Only Yesterday (Japan, 1991)

A twenty-seven-year-old office worker travels to the countryside while reminiscing about her childhood in Tokyo.

Only Yesterday is probably the most mature film animation giant Studio Ghibli has ever done, far away from the usual fantasy elements that often marks their other creations. Here, we're acquainted with 27-year old Taeko who, while taking a job out in the sticks, thinks back to her early days in the city. Made by Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies), Only Yesterday shows an incredible appreciation for nature and the life outside our stressful bubble of hectic social life and work. Studio Ghibli takes something as ordinary as slicing up a pineapple and makes it a joy to watch because it's so carefully and meticulously animated. Takahata took 17 members of his staff on a research trip to a rural area in Yamagata prefecture similar to the place where many of the film's present-day (1982) scenes are set. There the staff consulted with a farmer named Inoue, who taught them about harvesting safflowers, as the film's heroine, Taeko, does in the narrative. The staff videotaped their journey so that they would be able to re-create accurately in animation both the fields of safflowers and the natural beauty of the region in general.

The cinematography is a love letter to the films of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) with the "camera" set very low and rarely moving. Where Hayao Miyazaki makes films about the often fantastical and made-up worlds, Takahata usually focuses on the character driven stories and the deeply personal journeys that leaves a bittersweet taste with the viewers. The juxtaposition of Taeko's younger and older self naturally portrays the dreams we give up, the wishes never fulfilled but also how we're different people from when we were young. 

Genre: Drama/Romance

Book Review: WKW - The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai

The long-awaited retrospective from the internationally renowned film director celebrated for his visually lush and atmospheric films. Wong Kar Wai is known for his romantic and stylish films that explore—in saturated, cinematic scenes—themes of love, longing, and the burden of memory. His style reveals a fascination with mood and texture, and a sense of place figures prominently. In this volume, the first on his entire body of work, Wong Kar Wai and writer John Powers explore Wong’s complete oeuvre in the locations of some of his most famous scenes.

Through six conversations we follow WKW through the jungle of his movies and get to know everything from how he creates the atmosphere of the most intense scenes, to how he struggled when some of his films were poorly received. Between chapters where past films and childhood memories are discussed the pages are covered with gorgeous photos from all his movies and a ton of behind-the-scenes photos. To me, WKW has always seemed like a more mysterious director or at least more secretive than other directors which you hear news from all the time, so the book definitely filled a void of things I wondered about ever since I first began watching his movies. A hearty recommendation to any fan of his films, and whether you're reading about juicy actor backstories from In the Mood for Love (2000) or how he were a bit regretful regarding the lead roles in Fallen Angels (1995), you're bound to be fascinated by one of the greatest minds in the history of cinema.

Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (Japan, 1981)

A teenage delinquent schoolgirl named Izumi Hoshi inherits her father's Yakuza clan.

Sailor Suit sounds like it could be a slapstick comedy but the film is way more serious than you'd think, and while there's of course some comedic elements we're given an honest portrayal of what it would be if a young school girl suddenly had to take control over a Yakuza clan. It's an early example of how a huge pop idol also became a massively popular actress, due to how singer Hiroko Yakushimaru plays the lead role. 

Many cool scenes, a great balance between violence and Japanese quirkiness and a fantastic ride through 1980's Tokyo, Sailor Suit is a time capsule full of Yakuza satire.

Genre: Action/Romance

Hiroshima Mon Amour (France/Japan, 1959)

A French woman and a Japanese man have an affair while she is in Japan making a film about peace and the impact of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, The man, an architect, lost his family in the bombing. She recalls her lover during the war, a 23 year-old German soldier who later died. Despite the time they spend together, her attachment appears minimal and they go forward into the future.

Given that I have a seemingly insatiable fascination and interest in the atomic bombings during WWII, Hiroshima Mon Amour feels like one of the essential classics. The film pioneered the idea of having flashbacks to create a nonlinear storyline, and when we're taken back to the destruction and burning fields of Hiroshima it's done with stark realism and nothing sugar coated. It's also wild to see the place a couple of years after the explosion in scenes taking place around the wounded city. 

Genre: Drama/Romance

Vengeance Is Mine (Japan, 1979)

Iwao Enokizu is a middle-aged man who has an unexplainable urge to commit insane and violent murders. Eventually he is chased by the police all over Japan, but somehow he always manages to escape. He meets a woman who runs a brothel. They love each other but how long can they be together?

