Japanese

  • Tadashi Sawashima – Oedo Hyobanji Binan no Kaoyaku AKA Good Rascals (1962)

    1961-1970AsianComedyJapanTadashi Sawashima

    A small-time con artist gets word that his mother will come see him in Edo. To avoid her finding out that he’s been wildly exaggerating his success, he enlists his buddies in a wild scheme to impersonate a samurai lord.Read More »

  • Tomu Uchida – Koiya koi nasuna koi AKA The Mad Fox [+ commentary] (1962)

    Tomu Uchida1961-1970DramaFantasyJapan

    Colourful, wildly stylised, immense captivating fable, including animation, kabuki and butoh and collapsing sets. About a soothsayer at court who was driven to insanity by the murder of his lover and will marry her likeness. And indeed, she’s a fox in human form!Read More »

  • Tôru Kawashima – Ryûji (1983)

    1981-1990DramaJapanTôru Kawashima

    Quote:
    This is an excellent piece of cinema, about life of yakuza (gangster) and his family. Ryuji tries to quit yakuza and spend a decent life with his wife Mariko and daughter Aya…but as he’s used to getting easy money, it’d become hard for him to work hard and get little. Eventually he’s back to where he belongs.Read More »

  • Yasuzo Masumura – Sonezaki Shinju AKA Double Suicide of Sonezaki (1978)

    1971-1980AsianDramaJapanYasuzô Masumura

    From All Movie Guide:
    “Suicide has long been used as a form of social protest in Japan. In this film, set in 1703, samurai culture is being transformed by the emergence of a new merchant class. Elements of the social contract are beginning to unravel, and some unscrupulous people took undue advantage of these changes before the social order was re-created. In this story, a rich merchant gives his clerk an I.O.U. instead of wages. When the impoverished clerk presents the paper to the merchant at the agreed upon time asking for payment, the man flies into a rage and pretends he never wrote it and claims the clerk is trying to defraud him. Then he sets his henchmen on the clerk to administer a beating. Though similar in story and period, this is a different film from the 1969 Double Suicide by director Masahiro Shinoda.”Read More »

  • Nobuhiro Yamashita – Mai bakku pêji aka My Back Page (2011)

    Nobuhiro Yamashita2011-2020DramaJapan

    Mai bakku pêji (2011)

    Quote:
    Based on Saburo Kawamoto’s autobiographical novel My Back Pages: Aru 60-nendai no Monogatari (A Story of Life in the 60s), the film is set during the student protests at Tokyo University. At the time, Kawamoto was working as a journalist covering the protests, which were in reaction to the Japanese government’s tolerance of US involvement in the Vietnam War and the use of Okinawa as a staging ground for that war.Read More »

  • Kiyoshi Nishimura – Bara no hyôteki AKA The Target of Roses (1972)

    1971-1980ActionAsianJapanKiyoshi Nishimura

    Bara no hyôteki (1972)
    A gunslinger is hired to kill a news photographer. The young ward of the shot photographer discovers the set-up behind the killing – that a laboratory is being set up by a Nazi organization to capture and train talented youth and that the photographer was about to expose it.Read More »

  • Kei Kumai – Ogin-sama AKA Love and Faith (1978)

    1971-1980AsianDramaJapanKei Kumai

    Ogin-sama (1978) Synopsis:
    Sen Rikyu is a ceremonial tea master who advises warlord Hideyoshi in sixteenth-century feudal Japan. His daughter, the beautiful Lady Ogin, has an unrequited love for Lord Ukon, who has angered Hideyoshi by becoming a Christian convert. Ogin’s father Rikyu also displeases Hideyoshi by opposing the warlord’s plan to invade China and Korea. When the animalistic Hideyoshi is rejected by Ogin, he threatens her and her father with arrest and worse.

    Ogin, a very beautiful young woman, comes to the attention of Hideyoshi, the unifier of 16th century Japan. Her love for another causes her to reject him and precipitates tragedy.Read More »

  • Tetsuya Nakashima – Pako to mahô no ehon aka Paco And The Magical Book (2008)

    2001-2010FantasyJapanTetsuya Nakashima

    Plot / Synopsis (Pako to mahô no ehon (2008)
    There once was a hospital where patients and even doctors and nurses were all strange. Above all, Onuki, a patient who built up his own company, is a super cranky old man. One day, he meets up a girl named called Paco, who cannot retain memory beyond one day due to a car accident. She reads the same picture book everyday. As time passes, Onuki starts bonding with Paco, and begins to doubt his way of living. He starts wanting to do something for Paco with his remaining life, and comes up with a brilliant idea. This pleases Paco, but their fate is…Read More »

  • Kinji Fukasaku – Kamata kôshinkyoku AKA Fall Guy (1982)

    1981-1990AsianComedyJapanKinji Fukasaku

    Kamata kôshinkyoku (1982)
    Quote:
    The English title Fall Guy is fitting – this is a film about a stuntman who takes several plunges for his movie star friend – but there’s a clever touch of subversion in the less obvious Japanese title. Kamata Koshin-Kyoku refers to Shochiku studio’s theme song. But this film about the production of a samurai epic on the Toei studio lot in Kyoto is hardly a fawning tribute to the world of cinema. It’s a film by Kinji Fukasaku. Like the director’s masterpiece, Battles Without Honor and Humanity, Fall Guy exposes the injustices visited on honest, hard-working men serving corrupt and undeserving bosses; all he has done is change the setting. In the place of low-ranking yakuza are stuntmen, the foot soldiers of the entertainment industry. In the place of Japan’s criminal underground is a movie set.Read More »

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