After being raped in an unknown rooftop, nineteen year-old girl Poppo meets a mysterious boy, and both share their sexual traumas and fears, with fatal consequences.
Tag: JAPAN
Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, Goshogaoka takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls basketball team. The film consists of six ten-minute takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level, in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movements (the routines, etc.) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones.
——UPGRADED——
Shûji Terayama’s debut feature Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, an adaptation of his eponymous novel and play, is a playful, energetic, psychedelic, visually hypnotic critique of contemporary Japanese society’s descent into ruthless materialism. The story focuses on a teenager in hopeless search of identity within a highly dysfunctional family and a fractured world that both threaten to devour the boy—demanding everything and not really caring at all. A masterpiece of subversive cinema.
Based on the novel by Yojiro Ishizaka (The Blue Mountains), who wrote this novel with Yujiro Ishihara and James Dean’s performance in East of Eden in mind. In this three-and-a-half-hour epic, Yujiro Ishihara is Yuji, who fights with his older brother over the same girl, while finding out the secrets of his birth.
Three thieves escape from a heist, one of them killing the other two. He is sheltered by a prostitute and sought after by the police, but only after ten years his true motivation unravels.
This gripping docudrama is a fictionalized account of what could happen to a Japanese family when one of their sons shames them in front of the entire nation. Director Masaki Kobayashi has used real events so the dramatic turns in the film are based on fact — a 1970s shootout in the mountains between a band of Japanese terrorists and the police in which many men on both sides died.
When American reporter Steve Martin investigates a series of mysterious disasters off the coast of Japan, he comes face to face with an ancient creature so powerful and so terrifying, it can reduce Tokyo to a smoldering graveyard. Nuclear weapon testing resurrected this relic from the Jurassic age, and now it’s rampaging across Japan. At night, Godzilla wades through Tokyo leaving death and destruction in his wake, disappearing into Tokyo Bay when his rage subsides. But which disaster is worse, Godzilla’s fury, of the death of Tokyo Bay?
Zaizen Goro may only be an assistant professor but he has already made a name for himself. His superior, however, does not approve of his attitude towards their profession, and is at odds over who to nominate as his successor. The selection of the new professor reveals a rich and complex political world inside Naniwa University.