Month: March 2021

Ishiro Honda
Double Feature
The H Man
(Bijo
To Ekitai-ningen,
美女と液体人間)
and
Battle
In Outer Space
(Uchu Daisenso,
宇宙大戦争)

The H Man

*****

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1958 – Japan – Cert. X – 86m

Battle in Outer Space

*****

Director – Ishiro Honda – 1959 – Japan – Cert. U – 90m

Alongside the standalone release of Mothra (1961) comes a double bill of two more Toho science fiction movies directed by Ishiro Honda with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya: , The H Man (1958) and Battle In Outer Space (1959). The Toho studio is associated more with monster movies than any other genre, notably Godzilla (1954) and Mothra. The superior entries in this cycle tend to be the ones they directed, including the initial 1954 film which ticked all the right boxes to prove a massive success.

When no-one at Toho was quite sure what had made Godzilla work, the pair collaborated on a number of different SF films before everything came together on Mothra. The H Man is a monster film dressed up in gangster trappings while Battle in Outer Space is an epic with space stations, flying saucers, rocket ships, an alien moon base and alien mind control… [read more]

Over at All The Anime, I review Eureka!’s Ishiro Honda double bill Blu-ray.

Tags 1950s, alien, America, astronaut, Battle In Outer Space, bombardment, cinema building, Cinerama, Columbia, conference, Conquest Of Space, cops, cops and robbers, damsel in distress, detective, East Germany, Eiji Tsubaraya, Etsuko Shiraishi, Forbidden Planet, freezing, gags, gangster, gas, gender bias, George Pal, George Whitman, ghost, Godzilla, Golden Gate Bridge, Great Space War, India, inspector, Iran, Ishiro Honda, Japan, Jasper Sharp, Kaiju, Kyoko Anzai, landscape, life form, liquid, Matango, meteors, mind control, monster, moon, Mothra, mushroom, mutant, New York, nuclear tests, Philippines, police, police procedural, position of women, Puppetoons, ray, rover, Ryu Ikebe, sailor, San Francisco, science, science fiction, scientist, SF, Shinichi Sekizawa, ship, singer, song, space torpedoes, space travel, special effects, Takashi Kimura, The H Man, The H Men, The Human Vapor, The War Of The Worlds, This Island Earth, Toho, Tokyo, trauma, UFO, US, Warning From Space, weightlessness, Yoshio Tsuchiya, zero gravity

Animation Features Movies

Lotus Lantern
(Bao Lian Den,
宝莲灯)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 30 March 2021
No Comments on Lotus Lantern
(Bao Lian Den,
宝莲灯)

Director – Chang Gwang Xi – 1999 – China – Cert. N/C U – 85m

*1/2

A boy must rescue his goddess mother from Heavenly wrath invoked when she fell for his father, a mortal – available to rent online in the UK & Ireland as part of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio Retro in the Chinese Cinema Season 2021 from Friday, February 12th to Wednesday, May 12th

Immortal Goddess Sanshengmu (voice: Xu Fan) falls in love with mortal man Liu Yanchang and leaves Heaven to pursue love with him on Earth. This goes down badly with her brother Yang Jian (Jiang Wen) since it’s against the Law of Heaven, so he sends an army of hounds down to earth in pursuit. She is however able to evade capture by keeping a lotus lantern close to her to make sure it’s not accidentally lit as this would give away her location.

Seven years later, while boating on a river with her young son Chenxian (Yu Pengfei), the lantern’s accidental lighting reveals her whereabouts to her brother, who promptly whisks the boy to heaven. When she arrives to demand her son’s return, her brother instead imprisons her in a mountain. … Read the rest

Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Series Shorts Television

Greenaway
By Numbers

How Peter Greenaway’s obsession with various numeric and other cataloguing systems has led to the creation of highly complex, multi-layered film pieces that joyfully play with audiences

If ever anyone were to make a film about the Dewey Decimal System, it would be Peter Greenaway. He is obsessed with ways and means to classify the world in which he finds himself, systems to organise and make sense of that peculiar world, people’s relationship networks with one another and their movement and actions within that world and those networks.

I first came across him on the theatrical release in Hammersmith of his three hours plus epic The Falls (1980), made in between his early, self-financed short films of the 1960s and 1970s and his first, more conventional in length feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). The Falls takes its name from entries in the section of a directory beginning with the letters F A L L e.g. Orchard Falla, Constance Ortuist Fallaburr, Melorder Fallaburr. The directory chronicles survivors of a Violent Unknown Event, VUE for short… [read more]

Full article at DMovies.org in association with Doesn’t Exist Magazine – purchase your copy now.

