LA Eiga Fest! (Nov. 11-13)

Hi Blog,

COMING VERY SOON my friends over at the LA Japan Film Society are doing the LA EIGA FEST; a short, but fantastic Japanese film festival on the weekend of November 11th - 13th.

Highlights include the West Coast premier of Yoshimasa Ishibashi's MILOCRORZE, Shinji Imaoka's international kappa-stroking Pink Eiga co-production UNDERWATER LOVE, Su-yeon Gu's face bruisin' HARD ROMANTICKER, and an exclusive 3D screening of Takashi Miike's 'no, this isn't 13 ASSASSINS part 2' jidaigeki, HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI (most likely the only time it'll be screened in 3D for the foreseeable future).

But that's not all, you can get your Tokyo gore thirst slaked with Yoshihiro Nishimura's zombie milkshake HELLDRIVER and then later feel guilty about laughing at death by watching Hiroshi Nagashima's short documentary on the Tohoku Earthquake, REMEMBRANCE OF THE TOHOKU EARTHQUAKE.

Held at the Mann's Chinese Theater 6, in the black and crimson heart of Hollywood, the schedule of screenings is as follows:

Friday Nov 11th

7:30pm - Opening premiere – Milocrorze: A Love Story (Dir Yoshimasa Ishibashi)

Saturday Nov 12th

9:30am – Competition Selection: The Volunteer, For Real? (Dir Tsuyoshi Satoda)

11:40am – Shorts program 1

Rootless Heart (Dir Toshiko Hata)

Tidy up (Dir Satsuki Okawa)

Cat Shit One (Dir Kazuya Sasahara)

1:10pm – Competition Selection: Food and the Maiden (Dir Minoru Kurimura)

3:15pm – Shorts program 2 – Official Short Shorts Film Festival Selection

Super Star (Dir Kentaro Hagiwara)

Smile Bus (Dir Sang-joon Park)

Hokkaido Tourism (Dir Yosuke Hamaguchi)

Heaven’s Island (Dir Naoko Tajima)

5:05pm – Competition Selection: Door to the Sea (Reiko Ohashi)

7:25pm – Hard Romanticker (Su-yeon Gu)

9:50pm – Underwater Love (Shinji Imaoka)

12:00am – Midnight Screening - Helldriver: Director’s Cut (Dir Yoshihiro Nishimura)

Sunday Nov 13th

9:30am – Cannonball Wedlock (Dir Koji Maeda)

11:15am – A Man with Style (Yuya Ishii)

1:40pm – Remembrance of the Tohoku Earthquake (Hiroshi Nagashima)

3:05pm – Someday (Junji Sakamoto)

5:15pm – Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai 3D (Takashi Miike)

More info HERE.

If you're a fan of Japanese film, you definitely don't want to miss this. See you there!

Bitchin' Wakamatsu Koji Series this Month!

Hi Blog,

My programming for the Cinefamily (aka. The Silent Movie Theater) here in LA, continues with a pretty awesome seven-film Wakamatsu Koji series that kicks off this coming Wednesday with the masterful UNITED RED ARMY. (And that was a long sentence!) The series will then go on to run for the first three FRIDAYS in NOVEMBER, offering a pretty great selection of films (almost all collaborations with leftist political radical screenwriter Adachi Masao) -- some of which have never played in Los Angeles before.

The films, in order, are:


1. UNITED RED ARMY: Wednesday Nov. 4th 8pm

2. SHINJUKU MAD: Friday Nov. 7th, 7pm (Double Feature ONE)
3. ECSTASY OF THE ANGELS: Friday Nov. 7th 830pm (Double Feature ONE)

4. GO, GO SECOND TIME VIRGIN: Friday Nov. 14th, 7pm (Double Feature TWO)
5. RUNNING IN MADNESS, DYING IN LOVE (LA Premier and, oh yeah, what a fucking cool title?): Friday Nov. 14th, 8:30pm (Double Feature TWO)

6. VIOLATED ANGELS: Friday Nov. 21st, 7pm (Double Feature THREE)
7. VIOLENT VIRGIN: Friday Nov. 21st, 8:30pm (Double Feature THREE)

Here're the film write-ups I did for the series (with some copy-editing and some additional notes done by the editors up at the Cinefamily):

Intro:

Divisive, exploitative, cruel, vengeful, erotic, political, provocative, avant-garde -- Koji Wakamatsu is all these things, and a ridiculous amount more. A country bumpkin who wandered his way through the Yakuza and into one of the most prolific directing careers in Japan, Wakamatsu has created an unsurpassed, massive filmography of unique and disobedient works. While inextricably connected to the pinku eiga (Japanese soft-core film), Wakamatsu himself has always insisted that his films were something more. Certainly they contain copious amounts of sex and nudity, but this often was a cover for leftist political diatribes decrying Japan’s imperial inclinations, and its subservience to US foreign affairs on Asian politics. Now in his seventies and having produced more than 200 films in his career, Wakamatsu and his uncompromising worldview show no signs of slowing. In addition to his latest epic transgression, United Red Army (2008), The Cinefamily is thrilled to present six of Wakamatsu's other treasures -- some of which have never before screened in America!

