Sonatine tells the story of middle aged yakuza boss Murakawa (played by Kitano) and his gang's trip to Okinawa to settle some yakuza wars and return the peace to the criminal underworld of Japan. Murakawa openly suspects that the assignment is attempt to have him removed and even beats up one of his colleagues. There are all the Kitano elements as beautifully present as possible. The scenes are often without too much dialogue , and the film is very symbolical and calm. The faces are among the most important elements in Kitano's films as there are so many things to be read from character's faces. Takeshi delivers a perfectly-measured performance as the man who wants out , but retains the strength to recognise that circumstances and obligations will never allow it. When violence is shown in this film , it is usually portrayed in the director's signature style , erupting suddenly amid absolute stillness in a spasm that is over almost before it begins. Sonatine is a lyrical picture of Japan's poker face toward the outrageous violence of its mob culture. The film's title is a musical term that refers to a sonata of modest length ,however not diminished in complexity.
Umberto D is a 1952 Italian neorealist film directed by Vittoria De Sica . Most of the actors were non-professional , including Carlo Battisti, who plays the title role of Umberto Ferrari., a poor old man in Rome desperately trying to keep his room. His landlady is a gold-digger , looking to show off her apartments and marry someone who can provide for her. His landlady is evicting him and his only true friends , the housemaid and his dog Flike are of no help. The young maid , Maria who is pregnant by one of two soldiers - still likes him , though and provides moral support ,even if she can't help in any practical way. "Umberto D" is a character-driven film . It works very well because of its sharp observations on loneliness and poignant gestures. Many of the scenes , even the ones that do not necessarily advance the plot, are hypnotically beautiful in their simplicity. The film sticks firmly to the neo-realist conventions ; the lead actor is a non professional actor (who does a good job if not great) , the use of studio sets is kept to minimum and the everyday lives of people are examined in minute detail. Indeed, Umberto D could have been one of the most depressing films ever made , but instead it's one of the most heartfelt.
Lee Egan , played with restraint by Timothy Hutton , wants to pull off a big jewel robbery in Palm Springs. He has been casing a jewelry store where once a year they have two to three million dollars in stones from Russia. To pull it off, he asks his brother and old pro-criminal Roy (Harvey Keitel) to come to town to join his gang for the big heist. Jorge Montana and Skip Kovic (Stephen Dorff) make up the rest of Lee's team. Calm and resolute Jorge needs the money for his wife Rachel (Famke Janssen) and their kids since Jorge has just been sentenced to prison. After the heist , at the trailer park, as Lee and Jorge are counting and dividing the money, Skip guns both of them down. Most of the show , which happens after the jewel theft, consists of an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with Roy and Skip chasing each other. As Roy , Keitel carries the film with the kind of credible performance we've come to expect from him. Keitel always brings an emotional and physical intensity to his roles that is unequaled. Here he is outstanding as Roy Egan-an experienced, complicated thief who never says much . Timothy Hutton turns in a stellar performance, as does the always watchable Famke Janssen as a woman recently widowed by the fall-out from Dorff's betrayal of friends. Thomas Burstyn's dark cinematography does a good job here to capture the city's underbelly. This John Irvin film is a small, hard-edged little gem , full of crisp action and tough minded codes of honor.
Outrage is a 2010 Japanese Yakuza film directed by and starring Takeshi Kitano. Kitano's Outrage exists in an effort to explore the various amounts of violence that can be dispensed in the midst of a Yakuza turf war in the Japanese underworld. The complex plot stars Kitano as Otomo , a mid level mob boss. Otomo's direct loyalties lie with Ikemoto, his gangster-father , an aging gang leader who has formed a formal pact with Murase. This pact has raised the ire of the overall Yakuza Chairman, the highest ranking gangster of them all to whom Ikemoto must answer. The Chairman claims his displeasure comes from the shame of associating with Murase's drug business but it is equally likely that he simply doesn't like these two powerful men creating an alliance that could threaten his own power. Payback and revenge become the order of the day and the control of Ikemoto and Murase's territory is up for grabs and several of the players involved have their eyes on it. As Kitano remarked publicly about his making of Outrage , he is giving the people what they want - no pretense of artistic embellishments, but rather blunt , cruel acts of violence of the professional criminal devoid of any romanticism. Despite the plot complexity , Kitano directs one of his most direct and most violent pictures here.
