Japanese Film
 

please share suggestions of directors/films to check out.
i think everyone who knows anything about jp films will know the famous (outside of japan) directors like takashi miike, beat takeshi, etc. so lets try and let each other know about some less known ones.

here are a few films ive watched recently that i really liked.
himitsu no hanozono (my secret cache)
cha no aji (a taste of tea)
samehada otoko to momojiri ona (sharkskin man peach hip girl)
swallowtail butterfly
all about lily chu chu

i warn everyone not to watch a film called pornostar. its absolute shite.

The Japanese film Versus is the best action film I've seen by a long way.

Korean films is where it's at, I reckon. Public Enemy, R-Point, Real Fiction etc etc.

where's iain? he's an expert on the subject

wild zero
branded to kill
nobody knows
versus

my friend writes reviews for a website called midnight eye which is a pretty good source of info on japanese cinema

here's his review of nobody knows
http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/nobody-knows.shtml

don't go for calimari wrestler, it's pretty rubbish

I haven't seen many but here goes.

Anything by Akira Kurosawa
Hidden fortress
Throne of blood
Drunken angel
The seven samurai
Stray dog
Rapsody in August... to name but a few.

Boiling point - Takeshi Kitano
The flavor of green tea over rice - Yasujiro Ozu
Nobody knows - Hirokazu Koreeda
Violent cop - Takeshi Kitano
Queer boys and girls on the shinkansen - Ten different filmmakers
The samurai trilogy - Hiroshi Inagaki
Suicide circle - Sion Sono
Tatsuo & Body hammer - Shinya Tsukamoto
Tokyo Decadence - Ryu Murakami

Godzilla movies kick ass too.
I don't really like the manga stuff(animation).

oh no, suicide cirlce?
its one of the worst japanese films i ever saw.
but thanks for all the other suggestions. ive heard of alot of them but never seen most of them.

ghibili animation is pretty good, spirited away, laputa, totoro and all those.

for anime definitely check out

the cowboy bebop movie & series
porco rosso
ghost in the shell
akira
steamboy's meant to be good too

We have periods with quite a lot of eastern films on our 3rd channel here in Holland. Mostly on sunday afternoons.
Some good and some bad.
Suicide circle wasn't that great for me either.

ah, i thought you were recommending those films.

Most are recommended for sure.
Only Suicide circle and Rapsody in August are a little weak.

If you haven't seen the Tatsuo films, then check those out first.
Fracking hardcore visuals!

Wow...Midnight Eye is more than just pretty good. It's the best website for Japanese film by far...that I have come across anyway.

Indeed Branded to Kill is a mighty film and one of my favourites of all time. Also, Tokyo Drifter, Youth of the Beast, Tatooed Life and Pistol Opera by the same director.

Any Shinya Tsukamoto is well worth watching. Tetsuo 1 and 2 if you haven't already seen them and Gemini, Bullet Ballet and A Snake of June are also great (especially Gemini)

If you want a heady mix of radical left wing politics, sex and violence and bleak nihilism then you can't go wrong with anything by Koji Wakamatsu. I have only seen a couple of his films but Go Go Second Time Virgin was pretty good.

You've probably seen some Takashi Miike films perhaps but he's done loads and a lot of them are good. Audition, Dead or Alive 2, Bird People of China and Visitor Q are all really good. Audition is fantastic.

And if you like really fucked up shit then see Naked Blood.

ive seen tetsuo 1 and 2. i didnt like them at all. not my kinda thing.
i saw another film by that director which i also didnt like, i think it was called either loved gun or bullet balet, i cant remember cuz i think i watched both of these on the same day. one is not bad and the other is not good.
its a matter of taste though, so if you like the tetsuo films you should maybe check this one out.

if anybody knows any good japanese comedy films then let me know! i watched my secret cache last night and ive got a thirst for it now.

Isn't pistol opera a remake of some other film?

well, yes, it must have been bullet balet then. its the one with the guy who's girl shoots herself then he hooks up with the gang and the wierd girl?
takashi miike is great. visitor q is ridiculously fucked up. its great.
as you say, audition too. ichi the killer, gozu, happiness of the katakuris..... some are shit though. i went thru a stage of watching his films, i saw about 20 and probably half of them are great and half are pretty bland.

iwai shunji is a good director. swallowtail butterfly, picknick, lily chou chou, hanna and alice.

its gonna take me a while to see all these, but itll be good fun.

koji wakamatsu has 100 films listed on imdb.
thats alot of films

Oh, Eureka by Shinji Ayoyama is pretty ace if you can stand 3+ hours of film.

