Synopsis/ Plot:
High school teacher Seiji Hasumi (Hideaki Ito) is the most popular teacher at his school with an attractive smile. Yet, Seiji Hasumi is a psychopath. To solve some of his school’s problems, like bullying, and to protect himself, Seiji begins to kill his students one by one. Continue reading
Quote:
Simon Wade is an average young man who goes about his profession as a teacher with the same kind of dedication that he exhibits when taking care of his ailing mother. But, under the seemingly obliging surface of nice-guy Simon there lurks an entirely different side. His unquenchable thirst for fresh blood forces the young teacher to trawl websites in search of suicidal young women, whose blood he can steal. Continue reading
From IMDB:
The film follows Nishi, a loser who has a crush on his childhood girlfriend. After an encounter with the Japanese mafia, the film follows Nishi as he journeys to heaven and back, and ends up trapped in an even more unlikely place. Nishi (and some friends) attempt to break out of their trap, and discover what it truly means to be alive along the way. This is a mind-bending trip that uses some of the most innovative animation ever created. Written by animenewsnetwork.com
This award-winning film is a journey of self-discovery based on Japan’s cult underground comic “Mind Game” by Robin Nishi. The story follows Nishi himself through the life experiences that directly inspired the semi-autobiographical “Mind Game” comic. As a college-age loser addicted to porn and aspiring to write seedy adult comics, Nishi aspires to overcome his addiction to perversion in a tale that is lighthearted yet painful and touching. What starts off as an innocent meeting between old friends quickly turns into a psychedelic extravaganza, filled with violence, sex, love, redemption, and the infinite possibilities of the human mind. Director Masaaki Yuasa rejoices in experimental animation techniques, filling the screen with virtuoso wackiness, mixing in rough lines and storyboards, then inserting photographic touches. Written by Anonymous ” Continue reading
Quote:
SOMEWHERE BENEATH THE WIDE SKY (1954, aka KONO HIROI SORA NO DOKOKA NI) came near the end of Masaki Kobayashi’s formative period as a director — scripted by the sister of his mentor Keisuke Kinoshita (and scored by Kinoshita‘s brother), this drama of middle-class life in postwar Japan tells the story lower-middle-class workers in the city of Kawasaki, and their troubles and travails. Continue reading
![Nagisa Oshima Ai no borei AKA Empire of Passion [+Extras] (1978)](http://i.imgur.com/YUQPGVE.jpg?1 "Hosted by imgur.com")
Quote:
With an arresting mix of eroticism and horror, Oshima plunges the viewer into a nightmarish tale of guilt and retribution in Empire of Passion (Ai no borei). Set in a Japanese village at the end of the nineteenth century, the film details the emotional and physical downfall of a married woman and her younger lover following their decision to murder her husband and dump his body in a well. Empire of Passion was Oshima’s only true kaidan (Japanese ghost story), and the film, a savage, unrelenting experience, earned him the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival. Continue reading
IMDB summary wrote:
Josef von Sternberg directed, photographed, provides the voice-over narration and wrote the screenplay (from a based-on-actual event novel by Michiro Maruyana translated by Younghill Kang)about twelve Japanese seaman who, in June 1944, are stranded on an abandoned-and-forgotten island called An-ta-han for seven years. The island’s only inhabitants are the overseer of the abandoned plantation and an attractive young Japanese woman. Discipline is represented by a former warrant officer but ends when he suffers a loss-of-face catastrophe. Soon, discipline and rationality are replaced by a struggle for power and the woman. Power is represented by a pair of pistols found in the wreckage of an American airplane, so important that five men pay for their lives in a bid for supremacy. Continue reading
Quote:
Cut, by Iranian expatriate Amir Naderi, is a brilliantly offbeat homage to Japanese cinema,” blogs Kieron Corless for Sight & Sound. “It opens on a rootop in Tokyo, where keeper-of-the-flame filmmaker protagonist Shuji projects classic films to a group of friends. The rest of the time he spends haranguing the citizens of Tokyo through a megaphone about the destruction of ‘pure cinema’ by crass commercial fodder, and visiting the graves of Japanese masters Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa. The film then takes, via the death of his brother at the hands of the yakuza, what seems at first a strange but wonderful detour. Shuji must now clear, in just two weeks, a massive debt that his brother accumulated to finance Shuji’s films; the unexpected method he hits on to do so opens up frightening perspectives on the depths of his devotion to cinema, in the most masochist way imaginable. Continue reading
