An exploration of certain conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination from Jack Ruby’s perspective. Ruby owns a run-down strip club in Dallas, and does what he can for credibility, both by giving information to the FBI and by doing the odd favor for his mafia contacts. When hitman Action Jackson is hit, Louie Vitali asks him to help get crime boss Santos out of a Cuban jail. When they get back, the bosses take his headliner Candy Cane under their wing to develop her career in Vegas. A mysterious government man named Maxwell expresses his displeasure to Ruby over his Cuban activities. Slowly all the pieces of a massive conspiracy begin to emerge to Ruby, who can do nothing to stop it.
Tag: JAPAN
White-collar worker Yamashita finds out that his wife has a lover visiting her when he’s away, suddenly returns home and kills her. After eight years in prison, he returns to live in a small village, opens a barber shop (he was trained as a barber in prison) and talks almost to no-one except for the eel he “befriended” in prison. One day he finds the unconscious body of Keiko, who attempted suicide and reminds him of his wife. She starts to work at his shop, but he doesn’t let her become close to him.
This valiant melodrama is the brilliant debut as a moviemaker of the great Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka, who also has a small role in the story. Based on a screenplay by Keinosuke Kinoshita, Koibumi explores the wounds of war, the limits of love and the need to forgive. A sad and troubled man, Reikichi Mayumi finds a new job five years after the end of WWII. He will write love letters for other people, which was not uncommon in post-war times His ideas about love and his personal principles will be tested when he reconnects with his former girlfriend, Michiko, a woman with a dark past marked by war and the further occupation of her country by the US military forces.
A runaway cat-loving girl begins a love triangle with a reckless older man and a young biker in high school. The film follows their subsequent chaotic relationships.
Mr. Kenmochi is older and loss of sexual potency. He discovers that jealousy is the remedy, reviving his loss of sexual vigor. To do so, he forces his wife Ikuko to take an interest in young Kimura, his daughter Toshiko’s fiancé.
Yuriko works at home all day as a tape transcriber, while her husband, Takashi, works as a school teacher. Yuriko’s behavior grows stranger and more distant and she starts spending all day “patrolling” the neighborhood. Takashi follows her one afternoon and begins to suspect that she may be suffering from schizophrenia.
A helter skelter of late 60’s counter-culture psychedelia played in two separate screens, images of student riots, drag queens getting ready for a night in town, fires, juxtaposed against swinging hippies, Japanese women casually arranging their wardrobe, people commuting to work, and various cartoon strips, all this played over a collage of news report snippets telling about the Communist threat, radio recordings, Rolling Stones, Japanese pop tunes, and Hitler speeches, while flickering images of fires and disfigured babies flash over the screen now and again. It’s all pretty anarchic and adds up to no concrete narrative but it all makes sense in a purely audiovisual way.
The solemn, intent faces of the Japanese schoolboys playing video games in Jun Ichikawa’s “No Life King” bespeak a new type of modern horror. Addicted to their favorite new game (from which the film takes its title), these children have become seriously estranged from the real world. The film’s constant emphasis is on the ways in which this has been allowed to happen, and on how emblematic it is of larger attitudes in a technological society. When a young boy trying to converse with his mother must compete with a home computer for her attention, it’s not hard to see why the boy has retreated into his own computer-dominated world.