Niall Anderson takes delivery of foodie Indian romcom The Lunchbox
Category Archives: Asian Cinema
Miyazaki Trifles
Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, The Wind Rises, is the centrepiece of the BFI’s celebration of the work of a master animator this April. So we, and in places MostlyFilm: The Next Generation*, wanted to talk about our favourite films from Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli.
Continue reading Miyazaki Trifles
East Side Stories
Spank The Monkey previews the Japan Foundation’s 2014 touring film programme, which brings a selection of recent Japanese movies to cinemas across the UK from January 31st to March 27th.
Firebombs and Broomsticks
Indy Datta takes a look at the new BluRays of Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies and Kiki’s Delivery Service.
After the recent theatrical run for the 1988 Ghibli double bill of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, today sees the release of a slew of Studio Ghibli titles in DVD/Blu-ray dual format editions. I was lucky enough to score review copies of Fireflies and Miyazaki’s follow-up to Totoro – Kiki’s Delivery Service. Thoughts on the films and the discs after the jump.
For Love’s Sake
By Spank The Monkey
At the Cannes festival last month, you could see – and hear, thanks to some conspicuous booing – the breakdown of the love-in between Western critics and Japanese director Takashi Miike, as his latest thriller Shield Of Straw got very short shrift indeed. Does this mark the end of Miike’s career as the go-to director for Asian weirdness? I suppose it depends on whether you trust the judgment of the sort of wankers who think that yelling at projected images will improve them.
Perhaps it’s the end of the respectable phase of Miike’s career – after a couple of years of working on the sort of serious drama that attracts festival programmers, he’s going back to just doing whatever takes his fancy. That’s not to say the boo-ers are wrong, though: in a career that’s getting close to hitting the 100 feature mark, he’s made a couple of undeniable stinkers. But no single film in his canon gives you any idea what the ones either side of it will be like. We can go back in time just one year – to June 2012, and the Japanese theatrical release of For Love’s Sake, now available in the UK – for a good example of that.
Vulgaria
By Spank The Monkey
You may be familiar with the cinema technology known as D-Box – a small number of screens in the UK have already been fitted with it. It’s one more way of reducing the film experience to a theme park ride: a cinema rigged with motion control seats that shake, tilt and vibrate in ways defined by the movement on screen. Generally, it’s used to add realism to action movies, wobbling the viewer as things crash and explode in front of them.
Later this year, a Hong Kong studio is set to release the first 3D pornographic film using the D-Box process. This should tell you everything you need to know about the territory’s attitude to sex on screen. Even more so when you discover that the film in question is 4D Sex & Zen, the latest entry in a franchise previously discussed in these pages. As I suggested back then, you get the feeling that erotic film in Hong Kong hasn’t really grown up yet. So when you discover that one of the biggest local hits of the past few years has been a bawdy comedy called Vulgaria (just released on home video in the UK), you begin to fear the worst. But you shouldn’t. Continue reading Vulgaria
Once Upon A Time In Japan
by Spank the Monkey
This year’s Japan Foundation film season – entitled Once Upon A Time In Japan, and touring the UK’s arthouse cinemas from today – has a historical flavour to it. All of the films are period pieces of one type or another, showing how Japanese filmmakers use stories of the past to say things about the present day.
Much of the programme hasn’t been seen in the UK before, unlike last year, so I can’t give you quite as comprehensive a preview as I did in 2012. We can’t discuss Hula Girls, the latest example of the Japanese genre in which young people bond during unfashionable physical activity. (See also: Waterboys, Swing Girls, Tits Volleyball.) We have to pass over Kaidan Horror Classics, a portmanteau film featuring big name directors like Hirokazu Kore-eda and Shinya Tsukamoto. Most regrettably, screeners were not available for Bubble Fiction: Boom Or Bust, in which Hiroshi Abe tries to solve Japan’s economic crisis with a time-travelling washing machine. How can the other seven films in the programme stand up against a synopsis like that? Well, let’s find out.
Mostly Film Best of 2012: The Raid
by theTramp
2012 in film has been the sort of year, for me, where the best films have not been the most memorable. Three films stand out in terms of memorability; TED – a one joke movie about a teddy bear that can talk and also smoke, take drugs, drink and is consistently horny, made by the makers of Family Guy and memorable mostly for two great cameos. Killer Joe – a film with so many flaws that you can list them as you watch it, but the central performances are so great that you don’t care. If Matthew McConaughey doesn’t get an Oscar nod for this then quite frankly he’s been robbed. To my mind Killer Joe is the most chilling on screen character since Mitchum’s Harry Powell and that is a comparison I do not make lightly. Finally, and the subject of my ‘best of 2012’ is The Raid.
The Hometown Trilogy
by Spank the Monkey
Thanks to the London Film Festival, I have a uniquely skewed perspective on the career of Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke. I’ve seen two of his movies there – his 2004 drama The World, and his 2010 documentary I Wish I Knew – in what would turn out to be among the very few screenings they ever received in the UK. And I’ve even briefly been in the same room as the man himself, when in 2000 he attended an LFF panel on the challenges facing Asian independent filmmakers.
But his famous films – the ones that made his reputation, and actually got a proper cinema release over here – well, somehow those have eluded me over the years. So just in time for Christmas, Artificial Eye have repackaged the three films that introduced Jia Zhang-Ke to the world: the loosely-related collection that’s nowadays referred to as The Hometown Trilogy.
Tales from the Land of Gold: Zipangu 2012
Clare Dean experiences Japanarchy in the UK.
It’s Friday evening and I find myself eating Sushi in an old Lambeth workhouse. Not something Charlie Chaplin would’ve done but then he never got the chance to go to the Zipangu Film Festival. This was the third annual festival and the first one held at the Cinema Museum in Kennington (and former workhouse home of Chaplin when he was a small boy).
Zipangu is a different kind of festival. You might not see the latest Japanese big budget, sword fighting epic or an in-depth Ozu retrospective, but you will see something unusual or little-seen and it’s not always the traditional representation of Japan that you might expect.
MostlyFilm 