and some short films and a History Channel documentary called Defending Japan. Guests will also be in attendance.
Ryoko Shinohara has been announced as a guest for this film.
Synopsis: Kaori (Ryoko Shinohara) is a single mother raising her daughter Futaba (Kyoko Yoshine) alone. Futaba has entered her rebellious phase and ignores her mother so Kaori decides the best way to communicate with her daughter isby creating messages in the bento meals Futaba takes to high school.
This is an anime made using Flash and it was produced and edited by Shinichiro Ueda (One Cut of the Dead). It won last year’s Best Animation Film award at the Annual Mainichi Film Awards.
Synopsis: Yui Kitani is a middle schooler who has a complex she daren’t reveal to others: she has a thing for boy’s armpit hair. Her classmate Masato has arm pit hair which is the thickest. Masato has his own complex: he’s ashamed of his armpit hair. In this film, armpit hair could be the start of a beautiful relationship?
This drama, mingles Akutagawa’s Shanghai Yuki (a newspaper report on his trip to the city) with the writer’s literary universe. Ryuhei Matsuda (The Miracle of Crybaby Shottan) takes on the role of the famous writer.
That’s a great shot of Ryuhei Matsuda looking enervated as Ryunosuke Akutagawa in the poster. It’s a historical piece from long-time director of NHK dramas, Taku Kato. He helmed KURARA -the Dazzling Life of Hokusai’s Daughter which won the Grand Prize of the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs Arts Festival and was screened at fests like Nippon Connection. He will be at this special free screening presented by NHK WORLD-JAPAN with executive producer Natsuko Katsuta for a Q&A.
Synopsis: Ryunosuke Akutagawa worked as a reporter for the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and, at the age of 29, travelled to report on a city which was dominated by western powers after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Turmoil, poverty, exploitation and revolution are in the air as Akutagawa tries to navigate the environment of a fallen world power and understand its culture through his own sensitive and intelligent analysis.
Synopsis: Sachie Kitahara (Sayuri Yoshinaga) is a devoted housewife and mother while Mako Goda (Yuki Amami) is a career woman who has set up a successful hotel chain. The one thing they have in common is that they are both diagnosed with terminal illnesses and have a short time left to live and both feel emptiness in their lives. When they meet in a hospital they also encounter a 12-year-old girl who has written a bucket list. When the girl is rushed away in an emergency, they have that list and decide to fulfil it and they begin to feel happiness entering their lives again.
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 (Samurai Marathon and the lead actress in The World of Kanako) as well as Takako Matsu (Dreams for Sale) and Junichi Okada (TheFable). I’m desperate to see this one.
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...
Kotaro Yoshida takes over from Ren Osugi in portraying a man who reconnects with his son through playing Final Fantasy XIV on the PlayStation 4.
Synopsis: Akio (Kentaro Sakaguchi) knows a lot about his virtual “friends” in the realm of Eorzea. The players behind the avatars in Final Fantasy XIV are happy to share their daily details, especially after a big win together. But his own father, Akira (Kotaro Yoshida), remains a mystery, as he has been ever since Akio was a small boy. The distance between the workaholic salaryman and his now-adult son seems greater than ever when Akira, on the verge of a big promotion and raise, suddenly announces his retirement. Recalling his fondest childhood memories, bonding with his dad over 8-bit victories in the earliest Final Fantasy games, Akio hatches a plan. He’ll convince his father to take up gaming, befriend him anonymously within the online world, and rebuild their connection. Operation Dad the Warrior of Light is a go! But real life isn’t a game, and Akio can’t be sure of his surefire moves…
Seiji Tanaka’s debut feature Melancholic won him a share of the best director prize in the Japanese Cinema Splash section at last years Tokyo International Film Festival (Masaharu Take also won for his film, The Gun (2018)) and one can see why as it manages to combine a number of tones and genres to create a film that feels fresh and original as well as socially conscious as it looks at differences between generations to the workplace and it has a great performance by Yoji Minegawa. It’s a real treat with a great lead performance from Yoji Minagawa. It played at this year’s Japan Cuts where it went down well with audiences. Here’s my review.
Synopsis: Kazuhiko (Yoji Minagawa) graduated from the prestigious halls of Tokyo University you would expect him to be in some high-flying job but since leaving academia he has moved back home with his parents and lived the life of a slacker. A chance encounter with a girl he knew at high school at a bathhouse leads to him taking a job there as an attendant and he quite likes it, not least because he can talk to the girl. However, what seems like a normal onsen turns out to be a killing space for yakuza-ordered hits and when Kazuhiko stumbles upon this he ends up getting dragged into the criminal underworld…
Synopsis: It is the era of the silent movies and benshi (narrators who appear live in the cinema) are in demand. Shuntaro lives in a small town and he has had dreams of becoming a benshi ever since he was a child and his dreams are about to come true just as (it gets better) he is also reunited with his first love. He is, however, tasked with pleasing tough crowds as well as doing the chores and he also gets involved in a police case where they are tracking thieves and political activists…
It’s another weekend so that means more badly translated trailers. This week has been playing catch-up with reviews I am supposed to turn in and writing down reviews for films I saw at the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival as well as an interview with director Takeshi Yashiro. I posted a delayed trailer post in two parts (part one / part two) and a preview of Japan Cuts Hollywood this week.
The big news is that Typhoon Habigis is about to make landfall in the Tokyo Bay area. There has been hours of rain leading up to this and rivers are swollen and people are being prepped for evacuation already. If you’re in Japan during this typhoon, take all precautions and make sure you stay indoors and stay safe and heed official warnings for evacuation if necessary. The Japan Times has a Disaster News and Information page which will be of help.
What’s released this weekend?
