If you’re a fan of the “Koshonin – The Negotiator” TV series, you won’t want to miss the movie that’s scheduled for release in February of 2010.
The movie will reportedly take place aboard an airplane, where the hero Reiko Usagi just happens to be on board. Picture “Snakes on a Plane” without snakes or Samuel Jackson. Ok, that sounds awful — I promise it will be much better than that. Read the rest of this entry »
It seems that there’s a wave of big budget war movies in Japan right now. After Lorelei, Sengoku 1549 and Aegis, here comes Otoko tachi no Yamato. Based on the non fiction books from Jun Henmi, Otoko tachi no Yamato relates the story of a japanese battleship during the second World War. According to twitch the budget for the movie is 14 millions $. Not bad at all. It’s directed by Junya Sato and planned for a december 2005 release.
And yes the promotional staff are already quite busy. They often show the teaser on one of the three big screens in Shibuya, they already have posters at movie theaters and a shitload of videos up on the official site.
A flop for this one would equal the wreckage of the title name battleship.
And yes, it’s the same Yamato as in Space Battleship Yamato, where the battleship in question was made from salvages from the real Yamato. Well according to wikipedia anyway.
You have making of videos here and lots of trailers here.
Shiroh is a rock musical. It looks like filmed theater with some additional shots to justify the movie version. Now i didn’t really get what Shiroh was all about but looking at the trailer, it seems to be a christian, visual-rock opera.
Wait a second, i’d like to write that once more, a christian visual-rock opera. That’s the thing with fads in Japan they never really go away and the visual rock fad is still there lurking in the dark alleys of Tokyo waiting to jump on you again.
The movie is being released in (thank god) only one theater in Tokyo (and probably japan), namely cine quinto.
It’s a limited release since the dvd is going out in October. So it’s not really a straight to dvd release, but don’t be fooled, it’s a straight to dvd movie indeed.
And here’s the official site and the trailer.
Einstein Girl is a movie about a highschool teen who happens to fall in a timeslip. Way to go Einstein girl ! Anyway she has the chance to save her mother from dying in an accident while messing up with time continuity and fuck this world up for good.
What is she going to do ?
Well, you’ll have to go and see Einstein Girl to figure this out Einstein. Anyway, it’s nonsense. Go read the article on wikipedia about time travel to see that these sort of events can’t happen. In case you still had doubts.
The trailer’s here and the official website’s here. And it’s playing right now in Japan. So go and see it or don’t.
Man, i don’t want to write about this. Anyway, Nana is, in a way, a gentler version of Kamikaze Girl i was talking about two weeks ago.
Basically two very different girls meet on a train and happens to share the same name. They become friend eventually and start fightning over the same guy, while trying to stay friends. It’s adapted from a shojo manga of the worst kind. The girl who was doing the manga is actually working on another manga written by Courtney Love. So yeah some rock n’roll is involved since one of the girl is part of a band.
The thing is that japanese rock musicians have most of the time some weird outfit that make you think their music must be violent and edgy. In reality most of them are spineless j-pop singers. The infamous Gackt being a good exemple. He dresses like Marylin Manson on crystal meth but his songs are the cheesiest stuf you’ve heard since, i don’t know, Michael Bolton. On the other hand, musicians that dresses like geeks are actually the one playing the sickest noisiest shit you could find.
The spineless but cute j-pop singer Nakashima Mika is playing the rocking Nana. Another cute but spineless girl play the cute and spineless Nana. The trailer made me sick. The official site is in flash. You’ll be the judge.
I really like jidaigeki and chambara movies. One day i saw that an asian film festival in Paris was playing a movie called Daibosatsu Toge. That movie was directed by Kenji Misumi and it was all i needed to know to go and see it. Kenji Misumi is the master of chambara as much as Leone was the master of western spaghetti.
Chambara is to samurai movies what western spaghetti is to regular western. The name comes from the sound the flesh makes when cut by a katana. It’s bloodier and sexier, it also spawned countless corny stupid flicks. Misumi participated in all the great series of the genre, Zatoichi, Kozure Okami(lone wolf and cub), and Nemuri Kyoshiro to name but a few.
Daibosatsu toge is an adaptation of an unfinished serie of books about Ryonosuke Tsukue, a psychotic samurai killing everybody in his path. The movie is in fact a trilogy starring then superstar Raizo Ichikawa (Kyoshiro Nemuri).
It’s desperate and bloody, it’s Misumi at his best.
Anyway a couple of years later, i stumbled upon Sword of Doom which is an adaptation of the same books. Being unable to track down any copy of the Misumi version i bought it by curiousity. I was expecting a much less intense version of the same story. Was i wrong. Sword of Doom is one of the best jidaigeki i’ve ever seen. The devil lives in Tatsuya Nakadai’s eyes i am now sure of it. The movie is only the first part of the story and it’s a shame that Okamoto never made a following.
Sword of Doom is nothing short of intense. The black and white cinematography is much more careful than in the Misumi version which bears some of the stigmates of the directing of that era.
The good news is that the film buffs at criterion have released last year a dvd edition of Sword of Doom, the bad news is i am late on this and it’s a limited edition like almost every dvd in the criterion collection. Go get it, fast.
This news made me think of Go, so i have to talk about it now.
Go was, along with Ping Pong, the movie that contributed to make Yôsuke Kubozuka one of the biggest teen idol of the 00’s.
It’s about a korean kid trying to have a normal relationship with a japanese girl. It tackles a japanese problem of korean immigrants. You see most of the korean immigrants in Japan are not really immigrant anymore, they were born in Japan and most of them don’t speak korean or have ever put a foot in Korea.
You are japanese because your blood is japanese not because Japan is the place you were born and raised in. That creates a generation of fucked-up kids that really don’t know where they fit-in.
If you add that the kid in Go goes to a North Korean highschool in Japan you have a really good setting for a tormented teen flick.
There’s very few movies talking about that topic in Japan. What makes Go en more an exception is that it was aimed at a teenagers audience. Anyway Go is not as depressive as it sounds it’s actually a pretty decent teen movie.
The opening scene where an (kinda) afroed Kubosuka single-handedly beat the crap of an entire Basketball team is kinda cool too.
Anyway here’s a korean-german (don’t ask) trailer for Go(qt).
Well asano Tadanobu definetely doesn’t stop. He’s back in Kohei Oguri’s (Sting of Death) last movie Buried Wood (Umoregi). It’s preceded by an excelent reputation since it has been presented at the Cannes film festival this year.
The movie is about a groupe of young girls in a small village making up stories and the real story of the adults of the same villages. At some point they discover a buried forest (hence the title) and the story dreamed by the girls and reality begins to merge.
All this looks like a very poetic and dreamy movie. The kind of which doesn’t show up on cinema.3yen.com often. But you know how it is, sex and violence is the only thing that can get you an audience these days.
Which reminds me i should write more often about japanese porn.
Anyway, the official site is here and the beautiful trailer can be watch here.
Shinya Tsukamoto is probably one of the most interesting director working in Japan. I think he’s also one of the few directors whose’s new films are better than the last. That’s pretty amazing actually.
Anyway he released Vital last year, and of course it went totally unnoticed here, that’s why i’m only talking about it now.
Also i’m a lazy bastard so i don’t keep up with the news. Who can blame me anyway. Nobody reads this. It stars Tadanobu Asano who shaved for the occasion. It’s a love story about an amnesic guy, anatomy and a corpse and it’s beautiful.
You can see the trailer here, the official site here and a review from the Rolls Royce of japanese movies websites midnight eye, here.
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