The trials of filmmaking, or all this homoerotic stress did nothing for Oshima’ s health. Having suffered a stroke in 1996 he recovered sufficient strength to direct a few years later, albeit from a wheelchair. Gohatto – English title, Taboo - is based on a novel by Ryotaro Shiba. Set in 1865, a samurai militia is recruiting new members from the peasant class. One of the new inductees is Kano (Ryuhei Matsuda). Kano, becomes a homoerotic focus for several members of the militia. The group’s leaders try to maintain order but the lust Kano inspires in the men generates jealousy, dissension and betrayal.
The samurai film is a venerable Japanese genre, and Oshima obeys its codes only to inject this unfamiliar element into its bloodstream – to blow up the tradition from within its gates. What links Taboo to Oshima’s earlier work is its depiction of the social order shaken by unstoppable human urges. There is an obvious resemblance here to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence: a rigid military hierarchy crumbles into chaos with the arrival of a beautiful stranger. Tellingly, it’s the lower-ranking men who openly express their desires. Hijiketa (Kitano), smothers his passion in the name of duty. We absorb much of the story through Hijiketa’s eyes, and we hear some of his thoughts in voice-over, but Kitano might as well be acting with a mask on: he gives almost nothing away, until his banked emotions flare up in a sudden, startling release in the final scene. Poor Oshima suffered a second, more serious stroke after completing Taboo.

Going solo Kitano doubled as director and star on his first film Violent Cop. Initially hired to play the lead role of Detective Azuma, he also took over directorial duties and proceeded to re-write most of the screenplay, taking out much of the dialogue to make the film tighter and funnier. Something of a Japanese Dirty Harry, Azuma is a cop who plays by his own rules: he batters suspects, beats confessions from criminals, and plants evidence. He’s a vigilante force the department quietly supports as long as he gets results, but when a volatile drug case results in the death of a colleague, the hair-trigger cop goes rogue as he takes on an equally impulsive criminal. Kitano’s big teddy bear eyes and soft features maintain a calm, almost bemused expression even in his most violent moments: a kind of Zen “Dirty” Harry with a deadpan sense of humor. For a first-time director, Kitano displays astonishing cinematic control, creating a style of long takes and serene tranquility shattered by startling explosions of gunfire and abrupt blows. It’s a violent world in which adolescents attack beggars and grade school kids pelt bystanders with garbage and insults. Ironic, grim, and focused to a mesmerizing intensity, Violent Cop is one of the great Japanese crime films and a brilliant debut that was as much of a surprise as a shock from this mainstream entertainment business insider.

Fast-forward more than ten years to the movie Brother. Here we have Kitano exporting his now signature Japanese gangland tales to Los Angeles in an international co-production, also heavily featuring American actors in the cast.
Brother centres on Yamamoto (played by Kitano), an aging Tokyo gangster left isolated after his boss is murdered in a war between yakuza families. After receiving a tip-off that he is a marked man, Yamamoto flees to Los Angeles, where he manages to track down his younger brother. Sent to the US to study, his brother is now involved in street-level dope dealing. Yamamoto quickly assesses the situation, and uses a minor dispute between his brother and a supplier to commence a murderous drive to the top of L.A.’s crime world. Along the way, he builds a new family of African- and Japanese-American ‘brothers’, imbuing the Americans with yakuza notions of honour and loyalty. Their ‘business’ expands rapidly, until they run foul of the mafia, triggering a war from which only one side can emerge alive. Once again, Kitano’s character becomes embroiled in a situation that spirals out of control, and the story ends in death. Brother also retains Kitano’s trademark scenes of off-kilter humour, sudden violence, and an episodic narrative structure. But whereas previously story and style were closely melded to Kitano’s idiosyncratic thematic concerns, Brother plays-out as a curiously hollow genre piece, distinctly lacking the meditative depth of the director’s best work. But if you like a shoot-them-up-blood-bath kind of a movie then this is one to wallow in.

Tokyo godfathers

Tokyo Godfathers, director Satoshi Kon’s third production is shamelessly sentimental and built on a series of absurd coincidences, but works wonderfully well and is great fun to watch. Set in contemporary Tokyo, the story opens on Christmas Eve and concerns three homeless people: Gin, a middle-aged man claiming he used to be a professional bicycle racer; Hana, a.k.a. Uncle Bags, an aging transvestite; and Miyuki, a teenaged runaway girl. They live together in a makeshift, tent-like shelter in the shadow of the Tokyo Metropolitan building, from where they go scrounging in the garbage heaps of Shinjuku. The three protagonists, out on a scavenging expedition, find an abandoned baby girl. This astonishing discovery transforms the trio’s lives while they struggle to take care of their newfound charge and, using a few clues left with the little one, they set out on a quest to find the infant’s parents, all the while hoping to also learn why they would desert their child.
Their adventures take them all over the city and they encounter all sorts of folks from every stratum of society—some helpful, others threatening — but all having transforming effects on the protagonists. Along the way to the riveting conclusion, Tokyo Godfathers epitomizes the full potential of anime to deliver complicated, interesting tales. In fact, this cartoon has more depth than most mainstream Hollywood movies!