The Path Leading to Love
アイニ向カッテ 「Ai ni Mukatte」
Release Date: October 11th, 2019
Duration: 76 mins.
Director: Kohei Takayama
Writer: Kohei Takayama (Screenplay),
Starring:Ippei Tanaka, Yumi Mukai, Mika Dehara, Suzuka Minagawa, Koichi Sakaguchi,
The word minimalist could be used with this trailer. There are no big dramatics and with a combination of subdued but powerful lighting and set design, one character’s battle with alcoholism is powerfully told through encounters with the human wreckage he leaves behind. Here’s my review and an interview with director Kohei Takayama.
Synopsis: Shosuke could be a promising manga artist but his alcoholism pushes away his desire to work. It also pushed away his ex-girlfriend Sawako and threatens his relationship with his current partner Yasuko. Perhaps it is an escape from a deeper question he has: whether love is real or not. Haunted by his failings with these two women, he drifts along in life but when he gets a call from his sister in his home town that their mother is ill, Shosuke must confront whether the questions and problems he has are all an excuse for his selfishness. Perhaps the potential absence of the ones who care for him will force him to walk a path leading to love…
Following on from his win of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival with Shoplifters, Kore-eda newest film is based in France and starring some of the luminaries of French cinema with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche (Certified Copy) and Ludivine Sagnier joined by Ethan Hawke, a truly talented American actor. This is the director’s first work set outside Japan but it features the sort of family narrative he is famous for as a clan is reunited in Paris and go through a cycle of lies, resentment, love and reconciliation.
Reviews have painted this one as another good Kore-eda film. It recently played at Busan where Kore-eda won Asian Filmmaker of the Year.
Synopsis: Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) is a star of French cinema with the power to charm the men around her. When she publishes her memoirs, her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) returns from New York to Paris with her husband (Ethan Hawke) and their young child and a reunion between mother and daughter kicks off a confrontation that leads to truths being told, accounts settled, loves and resentments confessed.
Synopsis: Sachie Kitahara (Sayuri Yoshinaga) is a devoted housewife and mother while Mako Goda (Yuki Amami) is a career woman who has set up a successful hotel chain. The one thing they have in common is that they are both diagnosed with terminal illnesses and have a short time left to live and both feel emptiness in their lives. When they meet in a hospital they also encounter a 12-year-old girl who has written a bucket list. When the girl is rushed away in an emergency, they have that list and decide to fulfil it and they begin to feel happiness entering their lives again.
Now we’re talking! A low-budget indie drama set in Osaka! A drama about the delicate connection between mother and daughter told through leather craft.
Synopsis: Asako Kijima is a single mother and she looks after her daughter Mayu with whom she has a close relationship. After graduating from high school, Mayu had planned to move to Osaka to become a writer’s apprentice but she feels she can’t tell Asako while Asako also wants to move to Osaka but can’t tell Mayu. A shared fascination with leather crafts and the characters they meet because of it could make mother and daughter be honest with each other.
Her Blue Sky
空の青さを知る人よ「Sora no Aosa o Shiru Hito yo」
Release Date: October 11th, 2019
Duration: 100 mins.
Director: Tatsuyuki Nagai
Writer: Mari Okada (Script),
Starring:Shion Wakayama (Aoi Aioi), Riho Yoshioka (Akane Aioi), Ryo Yoshizawa (Shinnosuke, Kanomura/Shinno), Ken Matsudaira (Dankichi Nitobe), Atsumi Tanezaki (Chika Otaki),
Synopsis: Aioi and her older sister Akane have always relied upon each other since the death of their parents in an accident 13 years ago. Akane gave up her ambition of going to Tokyo with her boyfriend, a guitarist named Shinnosuke, to take care of Aoi. Since then, Aoi has felt indebted to her older sister. One day, Aoi is invited to perform at a music festival as a session musician by a famous enka singer named Dankichi. It’s now that Shinnosuke returns to Aoi and Akane’s town and he’s not the only one as a boy named Shinno mysteriously appears— and it turns out he is actually Shinnosuke from 13 years ago after travelling from the past to the present—and Aoi falls in love for the first time.
Walking Man
ウオーキングマン「Uo-kingu no man」
Release Date: October 11th, 2019
Duration: 95 mins.
Director:ANARCHY
Writer: Aki Kajiwara (Screenplay/Original Creator), Shin Kibayashi (Novel)
The rapper ANARCHY makes his directorial debut with an autobiographical story of how he became an MC. It stars Shuhei Nomura (Puzzle).
Synopsis: Atom comes from a poor family in Kawasaki. A shy kid growing up due to his stutter, he now works every day as a part-timer in the waste collection business but when his mother suffers a serious illness due to an accident, the family begins to struggle even more with bills. With no help available, Atom stumbles upon rap music and a way out of his difficult life begins to emerge.
Welcome to Japan Hinomaru Lunch Box
WELCOME TO JAPAN 日の丸ランチボックス「Welcome to Japan hinomaru ranchi bokkusu」
Release Date: October 11th, 2019
Duration: 87 mins.
Director:Yoshihiro Nishimura
Writer:Yoshihiro Nishimura, Jun Tsugita (Screenplay),
Synopsis: The year: 2020. The place: Japan. A major “World Sports Tournament Which is Not the Olympics but Quite Similar” is due to be held and that means lots of foreigners are going to arrive in Japan. In order to protect Japan from bad foreigners, a far-right organisation has a trained female killer named Kika to greet them. She was raised to be a merciless massacre artist but her character changes when she meets an idol girl…
Synopsis: Sunada (Kaho) is a 30-years-old CM director living in Tokyo. She is unhappy about the direction of her life and decides to return to her hometown of Ibaraki where her grandmother is in hospital. Accompanying her is her best friend Kiyoura (Shim Eun-Kyung).
