Tag Archives: Japanese

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CAPSULE: BEST WISHES TO ALL (2022)

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Mina ni ko are

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Best Wishes to All is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

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DIRECTED BY: Yûta Shimotsu

FEATURING: Kotone Furukawa, Masashi Arifuku, Yoshiko Inuyama

PLOT: A nursing student returns from Tokyo to visit her grandparents remote village, where she finds they are acting oddly.

Still from best wishes to all (2022)

COMMENTS: We first meet the nameless young star of Best Wishes to All as a kindly nursing student who, based on sinister musical cues and subtle expressions, seems nervous to travel back to the village she grew up in to visit her aging grandparents. Part of her reluctance may be the family’s obsession with happiness. Since she was a young girl, they have been asking her “are you happy?”; her affirmative replies ring uncomfortably insincere. Dim, disturbing memories from childhood centered around bumps in the night and a perpetually locked door in the upper level of the house also give her pause. And perhaps she also foresees her outwardly pleasant grandparents’ odd behavior, such as their tendency to snort like pigs when eating pork.

In fact, their strange habits are accelerating, to the point where the heroine wonders if they might be experiencing dementia. But her own reactions become equally strange as the movie goes on. Relatively early on, the true horror of the situation is revealed; and while, at first, our heroine reacts as expected, then the movie shifts into a more dreamlike register. Beginning with an absurd automotive accident, the semi-logical horror story dissolves into a more impressionistic and nightmarish experience. It goes from ominously eccentric to full-on surreal, ending up in blood, betrayal, and, somehow, a middle aged man dancing in his underwear.

The village nonchalantly accepts the unnatural brutality of the movie’s premise, and the heroine is pressured into believing that this is just the way of the world. The happiness of the lion is the misery of the gazelle. Best Wishes to All posits the logically questionable but metaphorically sound proposition, “does the happiness of one person require the misery of another?” Although the thesis, taken literally, is absurd, the hypothetical is provocative. Who makes the smartphones, coffee, chocolate, diamonds, pornography, and food that you enjoy in your daily life? Wouldn’t you be happier if you didn’t know? Or, at least, if you could pretend that you don’t?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…almost 90 minutes at the intersection of happiness and weirdness.”–Sharai Bohannon, Horror Movie Blog (festival screening)

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CAPSULE: WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE (2001)

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Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu

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DIRECTED BY: 

FEATURING: , Misa Shimizu, Kazuo Kitamura

PLOT: An unemployed salesman intends to steal hidden treasure from a confectionary shop, but complications arise when he falls for the elderly owner’s caretaker, a woman with a unique condition.

COMMENTS: Sasano is already down on his luck when his only friend, Taro, passes away. The architectural firm he worked for has folded, leaving him unemployed, and his wife only calls to insult him while demanding his unemployment check. Taro, known as the “Philosopher,” lived as a hobo in a tent filled with rare books, but he was the only person to treat Sasano with respect and to offer him advice gleaned over the course of a misspent life.

Taro once told Sasano of a buried treasure, secreted in a pot, in a house with a view of a red bridge, in a summer resort town on the Sea of Japan. At an impromptu funerary meal held in his honor, Sasano mentions Taro’s claim to this improbable treasure. His hobo companions laugh it off; Taro told the rest of them about it, too. But after a series of unpromising job interviews, Sasano decides to leave Tokyo for the seaside, in search of Taro’s supposed pot of gold.

Arriving in the off season, Sasano stands out as an unlikely tourist. He locates the red bridge, and the house, which Taro had worried wouldn’t still be standing. Sasano spies a woman leaving the building and tails her to the grocery store. There, he catches her stealing cheese while awkwardly standing in a puddle of water. A dropped earring gives him an excuse to follow her back home. She hesitantly welcomes him in, then their chance meeting rapidly becomes a rather. . . aqueous sexual encounter.

Saeko, as she reluctantly explains, suffers from too much “water,” and when it overflows, she’s driven to commit crimes like petty theft. Thoroughly shocked by the whole thing, Sasano hypocritically reproaches her for stealing, while the relationship provides him convenient opportunities for him to search the house for Taro’s treasure.

