CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE GENRE FILMS

CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE GENRE FILMS

2007.8.7(Tue)-26(Sun) (Closed on Mondays)

 

Venue | Cinematheque Pusan (Haeundae Yachting Center Area)  

Tickets |  4,000 Won / per Screening  

Contacts | 051-742-5377(ext 5), cinema.piff.org, [email protected]

 We, Cinematheque Pusan is planning to have CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE GENRE FILMS from August 7 to 26. You can meet Japanese genre films, a suprising and shocking V-Cinema* at this program.  You can also meet a highly prolific and controversial Japanese filmmaker, like Takashi Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Junji Sakamoto and so on. For this time, we offer to have a chance to watch the movies with English subtitle. (except  <Shinjuku Triad Society>, <Crazy Lips > and <Noroi>)

*V-Cinema

Japanese V-Cinema is the direct-to-video industry that appeared in Japan in the 1980s. The term is a trademark of Toei Company but is widely used in the West to describe any Japanese direct-to-video release. Unlike its Western counterpart, this industry has a considerably better reputation, with directors sometimes making V-Cinema movies by choice, due to the creative freedom afforded by the less stringent censorship of the format, and the riskier content the producers will allow. Notable examples are director Takashi Miike, who has released several direct-to-video films after his theatrical debut, and Takashi Shimizu, whose Ju-on series of films started out as V-Cinema, becoming surprise hits as the result of favorable word of mouth.

  

* 미이케 다카시 三池崇史 Takashi Miike

신주쿠 흑사회 Shinjuku Triad Society 1995, 100min, 35mm, Color, Japan

 The film is one of the earliest examples of Miike's use of extreme violence and unusual characterization, two aspects he would become notorious for. The film is part of the Black Triad trilogy. The film is based around the interactions of a homosexual triad group with a police officer as well as opposing yakuza organizations. When the younger brother to a renegade police officer becomes the lawyer to the yakuza group, an argument between the two lead to the downfall of the organization.

 ê·¹ë„ 흑사회 極道黒社会 Rainy Dog â“”  1997, 95min, 35mm, Color, Japan  

Although the movie contains a fair amount of controversial material, the overall theme of the movie is place on the unlikely relationships formed between a hitman and his girlfriend / hooker and son. The final scene forms a basis for the speech Beatrix Kiddo gives to Copperhead's daughter after her mother's assassination in the film Kill Bill Volume 1. This movie is the second part of the Black Triad trilogy. The film begins with the main character, Yuuji, being fired from his yakuza syndicate. Soon he finds work for another boss solely as a pay-per-hit assassin, killing members of other syndicates. His life starts to become more complicated when an ex-girlfriend or hooker drops his son off at his house. His son, who is dumb, begins to follow him, where the boy witnesses his father assassinate a man. Afterwards the boy follows his father to a whorehouse where he waits outside for his father, eats food from the garbage and befriends a puppy who is chained in the alley. The prostitute and Yuuji develop a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. Things get much more complicated when the last mark's brother, a lawyer, approaches his brother's yakuza syndicate to request heading the revenge attack on Yuuji.

 ì¼ë³¸ 흑사회 日本黒社会 Ley Lines â“” 1999, 105min, 35mm, Color, Japan  

Ley Lines is the third film in his 'Triad Society' trilogy (also known as the Black Society Trilogy), following 1995's Shinjuku Triad Society and 1997's Rainy Dog. The story follows a trio of Japanese youths of Chinese descent who escape their semi-rural upbringing and relocate to Shinjuku, Tokyo, where they befriend a troubled Shanghai prostitute and fall foul of a local crime syndicate. Like many of Miike's works, the film examines the underbelly of respectable Japanese society and the problems of assimilation faced by non-ethnically Japanese people in Japan.

