Eiji Uchida and Shinzo Katayama are two of the most interesting voices active in Japanese cinema nowadays, with titles like “Lowlife Love” and “Midnight Swan” of the former and “Missing” of the latter being some of the best we have seen in recent years. Now the two combine their forces for “Life of Mariko in Kabukicho”, a movie that shares a lot of similarities with another work of Uchida, “Love and other Cults”.
“Life of Mariko in Kabukicho” is screening at Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival
Mariko, a girl with a rather dramatic past, runs a small bar in Kabukicho filled with eccentric but loyal patrons which also doubles as a detective agency. Meanwhile, a missing scientist is running amok in the streets of the area, carrying with him an alien in a wooden box. The FBI are searching for both, and in their efforts to find someone who can...
“Life of Mariko in Kabukicho” is screening at Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival
Mariko, a girl with a rather dramatic past, runs a small bar in Kabukicho filled with eccentric but loyal patrons which also doubles as a detective agency. Meanwhile, a missing scientist is running amok in the streets of the area, carrying with him an alien in a wooden box. The FBI are searching for both, and in their efforts to find someone who can...
- 7/8/2023
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
Winner of the audience award in last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, “Just Remembering” channels a number of elements from Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth” but also includes a very interesting role reversal element and unusual approach to the timeline of the story.
“Just Remembering” is screening at London East Asia Film Festival (Leaff)
Teruo is a former dancer who suffers from an injury on his leg that has forbidden him from dancing, and now works as a light technician for a theater company, although he is not exactly great at his job. Yo is a taxi driver (concluding the role reversal element), and a fan of Winona Ryder’s segment in the aforementioned movie, and also Teruo’s former girlfriend. Through a series of flashbacks mostly taking place around July 26, Teruo’s birthday, their backstory is revealed, as much as the background of a middle-aged man always...
“Just Remembering” is screening at London East Asia Film Festival (Leaff)
Teruo is a former dancer who suffers from an injury on his leg that has forbidden him from dancing, and now works as a light technician for a theater company, although he is not exactly great at his job. Yo is a taxi driver (concluding the role reversal element), and a fan of Winona Ryder’s segment in the aforementioned movie, and also Teruo’s former girlfriend. Through a series of flashbacks mostly taking place around July 26, Teruo’s birthday, their backstory is revealed, as much as the background of a middle-aged man always...
- 10/21/2022
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
"You're wasting your time! Go away" Grasshopper Films has debuted the official Us trailer for a Japanese romantic drama titled Asako I & II, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year. This is actually just one 119 minute film, despite the title including what references to what looks like Part I & Part II. The title is actually a reference to the plot - where a woman from Osaka (named Asako) meets a man, falls in love with him, then he disappears. Two years later, she meets his perfect double. Erika Karata stars as Asako, along with Masahiro Higashide as both Baku & Ryôhei (of course), plus Sairi Itô, Kôji Nakamoto, Kôji Seto, Misako Tanaka, and Daichi Watanabe. This played to quite a bit of acclaim at Cannes, and stopped by a number of other prestigious festivals last fall. Everyone always talks about the cat. If you're in the mood for...
- 2/15/2019
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s earnest romance switches things up by having a woman obsessed with a man’s beauty and then falling for his double
Here is a quibblingly titled movie from Japan that turns out to be an odd doppelganger romance of Ya earnestness, directed and co-written by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, adapted from the novel by Tomoka Shibasaki. It has a kind of counter-Vertigo theme, a tale of mirror-image obsession, but where this kind of thing is usually about the possessive male gaze and passively enigmatic female beauty, here things are reversed. Asako is about the female gaze, and male beauty.
Erika Karata plays Asako, a college student in Kyoto, demure, hardworking, self-effacing and possessed of a doll-like beauty. One day she attends a photographic exhibition and outside chances across Baku (Masahiro Higashide), a fellow student who is hardly less pretty than she is: cool, careless, like the solo breakout star of a boyband.
Here is a quibblingly titled movie from Japan that turns out to be an odd doppelganger romance of Ya earnestness, directed and co-written by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, adapted from the novel by Tomoka Shibasaki. It has a kind of counter-Vertigo theme, a tale of mirror-image obsession, but where this kind of thing is usually about the possessive male gaze and passively enigmatic female beauty, here things are reversed. Asako is about the female gaze, and male beauty.
Erika Karata plays Asako, a college student in Kyoto, demure, hardworking, self-effacing and possessed of a doll-like beauty. One day she attends a photographic exhibition and outside chances across Baku (Masahiro Higashide), a fellow student who is hardly less pretty than she is: cool, careless, like the solo breakout star of a boyband.
- 5/15/2018
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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