As a big fan of Shohei Imamura (Black Rain), seeing him tackling the story of a real life serial killer was a no brainer. It's not exactly for the faint of heart due to the grisly acts of rape and violence toward women, and it can be a bit draining. If you've seen a film about Ted Bundy, this has some of that same style of following a psychopath and being horrified by the fact that people like this can exist anywhere, and on the outside they look just like anyone else. 

Genre: Crime/Drama

The Neighbour No. 13 (Japan, 2005)

Jûzô Murasaki is a boy miscast in his classroom, being frequently abused, tortured, beaten and humiliated by the bully Tôru Akai and his gang of juvenile punks. After years of repression, rejection and fear without facing Akai, he develops a psychopathic dual personality with a violent alter-ego. While living in the apartment 13 of a tenement building, he becomes unable to control his violent dark personality, who plots an evil revenge.

Based on a manga, The Neighbour No. 13 serves us a mysterious case of underdog turned villain. An interesting story which grabs you right off the bat though it looses some steam and some later scenes starts to drag, even so, it's a story of revenge that you'll want to finish and maybe question who you want to see come out on top. Not too bloody but rather spooky due to the hidden, unreliable and unpredictable dark side of Murasaki.

Genre: Horror/Thriller

Late Autumn (Japan, 1960)

Family and friends of the late Shuzo Miwa have gathered for his annual memorial service, this one marking the seventh anniversary of his passing. Three of his long time friends - married Shuzo Taguchi, married Soichi Mamiya, and widowed Seiichiro Hirayama - have long known and admitted to each other that they have always been attracted to his widow, Akiko Miwa, who they believe has gotten even more beautiful as she has matured. The three friends take it upon themselves to find a husband for the Miwa's now twenty-four year old daughter, Ayako Miwa, who they believe as beautiful as her mother, and who, as a pure innocent, deserves a good husband. 

I will try not to write a whole speech proclaiming how perfectly Yasujiro Ozu composes his shots or how his color system of choice makes characters and carefully placed objects glow, but instead be thankful for the wealth of movies he gave us. Late Autumn has that grainy yet incredibly defined and mesmerizing colorization, much like Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), and here it blends together with Ozu's tranquil film style very naturally. I guess the visuals overshadows the plot, though it's not disappointing by any stretch. Definitely a film one should go through when the Akira Kurosawa filmography has been exhausted and Ozu is next in line. 

Genre: Drama

The Third Wife (Vietnam, 2018)

In 19th century rural Vietnam, fourteen-year-old May is ready to become the third wife of a wealthy landowner. Little does she know that her hidden desires will take her by surprise and force her to make a choice between living in safety and being free.

The Third Wife marks an amazing debut by director Ash Mayfair, who for 4 months lived in a rural village in preparation for the film and to get all the customs and details right. Ash commands the camera with great confidence and you could never have thought that this is her first feature film, but she perfectly blends a disturbing tale of underage marriage with the beautiful countryside of Vietnam. The tempo is consistently composed, yet the emotional waves inside of young May are growing higher and higher. 

By some it would be considered art-house, but I hope that term doesn't scare away people from experiencing a film which is in the vein of Tran Anh Hung (Cyclo).

Genre: Drama

Serpent's Path & Eyes of the Spider (Japan, 1998)

Who knew that in 1998, we got a Japanese precursor to Park Chan-wook's Vengeance-trilogy, only this time it's a duo. 

Both directed in the same year by everyone's (you horror connoisseur's out there) favorite Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and both dealing with the ever returning, never-dying theme of revenge. I mentioned Chan-wook because Serpent's Path especially feels like a huge inspiration for his Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), only here we got a much higher body count. Serpent and Spider very much goes hand in hand, sharing some of the same actors and how they deal with the possibility of being able to exact pain on those who've ruined your life, and in some instances it gets way darker than Chan-wook's films. 

The two stories are also like different branches on the same tree, where in Spider a man discovers a darker side of himself after exacting revenge on his daughter's killer, and in Serpent a man enlists a friend to help him identify and exact revenge upon his daughter's murderer. Kurosawa manages to juggle the films plot elements not to close to each other and finds their own personalities with ease, the only thing the viewer know is that someone is going to pay for a heinous crime.

Genre: Drama/Crime

Daughter of the Nile (Taiwan, 1987)

The eldest daughter of a broken and troubled family works to keep the family together and look after her younger siblings, who are slipping into a life of crime.

