Happy weekend, everyone!
I hope you are all doing fine!
The Kotatsu Festival is underway and there will be two free film streaming sessions later today. My review for Yuya Ishii’s All the Things We Never Said went lives yesterday on V-Cinema. This is the follow-up post to yesterday‘s which details what was released in cinemas in Japan this weekend.
Happy weekend, everyone!!!
I hope you are all well.
This post is truncated due to time constraints. As has been the case for at least the past four years, I’m working as press officer/writer for the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival and so I am caught up doing SNS as well as covering other things (one more day to go and everything is online and free to view).
This week I posted a preview of the Japanese films at Tokyo FILMeX and my review for the Kazuya Shiraishi film One Night. I’ve watched Italian horror giallo movies like Terror at the Opera and Deep Red (both by Dario Argento), Black Sabbath and Black Sunday (both by Mario Bava).
What is released this weekend? About 19 films, so I’ve split this post into two with the second part tomorrow. Some of these films are screening as part of Busan, others I have seen as part of Nippon Connection and the Osaka Asian Film Festival.
Tokyo FILMeX 2020 runs from October 30th to November 05th. It’s the place
to see arthouse films but, due to Covid-19, organisers have decided to shorten the duration of the fest and have it run alongside the Tokyo International Film Festival, although it’s still a physical event. This move positions the festival in a way to make it akin to Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. You can read a statement here which explains more.
Anyway, the festival has quite a few titles from Japan or set in Japan that are worth checking out.
Click on a title to be taken to the festival page:
Continue reading “Japanese Films at Tokyo FILMeX 2020 (October 30th to November 05th)”
Happy weekend, everyone!
I hope you are all doing fine!
This week I posted about the Japanese films at the Raindance Film Festival and the OP Pictures + Fest going on throughout this month.
I will be recording the Halloween episode of the Heroic Purgatory podcast about the film Audition (1999) and watching some Japanese films from the 80s. Since it’s the season of scares, I’d like to highlight some of my older horror films reviews.
Carved – The Slit-Mouthed Woman
What is released this weekend?
OP Pictures is back for another year and it comes in the middle of the Covid-19 
pandemic, a time when intimacy is to be shunned lest the virus get you. These films were mostly made last year before Covid-19 went global and just before the actor Takuya Sakurai died (he appears in a number of these titles). These films are screening between October 16th – 29th at Theater Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Just like last two year’s events (2018 and 2019), this is a collection of pink films produced by Okura Movie and screened over a number of evenings and there is a selection of films from Hideo Jojo who I spoke to at this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival due to the screening of his film On the Edge of Their Seats – you can find the interview here. A wonderful irony about this is that I have compiled this list of titles and I don’t think I’ll watch them myself but this list might prove useful to others.
It goes without saying that this stuff is NSFW so you have been warned.
Here’s a festival trailer, the films will follow below…
Continue reading “OP PICTURES+FEST 2020 Films (October 16th – 29th)”
Happy weekend, everyone!
I hope you are all well.
I started the week with a review of the gentle family comedy The Taste of Tea (2004) and followed that with a preview of the free films and events at the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival 2020, an interview with Ryushi Linday, director of Idol (2020) and Kokutai (2019), and a look preview of the Japanese films at the Busan International Film Festival. The filmic highlight of the month has to be The Taste of Tea which I enjoyed a lot but I have been able to watch more…
In terms of films watched three horror movies, After Death (1989), Society (1989) and Spellcaster (1988), and three films by Hirobumi Watanabe.
What is released this weekend?
The Taste of Tea 
茶の味 「Cha no Aji」
Release Date: July 17th, 2004
Duration: 143 mins.
Director: Katsuhito Ishii
Writer: Katsuhito Ishii (Screenplay),
Starring: Tadanobu Asano, Takahiro Sato, Maya Banno, Satomi Tezuka, Tatsuya Gashuin, Tomokazu Miura, Anna Tsuchiya, Ikki Todoroki, Hideaki Anno,
Katsuhito Ishii is probably best known for making weird films and while The Taste of Tea is one of his most restrained, it is probably his most popular work. At its simplest, The Taste of Tea is a cross between Yasujiro Ozu’s gentle comedy Good Morning (1959) and the playfully bizarre Survive Style 5+ (2004). Try to imagine the styles of the two melding with and diluting each other and you come close. The result is a film where everyday characters and their small dramas are given the odd flights of fancy that burst out from beneath the surface of normality.
Like in a typical Ozu film, we follow multiple generations of a family. Here, we are spending time with the Haruno family who live in an old-fashioned house in a small mountain town just north of Tokyo. They consist of the mother, Yoshiko (Satomi Tezuka), Nobuo (Tomokazu Miura), the father, their son Hajime (Takahiro Sato), Sachiko (Maya Banno), their daughter, and eccentric grandfather Akira (Tatsuya Gashuin). They will soon be joined by uncle Ayano (Tadanobu Asano) who is taking a break from his job as a music producer to visit for a few days.
Continue reading “The Taste of Tea 茶の味 Dir: Katsuhito Ishii (2004)”
Happy weekend, everyone!
I hope you are all doing well.
I will be recording an episode of the Heroic Purgatory podcast tonight so I spent this week watching pistol operas from John Woo – A Better Tomorrow (1986), Hard Boiled (1990) and The Killer (1989). The last title is the one my co-host John and I will be talking about for the Heroic Purgatory podcast.
Anyway, other Heroic Purgatory podcast episodes covered Police Story (1984) – podcast -, Battle Royale (2000) – podcast – and A Bittersweet Life (2004) – podcast.
This week I posted reviews for the Kiyoshi Kurosawa thriller Creepy (2016), the experimental documentary Kokutai (2019), and a preview of the next Third Window Film release, The Taste of Tea (2004). My review for the Atsushi Funahashi film Lovers on Borders (2018) was published on V-Cinema on Thursday evening.
What is released this weekend?
Third Window Films are going to issue the world’s first blu-ray release of the offbeat comedy The Taste of Tea on October 05th. Here are the details on the extras on the disc.
Extra features:
Extra features (*in standard definition):
90 minute Making Of
‘Super Big’ – Animation
Reversible sleeve art
Here’s the trailer and synopsis and a little extra info:
Happy weekend, everyone.
We have made it through another week.
I have been busy posting things such as a round up of the Japanese films at the Vancouver International Film Festival, the London Film Festival, Skip City D-Cinema Festival and an interview with Urara Matsubayashi and Mayu Akiyama for their work on Kamata Prelude and a post about the Kickstarter campaign for Noriko Yuasa’s latest project, Performing Kaoru’s Funeral. In terms of films watched, I have ploughed through the MOOSIC Lab works that are free to view for the remainder of this month and I have watched John Woo’s The Killer and a Japanese film from 2018, Lovers on Borders. Oh, also more episodes of The Boys season 2!
What is released this weekend?