In the film , two brothers and a sister witness the disappearance of their childhood memories when they must relinquish the family belongings to ensure their deceased mother's succession. Summer Hours (aka L'Heure d'été) a quiet ,carefully observed film by writer-director Oliver Assayas , a former Cahiers du Cinema critic. In a small town, Helene is a family matriarch who has devoted her life to preserving the legacy of her artist uncle. However, while her eldest son , Frederic , wants to preserve her home after her passing, she harbors no such illusions as she prepares her legacy. When she dies, the family gets together again at her home , which is taken care of by Eloise (Isabelle Sadoyan). Jeremie ,the youngest son , lives with his wife and children in China and is about to start a new job in Beijing. He needs the money from the sale of the family heritages to pay for the move. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) , a successful designer who lives in the United States , is about to get married. She does not see herself returning to France often in the future and so suggests they sell the house. Frederic ,who wants to keep everything , is disappointed to hear of his brother and sister's responses. But Jeremie and Adrienne see themselves as elite members of the global community with no specific ties to any place or culture. Life will go on , with an acknowledgement of loss that will always seem insufficient. Assayas has made a drama that is filled with bittersweet observations about family , memory , money , globalization and transitoriness.
A bunch of young hipsters kidnaps a loving couple and keeps them trapped in a barren landscape. To the sounds of free jazz they are performing various instruments with the couple. Yet, as the film progresses the characters appear to be more like symbols acting out relationships in an allegory rather than part of a narrative. The central male character , played by Atushi Yamatoya ,goes from kidnapped victim ,to escapee ,to killer , to demon and then to oppressor himself. Here both male and female characters go through a range of experiences of erotic pleasure , physical restraint and humiliation. The women characters are seen to be as sexually and violently charged as their male counterparts. Wakamatsu used the format of sexploitation as a way into an exploration of other transgressive acts such as extreme violence and amorality.
Hukkle is a 2002 Hungarian film. It's about the daily life of people in a random village which seems beautiful and harmless , but there is something mysterious going on. It begins with an old man who has hiccups, and takes place in front of his house near a can of milk. He observes the daily habits of the villagers, and the viewer is shown many sequences about different events. Elsewhere ,an old man prepares food and a man goes fishing . Life cycles dominate as Palfi invites us into a cruel world where everything's struggling for survival and everything is liable to be munched on by something else. The cinematography is exquisite and full of surprises . There's also a vague thriller element and some amusing visual humour, but really much of the enjoyment is seeing the interconnectedness of rural life : a frog skims across a pond , before being snapped up by a large fish ,which is hooked by a fisherman and so on.
Gozu is more of a surreal character study in the tradition of David Lynch than a true horror film. Mike takes great delight in introducing what seems like a normal action film or a horror film , then suddenly twisting it into something new. A driver named Minami (Hideki Sone) is out with his Yakuza boss , his "aniki" (brother ) Ozaki . To protect an innocent woman , Minami accidentally kills Ozaki. While trying to figure out what to do with the corpse , then trying to find a phone that works,Ozaki's corpse disappears. Now it's upto Minami to find him while dealing with encounters with all sorts of bizzare people and situations as he tries to do so. Minami begins looking for the corpse with the help of a strange man whose face is half-painted white. Other,increasingly bizzare characters come into the mix , and the story gets weirder and weirder. More than a parade of distorted and strange characters , Gozu's descent into the grotesque is above all the manifestation of protagonist's confusion. As the film progresses , we as viewers get to know about Minami's personality ,in particular his insecurity about his sexual identity and his devotion to Ozaki. As with many of Mike's films, Gozu follows no singular genre or style ; moving freely between the characteristics of illogical comedy , gritty Yakuza thriller , unrequited romance and psychological horror story seemingly simultaneously.