United Red Army
(SPECIAL WEDNESDAY SCREENING!)
"Consensus is boring." -- Koji Wakamatsu

For 35 years, director Koji Wakamatsu has been mulling over what happened to the idealism and moral imperative of the far left Japanese student movement that left a rash of dead bodies and unanswered questions, and his latest film is as close to his heart as Schindler's List was for Spielberg. In the unflinchingly violent United Red Army, Wakamatsu dramatizes the self-immolation of the fiercest of Japan's underground paramilitary groups, who, in the early '70s, after internal strife led to the murders of fourteen of its own twenty-nine members, fled to a remote mountain location and instigated a police standoff which lives in infamy to this day. No stranger to radical politics, Wakamatsu not only drew from interviews with surviving URA members, but also from his own street-level experiences with the URA and other subversive organizations at the time -- affiliations which landed him on the U.S. State Department's no-visa blacklist, where he remains to this day. Backed by a searing psych rock score by former Sonic Youth member Jim O'Rourke, United Red Army is a film that doesn’t pretend to have the answers, but is instead an epic dissection of ideology can trump reason.


11/7 @ 7pm / SERIES: koji wakamatsu: sexfilmrevolution
Shinjuku Mad
shown with
Ecstasy of the Angels
With a sensationally violent and squelchy opening that sets up the plot of a father searching for his child’s murderer through the Shinjuku underworld, Shinjuku Mad never lets up its relentless assault as the blood flies, the bodies pile and the suffocating alienation multiplies like H1N1 in a school playground, all while Japanese '70s space rock band Food Brain provides harrowing cuts of fuzzy skronk on the soundtrack. The film was embraced by college students, artists and intellectuals upon its release, for its abrasive style and its honest countercultural insight (hippies and bikers are to be equally mistrusted!) Scripted by Wakamatsu’s partner in crime and leftist political radical, Masao Adachi, this film is purportedly one of Wakamatsu’s personal favorites for its "…vicarious portrait of Swinging Shinjuku in its vibrant heyday, making full use of local landmarks…" One of six(!) films Wakamatsu released in 1970.


Ecstasy of the Angels, a jarring exercise in experimental cinema clothed in pink film trappings, trails a leftist terrorist unit that, after a failed attempt to steal weapons from a US military base, learns that they might have been set up to fail by their parent organization. Dispensing with conventional storytelling, Wakamatsu plunges the viewer into a melange of political dissertations, rough and sweaty sex, explosions and swanky nightclubs. Though it certainly looks and feels like an exploitation picture, Ecstasy clearly has much more on its mind. The infusion of radical politics into the head-spinning assault of nudity and gore makes for a very odd experience, and the rapid shifts in time, film stock (black and white alternating with colour), sound effects, and character affiliations make this a dense, truly rewarding hour and a half. Ecstasy was Wakamatsu's biggest production to date -- a fact that guaranteed that the film was still released even though the government viewed him as an instigator of violence and anarchy.


11/14 @ 7pm / SERIES: koji wakamatsu: sexfilmrevolution
Go, Go Second Time Virgin
shown with
Running In Madness, Dying In Love
An allegory for the end of the hippie movement? For the impotence of youth against the crushing oppression of a chaotic world? Or a cruel reflection of society’s self-destruction during the chaos of the 1960s? It’s up to you to draw your own conclusion, for Go, Go Second Time Virgin's grim teen rebellion has explosive impact that defies conventions. In the film, two psychologically battered teenagers of the opposite sex meet on a desolate urban rooftop and bare their psychic scars to each other. The boy feels a mixture of arousal and anguish when he sees the girl unclothed following a gang rape on the rooftop (in which he was a partial participant) but their relationship becomes far more devastating and perverse than a forced sexual encounter. Though running barely over an hour, Go, Go... packs a tremendous amount of artistry into every scene, as Wakamatsu gives us one of his most visceral and intensely focused works.