Writer/director Soichi Umezawa 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 Wavesand 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. His feature film debut Vampire Clay became a low-budget breakout hit thanks to Umezawa’s special effects skills which 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 sequel unleashes more of the creepy monsters and some returning characters… Sitges Film Festival Fantastic Selection 2019”
Synopsis: At the end of the last film, it was revealed that the clay was discovered by the artist Yozo Fushimi and the clay monsters that escaped captured by two survivors and imprisoned in a crate. Well guess what? Yozo’s body contained some of the clay and it looks like it’s about to get loose again.
Synopsis: What is it to be an entertainer? Do you need to be on TV or represented by an agency? Do you need to be famous? There are “underground performers” who are mostly unknown but pursue their own styles. Yokosuka Utamaro is one such entertainer. Called the “Emperor”, he entertains from the shadows and that doesn’t pay much which sucks because there’s always rent and the need to eat. He does have fans like Yuri Yanagi and she both inspires and supports his creativity as he strives to entertain her but the going is tough for the both of them and Yokosuka enters a realm of madness as he tries to create a super-fantasy play where a man dedicated to laughing falls …
The London East Asian Film Festival announced its programme last month and there will be a lot of films to see from October 24th to November 03rd and there is a great slate of films from Korea to Hong Kong and Japan.
Here are some of the non-Japanese titles I’ve reviewed:
Kiyoshi Kurosawa teams up with a great cast to make a movie which is a co-production between Japan and Uzbekistan to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations. Two of the leading actors have worked in his films, Atsuko Maeda being the lead in Seventh Code and Shota Sometani having a supporting role in Real.
Synopsis: Yoko (Atsuko Maeda) is a reporter for a TV variety program and her assignment is to find a mythical fish in a huge lake in Uzbekistan, a country that once flourished as the centre of the Silk Road. Things don’t quite go according to plan for Yoko and her crew and, one day, drawn by a mysterious voice, she departs from their company and loses herself in the wonders of the country…
The latter won the Prix du Jury in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival of that year. It stars Mariko Tsutsui who has been doing stellar work as seen in Jam (2018) and Antiporno (2016) and she returns here with a bonkers cast including Mikako Ichikawa (Rent-a-cat (2012)), Mitsuru Fukikoshi (Cold Fish (2011)) and two newbies both in NDJC 2019 films, Ren Sudo (Last Judgement) andMiyu Ogawa (Quiet Hide-and-Seek). This has awards potential as it lets Tsutsui off the leash and looks like it has decent direction but Fukada will have to present a reigned-in story!
Synopsis: Ichiko (Mariko Tsutsui) is a visiting nurse who has earned the trust of her patients. She has been helping Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) study for the purpose of becoming a care worker. Ichiko is the only person with whom Motoko is open with. One day, Motoko’s younger sister Saki (Miyu Ogawa) disappears. A week later Saki returns hom unharmed, but the person arrested for her kidnapping is an unexpected person and Ichiko is suspected of being involved in the abduction. This causes Ichiko to collapse…
This, I believe, is the last role we will see Kirin Kiki after her passing and it’s an interesting looking drama.
Synopsis: Satoko Watabe (Miyoko Asada), a 60-year-old con woman, and her new lover Ikuo Hirasawa (Takehiro Hira) defraud people in an investment scam and make a lot of money but the deceiver is deceived when she discovers that her boyfriend has other girlfriends. Satoko Watabe ups and leaves with the cash and goes to Thailand and passes herself off as a 38-year-old woman named Erica before returning to Japan where she cons an elderly man out of a large house and calls her mother (Kirin Kiki) at a nursing home to live with her but Erica cannot continue her crooked ways…
Kengo Kora takes on a daring role that in this film directed by Mari Asato, someone who specialised in horror films like Bilocation prior to this. My favourite Kora roles are in The Drudgery Train and The Story of Yonosuke.
Synopsis:Naoto (Kengo Kora) was ignored by other people growing up. Whether at home or at school, he was ignored. The first person to call his name was a classmate named Chihiro (Kanako Nishikawa) and that sealed her fate as his dream girl. Naoto becomes obsessed with her and spends 11 years searching with nothing but her sweet memory during his school days as a reference until he finds her and discovers she is a different person. Naoto discovers how different by sneaking into her house and staying under her bed and tracking her every move…
Hideo Nakata of the Ringu franchise and Don’t Look Up teams up with the writer of Apartment 1303, Kei Ohshi to make this psycho-sexual thriller.
Synopsis:To escape sexual abuse at the hands of her step-father, Kyoko (Rin Asuka) retreated into a fantasy land and developed multiple personalities. As an adult, she lives with three women, one of whom, Naomi (Shoka Oshima), is attracted to her. At the same time, she gets involved with a novelist living next door. All of these complicated emotions disturb her precarious mindset and when a series of murders occur in the area, Kyoko begins to wonder if one of her split personalities could be responsible.
I proclaimed this my favourite film of 2011. It’s a bloodthirsty battler where 13 rogue samurai brawl with a small army. It’s freaking amazing. A remake of an earlier film of the same name by Masaki Kobayashi but this one is helmed by Takashi Miike (Audition) at the helm. I saw it twice at the cinema and here’s my review from nearly a decade ago!!!
Synopsis: 1844, Japan. In the last decades of the Shogun and before the reforms of the Meiji era there is a moment of fragile peace. Unfortunately this peace will be shattered with the promotion of the Shogun’s half-brother, the depraved and psychopathic Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki) who uses his status to commit acts of depravity and evil against the people of Japan. In an effort to preserve order, high ranking official Sir Doi calls upon noble samurai Shinzaemon Shimada (Koji Yakusho) to carry out an assassination. Waiting for Naritsugu to leave Edo with his personal army, Shinzaemon recruits twelve others to carry out a daring ambush in a remote village.
