Loft is the next Kyoshi Kurosawa’s picture. For those who don’t know him, no, he’s not realted at all with the other Kurosawa.
KK has been one of the most revered japanese directors in the west those last few years. Some would say he’s like a respectable Takeshi Miike. Like Miike he’s working a lot, directing between 1 and 2 movies a year, and like Miike his filmo spans over countless different genres from auteuresque drama to yakuza skin flick, to horror movies.
The big different between the two would be that Miike is well known for his genre movies while Kurosawa is mostly known for his auteur movies.
Loft is a horror movie about ghosts (yawn) and mummies. It’s Kurosawa so we can expect something interesting but the plot is very boring :
“A prize-winning writer, Leiko (NAKATANI Miki), moves to a quiet sub-urban house to finish up her new novel with a help from the editor. That night while sleeping, she sees a man in a storage room transporting an object wrapped in cloth. She soon finds out that he is a renowned archaeologist, Professor Yoshioka (TOYOKAWA Etsushi), researching ancient mummies, and that object was a recently discovered mummy. Working late on her book, Leiko witneses a ghost and finds out that her room once belonged to a woman who had been misssing for a while. This brings unexplainable fear to Leiko as she starts to uncover more stories from the past.”
Then again, Kourei was another Kurosawa’s horror film and was very boring.
If you’re interested in Kurosawa’s work my personal recomendations would be Cure and Barren Illusions. He has yet to top those two movies, imho.
Anyway, Loft official site (in english) and the trailer(.wmv).

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.

I was talking a while back about a can coffee serie of ads featuring Asano Tadanobu and Susumu Terajima. Looks like the ads were so popular that they’re putting the main characters in a feature length movie.
So Tadanobu and Terajima will reprise their roles as the Okanemochi Brothers (rich brothers) except that they’ve been renamed the Guitar Brothers. There’ll be a third brother too, a fat gaijin kid named Masao (what ?). Oh the absurdity and nonsense humor we can expect from that one make my toes cringe with anticipation.
Here’s what Katsuhito Ishii (one of the directors) said about it in a midnight eye interview :
“..it’s a movie of one hundred gags. In between the three main segments we put commercials, which are also gags. But the whole thing combines into a single story.”

Here’s the trailer (giant anuses included) in high resolution (don’t say i didn’t warned you), thanks to twitch.
It’s directed by Hajime Ishimine, Shin’ichirô Miki, and as prevously mentionned Katsuhito Ishii.
Now the first two both have Nice no Mori listed as their only movie, i’m guessing they’re coming from the music video and advertisement industry. Katsuhito Ishii on the other hand should be a familiar name for japanese film buff.
Ishii is fairly known in the west for having directed the anime segment in Kill Bill Vol 1.
He’s also the director of three movies, that have received mainly good press in cult movies amateur circles. The last one The Taste of Tea is considered to be one of the best japanese movie of 2004 by practically everyone.
I don’t know about the Taste of tea but his first two flicks namely Shark skin man and Peach Hip girl and Party 7 were not that great imho.
I guess there’s something about wacky japanese movies being overrated in the west. Most of the times it’s because it’s wacky and exotic. Yes, it has the merit of being original but on the other hand you can see the same kind of originality in commercials and music videos everyday.
It’s something that striked me particularly on Survive Style 5+, released last year and also a cult moviegoers favorite.
In that movie one of the character is an advertising creative that makes wacky commercials. The movie clearly makes fun of the character whose ideas are not at all related to the product they’re supposed to sell.
But you could say the same thing about Survive Style 5+. It’s wacky for the hell of it. Yes it’s original and sometimes visually “cool” and you’ll eventually find a message about love triumphs all and so on and so forth, but it’s still pretty hollow.
Survive Style 5+ making fun of meaningless commercials is actually like spider babies making fun of their mother after having eating her.
I can understand people being amazed by the creative liberties japanese directors are given even in the field of genre movies. I can also understand the exotic value, but if you look past this you’ll find that, although fun, those movies are pretty limited. As in Dude, Where’s My Car limited (ok, that one was trolling).
That doesn’t mean of course that i won’t go and see Nice no Mori.

