Hello 2024
2023 was a tumultuous time with regard to medical issues but what kept me going was family, friends, and films. Having them in my life helped keep me focussed and gave me room for reflection and time away from problems. I couldn’t live without them so I’d like to thank them.
In terms of films… According to my Letterboxd Watch List/Diary, I caught up with over 400 films in 2023. This was mostly down to Internet Archive and Important Cinema Club streams and keeping up with festivals.
I worked for Osaka Asian Film Festival (OAFF) – always a privilege – and covered the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) – again, a privilege – and the Chicago International Film Festival. It was also cool to have filmmakers reach out to me and to cover The Guard from Underground, DOOR, DOOR II: Tokyo Diary, and Typhoon Club releases from Third Window Films. Series four of the Heroic Purgatory podcast has been another highlight as we covered action films with female heroes.
Sad news came with the closure of V-Cinema Show. I have helped provide coverage for the site since 2016 and enjoyed my time there and would like to thank the people who ran the site. And we started 2024 with the Earthquake off Ishikawa. The situation seems bad and people need help. I have seen that donations can be made here at Yahoo and at the Red Cross.
So, let’s try to be thankful for what we have experienced. For my part, this year I published 56 film reviews and two game reviews. I was fortunate enough to conduct 7 interviews with directors – one was a holdover from last year – and there are something like 20+ drafts for reviews started but never finished.
At this point, I would like to thank everyone involved in helping me get interviews this year. OAFF and NYAFF staff and the directors themselves. It was an honour to get their words back and learn more about their fantastic films!
Interviewees:
Chihiro Ito (In Her Room), Junji Sakamoto (Okiku and the World), Tetsuya Mariko (Before Anyone Else), Anshul Chauhan (December), Takeshi Fukunaga (Mountain Woman), Atsuro Shimoyashiro (Kidofuji), Kasho Iizuka (Angry Son).
Here is a list of my favourite films of 2023. These were all first-time watches for me and were the ones that moved or impressed me the most. Here’s a nice track (albeit, a short one) to listen to.
1: Okiku and the World (Dir: Junji Sakamoto, 2023) is about the love between the daughter of a fallen samurai, a high-class woman played with fiery comedic aplomb by Haru Kuroki, and a lowly manure man who trawls the toilets of Edo-era Tokyo for his stock in trade.
All great romances feature couples overcoming barriers to be together and this one has the class barrier of feudal-era Japan. The opposites-attract nature of the relationship leaves room for social critique and comedy while the film also carries an ecological message of reuse and recycling. It is full of pure expressions of love that really touches the heart – amid a whole lot of sh*t, admittedly.
While I had a tight review originally written, I gave into temptation and went on a little longer than necessary because I was so moved and months later there are lines from this movie that, when I think of them, move me to tears. Visually enrapturing and with characters that are easy to root for, this is my film of the year.
Here’s my interview with Junji Sakamoto.
2: In Her Room (Dir: Chihiro Ito, 2022) is an offbeat anti-romance where a down-at-heart dentist chases after an enigmatic woman whose titular room receives visitors. Said visitors drive the dentist to distraction. As he gets lost in matters of the heart, he also gets lost in her room, a suburban flat overtaken by foliage.
Chihiro Ito is a name familiar with well-written dramas but with this film and Side-by-Side, she announced herself as a visual stylist of tremendous skill. It is low-key stylisation where widescreen shots of strangely decorated interior locations, use of colours, angles, and acting that is perfectly pitched make a rote story absolutely enthralling because stylistic peculiarities keep the film off kilter and hard to predict. Every choice Ito makes as a director transforms the familiar into the mysterious and symbolic and so the film becomes that much more interesting.
Here’s my interview with Chihiro Ito.
3: Sekai (Dir: Natsuka Kusano, 2019) I described as “small but wondrous.” It is the type of film that is restricted to the festival circuit that I wish more people could see.
Mid-length, minimalist, naturalistic performances, it tells the story of two females living in a small town in Nagano Prefecture (captured in some gorgeous shots by director Marina Tsukada). One is a musician working different jobs as she half-heartedly pursues her passion, the other is a school girl with a stutter. Both of are struggling with confidence issues and facing uncertain futures.
The film is a snapshot of a few days in their lives as they negotiate social interactions and unstable backgrounds. The camera clings close to them, asking us to concentrate and read their faces, their pauses in conversations, their body language and place in a scene. As we look, we see the determination to keep moving forward and it is utterly, utterly life affirming in its own quiet way. Life can be difficult but, as one character says, the world is cool isn’t it?
Whenever I think of that scene, I cry.
4: Here (Dir: Bas Devos, 2022) is similar to Sekai in that, it’s a film that is minimalist and naturalistic in execution and features a snapshot of a few days in the lives of two people, here a Romanian mechanic and a Chinese bryologist who works at a university in Brussels. Within this small-scale setting is a tale of blossoming love that made me burst into tears at the end.
The film eschews familiar romantic movie cliches and asks viewers to look at and get involved with what is ordinarily overlooked – immigrant communities, settings such as urban woodlands, empty streets, and hotels at 04:00 in the morning – to find meaning in actions. From people, paces, and actions that are seemingly nothing or devalued, we get the richness of human contact – sharing food, kind words, physical touch, and the first attempts at getting to know each other. The film’s restrained style and setting is disarming and so these actions carry more power. These small actions lead to an ending that suggests this couple can find love from unexpected encounters and despite the restraint, it creates a giddy sense of that emotion for a knockout ending that is happy without needing to embellish anything.
5: Egoist (Dir: Daishi Matsunaga, 2021) proves that money can buy you anything but not love. Although it certainly helps out a lot in that regard for the main protagonist.