 ë°ë“œ 오어 얼라이브 1 : 범죄자 DOA 犯罪者 Dead or Alive 1â“” 1999, 105min, 35mm, Color, Japan 

Dead or Alive 1, abbreviated as DOA, is a 1999 Japanese yakuza action film directed by Takashi Miike. It stars Riki Takeuchi, as the Chinese Triad boss and former yakuza Ryūichi, and Sho Aikawa, as the Japanese cop Detective Jojima, and focuses on their meeting and conflict. It is the first in a three-part series, followed by Dead or Alive 2: Birds in 2000 and Dead or Alive: Final in 2002. Ryūichi and his small gang of Triad vie for control of the Japanese underworld in a crime-ridden Shinjuku quarter while Detective Jojima tries to bring it down. Jojima attempts to start a gang war between the Triad and yakuza. Ryūichi and Jojima meet.

 ë°ë“œ 오어 얼라이브 2 : 도망자 DOA2 逃亡者 Dead or Alive 2 â“” 2000, 97min, 35mm, Color, Japan  

Dead or Alive 2 is a quieter affair with Riki Takeuchi and Sho Aikawa as rival hitmen. This too has moments of completely wacky surrealism with the two randomly turning into angels and children, although does not feature the same touches of perversity, with the single exception of a necrophilic sex scene, intercut with a children's play written and performed by the protagonists.

 ê³µí¬ëŒ€ê·¹ìž¥ 우두 牛頭  Gozu â“” 2003, 129min, 35mm, Color, France

 Gozu (literally: Cow's Head) is a Japanese Cult film directed by Takashi Miike. Shot on a low budget, Gozu was originally planned for release on DVD but its positive reception at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2003 secured its theatrical release overseas. Gozu has a reputation for being one of the strangest Japanese films ever filmed, with its ensemble of weird characters and dreamlike storyline approximating the work of the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Of the film, Miike says: "If you were a child and rode on a bike to a place you've never been, you'd feel like it's real but not really real. Gozu is like that. You go to a place you've never been but you don't have to make any sense as to why or how you are there." Structurally, Gozu is a succession of bizarre scenes sandwiched between a storyline involving Minami’s search for his friend Ozaki that is reminiscent of the episodic quests in Greek Mythology. These scenes are often comedic and disturbing, approaching a sort of cartoonish perversity and gross-out humor that is comparable to the films of John Waters.

 

* 구로사와 기요시 黒沢清 Kiyoshi Kurosawa

 ë³µìˆ˜: 운명의 방문자 復讐 運命の訪問者  The Revenge : A Visit From Fate â“” 1997, 83min, 35mm, Color, Japan

 Goro Anjo (Aikawa) is a policeman who refuses to carry a gun, due the trauma of witnessing the shooting of his family as a boy. After the suspects in a murder case kidnap and kill his wife, he changes his beliefs and resigns from the force, taking only his gun on a search for vengeance. The first of a pair of films starring Aikawa as the wayward cop Anjo, this comes across as Kurosawa's retelling of Dirty Harry, with an origin story added for good measure. Made the same year as his breakthrough film Cure, this has all the Kurosawa characteristics in place (plus a script by The Ring scribe, and regular Kurosawa collaborator, Hiroshi Takahashi), but it still takes him two films to say the things he said in a single film with Cure.

 ë³µìˆ˜: 지워지지 않는 상흔 復讐 消えない傷痕 The Revenge: A Scar That Never Disappears â“” 1997, 80min, 35mm, Color, Japan

 Aikawa returns as the former cop Goro Anjo in this follow-up shot back-to-back with its predecessor. Anjo has now entirely left his old life behind and lives under an assumed name, working as a hitman for a minor yakuza outfit (which consists of only five men!). But when an ambitious young detective starts gleaning his true identity, Anjo can no longer deny his past. entering around the question of what constitutes a person's identity (a question that runs throughout Kurosawa's best work), this film is a further step closer towards the director's masterpiece Cure. Often very funny, the Revenge films can be watched independently from each other, but watching both will only enhance the viewing experience. This second film is therefore not a sequel as much as a continuation of the first instalment. Although making two films back to back is fairly common practice in the lower budget end of Japanese cinema, in Kurosawa's case, making two flipsides of the same cinematic coin is an ideal way to explore the question that has formed his motivation as filmmaker since his amateur days: "What is cinema?"