Watching a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien (Café Lumière, The Assassin) is like opening a bottle of Taiwan's finest movie magic. His restrained and subtle way of shooting scenes feels like a must-have in our contemporary cinematic hell of exaggerated editing, simplified storytelling and dumbed down characters for the masses. Daughter of the Nile spoils us with a beautiful portrayal of life in 1980's Taipei's neon-soaked street-corners and crowded bars. We get to see just how close the danger lies even to those who should be far from it. 

Hou is a big name in Asian film circles, but I'm certain that if he would have been a western filmmaker his films would make a much larger splash and be acclaimed by a much larger audience. Now they sort of lives on as an old reminder of how Taiwan made films in ways critics praise directors for in modern times.

Genre: Crime/Drama

The Famous Sword Bijomaru (Japan, 1945)

Kiyone Sakurai, an apprentice swordmaker makes a sword for his guardian, Kozaemon Onoda. Onoda breaks the sword while defending his lord which eventually leads to his death at the hands of Naito, when Naito demands to marry his daughter Sasae. Sasae vows to avenge her father's death and pleads for Kiyone Sakurai to make a special sword for her. So Kiyone go to the master swordsmith Kiyohide Yamatomori to learn their craft and forge the sword.

With Bijomaru, director Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu) must have made one of the first films in Japanese cinema where a woman gets to bring the pain to the bad guys, and in 1945 that wasn't exactly the norm. Clocking in at just over an hour, Bijomaru feels like a well-balanced samurai skirmish, and I like how the making of a sword is such a big part of the plot and not a romance or a story about a helpless geisha. 

It also gets harder and harder to find films in decent quality from this far back in Mizoguchi's filmography, so being able to reach this deep is always a treat. 

Genre: Drama

Mifune: The Last Samurai (US/Japan, 2015)

A feature-length documentary about the life and films of legendary actor Toshiro Mifune, weaving together film clips, archival stills, and interviews with such luminaries as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. Narrated by Keanu Reeves.

If you're at all interested in actor Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa's collaborations, Mifune should prove to be a fascinating look at their work together with the most focus on Mifune's filmography. Not just is Mifune an in-depth look at his life, but an incredible source of information and trivia from his entire film career; e.g . the man who played the original Godzilla (1954) was a petty samurai who got killed by Mifune once, and there's a lot of interviews with old actors who used to act alongside Mifune who all shares their stories of what happened on set. Even actor Koji Yakusho weighs in on how huge Mifune was in the industry.

Sure, it's a little jarring to hear a tired Keanu Reeves narrate the whole thing, but you quickly get used to it and after a while you're absorbed by stories of how Mifune loved to eat ramen between takes. Being a film with limited time, Mifune can't go into details with absolutely everything but at least it touches upon what happened between him and Kurosawa at the end of their work together. It's painfully bittersweet to hear an actress read Kurosawa's last word to his favorite actor.

All in all, this is a captivating time capsule showing the massive impact one single actor had on the film industry, and how his acting inspired people around the globe.

Genre: Documentary

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (Japan, 2001)

Strange incidents occur when an American submarine has been destroyed by a mysterious force at sea off the shores of Guam. Only Admiral Tachibana was certain that behind the disaster was none other than the destructive King of the Monsters, Godzilla! 50 years after his attack on Tokyo in 1954, Godzilla has mysteriously returned to life to destroy Japan, and General Tachibana, whose parents died in the monster's destructive wake, was prepared for his return.

In these days of never-ending, disappointing remakes it's always nice to fall back on the originals. GMK does what a billion dollars worth of computer graphics can't: create timeless, wildly entertaining destruction. Watching this film today is just as fun as it was back in the day, and will be in many years from now due to the fact that everything is made of real props and every exploding building is an amazing spectacle. Here, the monsters have gotten an updated look, King Ghidorah is a nice guy (!) and Godzilla is back to being the main baddie. 

The plot is of course nothing to write home about, and basically follows a B-movie storyline pattern but that's forgiven the second Godzilla shows up. Cue an amazing amount of destruction, cool monster fighting scenes and a bit of hilarious monster choreography and you know you're in for a good time. GMK is a great example of what's being lost when everything is made inside of a computer, you're no longer watching hollow action but carefully planned scenes and detailed set designs.

Genre: Action/Adventure/Drama