Tags 18th century, action, actors, age, alphabet, apartheid, architecture, artefact, artist, Bible, biographies, body part, book, boundaries, buildings, catalogue, category, children, classicist, classificatory systems. reports, colour, compendium, conception, confines, consumption, country house, Dante, David Attenborough, David Rudkin, device, directory, division, documentation, drawing, dying, editing, entries, exhibition, falling, fatality, food, footnote, garden design, grid, historian, identities, index, journey, law, letter, library, lists, maps, motivation, multimedia, narrative, natural history, numbers, obsession, open plan, order, page, painting, Patricia Morison, Peter Greenaway, photocopy, photographs, poet, political prisoners, production, pseudonymous, random, real time, rectangle, Rembrandt, rhythm, screen, seamstress, season, secret, sex, Shakespeare, South Africa, speaking, stomach, storytelling, subjects, suitcases, taboo, talking heads, text, Tom Phillips, UK, verbal, video editing, visual frame, volume, website, whimsy, wife, window, word, YouTube

Features Live Action Movies

37 Seconds

Director – Hikari – 2019 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 115m

*****

A wheelchair-bound, young woman manga artist struggles to become independent of her over-protective mother – on Netflix from Friday, January 31st, 2020

Yuma (Mei Kayama), wheelchair-bound with cerebral palsy from birth, lives with her mother Kyoko (Misuzo Kanno) who looks after her in a small Tokyo apartment. However Yuma is far from helpless with a day job as an uncredited manga artist who draws and writes the comics allegedly penned by fast rising YouTube star Sayaka (Minori Hagiwara). The uncomplaining Yuma secretly yearns for Sayaka’s celebrity, if not to actually be her at least to know what it feels like, but Sayaka bans her from attending any public events such as book signings.

Yuma starts exploring ways of going independent of Sayaka. She shows some work to Iketani (Shohei Uno) from Sayaka’s publishers who tells her that what she’s produced is good but alas too close to Sayaka’s work. Finding a bunch of porn manga magazines in a park, she phones around to see it the magazines are taking submissions and embarks on an erotic space opera series, lovingly rendered in a sequence which is not so much full animation but more like an animated peruse through pages of manga, only to be told when she goes to see a friendly editor Ms.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Shape Of Red
(Red)

Director – Yukiko Mishima – 2020 – Japan – Cert. N/C 15+ – 122m

****1/2

A woman trapped in a stultifying marriage experiences freedom and laughter in both returning to work and pursuing an extramarital relationship – played online in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2021 in the UK

Married to Shin (Shotaro Mamiya) with a six-year-old girl Midori, Toko (Kaho – Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015) is a stay-at-home mum. Shin works with a trading company and judging by the size of the house is not lacking financially. Shin’s mother is a constant fixture in their home and the first time we see Shin come in from work of an evening, he rejects the meal his wife has prepared because he’s “not hungry” only to readily accept a favourite dish his mother has prepared.

That doesn’t bode well for the marriage. In bed she dutifully performs a blow job on him which satisfies him but not her. As she wipes away the results with a tissue, you feel that she’s not so much a wife, more a sort of sexual skivvy.

As his wife, Toko accompanies Shin to various work social events where she similarly appears to be little more than an appendage.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Custody
(Jusqu’à La Garde)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 18 March 2021
No Comments on Custody
(Jusqu’à La Garde)

The Pain Of Separation

Custody

Directed by Xavier Legrand.

Certificate 15, 93 minutes

Released 13 April 2018

Husband Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and wife Miriam (Léa Drucker), whose marriage has fallen apart, attend a custody hearing regarding their son Julien (Thomas Gioria) who is 11. Their daughter Joséphine (Mathilde Auneveux) being almost 18 will soon be considered an adult under French law and is therefore legally regarded as able to take care of herself.

Antoine wants custody so he can look after and spend time with Julien at weekends. Miriam doesn’t want to grant him this. She wants as little to do with Antoine as possible. Each partner makes accusations against the other. As the judge says, it’s a question of who is telling the bigger lies. But the judge must make her decision based on this brief hearing. So Antoine will be allowed custody at weekends… [Read more]

Full review published in Reform magazine, 2018.