Lesser-known but still packing a mad punch, Running In Madness... tells of a student activist who is forced to flee Tokyo with his sister-in-law after he inadvertently shoots his police officer brother at a protest rally. We follow the two as they travel north to their hometown of Hokkaido, across a majestic winter landscape. Shot in a stellar psychedelic style and scripted by frequent collaborator Masao Adachi, the story was influenced by Adachi’s time spent with master director Nagisa Oshima, which led to Adachi's development of a more rigorous, formal approach to his work. Running In Madness is one of the first Japanese films to employ "Landscape Theory" (fukei-ron), a style of storytelling, according to Adachi, in which "all the landscapes one faces in...daily life, even those such as the beautiful sites shown on a postcard, are essentially related to the figure of a ruling power."


11/21 @ 7:30pm / SERIES: koji wakamatsu: sexfilmrevolution
Violated Angels
shown with
Violent Virgin
One of Koji Wakamatsu’s more infamous productions (and inspired by the real-life case of Richard Speck's 1960s student nurse killing spree in Chicago,) Violated Angels is a compact celluloid acid trip into one man’s derangement as he kills a group of nurses and regresses to a child-like state. Acting more as a protest piece than Grand Guignol debauchery -- although it strongly delivers the goods in that department, with shocking deaths filmed in lurid color by Hideo Ito (In The Realm of the Senses), and a bevy of ravaged beauties -- the film draws a strong analogy between the man’s dehumanized actions and the Vietnam War protest movement going on concurrently with its production in 1967. Filmed Corman-style in less than one week in order to seize upon the wave of publicity wafting off of the Speck murders, this melancholy mini-masterpiece plunges the viewer headlong into ice-cold madness.

Easily the most divisive film in this series, Violent Virgin is guaranteed to bewilder, titillate and spark debate in the theater lobby. Shot on a punishingly low budget and tight schedule, the film follows the bizarre ritual of a group of Yakuza and their female companions, who all go to the countryside to punish their boss’s unfaithful mistress and her chinpira (low-level Yakuza) lover. A simple-enough scenario for your average twisted pink film, but Wakamatsu, never one to take the straight and narrow path, grabs the material by its neck and yanks it into a Jodorowsky-esque realm of Christ symbology, dream logic and all-around bat-shit insanity. As well, it's all couched inside another nod to underground political struggles, as the Japanese title, Shojo Geba Geba (reportedly suggested by Nagisa Oshima) refers to the German word "Gewalt", linked specifically to violence from student protestors. Filled with sex and cruelty, as well as Wakamatsu's trademark fantastic eye for black-and-white images, Violent Virgin is one of the headiest and rawest works in all of late '60s Japanese cinema.

More info on the Cinefamily website. See you there!

9/5/08: Pecha Kucha Presentation at Royal/T in Los Angeles

Hi Blog,

Yeesh, this blog is turning into my personal secretary minus the fingers and phone calling skills but as the title of this blog says, I'll be presenting at the next Pecha Kucha night here in Los Angeles. That'd be on this coming Friday, September the 5th at 20:20 O'Clock.

What is Pecha Kucha? Let's reprint what their site sez:

What is Pecha Kucha Night?

Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.

But as we all know, give a mike to a designer (especially an architect) and you’ll be trapped for hours. The key to Pecha Kucha Night is its patented system for avoiding this fate. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

Pecha Kucha (which is Japanese for the sound of conversation) has tapped into a demand for a forum in which creative work can be easily and informally shown, without having to rent a gallery or chat up a magazine editor. This is a† demand that seems to be global – as Pecha Kucha Night, without any pushing, has spread virally to over 100 cities across the world. Find a location and join the conversation.

Whelp, I didn't know jack about this whole Pecha Kucha thing until I was asked to participate (or it was firmly suggested that I should) and still have been kind of flying by the seat of my pants on this one but in a last minute desparation as to what the hell I should blab about I've decided to focus on something Japanese film related. (Surprise!) And something from the 60s and 70s! (Double Surprise!!)


Actually there will be some other stuff from more contemporary corridors here, but it seems like a fun thing to do and even though I've just submitted my 20 slides to the curators, I still don't know how or what or どうやって I will put this together. Should be fun though.

At any rate, if you do make it out to the event, please bring soft and spongey foodstuffs to through as they don't hurt as much when you get pelted by them. Thanks and see you there!


Location:
Royal/T
8910 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
T 310 559 6300
F 310 559 6633

Bone House Asia Presents: LATE BLOOMER

Hi Blog,

Ijichi-san over at Tidepoint Pictures sends me news of a new DVD label Bone House Asia and Late Bloomer's US release. I wrote about my pal Shibata Go's film Late Bloomer NYC screening before (here) but it's now been confirmed as happening at the Pioneer Theater in NYC from July 25-31st!

So if you're not at the San Diego Comic Con and are in NYC, then don't dally! See the fucking movie! Also, if you're interested in having it play in your area-- and if you are a theater owner/programmer or whatnot-- then contact Ijichi-san via the Tidepoint Pictures website. I know he's still looking for more venues.

