A message from the Don

"Ain't it time you started posting in yer blog again, ya primitive screwhead?!?!"
(to be continued...)

Festivals On the Rise!

The one thing I love about living near a big city is the opportunity to check out large film festivals. Being a huge genre film fan, I have always been somewhat jealous of places like New York and Toronto that host big festivals which focus on films I like to watch. Then, there are places like Los Angeles that house theaters that I would pay rent to reside in, just so I wouldn't miss a single showing.

The San Francisco Bay Area, of course, is no slouch when it comes to film festivals and events. In addition, this area has its own slant to festivals; as the last link shows, they tend to focus on diversity as well as individuality. I was bound (pun intended) and determined to attend the "I Am Curious" pink eiga event at the Roxie last week at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival but was hit by the mutant cold that's been going around lately. Luckily, though, the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival is rolling through in a "hot on the heels" sort of way and has several showings during the Kiyoshi Kurosawa (director of Cure and Pulse[aka Kairo]) that I'm hoping to attend.

Tokyo Sonata, Kurosawa's latest, is at the top of my list. His first non-horror film in six years, it has been receiving very favorable reviews since its release late last autumn. It's also the first film he's done without his usual leading man Koji Yakusho in that long. This is a bit of a surprise since Yakusho, when not starring for Kurosawa, typically plays in family dramas like Tokyo Sonata. The spotlight will also feature many rarer Kurosawa films such as Eyes of a Spider and Serpent's Path, both meditations on violence and revenge and featuring another common Kurosawa leading man, Sho Aikawa (below), as well as 1998's dryly comedic yet human License to Live. Two other Kurosawa-helmed Aikawa vehicles that I'm hoping to catch are The Revenge: A Visit from Fate and The Revenge: The Scar That Never Fades, both V-Cinema yakuza flicks that will be screening one after the other. Direct to video yakuza flicks are typically pretty cheaply made on digital video and feature tons of ridiculous overacting, gunplay, and haircuts. If there's one director, however, who's proven that he can make V-Cinema stand for "very good" cinema, it's Kurosawa. I'm currently looking for people to see these last two showings with but, considering the rarity of the two films, I will go alone if I have to. Stay tuned for reviews of some sort.

Review: Maruhi Shikijou Ichiba: The World of Roman Porno

Reprinted from Eigazoku

For those not familiar with the term Roman Porno (Romantic Porno - classy eh?), the term came from Nikkatsu Studio's classifications of its pinku softcore/sexploitation films primarily from the '60s and '70s. The thing that differentiates a Roman from a regular old porn film is the directors of the former were given a lot of free reign in their films thus allowing more room for characterization, drama, action, and the like. The only requirement of a Roman was a certain amount of nude and/or (simulated) sex scenes per hour were required to be in the film. Several well-known cult directors have come out of this system including Yasuharu Hasebe (Stray Cat Rock series), Noboru Tanaka (Angel Guts series), Shogoro Nishimura (Gate Of Flesh), and Masaru Konuma (Flower and Snake).

So, now, we have in our hands Maruhi Shikijou Ichiba (tr: Confidential: Sex Market, a 1974 Roman Porno directed by Tanaka) The World of Roman Porno, a CD (and seedy) collection of various tracks from films spanning 1973-1978. As could be expected, a great majority of the tracks have a funky undertone to them, from the wailing Dennis Coffeyesque guitar fuzz of "Photograph" to the high strutting "Hitozuma Shudan Boko Chishi Jiken M1-A". Besides the funky stuff, there is a wide variety of moods to choose from: rock, pop, blues/enka, a nice Fender Rhodes/soprano sax duet, even a full-on lushly scored tune by an orchestra (I'm assuming this is where the romantic in Roman Porno came from). Packaging is nice but not spectacular by Japanese standards which can be very lavish. The CD comes in a promo-still covered digipack case, a mini-fold out poster is also included which contains liner notes in Japanese about the collection as well as advertisements for the label's (Hotwax Trax) other releases.

A very solid collection of music for Japanese genre film fans, my only objection being that, clocking in at an average of 2:30 per track, I wish there were more included especially for the price, expect to pay $20-$25.

Sample some of the tracks here via Windows Media Player at Movie Grooves

Buy it here from Dusty Groove