Baby Assassins 2 Babies
Last year, Sakamoto Yugo's made Baby Assassins, an action comedy about two teenage girls getting into the lucrative business of paid killing. It was an international surprise hit, so guess what? He made a sequel!
Our J. Hurtado checked it out and this is what he said in his review:
"There’s an energy to Baby Assassins 2 Babies that is hard to match and impossible to ignore. The film fan in me regrets that someday these babies will have to grow up, but there is also excitement at where this franchise can go if it continues to grace us with dizzying marvels like this."
Sounds like fun!
Bad Lands
A crime thriller about a con-woman and her younger brother who manage to strike a big target, but then they discover that playing with the big guys brings a lot of additional danger. The director is Harada Masato of Kamikaze Taxi and Sekigahara fame.
Classics 1: The Frightful Era of Kurama Tengu / The Peerless Patriot, Priest of Darness, Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo
As always, the Camera Japan Festival will screen a few films from the 1920s and 1930s. For many people this will quite literally be the only chance to ever see these, and this year there is a nice selection. The Frightful Era of Kurama Tengu (1928) and The Peerless Patriot (1932, and pictured here) are two films of which only a few reels remain, so they are shown together as two mid-length silents. Live music by the Rotterdam Kinematic Ensemble will accompany the two screenings.
Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (1935), shown in a separate screening, is a thriller with comedy elements where several parties are looking for a big treasure. And in Priest of darkness (1936) a boy steals a valuable knife, setting off a chain of mysterious events. The director of both films is Yamanaka Sadao, who is also famous for Humanity and Paper Balloons. Only three of his twenty-six films remain, so it's great to be able to see two of them here!
Classics 2: Tokyo Pop, Macross Plus
Want something more modern, like with color, but still classic? look no further, the festival has those as well. Tokyo Pop (1989) is a bittersweet cult classic about an American woman trying to become a famous singer in Japan, and is directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer fame.
Classic anime lovers get treated to a screening of Macross Plus (1996), a mecha spectacle directed by legends Watanabe Shinichirō (Cowboy Bepop) and Kawamori Shōji (The Vision of Escaflowne), with a fantastic soundtrack by Kanno Yoko.
December
Already the buzz is out that this courtroom drama may be the best film shown this year. An estranged couple need to work together to build a case to prevent the murderer of their daughter to be released from prison. Meanwhile, the murderer has trouble getting to grips with the consequences of her actions. Heavy stuff, but apparently handled with empathy and subtlety by director Anshul Chauhan.
The Dry Spell
A feel-good drama about two waterworks employees who need to cut off the water supply of people unable to pay their bills. The job stops being fun when a heat wave strikes Japan, and when the men encounter some galling social circumstances, they start bending the rules a bit to show some humanity.
Egoist
A layered drama about two men getting into a passionate gay relationship until life throws them a few curveballs. Directed by Matsunaga Daishi (Pieta in the Toilet) fame, based on the semi-autobiography by Takayama Makoto, with the lead role played by Suzuki Ryōhei of Hentai Kamen fame.
Gold Kingdom and Water Kingdom
Stunning debut feature anime by Watanabe Kotono, a fairy-tale in which a princess and an architect fake a marriage to try to avoid two countries from sliding into a disastrous war with each other. The plan works initially, but the two less-fake-by-the-day-lovers are soon targeted by dark forces who want war anyway...
Komada: A Whisky Family (and a Japanese Whisky tasting afterwards...)
Alas, no sake-tasting this year, but if it was every year it wouldn't be speacial, right? And the festival has a different event planned which might just be as good: a Japanese Whisky-tasting, hosted by expert Wouter van Tol.
And as a nice tie-in, the festival shows the anime feature Komada: A Whisky Family earlier that evening. It's about a girl who inherits a distillery and is determined to make a success of it. And it is the feature debut of director Yoshihara Masayuki, a veteran animator who worked on Jin-Roh, Oshii's 1995 Ghost in the Shell and the series Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex (so I'm expecting technical excellence here).
New Religion
Horror is represented as well, with Kondo Keishi's New Religion. Sex worker Miyabi encounters a strange customer who only wants to take pictures of her body parts. But every time he does that, Miyabi feels a strange connection growing between her and her recently deceased daughter. What is happening, and why does Japanese society appear to be affected along with Miyabi? And what will happen when the photographer snaps pictures of Miyabi's eyes, which he leaves for the last?
Perfect Days
Here I can copy most of my blurb from the Vlissingen festival last week: the new film from Wim Wenders deals with someone who seems perfectly content living alone, cleaning toilets in Tokyo, until a visit from a family member reveals there may be more to his reclusive lifestyle.
This was nominated for the Golden Palm in Cannes and lead actor Yakusho Kôji won the price for best actor there. In his review, our Zach Gayne says the following:
"Wim Wenders, whose Palme d’Or winning Wings of Desire helped define a cinematic poetry of observation, returns to the same profound territory in his latest and possibly most spiritually satisfying ode to perspective and the power of connectivity to date. Though it’s a day-in-the-life film, It’s not so much about life as it is the act of feeling, and therefore being alive. With so much existence inundating our senses at every moment, it’s easy to forget our place within the creatures surrounding us: the birds, the fish, the trees, the garbage people, and the poets, breathing it all in while they still can."
Spaghetti Ramen
Last but not least there is a very, VERY special screening being planned by the festival, quite possible an only-time-to-see kind of screening.
Five years ago, director Chi Yen Ooi (alias Ozawa Kikuno) died in a mountaineering accident in Nepal. But during visits he had shown his family an edited version of his feature Spaghetti Ramen, a part live-action, part stop-motion dark paranoid fever dream in which a girl follows the instructions from a praying mantis on how to save the world. Oh, and it also has pink influences, in which a writer fantasises about his wife, who is a prostitute. Yes, it's wild. There are moving eyeballs and speaking turtles too.
Ozawa's family has now agreed to have the film shown once at a festival, and... well, this is it!