As Sasano spends more time in the town and comes to know its quirky residents, the story heads in a predictable direction; but its tale of two unlikely romances is tinged with metaphysical symbolism surrounding the element of water. In one scene, Saeko takes Sasano to meet a nuclear physicist who studies neutrinos. He explains to them how the particles have to be shot through “superpure water” in order for their experiments to work. The town’s pure water also provides the key ingredient to making the perfect sweet cakes, though as Saeko eventually reveals to Sasano, their river was once dangerously polluted with cadmium.

Director Imamura’s enduring interest in the connection between human beings and their environment, as well as his explorations into the influence of crime and nonconformity on Japanese society, surface here again, in his final film. The flights of philosophical fancy lead into brief moments of CGI-animated imagery, but most of the scenes remain rooted more or less firmly in reality. Ultimately, Warm Water makes for a slightly kinky but heart-warming tale of how to find purpose, meaning, and happiness in life, along with sex without shame.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…combines fish out of water stories with a weird metaphor for female sexuality in this sweetly quirky film which never quite gels.”–Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge [Blu-ray]

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CALAMARI UNION (1985) / THE CALAMARI WRESTLER (2004)

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The odds that, out of the near-500 films still in our reader queue, two of them would utilize the very same chewy appetizer in their titles seem awfully remote. Yet here we are, cinematically celebrating this savory treat from Helsinki to Tokyo. So let’s see just what calamari means to these filmmakers, and whether they’d have been better off invoking jalapeño poppers.

CALAMARI UNION (1985)

DIRECTED BY: Aki Kaurismäki

FEATURING: Timo Eränkö, Kari Heiskanen, Asmo Hurula, Sakke Järvenpää, Markku Toikka

PLOT: A collection of petty criminals band together to escape the Kallio district for the greener pastures of Eira; their journey to a new neighborhood, however, will be perilous and filled with obstacles.

COMMENTS: The classic World War II caper The Great Escape is about the daring breakout of more than 80 prisoners from a Nazi prison camp. The plan requires extraordinary levels of cleverness, craftiness, and chutzpah. Even then, the odds are against them, and (spoiler alert for 80-year-old history) only three men eventually get away.

Calamari Union is The Great Escape for idiots. A collection of 14 low-level criminals all named Frank (plus an additional traveler who speaks exclusively in English that he seems to have picked up from watching movies) join forces to escape certain doom in a bad Helsinki neighborhood. Are the cops closing in? Is some crime boss about to bring the hammer down on them? No, they just don’t fit in. Too many hills, with kids and dogs running around willy-nilly. No good can come of all that. They all agree: “A sick branch must seek a healthier tree.” They must escape to the paradise of Eira.

Trouble is, they’re all comically bad at looking out for their own best interests. Upon hijacking a subway to take them to the city center, the train driver shoots one of the Franks, an event met with only casual interest from the rest of the troupe. They all independently gravitate to the same café, despite having been warned that it’s every man for himself. They chase girls, make mildly extravagant purchases, pick fights, anything to delay actually reaching their destination. Getting to the promised land would seem to be the most urgent goal, but no one is in any particular hurry to get anywhere. Even when blessed with useful skills, such as convincing a driver to hand over their vehicle with no debate, they don’t put their talents to any particular use. That, of course, is Calamari Union’s particular breed of surrealism: no one does anything logical. It’s amusing, but as aimless as the petty crooks themselves.

Many of the actors are Finnish rock musicians, which might explain the moment when the Franks all show up for a musical interlude in Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CALAMARI UNION (1985) / THE CALAMARI WRESTLER (2004) →

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2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART THREE

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Montréal 2025

More than once I was quickly impressed by a film’s animation only to discover that I was only watching the production company credits.

7/30: Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo

Crank down the musical score by half, and this would land in a far better place. Tsai Chia Ying attempts something risky here as he aims to fuse deep character emotion with ghostly horror. Chia Ming awakens every morning from an overhead drip. Every morning: this love-struck fellow is stuck in a loop wherein he witnesses the object of his affections die somehow while on a hiking trip taken to search for the remains of a mutual friend lost to the haunted mountains. Major No-No Points are awarded to the original trio, who decide to cut through a rather creepy barrier in the surrounding woods, accidentally disrupting an esoteric ceremony. Very nearly ending badly, the movie upgrades from regrettable to merely “meh” with its final, actual, conclusion.