Kagemusha

A late Kurosawa classic, Kagemusha, set in 16th-century Japan, is an epic drama of feudal conflict and resolution. The film took the Grand Prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival and was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.
The action centers around a political ruse in which the warlord Shingen, head of the Takeda clan, is impersonated for three years after his death in order to stave off attacks which might befall a leaderless state. The man who impersonates him is a nameless thief, whose physical resemblance to Shingen is his only qualification for the job.
Kagemusha is a study in contrasts. It is a story about a very small, very simple man who is forced to assume the character of an immensely powerful warlord. The film explores the many contradictions and paradoxes which arise from such a situation, and, in the course of the story, gives us a deeper look at the meaning of leadership and power, and its relation to loyalty and faith. For the thief, unwilling at first to go along with the plan, ultimately gives all of himself out of loyalty to the deceased lord. Gambarre Nippon! Brilliant color, clever use of a limited budget and an excellently paced script will have your mouth hanging open over your popcorn.

Tokyo drifter

Seijun Suzuki transforms the yakuza genre into a pop-art James Bond cartoon as directed by Jean-Luc Godard. The convoluted plot revolves around hitman “Phoenix” Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari), a cool killer in dark shades who whistles his own theme song. Discovering his own mob has betrayed his code of ethics he hits the road to wander, with not one but two mobs hot on his trail. In a world of shifting loyalties Tetsu is the last honorable man, turning his back on a world that has double-crossed him. The twisting tale takes Tetsu from deliriously gaudy nightclubs, where killers hide behind every pillar, to the beautiful snowy plains of Northern Japan and back again, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake.
The movie opens in high-contrast black and white with isolated eruptions of color that finally explode in a screen that glows in oversaturated hues, like a comic book come to life. His extreme stylization, jarring narrative leaps, and wild plot devices combine to create a pulp fiction on acid, par for the course for Suzuki’s surreal cinematic fireworks, for which he was ultimately fired. This “barrage of aestheticised violence, visual gags, and mind-warping color effects,” got him into more trouble with Nikkatsu studio heads, who had ordered him to “play it straight this time.” Instead he gave them equal parts Russ Meyer, Samuel Fuller, and Nagisa Oshima.

ichi the killer

Ichi The Killer, epitomizing the ultraviolence of the films of director Miike Takashi, will either be a complete turn-on or turn-off depending on your disposition. Based on a Manga cartoon, this revenge movie has a sinister hypnotist manipulating the timid but unstable Ichi to dispatch various mobsters in horrifically violent fashion by invoking false memories of witnessing a rape. His ultimate target is a mutilated Yakuza played by the excellent Asano Tadanobu, a crazy blend of sadistic and masochistic tendencies, who incites his boss and girlfriend to beat him savagely while exacting horribly inventive torture techniques on his enemies. At one stage, he volunteers a “sincere apology” to his boss by cutting out his own tongue. He claims everyone is part sadist, part masochist, which the director explores with disturbing enthusiasm. Ichi The Killer would be well placed in the “therapy” films in A Clockwork Orange. Having made over fifty films since 1991, Takashi shows no signs of slowing down. He accepts almost all of the proposals offered to him, freewheels with scripts, preferring to let his films evolve on set, and makes a virtue of his characteristically low budgets, filming wild on the streets to avoid dealing with Japan’s restrictive authorization processes. Punk lives, in the movies anyway. Take a shower to feel clean again after watching this one.

My Neighbour Totoro

The story unfolds with 10-year-old Satsuki and 4-year-old Mei moving into an old-fashioned house in the country with their professor father. At the foot of an enormous camphor tree, Mei discovers the nest of King Totoro, a giant forest spirit who resembles an enormous bunny rabbit. Mei and Satsuki learn that Totoro makes the trees grow, and when he flies over the countryside or roars in his thunderous voice, he makes the winds blow.
Totoro becomes the protector of the two sisters,watching over them while they wait for their father and carrying them over the forests on an enchanted journey. When the children worry about their mother, who is in hospital, Totoro sends them to visit her on a Catbus, a magical, multilegged giant Cheshire Cat. Miyazaki has an amazing talent for making the most bizarre things believable, weaving drama and sentimentality, serious themes and fantasy into a beautifully rendered and thoroughly watchable cartoon.It is easy to forget in the land of manga how reluctant we would normally be to watch a feature length cartoon.
The film carries Miyazaki's usual eco friendly message and has inspired a citizens's group to buy up a forest in Saitama.