I've never seen it but I've heard great things about it, I'm quite curious about the film.

I really haven't seen many, but I think Beat Kitano makes anything and everything worth watching. I love that guy.

i only saw a few beat takeshi films, zatoichi and another one.
i like zatoichi but hated the other. sonatine or something like that.
my problem with beat takeshi is that i hate him. i cant stand his face or the way he is.
its probably not a problem in films where he is supposed to be a cunt, but otherwise, i cant take it.

i don't know what you are talking about wax, sonatine is awesome and takeshi is a legend.

a good japanese comedy is ping pong.

i'm a bit out of touch with anime at the moment, the last good one i saw tokyo godfathers, apart from that i saw steam boy and howl's moving castle and was bitterly disappointed by both.

kurosawa's ikiru is one of my favorite movies.
the scene where takashi shimura sings to himself in the snow made me cry first time i seen it.

as for takeshi kitano, i liked dolls alot, but probably more for the cinematography than anything else. i don't really care for him otherwise.
edit: hanabi is pretty good too.

some paintings i did on japanese cinema






hey toilet&bowels should i not bother downloading steamboy then? I heard it was good

I can't get tired of looking at these paintings. ;)

well it's up to you really, i mean it's better to see it for yourself and form your own opinion that take the word of some internet-o-bloke.

Yeahyeah.....Ping Pong is a good one if you want some heartwarming comedy/drama type stuff....it's nice.

Howls Moving Castle was super dissapointing....either I wasn't really paying attention or there were a few really bad plot holes. It was pretty bunk come to think of it.

you must have been paying attention because there are some pretty bad plot holes, especially at the end when they're suddenly in love and everything turns out ok.

i shouldnt judge his films based on me not liking him. im sure he has alot of good films. but it just hated sonatine so much it put me right off him.
i just cant stand him. which is gonna be apparant in everything i see him in.
ill give him another go though i spose.

i didnt watch howls moving castle, alot of people said it was shit. i love totoro and spirited away, but ive seen a few more that i didnt like.
i went to the gibili museum here in tokyo. it would have been great if i was 5 years old. they have the big totoro cat bus soft toy, but its massive and all the little kids can play in it with thousands of the pieces of dirt/spider things. and they have big laputa robot. i really wanted to be alowed to play on the cat bus!
you can also see a short film that you can only see in the museum. which i have to say was really good, even though i couldnt really understand it (because no subs)

i really liked "Eureka".

i think i read that shinji aoyama said he was inspired by jim o'rourke's album "eureka" for this movie, but that sounds strange to me... but i haven't really listened to that album anyway...

i cant say bad things about the skills of beat takashi, but he seems to star in all the films he makes. its seeing him thats the problem. i cant explain it.

anyway, i watched 4 japanese films over the past few days.

has anyone seen blind beast?
if not, go and see it right away. i really loved it. i dont wanna give anything away. id recommend watching it with out reading anything about it first.

i also saw swing girls and waterboys, both by the same director, both almost exactly the same plot. one is about boys and sychronised swimming, the other about girls and a brass band. neither did it for me. i watched them because the director made a fucking great comedy that i already mentioned in this thread. my secret cache.

Ha! Ha! You're funny. I'm not surprised that neither did it for ya! It would take a genius to make interesting movies using those topics.
Where they boring?

Howls Moving Castle is great....Grave of the Fire Flies is amazing...also cowboy bebop series is the best there is especially because all 26 episodes are only 25 dollars...i think the movie was legit as well...but akira takes the cake completley for anime...as far as anime...as far as other films i like gozu alot as well as zatoichi

ive been watching so many films recently, and feeling really shitty after i watch a really bad one. so i did something i never usualy do and i switched it off before it got halfway through.
i was fairly certian that it wasnt gonna get any better.
its just yer run of the mill film. shit plot, shit comedy, done in a way thats attractive to people of all ages who dont like to think very much.
i wouldnt say they are terrible films, but i wouldnt want to watch them.
i was really hoping that at least one of them would be as good as my secret cache. maybe its the lead actress who makes that film so good.

if anybody uses bittorrent, you can get my secret cache from demonoid.com.