$Positions

Mike meets his daily struggles with unwavering optimism and friendliness, which is no small feat in face of director Brandon Daley’s ceaseless abuse. Crypto (oh how I loathe you) sinks its talons in our hapless hero, clouding his judgment with every dip and spike. We follow a series of increasingly nasty twists of fate (and concurrent ill-decisions) as Mike’s already crummy life hits rock bottom—making true an early, optimistically-stated declaration that no, he’s “nowhere near the bottom yet!” With polyamory, drug addiction, medical debt, and somewhat more urine consumption than I might have preferred, $Positions is simultaneously icky, wacky, and heartfelt. Special shout-out to leading man Michael Kunick. I passed him after the screening commending his performance as one of the best depictions of Job to hit the screen.

Désolé, Pardon, Je m’excuse

Like many of her generation, office-worker Ella loves Internet videos. Unlike many of her generation (at least, I hope), she loves Internet videos released by a Continue reading 2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART THREE →

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CHAO (2025)

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チャオ

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DIRECTED BY: Yasuhiro Aoki

FEATURING: Voices of Ouji Suzuka, Anna Yamada, Ryôta Yamasato, Kenta Miyake, Kavka Shishido

PLOT: Stefan, a mild-mannered company drone with a dream, finds he is the key to peace between landmen and mermen when Neptune’s daughter chooses him to be her husband.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: This collision of Plymptonian flourish and anime fundamentals is an hour and a half of wild lines, vibrant colors, giant heads, small heads, robo-antics, and the pratfalls of a literal fish out of water. Intense. Cute, too.

COMMENTS: In an introduction recorded for the Fantasia screening, director Yasuhiro Aoki tells us to enjoy the fun, and that we should keep an eye on the many little details. It is well to heed his soft-spoken advice: his film is stuffed to the gills with sight gags, throw-away visuals, and plenty of narrative slight of hand. As a conjuring trick—for ChaO is nothing short of magical—this account of Stefan’s strange courtship pays off handsomely for the observant viewer. The wild flow of line and form, not to mention the glorious buffet of colors, builds to a fantastical showdown as the lowly hero bumbles from one awkward challenge to another.

The meet-cute between the lovebirds comes like a bolt out of the blue. (Albeit the ocean blue, not the skies above.) Dreaming of fabricating a marine-friendly ship propulsion system, Stefan faces a hectic journey one morning when alerted, and then attacked, by his roommate’s new robot-alarm invention. Shouted at, and ultimately smacked upside the head by, this assertive electronic, he escapes his tiny apartment, tossing a cool drink to the ever-present, never-working rickshaw driver out front. He’s charged with swabbing the deck of his boss’ ship (“Mr Sea”, a Little Tikes Toddle Tot-proportioned opportunist) and before he knows it, the sea king’s daughter singles him out as her suitor—and all of Shanghai is on board for the courtship.

Framed as a recollection from a burnt-out Stefan talking with an eager reporter, ChaO‘s energy is (barely) contained within its anecdotal form. Highspeed chases with feral reporters, inexplicable animated asides, and the omnipresence of ChaO herself—in glorious-pink koi form, five-foot tall, with golden high-top sneakers and jets of blue water flowing from her gills—make for an experience akin to one’s eyeballs being speedily pulled about by an enthusiastic raconteur. So much craft is packed into its ninety minutes that by the breathless, face-scrunching finale on the high seas as Neptune launches his watery arsenal at the hapless Stefan, some may be relieved that the end is in sight.

ChaO is a marvelous experience, with Yasuhiro Aoki batting the optic nerve with cleverness, cuteness, and confusion. (The infinitely long hospital bed, or the casual heaping of spun lavatory paper as Stefan panics in the men’s room, are among the head-scratching moments that could lead the viewer to a new bald spot.) Being so visual in its nature, I can only hope to convey a fraction of the peculiar charm. The child-friendly nature of this romantic comedy fish tale adds to its appeal, landing ChaO as another of the all-too-few gateway films for young weird-o-philes in development. Like Spirited Away and Ghost Cat Anzu, Yasuhiro’s madcap outing compels a manic grin which lingers well after the closing credits.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s a dreamlike logic to the world that might not make literal sense, but it holds surprising emotional weight…  This weirdly beautiful and absurdly humorous fable timelessly unfolds, reveling in its Japanese tendencies and aesthetic.” — Joshua M. Hayes, Josh At The Movies (festival screening)