 íì–´ キュア Cure â“” 1997, 111min, 35mm, Color, Japan

 <CURE> is a psychological thriller.  Kenichi Takabe is a police detective investigating a series of bizarre murders. Though each victim is killed the same way, with an X mark carved into their chests, the perpetrator seems to be different every time. In every case the murderer is caught close to the scene of the crime, and though they readily confess to committing the murder, they often have no motive and cannot adequately explain what drove them to kill. Eventually Takabe catches up with a man named Mamiya. Mamiya appears to have extreme short-term memory loss; he is constantly confused about what day it is, where he is, and what his name is. It is revealed that Mamiya is the common thread between the murders, as each person he comes in contact with seems to commit a murder shortly thereafter. Takabe catches Mamiya and finds that he used to be a student who studied hypnosis and mesmerism, but he cannot understand how Mamiya is able to convince strangers to become murderers. Though he has trouble believing it himself, Takabe comes to realize that not only does Mamiya have no memory problems, he is also a master hypnotist, able to control people's actions by simply exposing them to repetitive sounds or the flame from a lighter.

  ë±€ì˜ 길 蛇の道 Serpent's Path â“” 1998, 85min, 35mm, Color, Japan

 This is one half of a duo of straight-to-video yakuza pictures, with which Kiyoshi Kurosawa did the unprecedented thing of remaking a film immediately after finishing it. His motivations had very little to do with creative poverty, but rather with the opportunity to explore the same subject in two decidedly different ways. Serpent's Path and its companion piece Eyes of the Spider (Kumo No Hitomi) both start from the same premise: a man taking revenge for the murder of a child. Kurosawa used this premise as the jumping-off point for the two films rather than their definition, resulting in a pair of works which are not so much occupied with revenge, but with the mental processes of human beings in situations that have placed them outside everyday life. As Serpent's Path opens we see two men, named Nijima (Kurosawa regular Sho Aikawa) and Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa), drive their car to an abandoned warehouse on the edge of town. Out of the trunk they drag a man, who they take with them into the building and chain to a wall. Miyashita is out for revenge against the killers of his eight-year old daughter. Nijima, a schoolteacher by trade, is helping him, though exactly why and how these two men decided to team up remains unclear. They proceed to subtly torment their victim, a low-level yakuza, into a confession. Miyashita, himself a former yakuza, is grief stricken and about to lose his sanity altogether. He laments over a perpetually looping extract of home video footage of his daughter, which is played on a tv set in front of their captive. Nijima on the other hand is calm and collected, his detached air of professionalism keeping Miyashita's smouldering rage at bay.

  

*사카모토 준지 阪本順治 Junji Sakamoto

  í† ê°€ë ˆí”„ トカレフ Tokarev â“” 1994, 103min, 35mm, Color, Japan

 On his daily route driving the school bus, Michio Nishiumi (Yamato) sees his own infant son kidnapped from the vehicle by a masked assailant with a gun. The little boy in hand, the kidnapper knocks a man off his motorcycle and uses the bike to flee, leaving no trace. The bike belonged to Michio's neighbour Matsumura (Sato), who comes out of the scuffle with a broken arm. Michio and his wife Ayako (Nishiyama) are heartbroken to see their only child taken from them, all the more so when the police blow their only chance to retrieve the boy during a ransom exchange. Tensions between the couple increase in the weeks that follow. With no leads, Ayako slowly starts to give up hope of ever seeing her son again and wants to leave the tragedy behind her, but Michio remains convinced that there are ways of finding out the truth. On top of this comes the fact that the substantial sum of the ransom money has put them in debt with Michio's employer.

