The hero is Toshio Kanbe, a middle-aged salaryman with a typical family (wife, two teenage children), living quietly in a provincial city (Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture), who wakes up one morning in the summer of 1994 to find himself the prime suspect in the biggest mass-murder case of the decade. Someone, somehow, released clouds of poison gas that killed seven and sickened nearly 600 people in his apartment building and neighborhood.
Tag: JAPAN
Brian Anderson is an Army medic serving in Vietnam during the war who begins his service with an attitude of looking out only for himself. But to fulfill a promise to a friend who was killed in action, Brian agrees to work in a local orphanage. He gradually becomes so devoted to the children there that he risks his life and career in order to protect them.
Hani Susumu’s Inferno of First Love, is a brilliant, unforgettable, and sensitive film. Working from a script by playwright, and experimental filmmaker, Terayama Shuji, Hani’s film captures Shun, an orphan, who falls in love with a pretty young nude model named Nanami, with his sexual inadequacies, problem childhood, and coming of age. Examining Shun, we see the reality of child molestation, with deep scars that ripple into adulthood, exposing the twin monsters of repression and inadequacy looming overhead. Shun’s complex relationship with his parents, Nanami, and a young girl named Momi he befriends, eventually lead to disaster, as society closes in, so does fate.
As her husband Eiichi becomes more entangled in his life as businessman, Naoko looks for ways to expand her own life even as her husband’s life shrinks in scope and intimacy. She finds new interests, new love, and a greater sense of her place in the world.
Wakako, who runs a traditional restaurant in Tokyo, once had her portrait painted by an itinerant artist named “Goro” when she was a young girl living in China. Having treasured the painting for so many years, she decides to bring it to a Ginza art gallery in hopes of finding the long lost artist, but with his signature as her only lead the search initially goes nowhere. That is until she meets an unusual florist named Coney who helps her to uncover Goro’s true identity.
In the slums of Osaka, various marginalized misfits have their own interpretations of love. Completely alienated from the outside world, they commit sexual perversions, violence and cannibalism.
Two yakuza, one of whom frequently reflects on an uncomfortable past taking advantage of Korean women, meet a stowaway on Japanese soil from across the Genkai Sea.
Alex Cox (REPO MAN) directed this stylized adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges labyrinthine detective story about a totalitarian city of the future plagued by a rash of bizarre crimes. Peter Boyle stars as Lonnrot, a decidedly even headed detective prone to philosophizing and Christopher Eccleston is his nemesis, Red Scarlach, whom Lonnrot believes could be behind these ritualistic crimes. Set in a surreal landscape that provokes Lonnrot’s philosophical musings and leads him through mystical cabals and conspiracies within conspiracies, DEATH AND THE COMPASS is a remarkable adaptation of Borges’ story, and a fascinating, often exhilarating film.