Synopsis: Of all Masaki Kobayashi’s attacks on the cruelty and inhumanity perpetrated by authoritarian power, perhaps none are more brilliant than his visceral, mesmerising Harakiri. In a stunning performance, Tatsuya Nakadai plays a masterless down-and-out samurai named Hanshiro who enters the manor of Lord Iyi, requesting to commit ritual suicide on his property. Suspected of simply fishing for charity, Hanshiro is told the gruesome tale of the last samurai who made the same request but Hanshiro will not be moved.
The Lone Wolf and Cub double-bill can be seen at a discounted ticket price of £10!
The classic Lone Wolf & Cub manga was adapted into a long-running movie series that went on to become a cult classic especially when the five films were re-edited into one called Shogun Assassin. This is the first entry in the film series and it is a brilliant title that will leave you craving for more. The manga is brilliant so give that a try as well.
Synopsis: Ogami Itto is the shogun’s special executioner. He has taken the heads of hundreds of men. However the shogun is scared of him and when the Yagyu Clan frame him for treason the shogun orders his death. Ogami’s family is attacked by three ninjas, his wife Asami is killed but his son Daigo lives and both father and son wander Japan, father pushing the baby cart as he heads from town to town working as an assassin for hire as he treads the path of vengeance…
Synopsis: Ogami Itto and Daigo are still being hunted by the remnants and allies of the Yagyu clan and in this instalment they take the form of female ninjas. This is when the duo meet a group of cloth dyers who hire them to assassinate a former member of their guild to prevent the secrets of their trade from falling into the hands of the shogunate. Ogami’s target is protected by a trio of assassin brothers nicknamed ‘The Gods of Death’.
This is a stone-cold classic and should be seen in a cinema.
Synopsis:Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai) is an emotionless, sadistic, and seemingly unbeatable samurai with an unorthodox style who roams the countryside like a spectre, leaving a trail of destruction and fateful vendettas in his wake, slowly going insane as he racks up an impressive kill count…
Starring: Shinya Tsukamoto, Kirina Mano, Tomorowo Taguchi, Tatsuya Nakamura, Kyoka Suzuki, Hisashi Igawa, Takahiro Murase, Keisuke Yoshida, Hiromi Kuronuma
When you say bullet ballet I think of Hong Kong gun-play movies the likes of which made John Woo famous. That isn’t the case here with this Shinya Tsukamoto film which is distinctly him as it features a visual and aural style reminiscent of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (even shot in black and white) but closer in tone to the existential enquiries of A Snake of June and Tokyo Fist.
Shinya Tsukamoto takes the lead role of Goda, a thirty-something filmmaker working in advertising. His work aside, life is absolutely average – long hours at the office, drinks after work, an equally busy girlfriend named Kiriko. They have been with each other for a decade but never committed to marrying because they are both pursuing careers. No surprises. No detours. No shocks. That is until Goda returns home one night to find police cars and ambulances surrounding the entrance to his apartment building. Kiriko has committed suicide with a gun.
With Japan having some of the strictest gun control laws in the world not only is Goda left with the yawning, black hole of a question”why” behind Kiriko’s suicide, but also “how”, “where” and “who”. How did Kiriko get a gun in the first place? From where? And from who?
Goda, shaken out of his existence by Kiriko’s death develops a death-wish of his own as he rakes over those questions and so he enters the gritty criminal underworld of Tokyo in search of a gun.
As Goda descends from his middle-class existence the locations caught on camera fall into Tsukamoto’s familiar depiction of urban nightmare of anonymous streets lined with chain-link fences, dank alleys, underpasses and overpasses. It is here he finds ruthless hustlers and thugs hopped up on speed and gets sucked into a gang war.
A lot of the aesthetic style and content is recognisable from earlier films like the Tetsuo duo as Bullet Ballet does a little body horror with blood on splattering a concrete environment with macabre images and montages of real-world violence. For the fights, Tsukamoto raises the intensity with lots of erratic handheld camerawork, flashing lights and sudden zooms, sparks flying and an aggressive soundscape where percussion plays a huge part, from sudden screams and yells to the click of a gun’s trigger and Chu Ishikawa’s score, a nightmarish din of musique-concrete and clattering drums.
Tsukamoto fans will be in familiar territory while newbies will doubtless be left a little panicked but where the film differs, and becomes captivating, is the type of horror on display: the real horror isn’t necessarily the violence but an existential dread of a nihilistic existence. At different points in the narrative, people feel that without routine or a reason such as a career or kids or a lover, their existence is meaningless and the future becomes uncertain, pointless, scary. Once that realisation sets in for Goda, he understands why Kiriko committed suicide.
To get to that understanding, he meets Chisato (Kirina Mano), his mirror image and a fearless woman running with the street gang who exhibits a similar death wish but is actually able to verbalise the fear driving it. She acts as a muse for him, making the death wish beautiful but her honesty are the most moving moments as she gives vent to how lost she feels. Their conversations and wordless wandering around the urban landscape of Tokyo and amidst the sea of people before the final arc of violence is shot in soft tones with some poetic visuals for some moving soul searching and Chu Ishikawa’s score chills out for some beautiful moments.
Ultimately this is a solid Tsukamoto film and it actually acts as a bridge for A Snake of June as people ponder big issues and the body horror is toned down.
(I’m sure the music used at the end of Nightmare Detective can be heard in a chase scene)
We made it to another one. But we have to do more than just survive…
I’ve been really fatigued this week due to sleeping patterns which see me wake up at 03:00 in the morning and struggle to get back to sleep. It’s really dispiriting to get mid-way through a regular work day and struggle to smile. I’m going to exercise more to see if that improves things. Other than that and general sense of needing to change my life and improve my writing, I’m okay.
