Asian

Quote:
In 1954, Go Akuzu (Ken Takakura) travels to the Tsuruga Straits that separate Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido from the main island of Honshu, to investigate the tragic loss of a passenger ship in the treacherous waters of the straits. His solution to the marine dangers is to first advocate and then get a green light on building an underground tunnel to handle the inter-island traffic. His devotion to keeping the 25-year project on target leads to a separation from his wife, and a certain amount of loneliness — until he helps Tae Makimura (Sayuri Yoshinaga) get a job at a local restaurant. Read More »

Criterion’s title for this film is “You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum.”

From the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Films of Keisuke Kinoshita” program notes:

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Masao (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu) returns to his hometown after a successful career in business; the visit prompt memories of the time right before he left to study, when as a young man he fell in love with Tamiko, a beautiful, high-spirited young woman who also loved him but whom he was forbidden to marry as his family—and especially his mother—already had plans for him. Kinoshita brilliantly captures the flush of young love, played out against stunning landscapes—a love made all the more poignant as we know it will remain unrequited. Film scholar Donald Richie called it “one of the most nostalgically beautiful of Kinoshita’s films.”Read More »

A young woman fends off a series of aggressive marriage proposals from a man who committed atrocities during World War II.Read More »

Another rare Wakamatsu for y’all…..this time from his late 70s shintoho roughies/torture era. A sort of sequel to Torture Chronicles: 100 Years of Torture Inquisition, and much along the same lines as that and Female Rape and Torture as far as plot and production values goes.

Not a great film , but worth a watch for waka completists and ero-guro fans.Read More »

Synopsis:
In adapting Kawabata’s famous novel about the entangled relations between the son of a seductive tea-ceremony teacher and the women in his father’s life, Masumura subverts the literary genre so beloved of Japanese cinema. Kikuji (Mikijiro Hira) attends of a tea ceremony held by his late father’s one-time mistress, Chikako, and there embarks on an affair with the real love of his father’s life, Mrs. Ota. Mrs. Ota’s grief is palpable, but Kikuji’s motives are more mysterious-perhaps, like her, to know his father through the sexual experience. A complex transference is played out in such relationships, and through objects, such as tea cups, that are infused with human spirit. Masumura takes these suggested relationships to extremes in the film: Ayako Wakao plays Mrs. Ota with breathless despair, while Machiko Kyo’s Chikako, the gracious manipulator, is a veritable specter.Read More »

Eiji Kawano (Kunie Tanaka) has recently broken from the Japanese company he used to work for. As an immigrant to Tasmania, he has been won over by the island’s immense natural beauty, and he is conscience-bound to oppose his former employer’s ecologically unsound practices. He is also estranged from his grown son, who still resides in Japan. When his son comes to Tasmania for a visit, he must face the challenge of renewing their relationship.Read More »

Very entertaining Kihachi Okamoto feature, and while it is a WWII film, it is also a tribute to John Ford’s Westerns, set in Manchuria. In addition to the regulars in the series, a fine performance by the always lovely Kumi Mizuno.

One of Okamoto’s trademarks is his recessive staging, i.e. the big foreground wide-angle look, the kind of wide-screen composition which is quite common in spaghetti westerns, particularly those of Sergio Leone’s (partly due to the technical problems of the Techniscope format, widely used in Italy in that period). We could notice this signature in Okamoto’s late 50s films already, that is, a few years earlier than Leone and other western directors.Read More »

Tange Sazen was at first, the character in Fubo Hayashi’s novel. Director Ito Daisuke made this one-armed, one-eyed man an nihilistic, alienated hero, representing the anarchic energy and rebellious spirit of the time. Then Yamanaka Sadao came in and made a parodic retelling of the story and completely rewrote this image of Sazen by changing him into a child-loving, openhearted, and good-natured ronin living in a tenement house with his lover. Now, as Yamanaka’s nephew, Tai Kato rewrote Sazen’s image too, and the film is imbued with satire and humor, albeit different from his uncle’s.Read More »

During the Vietnamese war a Korean military base receives a distress transmission from one of their units stationed at a strategically important location known as R-point. The grim message relays that the unit is under attack, soldiers are dying and assistance is desperately needed, but the base members just listen in shock and horror. This is because the unit in question went missing at R-point no less than six months ago and the one person who survived the ordeal was left horribly burned and screaming deliriously that his squadron was slaughtered by an unknown enemy, not the Viet Cong. If the soldier is telling the truth, then who is sending these distress signals?Read More »