Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Scars of the Sun
(Taiyo no Kizu Ato,
太陽のきずあと)

Director – Chusei Sone – 1981 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 99m

***1/2

A young gang leader whose father is a successful literary figure finds himself battling against a rival – part of the Chusei Sone Double Feature on Blu-ray from Monday, July 27th.

NSFW

A dull, industrial pumping sound can be heard in the background. A man in a white raincoat and a hat waits. The wind blows his open coat. He takes out a cigarette. Down the road, another man steals a white car from a garage explaining, “I’ve a funeral to attend.” He picks up the raincoat and hat man.

Another car, red, heading in the opposite direction on the other side of the highway, U-turns and joins him. Both drive recklessly until the white one narrowly avoids a collision with a bicycle.

The other man asks Shuhei (Keniichi Kaneda), in the raincoat and hat, what they do about the now somewhat battered car. Shuhei says it can be fixed using his father’s money. When he tries to sign in for the funeral, he’s told to leave because the deceased wouldn’t have wanted him to attend.

They gather with others at a bar. His companion, Kobayashi, explains that Sugeru was so good at driving that he, Kobayashi, fell asleep.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Kim Novak’s Vertigo

Director – Alexandre O. Philippe – 2025 – UK – Cert. uncertificated – 76m

*****

An essential addition to the canon of work surrounding and helping audiences to understand the power of one of the cinema’s greatest works– out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 3rd

The opening black and white scene features actress Kim Novak, probably shot in the 1950s, as if through a peephole. This recalls Norman and his peephole in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). Novak here seems to know she is being watched, looks directly at the camera, then rolls her head so her eyes go into the darkness of shadow. Then, colour footage of present day, images that could be out of Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1945): a gate opening, a passage along a country roadway, a wooden memorial to someone. All this accompanied by the voice of Kim Novak, now in her twilight years, talking about her life on the soundtrack – her present difficulty in getting breath, how awful it must be to gasp for breath prior to dying.

All this has a Hitchcock connection. Novak is familiar to us from her twin roles in Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), the favourite film of director Philippe (and also, as it happens, of this critic) who specialises in documentaries about movies and made the definitive documentary about Psycho’s shower scene 78/52 (2017).… Read the rest