The Locarno film festival has just awarde two japanese movies. Nobuhiro Suwa’s Un couple parfait got the Special Jury Price, Watai Takeharu’’s Little Bird got the Human Rights Award.
Un couple parfait is a drama shot in France, Little Bird is a documentary about the Irak war.

Japanese filmmaker Teruo Ishii has died of lung cancer this morning. He directed no less than 88 movies, mostly B flicks. His last movie, Blind Beast vs. Dwarf (Môjuu tai Issunbôshi), an adaptation of a Rampo Edogawa’s novel, was released in 2001.

Aegis is the next summer blockbuster. It’s been released (k i’m late) the 28th of July.
It’s about a military ship that is taken by a group of terrorists and threatens to blow Tokyo up. Fortunately two guys on the ship will probably save the day.
What puzzles me is that they used a Hoobastank tune in the trailer and that terrible song doesn’t fit the movie at all. Something went horribly wrong in the music department. Someone must have though that to fit this big budget flick they needed to break the piggy bank and buy a foreign song. It’s a statement :”Yes we had enough money to buy a Hoobastank track wait till you see the ’splosions we have too”.
Anyway, Hiroyuki Sanada is in it, he was the guy in Last Samurai. No, not the bald guy. He was the one who didn’t like Cruise in the begining. But Cruise tends to grow on people, that’s the kind of scientologist he is, so in the end they became friend.
A part from Last Samurai, Sanada was in the very good jidaigeki Tasogare Seibei.
So go and see or rent Tasogare Seibei. But in the meantine you can go to Aegis website and watch the hoobastanked 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).

Adachi Masao is looking for funds to finance his next movie 13th Months. The japanese director is notably famous for his commitment to the Palestinian revolution. He has been living (and fightning ?) in the middle east since the 70’s until he was arrested in Lebanon and deported to Japan in 1997.
To produce his next movie he has set up a billingual website where you can ask to participate in the project as a staff or a benefactor.
And if you think it’s a boring arty flick go and read the story here. Unexploded nuclear war heads, silver haired computer nerds and trips to the Babel tower, no less.
Adachi’s filmo from imdb.
via Kinejapan

The Pia Film Festival (PFF) is a tokyo based event dedicated to support young filmakers from all over the world.
It will be held in Tokyo between the 9th and the 15th of July, so yes right now. If you want to submit your film for the next one, you should do it between October and December 2005.
But you should probably go and check this site by yourself.
The PFF Scholarship is part od the festival and is used to finance movies. It has participated in producing 15 movies since 1984.
Good luck.

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.