I wrote about the London East Asian Film Festival and I want to go to Samurai Sunday where they will show 13 Assassins, two entries in the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Harakiri, and Sword of Doom! I also posted a review for Bullet Ballet which I got two years ago but only got around to watching now.
What is released in Japan this weekend?
The Promised Land
楽園「Rakuen」
Release Date: October 18th, 2019
Duration: 129 mins.
Director: Takahisa Zeze
Writer: TakahisaZeze(Screenplay) Shuichi Yoshida (Novel)
This is based on the short stories “Aota Y Jiro” and “Yorozuya Zenjiro” by Shuichi Yoshida. His novels are popular for adaptations with Rage, The Ravine of Goodbye, The Story of Yonosuke, Villain, and Parade already getting the big screen treatment. The film had it’s international premiere at the Busan International Film Festival.
Synopsis: A little girl is kidnapped and the only witness, Tsumugi (Hana Sugisaki), is left traumatised. With the kidnapper never having been caught, paranoia runs high and it breaks out when, 12 years later, a girl goes missing along the same road. Takeshi (Gou Ayano) is a lonely young man who sells recyclable products with his mother and he is suspected of the kidnapping. Fearing the situation, he flees.
One year later, another man named Zenjiro (Koichi Sato) is accused. He lives with his pet dog near the road where the two kidnapping cases took place but is he guilty? Horrifying revelations soon emerge from the case…
Synopsis: A young girl named Sayaka is devastated by the loss of her pet dog. She develops a friendship with an old man who runs a jazz cafe and has a pet dog of his own. She learns he has his own tragic tale: he has been unable to accept the death of his son decades earlier and is waiting for “something”…
Shinichiro Ueda, director of One Cut of the Dead, brings his second feature film to the screen…
Synopsis: Kazuto is a timid young guy who prefers to stay indoors to watch the adventures of the psychic hero Rescueman instead of being stressed outside. Somehow he ends up being involved in a real life drama when a young woman named Yumi asks for help from the Special Actors to save her family’s inn from being sold to a brainwashing cult and it turns out that the Special Actors devise a complex plan that depends upon Kazuto…
Synopsis: A drama depicting a miracle experienced by a best-selling author with a beautiful wife and three children. He leads a successful life but it looks like it might be cut short when he suffers a heart attack and is told it might all be over. Only an intervention from higher powers can save him…
Synopsis: Suspense comedy about a guy named Kimihiko Kagiyama who has returned from the United States, where he was studying, to search for his father, a detective. He does so using a mysterious Tsundere AI and other detectives.
The Detective has a Melancholy Dream Tonight. 2
探偵は、今夜も憂鬱な夢を見る。2「Tantei wa, kon’ya mo yūutsuna yumewomiru. 2」
Release Date: October 18th, 2019
Duration: 89 mins.
Director: Yasutaka Mori
Writer:Fumio Nomoto (Screenplay),
Starring: Tomoki Hirose, Yuuki Ogoe, Asuka Kishi, Masaaki Nakano, James Takeshi Yamada,
Synopsis:This is the second detective buddy movie starring Tomoki Hirose and Yuki Ogoe, both of whom perform in the 2.5-dimensional stage plays that bring anime titles like The Prince of Tennis and Yowamushi Pedal to life.
Film director and actor Shingo Ota, was last written about in a trailer post here for the documentary The End of The Special Time We Were Allowed, which is about his friend’s suicide. He followed that up with this docudrama depicting different social problems like drug use, poverty and crime in one of Japan’s poorest areas. It was filmed with the support of locals.
Synopsis: Suyama, an assistant director for a television news show, aims to be a documentarian and striking out on his own. After disagreements with his colleagues, he travels to Nishinari to search for a friend who has gone missing. There, he joins forces with a schizophrenic man named Motoyama and shoots footage in the hope of turning it into a program…
A Small History of Love Vol. 1
愛の小さな歴史 誰でもない恋人たちの風景 vol.1「Ai no chiisana rekishi dare demonai koibito-tachi no fuukei vol. 1」
Synopsis: Yuri had drifted through life feeling melancholy and she wound up living at a secondhand bookstore and marrying the owner, an equally sad divorcee named Tomo. He fell in love and found happiness but when Tomo’s childhood friend Ryuta meets Yuri and the two are attracted to each other, more heartbreak and sadness ensue.
Star☆Twinkle Precure: Hoshi no Uta ni Omoi wo Komete
映画スター☆トゥインクルプリキュア 星のうたに想いをこめて「Eiga Suta- Touinkuru Purikyua Hoshi no Uta ni Omoi o Komete」
Release Date: October 19th, 2019
Duration: 72 mins.
Director: Yuuta Tanaka
Writer:Jin Tanaka (Script), Izumi Todo (Original Creator)
Synopsis: Hikaru meets the aliens LaLa, Prunce, and Fuwa while watching the night sky and she learns of the 12 Star Princesses of the constellations. They kept the balance of the universe until they were attacked. LaLa is searching for the legendary Precure warriors to help find the 12 scattered “Princess Star Color Pens” and revive the princesses but when Fuwa is captured by an enemy, Hikaru wishes to save Fuwa, and a Star Color Pendent and a Star Color Pen appear to allow her to transform into Cure Star. This means she has the power to save the princesses and also take care of Fuwa.
The Tokyo International Film Festival (TokyoIFF) (October 28th-November 05th) is back with a programme that is set to appeal to as broad an audience as ever as it casts its net wide to take in a slew of new releases alongside restored classics and promoting indie cinema.
Trailer time!