S
ukiyaki Western Django is not the first Japanese western. It is a feast for genre fetishists, a loving and lurid pastiche of the Spaghetti westerns that were themselves lurid pastiches of classic Hollywood cowboy pictures. The title of this western refers to the Japanese dish Sukiyaki , as well as Sergio Corbucci's Spaghetti western film Django. The film contains numerous references both to the historical Genpei war and to wars of the roses, as well as the films Yojimbo and Django. The story deals with a bitter rivalry between two vicious clans- the brutal Heike and the flashy Genji. They have taken over a remote mountain village in a region oddly called "Nevada". A mysterious gun fighter with no name (Ito Hideaki) rides into town and offers his services to the clan who offers to pay him the most. While both clans make interesting bids, the gun fighter rejects both offers and is instead swayed to hold off joining either faction by the town's salon madam , Ruriko. She tells the stranger of how the town was taken over by the clans and how her son , Akira was killed by them. The film was made with a fairly high budget , and it shows. Both set and costume design are awesome. The town is a perfect fusion of the classical western town and medieval Japanese architecture,Buddhist temples alternating with the saloon, the sheriff's office and dilapidated stanles. Sukiyaki Western Django is a feast for the eye ; even the much criticized flashbacks , soaked in oversaturated yellow and green tints , seem to work in its advantage.
In the mountainous country of Iranian Kurdistan , a group of itinerant teachers wend their way through a treacherous area in search of pupils. They carry their blackboards on their backs and use them as shields when they need to hide from army helicopters. One teacher Said comes across a huge group of nomads making their way back over the border into Iraq though they have lost their way. He offers to lead them in exchange for food. The other teacher , Reeboir meets a group of children laborers ,each with a heavy load strapped to his back. Reeboir learns that they're smugglers . The screenplay was co-written by Makhmalbaf with her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf . Like her father, Samira has learned a respectful, intelligent way of storytelling. But this film really pushes the slow-and-obtuse envelope. Its hard to have any feelings for the characters : there is extremely little known about them, no development, they show no willingness to accomplish anything except trek across the next mountain and hide from unseen helicopters and soldiers.
Bong Joon-ho's 2006 monster tale, The Host, brings a level of sophistication to the monster film genre with a combination of several genres all working to develop the narrative and its characters. It's about a family that becomes torn through this huge fish-monster crawling out of the water and killing/taking people back to his short of sewer-lair. The story follows a snack car employee Park Gang-Du , his father Hee-Bong , daughter Hyun-Seo ,sister Naam-joo ,who's an archer , and Gang-du's brother Nam-il , an alcoholic who has not done much since graduating. The monster takes his daughter Hyun-seo seemingly killing her until Gang-du recieves a call from Hyuen-seo informing him that she was in fact still alive but trapped in the monster's sewer-lair. Gang-du and his family set out to save his daughter but they face strong opposition from the government. The leads are good, particularly the young girl, Park Hyun-Seo played by Ah-Sung ko, who is very convincing and strong in character. The other characters continually walk that fine line between comedic and serious performances. That raises another interesting aspect, instead of following a standard route with the characters, their development follows the unusual turns of the film itself and we're treated to surprises and failures when we don't really expect them. The monster is really well-designed and doesn't look like any other screen monster that i have seen. The animation of it is excellent too , and the creature does almost feel like it's alive! The strongest aspect of this film has to be it's cinematography. The audience gets to visually see a dark world created in Korea as a result of a Foreign monster who creates a domestic threat to Korean life.
The Embryo Hunts in Secret , is the first film made by Japanese director Koji Wakamatsu independently of any film studio. A pioneer of pinku cinema, his work is subversive and universally applicable but without the tastelessness of the genre's worst contributors.
The entire film takes place in the protagonist's claustrophobic apartment ; the reclusivity of the protagonist's plight is now to be shared with the audience. A man keeps his girlfriend tied up in his small apartment and tortures her. As the story goes we are subjected to watching this man degrade and abuse the woman -he relentlessly flogs her with a bull whip, makes her crawl around on all fours and beg for food like an animal , repeatedly holds her head under water and slices her up with a straight-razor , all the while laughing with sadistic glee. All the while still recounting his family relationship , his oedipal relationship with his mother , and his estranged relationship with his wife , all at the cost of his utter rejection of a child. He cannot live without controlling every aspect of his own life as well- including the lives of others he's in contact with. Throughout the film, there are images superimposed over scenes happening in reality. Wakamatsu refuses to refashion the man into a monster, providing instead a purely pathological portrait of rank misogyny's desperate efforts to contain what taunts it.