Branded to Kill
Seijun Suzuki

Indulge at your peril in this wildly perverse blast from the past about the yakuza's rice-sniffing "No. 3 Killer," directed by Seijun Suzuki at his delirious best. From a cookie-cutter studio script, Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the Nikkatsu studio with unexpected results. As Suzuki relates in the DVD-included interview , "They told me my films didn't make money and they didn't make sense, so they fired me!" Seijun Suzuki's movie bends the hitman genre so out of shape it resembles something put together by Luis Bunuel and Jean Luc Godard. The story features Hanada, the mob’s Number 3 Killer. No ordinary gangster, in appearance or habits, Hanada, played by Jo Shishido, looks rather like an overstuffed hamster. Bizarrely, that’s not cotton wool stuffed in his cheeks, the actor had collagen implants, which made his box office appeal skyrocket! Hanada is hooked on the smell of boiling rice that drives his libido in kinky sex sessions with innumerable girlfriends. And why not. Drop-dead gorgeous Mari Annu plays Misako, a mysterious femme fatale with a bedroom full of butterfly specimens and a dead bird hanging from the rear-view mirror of her car. After Hanada botches a job — a butterfly lands on his telescopic sight just as he pulls the trigger — his girl is hired to kill him. The finale sees Hanada come face to face with the Supreme Being — Killer Number One. Mesmerizing nonsense that has kept black beret and turtleneck sweater wearing types enthralled since its release in 1967.

Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola

S ofia Coppola’s much-praised second film is a whole different experience for non-Japanese who live in Japan. The entire premise of Lost in Translation is that Japan is a weird, impenetrable, confusing and bizarre place that is somehow charming. Knowing that, it’s easy to see that those of us who know at least tiny bit about the country (unlike, apparently, the director of this film) might find her effort naïve, superficial, patronizing and even insulting. The irony is, of course, that wrapped inside this bunch of clichés is a pretty good film. Bill Murray brilliantly plays Bob Harris, a washed up Hollywood actor who is reduced to doing whisky ads in Japan (and his wife doesn't seem too sad that he’s 5000 miles away). Staying at the same hotel (the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku) appears Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a cute, intelligent twenty-something who has tagged along to Japan with her on-assignment rock photographer husband. Bob and Charlotte are both jet-lagged and unable sleep, yet have nowhere to go and nothing to do. After a few passing conversations in the elevator they start to talk in the hotel bar and resonate with each other. The experience of meeting someone and immediately feeling a rapport/sharing an experience is well portrayed here but the hackneyed descriptions of Japan just keep coming. In addition, Coppola misses the mark with a number of scenes that seem completely out of place (they get chased out of bar by a man with a gun; a ridiculous prostitute is sent to Bob’s room; the film abruptly changes seasons when Charlotte visits Kyoto, etc.). It’s not too difficult to look past these gaffes but the overall description of Japan is so lacking in understanding that the work gets tiresome. The film does have wonderful dialogue when it’s just Charlotte and Bob talking about life, love and happiness, and the two principals both do fine jobs with their roles. For us here in Japan, it’s a shame this movie wasn’t set somewhere else. 

Tampopo
Juzo Itami

East meets west in this magnificent ‘noodle western’ and comic meditation on food, sex and death. A ‘cowboy’ trucker on a quest to help a widower transform her mediocre noodle shop into the best ramen joint in town provides a fast-paced and funny backdrop for innumerable subplots and wacky digressions. We are following the sexy goings on between a gangster and his moll – what to do if you find yourself in a hotel, with a sex bomb, a raw egg and some live seafood – the problem of eating spaghetti silently and the trials of a group of grumpy old salarymen trying to order in a classy French restaurant. A must-see all-time great.

Audition

A devious ploy turns nasty in this Takashi Miike movie, based on a book by Ryo Murakami. Aoyama, a middle-aged widower, prompted by his son to get back into the dating game, turns to a producer friend to help engineer a meeting with a prospective wife. Under the pretense of auditioning a movie, they advertise for an actress, and select the most promising “dates” for an interview session. Aoyama, captivated by the snapshot and resume of 21-year-old Asami (Eihi Shima) sits through an amusing parade of unsuspecting ladies – a random mix of serious but nervous, hopeless, neurotic and occasionally shameless candidates that this kind of event would attract. At last, Asami appears, describing herself as a shy, “good girl” and turns Aoyama into a babbling schoolboy, much to the embarrassment of his hard-nosed producer friend, who with perhaps better instincts, detects something odd about the girl. Aoyama, however, is smitten and they begin to date. The deceptively long, slow, set up of this ‘man meets girl’ story could be just another low budget, slightly clumsy but charming distraction. Lulled into a false sense of where the story is heading you are in for a bizarre and shocking ‘detour de force’ that will make you shriek, cringe and, the slightly twisted might even laugh a little.
A festival and art house favorite, viewers were either riveted to their seats or walked out in disgust. Which way will you go? Love it or hate it, you’ll have to watch it to find out.

Spirited Away
Hayao Miyazaki

Exhausted after the highly successful production of Princess Mononoke (Mononoke Hime, 1998), the director Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement from filmmaking only to change his mind after a chance encounter with a ten-year-old daughter of a friend. The chance meeting inspired the character Chihiro, the little heroine at the center of Spirited Away, the highest grossing film of all time in Japan, also achieved in record time.
It is a beautiful match of simplicity and spectacle, a gorgeously crafted piece of art that relates a simple ‘gambalemasu’ fairy tale about a girl trapped in a fantasy castle, a kind of spirit world onsen resort, where her parents are being held, transformed into pigs after gorging uninvited at a food stall. Technically brilliant and visually stunning it will satisfy kids from 1 to 99 years old.