Tag Archives: japanese

In 1983, photographer Gocho Shigeo met an early death at the young age of 36. The view we see reflected in Gocho’s photographic images has become more profound over time since his death and has struck a chord in people’s hearts. While focusing on Gocho’s collection of photographs Self and Others, the film also visits places associated with him, creating a collage with the manuscripts, letters, photographs and voice recordings remaining in an attempt to capture “one more gesture”—a theme pursued by Gocho through photographic expression. This film is neither a critical biography nor a monograph on the photographer. Rather, we are offered a new perception. As if mesmerized, the photographs Gocho left behind captivate us in their gaze.
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An affluent medical professor, Komiya, and his bossy wife, Tokio, are to look after Setsuko, their high-spirited niece from Osaka. Setsuko is a liberated woman who does what she wants, including smoking, even though she is a minor. On Saturday, the professor does not feel like going to his weekend golf game, but his wife packs him off anyway. So he leaves his bag at the apartment of his student Okada, and goes to a bar with a friend. Setsuko traces him there, and insists that he take her to a geisha house. When she gets rather tipsy, the professor calls Okada to take her home, while he sleeps at Okada’s. The wife becomes suspicious of Setsuko when she sees Okada bringing her home, and also of her husband when she discovers that he did not go golfing.
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Sawa Yamagishi (Sakura Ando) worked as a nursing-care helper. The family of an old man asked Sawa to sleep with him, which led her to eventually lose her job and house. Now, she has nowhere to go. Sawa finds elderly people in trouble and gets involved in their lives. Meeting them, their lives change and Sawa’s own wounds start to heal.
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With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare’s King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa’s late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war and the crumbling of one family under the weight of betrayal, greed, and the insatiable thirst for power.
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Rinku is a suicide-prevention counselor, living with her husband Shigehiko. He’s older than she, scrubbing things constantly, sexually indifferent. They sleep apart. During Tokyo’s rainy season, Iguchi, a photographer Rinku has counseled by phone, sends her pictures he has taken through her skylight: she’s wearing a short skirt, masturbating. He offers her the negatives if she’ll follow his instructions. She’s humiliated and agrees. He tells her he’s only giving her license to express her inner desires. He sends her into the night to walk on the wild side. Then, she asks a favor of him, and soon her husband receives phone calls and photographs. Where will this triangle lead?
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Saya (Yui Aragaki) is a young widow mother. Her husband Yutaro (Yo Oizumi) died in an accident. Yutaro abandoned his wealthy family to marry Saya. To protect her baby, she goes to the town of Sasara where her aunt lived. Her aunt passed her house down to Saya. Saya and her baby settles down there, but she has difficulties dealing with her situation. At this time, her dead husband Yutaro borrows other people’s bodies to help Saya, but Yutaro’s family tries to take her baby away.
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A raucous teen boy with a feminine face is teased everywhere, so his odd biker father dresses him as a girl and sends him to an all-girl school. The lad introduces himself as Sukeban, and a classmate, Michiko, takes him to after-school activities. Lessons on humility turn violent when a masked hatchet-wielding woman turns up. Jealousy, syringes of hormones, bare breasts, a blood bath, and more figure in the resolution.
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Continuing his penchant for directing films in the characteristically Japanese genre he virtually created, director Takashi Ishii here presents yet another stylish rape/thriller. Nami is an attractive woman, and she loves her husband, who runs the real estate agency she works at. One day, during a rainstorm, a mysterious drifter stumbles into her and, following her on her way back to the office, asks for (and gets) a job from her husband, over her protests. Not long after that, Nami and the newcomer are trading amorous glances. When the drifter gets her alone in a model house, he rapes her on the floor. For some reason, this doesn’t offend Nami, and she encourages the socially backward man to take her to bed often. Eventually, the two of them decide to do away with her husband, despite the fact that Nami still loves him.
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Akiko is the heiress of a lumber business family that spans many generations. She married Hiroshi, a company man, and was leading a plain and happy life. But dark clouds overcast Akiko’s happy life when Hiroshi starts an affair with Michiyo, an underclassman from the school Akiko attended. Then Shinji, who used to work in the family lumber business, enters her life the turmoil of men-women relationships becomes tempestuous.
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D, a haunted half-human, half-vampire warrior, wanders the countryside of a feudalistic future, hunting his own kind while battling his own evil nature. Like a rogue samurai, the silent, solitary hero wanders into a small hamlet terrorized by the all-powerful Count, a monstrous vampire lord, and his demonic minions from a castle that casts a long shadow over the countryside. The Count has claimed the human Doris (who wields a mean cutlass herself) as his bride. D becomes her protector and–when she’s captured by the Count’s shape-shifting minions–her savior.
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