In a knock-out performance, Ryohei Suzuki plays a materialistic magazine editor who has his controlling ways wrested from his grasp when he falls in love with a personal trainer from a poor background. Cash and family ties soon enmesh the two as they learn to love each other.
The draw of the film is of its depiction of a love so deep that it draws the titular Egoist – so brilliantly depicted in Suzuki’s acting and the props/costumes and setting – from his ivory tower and into a vulnerable space where the sadness that comes with having made one’s self open to others. It is shattering.
6: New Religion (Dir: Keishi Kondo, 2022) starts with loss and the losses pile up for 
main protag Miyabi. Having lost her daughter in a tragic accident, she carries on life as a call girl after a divorce. A new boyfriend hasn’t healed her wounds but a new client and his creepy proclivity for photography promises change of some sort.
To explain the plot is to spoil it and ultimately this horror film offers more questions than answers but that is fine because the experience is more of an atmospheric one as director Keishi Kondo truly captures our age of decline with a story rich with regular references to Japan’s struggling economy and society, strong visuals that evoke the eeriest of atmospheres akin to the visceral horror of top-tier Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and an antagonist (?) who furthers that sense of loss and destruction who is played so offputtingly that he is as affecting as a character from mid-90s Shinya Tsukamoto’s stable of degenerates.
These references might make one think the film is unoriginal but the film is its own beast as everything coheres together in unexpected ways, especially in visual terms, as Kondo saturates the screen with a beguiling and haunting sense that we are witnessing the end of the world.
7: The Double Life of Veronique (Dir: Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
A film about two women, identical in so many ways, who barely know of each others presence save for a fleeting glimpse in public or the sight of a face in a photograph. Despite their never meeting, they influence each other’s lives in profound ways that take in music, love, and death.
The supernatural side to the story sits easily thanks to the “uncanny” when it comes to the central characters and also the use of a gold-like tint in the cinematography and sights of 90s Europe that feels so nostalgic as to be comforting like a fairy tale. It is beautiful and mysterious and it asks the viewer to enter a world rich with wonder. Viewers can use their own interpretation on events to add depth to the story. At a time when I was sick, there was something very comforting seeing a film say that there was more to life than the material world.
8: Undine (Dir: Christian Petzold, 2020) is another film about the supernatural, fate, destiny. An updating of the German myth, it takes place in and around contemporary Berlin and sees a historian named Undine fall in love with a diver in a fateful meeting. Their love is meant to be and so their lives are connected, through good times and bad.
What is wonderful about the film is its commitment to taking seriously the supernatural elements which might be dismissed as trite storytelling conventions and also the romance. The symbolic meaning of a broken statue of a diver in an antique diving suit, disembodied voices dictating directions characters will take, a catfish that pokes its head into scenes. This commitment feeds into a story of love and the actors really, truly capture that sense of being lost in another person spiritually and physically. The easy way that they hold each other and radiate a joy at being together, the way in which they try to spend every moment in each other’s company, the playfulness and dedication that comes with finding someone who is the one. I recognised that and so when the moments of sacrifice in the story came in, I was really affected. Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski are simply great. And, yes, there’s more to this world than simple materialistic elements.
9: Mountain Woman (Dir: Takeshi Fukunaga, 2022) takes place in the past but says a lot about human nature that resonates with today.
The setting is a village in late 18th Century Tohoku at a time when it is in the grip of a famine. The daughter of a family of outcasts finds herself persecuted by their fellow villagers after the theft of rice.
Think of it as an updating of The Ballad of Narayama but with a tinge of magical realism that crowns the film. The most affecting part is the real-time descent into madness of the villagers which is well sketched as the sense of desperation is a constant drumbeat in the background and we see their scheming. How it plays out is a little predictable but I got lost in the atmosphere of this piece as the setting, clothing, and acting really transported me back in time. It also gave lessons on how to hold on to one’s individuality and reason when many are falling into barbarity brought on by mob mentality.
Here’s my interview with Takeshi Fukunaga.
10: The Killer (David Fincher, 2023) was an unexpected treat. Released on Netflix after some festival play and a brief theatrical run, a glance at the synopsis doesn’t promise much:
A professional assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) botches a job and finds himself the target of a clean-up operation. He decides to turn the tables and wipe out the people who sent killers after him.
So far, so average. The execution is anything but.
In terms of content, the narration by Fassbender is full of hustle culture self-centredness and there is a critique of capitalism via the parasitic nature of the killer and his handlers and the way they see themselves operating in the world. It also comes down to style.
Directed by David Fincher, this beautifully-shot film features his airtight, concise, and precise plotting, camerawork, and editing that mainlines the cruel and cold world that the titular character operates in. Then he finds ways to make missions go awry and it becomes entertainingly blackly comic – it is in the gap between the heightened sense of professionalism and life or death stakes of missions and the humiliating reality of being a contract killer hired by the unscrupulous and unprincipled in an industry where there has never been any job security. And we laugh as we watch a modern man – with all his mantras of hustling and being dedicated – struggle with a brutal gig economy and we kind of feel bad because he’s just like us. Only a murderer. What makes it work is that it is pitched just right, not too clownish, definitely a slice of mishappenstance from a situation we think the killer has wrapped up due to the sheer confidence and professionalism he jabbers about.
Thanks for taking the time to see my picks for my top film of the year. I enjoyed watching these films and hope you can see them.
ALSO!
I hope we can all watch more great films in 2024!
Also!!!!
Video games! I played The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (PSP) and I really enjoyed my time with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS Vita) and Persona 3 Portable (PSP) and Project X Zone 1 and 2 (Nintendo 3DS) and that was fine and it was a pleasure to revisit Racoon City and Silent Hill (PlayStation).
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
明けましておめでとうございます！