This year, the artists in focus are Nobuhiko Obayashi and Machiko Kyo, both of whom get retrospectives, there is a 65th Anniversary tribute to Godzilla, and, in the absence of an anime director to fete, the development of visual effects is the highlight. Unlike my last TokyoIFF post, I’ll keep it brief by writing in detail about films I haven’t covered before or not that often and I’ll also focus on titles from the indie end of the spectrum and a couple of Competition titles.
It is the 50th Anniversary of the Tora-san series and this is the 50th film. Long-time director Yoji Yamada, returns to the series to bring back the travelling salesman and his adventure in love but as seen from his family’s perspective.
Synopsis:Mitsuo, Tora-san’s nephew, has arrived at Kurumaya Cafe in Shibamata, Tokyo, on the sixth anniversary of the death of his wife for a memorial service. Tora-san’s family ran the place as a traditional confectionery store before it was turned into a cafe but the living quarters in the back remain unchanged. It is here that the family gather to reminiscence about the past, including Tora-san’s adventures in love up and down Japan. It is now, at Tora-san’s childhood home, that Mitsuo runs into Izumi, his first love.
Competition
Two J-films in the competition and they couldn’t be further from each other which is good.
Macoto Tezka, son of famous manga-ka Osamu Tezuka, turns his father’s novel into a film with Goro Inagaki and top actress Fumi Nikaido taking the lead in the “writer and his muse” story. The cinematography is done by Christopher Doyle and it looks extremely erotic and a little magical. This one is backed by Third Window Films so it will get a great international release.
Synopsis:Osamu Tezuka re-imagines The Tales of Hoffmann which creates a series of meetings wrapped up in lust, forbidden love, the occult, art and all-round weirdness for a famous writer named Yosuke Mikura and a mysterious girl named “Barbara”. This was made for the 90th Anniversary of Osamu Tezuka’s birth.
Shin Adachi is best known for his script for 100 Yen Love (2014) and has worked on other projects, including directing a warmly received comedy 14 That Night (2016). He adapts his autobiographical novel for his sophomore film as a director and it was produced by Aoi Pro, whose works include Shoplifters (2018) and The Long Excuse (2016).
Synopsis:Gota Yanagida (Gaku Hamada) is a scriptwriter with a family and a desperate need for a hit film. His wife of 10 years, Chika (Asami Mizukawa), is the family breadwinner and very unhappy about their lack of money. His daughter Aki (Chise Niitsu) is beginning to view him as a bit of a loser. His desperation for a break is finally answered when a film producer tasks Gota with writing a screenplay for his story of “a high school girl who makes udon noodles at a tremendous speed”. Gota has a chance to travel to Kagawa Prefecture to write a screenplay and so he persuades Chika and Aki to go with him, but when he arrives he discovers a different film project has already been decided…
Despite the scheduler’s best efforts to suppress this film (a 255 minute movie screened at midnight), you can’t silence Kazuo Hara (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On) and international interest in political dissent over the corrupt and geriatric LDP Party (another one of those right-wing nationalist parties running the human race into the ground) will be high. I suspect that this one will get play at festivals around the world. Fight the power!
Synopsis:Kazuo Hara follows Ayumi Yasutomi, a transgender Tokyo University professor and a candidate from the anti-establishment party Reiwa Shinsengumi as she embarks on a national campaign for a seat in Japan’s Upper House.
Tatsuya Mori is a documentarian famous for the films A (1998), 311 (2011) and Fake(2016). He also acted as producer on The Journalist (2019) which is based on a book by the real-life female journalist, Isoko Mochizuki. She forms the centre of this film as she pursues the truth.
Synopsis: Traditional news media is in a spin as social media, financial forces and political tribalism batter them around. Maybe film documentary might be the best place for news if not for some of brave journalists still working for newspapers who are unafraid to look for the truth. Isoko Mochizuki of The Tokyo Shimbun is one of them as she asks all the awkward questions that keep those in power on their toes and ferrets out the truth. This in a country which is still patriarchal, in an industry which is male-dominated, in a media environment that prefers not to challenge those in power lest they lose access to government press conferences. Here’s an article about her in The New York Times (written by Motoko Rich) which gives an excellent overview of the environment she works in.
I met the Watanabe brothers and their cinematographer at the 2014 Raindance Film Festival‘s screening of And the Mud Ship Sails Away and I got their autographs. Little did I suspect that they would turn into familiar faces at the Tokyo International Film Festival as they get backing from the event to keep produce their brand of offbeat comedy shot in black-and-white. It’s an alternative to the urban voices and a lot of sideways fun.
Synopsis:A man who lives with his ageing grandmother works silently in a pigpen… That’s the synopsis…
Synopsis:The rapper SEEDA’s 2006 album Flowers and Rain forms the basis of this work about a young man’s travails. You can hear the SEEDA’s work on this webpage dedicated to Japanese hip-hop. Rising stars Sho Kasamatsu and Ayaka Onishi (Randen) take the lead roles.
どうしようもない僕のちっぽけな世界は「Dou shiyou mo nai boku no chippokena sekai wa」
Release Date: N/A
Duration: 87 mins.
Director:Tomoyuki Kuramoto
Writer: N/A
Starring: Tomohiro Kaku, Yuina Furuta, Jun Miho,
Synopsis: Cases of child abuse have hit the headlines a lot more frequently over the last two years after some harrowing stories. Child welfare services are being examined but as that happens, films come in to show what happens on the ground. In this one, a girl named Hiiro away from her parents when they suspect she’s being abused.
The winner of last year’s Unfinished Movie Trailer Grand Prix MI-CAN where filmmaker’s can win a cash prize based on a trailer around 3 minutes, this takes place in Sarugakuchou in Shibuya and looks at the lives of two young people who meet there.Here’s more about the area from Tokyo Weekender.