 

* 최양일 崔洋一 Yoichi Sai

막스의 ì‚° マ－クスの山  Marks â“” 1995, 138min, 35mm, Color, Japan

 When the appearance of the corpse of a former mobster in a classy residential district in Tokyo is followed a few days later by the murder of a Ministry of Justice official, there's seemingly nothing to link the two victims apart from a similar modus operandi: a gory 7"-long wound penetrating through the victims' left eye and exiting through the top of their heads. Put-upon detective Aida (Nakai) is assigned to the first case, but his obstinate working methods are soon putting noses out of joint, especially when a rival homicide division is assigned to the case of the second murder. Meanwhile Hiroyuki (Hagiwara), a disturbed young man tormented by long-suppressed memories of his parents' suicide beneath a windswept mountain is released from his mental asylum and shacks up with his former nurse. But what is the significance of the acronym MARKS scribbled into the private diary of the troubled 27 year-old, and what is his link with the members of a mountaineering club and a murder committed by a group of student radicals before he was even born? Based on a novel by Kaoru Takamura, Yoichi Sai's haunting mystery thriller is an opaque and perplexing piece. Initially masquerading as an apparently straightforward police procedural, MARKS soon adopts a more fragmentary approach to the narrative in a collage of seemingly unrelated plot strands that bely the linear expectations raised by its policier trimmings. In fact, the squabbling and infighting between the bureaucratic raincoated ranks of the Seventh Homicide Section, comprised of a host of familiar faces such as Susumu Terajima, provide some of the film's most telling (and amusing) moments, as the film is more concerned with mood and character than providing a convoluted "logical" solution to an otherwise straightforward murder mystery.

 

* 사사키 히로히사 佐々木浩久 Hirohisa Sasaki

 ë°œê´‘하는 입술 発狂する唇 Crazy Lips 2000, 85min, 35mm, Color, Japan

 The two daughters of a widow become distraught when their brother is targeted as the suspect in a rash of beheadings of schoolgirls. One of the sisters, Satomi, goes to a psychic to get definitive proof as to whether her brother is the murder. What she finds goes beyond anything she could have possibly expected. This bizarre piece of J-Horror delivers a shocking and action-packed finale.

 

*시미즈 다카시 清水崇 Takashi Shimizu

 ë§ˆë ˆë¹„토 稀人 Marebito â“” 2004, 92min, 35mm, Color, Japan

 Marebito is a 2004 Japanese Horror movie directed by Takashi Shimizu, a Japanese film director, most famous for the Ju-on series of horror films. He is currently involved to the sequel to The Grudge, itself a remake of his movie Ju-on: The Grudge. The film is about a man named Masuoka, played by Shinya Tsukamoto, who carries a camera everywhere he goes. One day he becomes obsessed with the idea of fear when he sees a frightened man shove a knife in his eye to commit suicide. Wishing to understand the fear that the dead man must have felt before his death, Masuoka descends into a labyrinthine underground area beneath the city. After hours of searching the series of tunnels and passages, Masuoka discovers a naked girl chained to the wall. He takes her back to his apartment and notices she doesn't eat, drink, or speak. The girl, who Masuoka dubs 'F', appears to be something other than human, and Masuoka becomes obsessed with understanding her. However, the more he learns about her and the underground world, the further his world seems to fall apart.

 

* 시라이시 코지 白石晃士 Koji Shiraishi

노로이 ノロイ Noroi  2005, 115min, 35mm, Color, Japan

  April of 2004 after filming a documentary called “The Curse” Masafumi Kobayashi, a respected journalist with a fascination for supernatural phemonena disappears. This is the premise of “Noroi: The Curse”, a spine-chilling Japanese cross between “The Blair Witch Project” and “The Last Broadcast” from director Koji Shiraishi (Ju-Rei) and Taka Ichise–producer of such J-Horror classics as Dark Water, Ju-on and Ringu. After a disclaimer stating that “Names and organizations in this movie have been partially changed” and a warning that the documentary we are about to see is “deemed too disturbing for public viewing”, we are then shown Kobayashi’s documentary–and some extra footage that ties it all together and is guaranteed to give even the most jaded fans a case of the creeping horrors.