Trailer:

Tags abuse, accusations, bad father, custody, custody hearing, Denis Ménochet, family court, France, husbands and wives, judge, Léa Drucker, lie, marriage, parents and children, separation, Thomas Gioria, thriller, violence, Xavier Legrand

Features Live Action Movies

One Night
(Hitoyo,
ひとよ)

Director – Kazuya Shiraishi – 2019 – Japan – Cert. N/C 15+ – 123m

****1/2

A woman murders her violent husband after years of his beating up the kids, goes to prison then returns 15 years later to find the siblings in turmoil – played online in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2021 in the UK

A night of torrential rain proves a defining moment in the lives of the Inamura family which owns and runs a taxi business. Koharu (Yuko Tanaka – Princess Mononoke, 1997) enters, dressed in her usual suit she wears to drive customers around, to announce to her three teenager children, “I’ve just killed your father. Nobody will ever beat you again. You can live however you want. You’re totally free.” Expressing no remorse and convinced she’s done the right thing, she promises to return in fifteen years then disappears to hand herself in to the cops.

Koharu’s designs of freeing her kids from their father’s years of violent abuse don’t quite play out the way she had hoped. Their father would beat them for any suggestion that they’d want to do anything other than work in the family taxi business. The eldest Daiki (Ryohei Suzuki – Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015; Tokyo Tribe, Sion Sono, 2014) is a stutterer whose relationship with wife Fumiko (Megumi) is mired in divorce proceedings as he struggles to hold down a regular job.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Martyr

Director – Mazen Khaled – 2017 – UK – Cert. 18 – 84m

***

Hounded by his parents to find work, a young man hangs out with friends and dives off the Beirut balustrade into the sea… and his death – in cinemas and on VoD from Friday, March 12th

A young man Hassane lives in Beirut with his parents. He can barely drag himself out of bed in the morning. They want him to go out and look for work and because he’s not yet found any, his father has a friend he’ll talk to too see if a suitable job can be found. To get his parents off his back, he promises he’ll look for work today.

He finds living at home with his parents to be a stifling experience. Masturbation in the shower might provide some respite were it not for his father beating on the door to shout the he’s taking too much time and using up the family’s water allowance.

Once he goes out on his moped, rather than look for work he joins his best mate Hmeid and other friends down at the promenade overlooking the Mediterranean, a popular diving spot. They hang out, chat for a while, then he mounts the balustrade to dive into the sea and… doesn’t come up.… Read the rest

Tags Beirut, bereavement, body, coast, dance, death, diving, drowning, floating, homoeroticism, Lebanon, masturbation, moped, Muslim, parents and children, peer group, ritual, sunshine, underwater, unemployed, water, young men

Features Live Action Movies

Fukushima 50
(フクシマ50)

Director – Setsuro Wakamatsu – 2020 – Japan – Cert. 12 – 122m

****

Historically-based, disaster movie cum drama in which workers struggle to limit the considerable damage to a nuclear power plant hit by an earthquake then a tsunami – on VoD from Monday, March 8th

March 11th, 2011. A powerful earthquake followed by a tsunami hit Japan. Situated near the epicentre of the earthquake on the coast where the tsunami hits is a nuclear power plant. The resultant nuclear disaster threatens to decimate Japan. Coming in at slightly over 9.0, it remains the most powerful earthquake the country has ever experienced.

The above is history. The title Fukushima 50 is the name given to from the crew of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant who at considerable cost to their own health stayed at the plant to limit the damage as much as they could and prevent an undoubtedly appalling situation becoming far worse.

To anyone not well-versed in the specific technical minutiae of how a nuclear power plant works (i.e. most of us) much of what happens in the film is bewildering. Not that it really matters, frankly, because if someone looks at a gauge, reads off a number in units of which you’ve never heard and exclaims that they’ve got to get the number down, you have a pretty good idea what’s going on.… Read the rest

Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Dissident

Director – Bryan Fogel – 2020 – UK – Cert. 15 – 119m

*****

An investigation into the state-sanctioned killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey in 2018 – on Amazon Prime from Thursday, April 1st

If you had to use a single phrase to describe this documentary, it would be “jaw-dropping”. The central subject here is the disappearance of Saudi-born Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi who on October 2nd 2018 entered the Saudi consulate in Turkey to obtain a document and was never seen again.

There are a number of narrative strands: the career of a Saudi exile Omar Abdulaziz Alzahrani in Montreal, Canada who Khashoggi befriended, a brief history of the Saudi regime focusing in particular on the last decade, Khashoggi’s ongoing romance with young Turkish political researcher Hadice Cengiz who he planned to marry and the story of what actually went on inside the consulate recounted by the Turkish prosecutor Irfan Fidan.

It’s jaw-dropping because it delivers one devastating revelation after another. The idea of entering your country’s consulate to collect a document and not leaving alive is horrific enough, but there are numerous other, equally chilling disclosures here.… Read the rest