Synopsis:A young photographer who is dating a model he met in Shibuya’s Sarugakuchou finds that their sweet romance which she has fostered begins to fall apart because of her dishonesty.
Synopsis:Based on a stage play by the director, this film stars Sairi Ito (Love and Other Cults) as Kanou, one of a number of escorts trying to make it in life.
Synopsis:Maki Yoshioka is a novelist and mother. She’s suffering a slump in her work and things get worse when her neighbour, Miwako, begins harassing her. Maki goes on the counterattack and makes Miwako a character in her novel but that causes the fight between the two to spiral out of control as the media and internet get involved…
This section is a collaboration between the two film festivals as Tokyo gives a platform for this year’s Pia Film Festival Grand Prix winning film and the runner-up.
Synopsis: A lonely filmmaker who works by himself with nobody and nothing but the stars which watch over him for company finds that his small filmmaking dream that nobody knows about eventually leads to a vast universe.
When the Rain Stops
雨のやむとき「Ame no yamutoki」
Release Date: N/A
Duration: 28 mins.
Director:Yui Yamaguchi
Writer:
Starring: Takumi Takita, Yuma Karino, Yuri Osawa,
Synopsis: Junior high-schoolers Rikako and Kouta are having trouble fitting in with others. They become friends and find their own place at a riverside.
This is Taku Tsuboi’s directorial debut. He has a background in working with Makoto Shinozaki (Sharing) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Journey to the Shore).
Synopsis: Told primarily in flashbacks, the film follows Midori, a college student who once belonged to a cult named Shio no kai. She predicted the Great East Japan Earthquake while she was a member but has shaken off her past and is now a college student. When disturbing incidents such as cat killings occur near the college she attends, it draws others in, including other former cultists. One other college student, Toko, suspects that the cat killer is her schoolmate Okita.
JAPAN NOW
This section highlights some of the more recent films to have garnered a release on the theatrical and festival circuit and features a strand called Nobuhiko Obayashi: The Wizard of Cinema with Hanagatami being among the titles selected.
Synopsis:A group of young people at a soon-to-be-shuttered cinema find themselves time-slipping through the screen to various historical events such as witnessing death during the Sengoku period and on the battlefront in China, being in Hiroshima just before the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of the city. This was shot in Obayashi’s hometown in Onomichi and seems to have an anti-war message.
Synopsis: Harada is a successful scriptwriter who learns that his ex-wife is about to marry his best friend. Shocked by the news, Harada heads back into the past and goes to the old family neighbourhood in Asakusa where he encounters a couple who bear a striking resemblance to his own parents, who were killed nearly 30 years ago when he was twelve…
Synopsis:Summer, 1937, Onomichi. A group of children find themselves surrounded by jingoistic adults as Japan begins a war with China but the kids have issues closer to home to worry about as they try to rescue a beautiful girl from being sold off into prostitution.
Synopsis:Hiroki is in love with a girl but another one mysteriously appears in his life and he can’t be sure if she is real or a figment of his imagination…
Innovation in animation is the theme and it spans movies from the first colour animation to the most recent releases, four of which have been submitted for the Best Animated Feature Film Oscar for the 92nd Academy Awards – Children of the Sea, Promare, Weathering With You,Okko’s Inn.
This is the first animated feature film in colour from Japan and it has been given a 4K scan and restoration job by Toei Animation Company and the National Archive of Japan to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Japanese animation and 60th anniversary of this film’s original theatrical release. Only two voice actors were cast for the film which would be one of the first of three anime features released in North America.
Original negative, 35mm print, tape materials, and animation cels were used by Toei lab tech and Toei digital centre to produce restored data which is in 2K. It was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
Synopsis:Xu-Xian was forced to free his pet, a small snake, as a young boy. What he didn’t know was that the snake is actually a goddess named Bai-Niang and she loved him. In fact, she never stopped loving him and years later, when they are both adults, they meet again only she has been magically transformed into a human. Their love goes against the local wizard who separates them by banishing Xu-Xian from the village. Fortunately his pet pandas Panda and Mimi set out to save him and bring him, in the process becoming leaders of an animal gang.
Synopsis:Hiromi Oka aims to be an ace tennis player but she must endure lots of hardships as she struggles to become someone who can stand among the best junior players in Japan.
You can’t have a focus on special effects without mentioning tokusatsu and there is a talk about the origins of the monsters from Ultraman Q and four episodes from that venerable show, each of which is a 4K restoration and has a talk attached to it.
Synopsis: When Ruka’s parents separated she went to live with her father who works in an aquarium. It is there that she meets two boys, Umi and Sora, who were raised in the sea by dugongs. Ruka feels drawn to them and begins to realise that she has the same sort of supernatural connection to the ocean that they do and she becomes connected to strange events such as the disappearance of sea creatures from around the world. Ruka investigates what is going on…
This road movie/western is a co-production between Kazakhstan/Japan and brought to the big screen via Tokyo New Cinema. It is the work of two directors, Yerlan Nurmukhambetov who won the New Currents Award in Busan International Film Festival 2015, and Lisa Takeba. Yes, that Lisa Takeba with the fierce imagination who made The Pinkie (2014) and Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory (2015). In his first overseas role, Mirai Moriyama (The Drudgery Train) takes one of the lead characters amongst a predominantly Kazakh cast.
It looks like an ambitious and fresh new movie production for Japan as it follows To the Ends of the Earth to new territories and stories.