Everybody love time travel stories. What about summer time travel stories ?
Summer Time Machine Blues is a teen-movie where a group of geeks from the science fiction club find a working time machine. Funny situations ensues
Seems to me that there’s a wave of time travel movies coming our way. after Sengoku 1549 and Einstein Girl, this is the third time travel movie this year.
I won’t complain, i mean everybody likes time travel movies. I mean you liked Groundhog Dayand Back to the Future didn’t you ? Summer Time Machine Blues is the same lighthearted comedy full of goofiness bathed in a general summer spirit that people likes.
Now, to illustrate that, i decided to put a pictures from the blog you can find on the official site. Those young people eating hamburgers are just plain likeable don’t you think ?
Now the official site is hilarious and the trailer (.asx) has a cute interface, you’ll like them both as if they were your children.
Children are our future by the way… except when the get their hands on a time machine hahahahamlkjshgpvqddgf

I was talking about Toyoda last week if you remember. I actually went to his”live cinema” performance last wednesday.
Anyway, Toyoda have been arrested for drug posession this morning. His next movie, Kuchu Teien, will have its october scheduled release postponed.
The original news article in japanese can be found here.
And heres’s translation of the same article by Jason Gray of the kine japan mailing list from which i got the news :

“Kyoko Koizumi Shocked! Director Toshiaki Toyoda Arrested
for Drugs - ‘Kuchu Teien’ Release Postponed”

Film director Toshiaki Toyoda (36) was arrested for
possession of a controlled substance on August 25th. Five
packets (approximately 3.9 grams) of a stimulant were
found at Toyoda’s home in Komae City, Tokyo. “It was for
personal use,” stated Toyoda. The young talent directed
the movie “Kuchu Teien”, slated to open in theaters this
October. The film’s cast and crew, including star Kyoko
Koizumi, who enjoyed a premiere of the film in April,
could not hide their shock at the news and the possibility
of the film’s release being delayed.

—–

Koizumi goes on to speak about her great surprise at the
news, as there was no indication during filming of a
change in Toyoda’s behaviour.

Looks like japan is going to join france and the US as animation pioneer countries. According to this article a recent found would date the first japanese animation picture in 1907.
Jasper Sharp of midnight eye fame is skeptical about it as stated in this post from the kinema club maling list :

“…J. Stuart Blackton’s incredibly
primitive looking Humorous Phases of a Funny Face, a series of chalk
drawings, was only made in 1906…”
“This seems to be akin to
saying that Japan invented animation. I, for one, am not convinced at all
by this discovery.”

Sharp has written a very good paper on japanese animation history for midnight eye. You can read it here.

I watched The Exorcist at age 12 thanks to some hippy relatives that thought it was ok for my developement as a young adult. They also let me watched Eraserhead at the same age. An enlightning experience if you ask me. Just to say that i know the effects an efficient horror movie can have on you. Until 16 i couldn’t sleep in a bedroom with a similar layout as the one in The Exorcist.
The next heavily promoted horror japanese flick is Noroi ! Noroi means cursing and the movie’s tagline, everybody dies kinda gives the plot away.
Anyway there are posters for Noroi all over the subway network right now. That’s probably why the movie is shot in dv, they blew the budget on promotional stuff.
Now the thing in Japan is that everybody believes in ghosts. The basic question is not “do you believe in ghosts ?” but “have you ever had an experience with a ghost ?”. And a lot of japanese people have actually.
To prove my point just check the prices of apartements located next to cemetaries. Those are the cheapest in the country. You can make good deals cause some of the locations are real nice. Take the gaijin cemetary in Yokohama for example, it’s on the best part of town, on a hill with a view on the whole city. Now maybe because it’s a gaijin only cemetary it doesn’t apply, us white barbarians probably don’t have the spiritual material that makes good ghosts. Plus gaijin ghosts can easily be bribed with booze and whores, japanese ghosts seek true redemption.
Anyway here’s the nifty flash site for Noroi and since it’s all flash i’ll let you find the trailer yourself. The navigations menu is billingual so i shouldn’t be too hard.
Careful though it looks like they put the picture of a naked guy on left side of the trailer section.

So Mamoru Oshii did an instalation for the world expo which is currently held in Aichi prefecture in Japan. Unfortunately it’s insanely hot and expensive and full of people queuing to see everything so i didn’t get there yet.
One of the thing that i wanted to see was Oshii’s instalation, fortunately they’re (don’t ask) releasing it in dvd and the guys at stauffen have gotten hold of one and put screenshots on their site.
Get a looky at the pretty pictures 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.

Toshiaki Toyoda is one of the hottest director working in japan today. Since 1998’s Pornostar, Toyoda has been receiving an international critical praise, making him the new asian festival diva.
His last movie 9 Souls made the list of best movies of 2003 at Midnight Eye.
I think it’s mainly justified, Toyoda, like Tsukamoto in a way, is the kind of director which new movie is always better than the last. I find it always very exicting to watch the evolution of a filmmaker, specially one with a peculiar vision of the world. Toyoda’s work is already very recognizable.
Anyway, he’s preparing a new movie but in the meantime he’s toying with dv cameras and computers to organise live movie performance with the band Pharmacy. The first one will be held in Tokyo at Hatsudai Doors from the 16h of august. There will be 3 screening then he’s going to the Rising Sun festival in Ezo on the 19th.
You can find Toyoda’s website here and see the trailer for the performance here.