The cover for the Late Bloomer DVD is above.

New Yorkers! New York Asian Film Festival '08 Starts Today!

Hi Blog!

The title says it all. Arguably the best Asian film fest in the US -- and there's some bias there since they're my pals running it -- starts today in NYC. Running until the 3rd of July, if you live in NYC or anywhere remotely nearby, I highly recommend you catch some films at the NYAFF.



Full schedule is here.

Good luck Grady, Goran, Brian, Dan and Marc! I hope this year's fest crushes New York like iddy-biddy taxis under Godzilla's feet!

Indies Fight Major Logjam (from Variety)

Hi Blog,

Here's another article that I wanted to post in the last couple of days, but didn't have a chance to. Last Thursday (May 8th) Marc Schilling wrote an interesting article for Variety on the plight of the indie film in Japan. You can either read it below of click to their site. (Link from Ryuganji RSS.)

Snip:

Japan

Indies fight major logjam

By MARK SCHILLING

TOKYO -- Japan is the world's second-largest film market, with a total B.O. in 2007 of $1.98 billion on 163.2 million admissions. Also, the Japanese biz released 407 theatrical titles last year, out of a total of 810. Of these local pics, 29 earned $10 million or more at the B.O., compared with only 22 foreign titles -- 18 released by Hollywood majors -- that hit this mark.

All is not going swimmingly for the Japanese biz, however, particularly for the dozens of small- to mid-sized indie distribs, who must fight tooth and nail for a static number of arthouse screens while trying to scrape out a profit from a slowly shrinking DVD market. (Last year, earnings from sell-through DVDs fell 2.3%, and from DVD rentals 1.4%.)

"About 70 new Japanese features ended up on the shelves last year, unable to find a screen -- there are serious bottlenecks in the film distribution system here," says Hirobumi Doi, prexy of Japan Digital Contents Trust, a leading film fund manager.

The average production cost for Japanese commercial pics is about $3 million to $3.5 million, usually supplied by consortiums consisting of a distributor, TV network, ad agency and other media companies.

"(Producers) can usually raise all the financing they need from these sorts of consortiums -- they don't have to go outside the country," says Takashi Uchiyama, director of Visual Industry Promotion Organization (VIPO), an industry org that promotes Japanese content abroad. "They can also recoup nearly all their money domestically, so they aren't very internationally oriented."

The Japanese government, beginning with the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is actively promoting Japanese content abroad. For the 2008 fiscal year the government has appropriated $42.2 million for content-related programs. Of this coin, $6 million is going for pic production and $17 million for the Japan Intl. Contents Festival (CoFesta). An umbrella org launched last year, CoFesta coordinates content-related events held in the fall, with the centerpiece being the Tokyo Intl. Film Festival and the concurrently held TIFFCOM market.

Even so, government support for the biz, including tax and other incentives for foreign producers, is still lacking, Doi admits. "It's hard to see the government doing much more than it is already," he says. "Parliament won't pass the needed legislation."

Private backing for production from local film funds is available, however. Most funds are one-shots, set up for a single pic or project, though some fund outfits such as JDC, which launched in 1998, are in it for the long term and serve a variety of clients. One of the biggest, JDC funds, started in April 2006, plans to raise $46 million for a slate of 20 pics for indie producer and distrib Cinequanon.

Among the pics already produced with the fund is "Hula Girls," a dramedy set in the 1960s about a mining town trying to pull itself out of the economic dumps by starting a hula troupe. Based on a true story, the pic was a hard sell to mainstream media companies, who thought its subject matter too downbeat, but Cinequanon manage to make it with JDC coin -- and the pic scored a solid $14 million at the B.O. in 2006. "We could balance the risk with other films on the fund slate," Doi says. "It's an easy concept for investors to understand."

JAPAN STATS
FILM FINANCE AT A GLANCE
Total film production spend in 2007: N/A
Total B.O. for Japanese pics 2007: $946 million (407 films released)
Top Japanese film: "Hero" ($81.5 million)

INCENTIVES
Japan does not offer financial or tax incentives to foreign producers. Production assistance is available through the 100 members of the Japan Film Promotion Council, an umbrella org for film commissions throughout Japan.

WEB
Japan Film Promotion Council: film-com.jp/en/fc.html
Japan Location Market: j-lm.com

B.O. STATS
Top film: "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," $109 million
Total B.O. in dollars: $1.984 billion
Total number of releases: 810

PICKUPS
"Nim's Island," Kadokawa Pictures
"Running With Arnold," Shochiku
"Rain Fall," Sony Pictures Japan
"The Reader," Showgate
"Mongol," Toei

Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117985323.html


Thanks to the Ryuganji RSS for the link. Check it out if you haven't yet!