Synopsis: We are in the plains of the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, a world where horse thieves operate under vast skies and on huge grass plains. A family man is murdered by those thieves as he heads to a town market to sell his horses. This leaves his wife a widow and his children fatherless. The village comes together to help the wife hold the man’s funeral and then the wife decides to return to her family with her children. Then, another man who vanished from her life eight years ago appears and helps the woman move and takes one of the children, the son, under his wing, teaching him how to ride horses. The son of the wife resembles that man. The man and the boy go out on horseback together and track down the horse thieves…
Synopsis:Hiromi (Yui Sakuma) is a 26-year-old who is popular with guys because of her cutesy and innocent ways which she uses as a flirtation strategy. In reality, she can be quite cruel because she will lead guys on and then dump them when it suits her. Her housemate Akira (Nijiro Murakami) and her friend Aya (Suzuka Ohgo) call her “Kakure Bitch” (a type of women who uses innocence to flirt with men) and she enjoys being one until she meets a man named Tsuyoshi (Yuta Koseki) and she realises she genuinely does like him…
Keiichi Kobayashi directed indie movies About the Pink Sky and Bon Lin and I’m pleased to see him back with another film!
Synopsis:Rei is an apathetic highschooler who is bored and lives a boring existence. When he sees his class-mate Nana bury a dead bee with care and respect he becomes interested in her and that is when Nana confides in him that she has no will to live and is harming herself…
Synopsis: When Lord Takuminokami Asano is ordered to kill himself due to a scheme by Kozukenosuke Kira, his loyal samurai plan an attack but they need the help of the accountant Chosuke Yato (Takashi Okamura) because but they don’t have enough in their budget.
Synopsis:Koharu (Yuko Tanaka), in an effort to protect her three children from their abusive father, she murdered the man. It shattered their family and sent them on wildly different paths. 15 years later, the family reunites again, each bearing scars from their traumatic background…
Synopsis:When a plane carrying important documents crashes in the Death Zone of Mount Everest, two men claiming to work for India’s research and analysis department offer a large sum of money to Team Wings to take them up to recover them.
Special Program
This is a mix of documentaries and an omnibus movie and jidaigeki.
ノンフィクションＷ 大林宣彦＆恭子の成城物語 [完全版] ～夫婦で歩んだ60年の映画作り～「Nonfikushon W ōbayashi nobuhiko& Kyōko no Seijō monogatari [kanzenhan] ~ fūfu de ayunda 60-nen no eiga-tsukuri ~」
Synopsis:After meeting as college students in the cinema town of Seijo, husband and wife Nobuhiko and Kyoko Obayashi have gone on to direct and produce acclaimed films together for 60 years. They have created more than 40 films and he remains one of the most famous names in Japanese cinema. This documentary looks back on their youth and their independent films. It comes with testimony from friends and family who talk about the special bond between the two.
Synopsis:This documentary was shot during the 1964 Tokyo Paralympics and looks at the conditions faced by the physically disabled in Japan at the time. Many of the athletes were affected by World War II, some returning from the battlefields as wounded soldiers, and this was seen as a way to rehabilitate them. The then Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko — now former emperor and former empress — are seen with them.
Synopsis:An omnibus film featuring five stories from five directors. Takashi Miike’s one shows the relationship between a man and a woman after she tries to commit suicide following an earthquake.
Synopsis:A documentary about Haruomi Hosono, famous for his solo work, his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra and the music he composed for Cannes Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters. The footage spans his career from his early days to his recent first overseas performances in London, New York and Los Angeles. In London, he was joined by Yukihiro Takahashi, and when Ryuichi Sakamoto made a surprise appearance onstage, the YMO members were reunited for the first time in five years, a must-see spectacle captured on film.
Synopsis:Based on a true incident, this is a timeless story of a hot-headed young man who rebels against his parents and is forced into desperate straits, eventually losing himself in madness.
Japanese Classics
This strand from the festival features three films programmed as Memorial Screenings for the actress Machiko Kyo who passed away earlier this year. HEre’s an obituary written for Sight and Sound magazine.
Synopsis:A film about female sex workers in a licensed brothel near the Sensouji Temple in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara district at a time when the Japanese government is considering a ban on prostitution. We see the women’s daily dramas as each tries to navigate different situations and achieve their dreams. Hanae supports her family while, Yumeko, a widow, uses her earnings to raise and support her son, who is now old enough to work and care for her. Yasumi aims to pay off a debt and leave while the ageing Yorie has the opportunity to get married. Miki finds her situation changes when her father comes from Kobe to bring her news of her family and ask her to come home.
Synopsis: It is 1159 and the Heiji Rebellion is underway and it is during this commotion that a samurai named Morito pursues a lady-in-waiting named Kesa. She is already married to another samurai named Wataru which means that Morito will have to bump him off…
Synopsis: Based on a Ryunosuke Akutagawa novel, this is the story of a vicious murder and a rape but where does the guilt lie and how can justice be served? The vicious bandit Tajomaru is the suspect but he claims the killing resulted from a fair fight and the woman welcomed his attentions. Others offer different, contradictory accounts of the events. The truth of what happened at the storm-tossed Rashomon Gate is explored from different perspectives.
Two films are shown in this section, the exciting and cracked macho Korean police procedural/off-beat buddy movie The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (review) and…
Sushi Typhoon was an outfit that took America by storm with its line-up of splatter films in the early 2000s. One film stood out above all other titles, Noboru Iguchi’s Machine Girl (2008) which is now getting a reboot thanks to a new director.
Synopsis:Ami and her sister Yoshie find themselves mortal enemies of the criminal enterprise known as the Dharma Family. Yoshie is kidnapped by the Battle Bust Sisters, female killing machines designed by Dharma Aoyama, and is turned into a human cyborg programmed to kill Ami who has had her arm cut off and decided the best way to rectify the situation is to attach a machine gun to the stump. Bullets and carnage are the only way to take her sister Yoshie back!
