So we thought we’d have a bunch of announcements this week, but we had guests canceling, guests re-confirming, films dropping out and then popping back in and basically just general chaos.

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It’s all straightened out now, so tune in Monday for the beginning of a string of announcements that’ll confirm and finalize this year’s New York Asian Film Festival running June 19 – July 5.

Comments (0) May 29 2009

…thought we’d have more news about the festival today, but some complications have come up. Announcements on Friday, or Monday at the latest. Thanks for your patience, everyone.

Comments (0) May 28 2009

More titles have been added to this year’s New York Asian Film Festival (June 19 – July 6). We still have many more to come, but these should satisfy your hunger for the moment.

HARD REVENGE MILLY & HARD REVENGE MILLY 2: BLOODY BATTLE (2008, Japan)
What happens when there’s no more gun control? Hell is unleashed and the world sinks into savagery where only a hardcase like Hard Revenge Milly can  survive. Her family was wiped out by heavily armed thugs and she’s left for dead, but is rebuilt with the works: shotgun leg, sword arm, gun-chuks and something…nasty in her chest. With insanely vicious special gore effects by Yoshihiro Nishimura (VAMPIRE GIRL VS FRANKENSTEIN GIRL) these two low budget sci-fi films are trimmed to the bone and hard as leather.

LALA PIPO (2009, Japan)
Written by Tetsuya Nakashima (MEMORIES OF MATSUKO, KAMIKAZE GIRLS) and shot in his candy-colored, hyper-surreal style, LALA PIPO is a crawl through the gutters of the porn industry in an desperate search for the hidden humanity of all the pimps, players, voyeurs, gangsters, hookers, A/V stars, and gangbang queens who make up the motley population of planet porno. Interweaving stories of the lost, the desperate, the horny and the repressed, LALA PIPO (a wordplay on “A lot of people,”) ultimately finds hope in the darkest – and stickiest – places.

QUICK GUN MURUGAN (2009, India)
How can you not love an Indian musical about a singing and dancing vegetarian cowboy out to stop the evil, non-veg, McDosa corporation from kidnapping all the mothers in India to use their love as the secret ingredient in their automated McDosa machines? A pop culture figure in India, this is the first feature film for Murugan whose taglines permeate the pop culture. It’s a silly, gorgeous flick in the vein of TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER only with more more vegetarian food. As Murugan would say, “We are like this only!”

THE WARLORDS (2007, Hong Kong)
Jet Li, Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro team up in this massive action movie about three blood brothers in the middle of the Taiping Revolution. As big, meaty and satisfying as a flame-roasted leg of wild boar, THE WARLORDS is the kind of movie you tear into with relish, wiping its bloody juices off your chin with the back of your hand as you sit on a throne made of the bones of your enemies.

Comments (3) May 26 2009

This year we are extremely proud to announce our Opening Night and Closing Night films as well as our Centerpiece Presentation. These three titles join a line-up of 45 feature films competing in this year’s New York Asian Film Festival for both the Audience Award and the Jury Award.

OPENING NIGHT FILM

The World Premiere of WRITTEN BY (Hong Kong, 2009)

Directed by Wai Ka-fai

Starring: Lau Ching-wan, Kelly Lin, Mia Yan

With a special appearance by Lau Ching-wan and Wai Ka-fai (and a huge thank-you to Chinastar for making this possible).

Lau Ching-wan

Wai Ka-fai

The man behind Johnnie To is, of course, Wai Ka-fai, the writer of almost every single film from Johnnie To and Milkyway Image. Wai Ka-fai has also co-directed several of the best movies from Milkyway Image including RUNNING ON KARMA, FULLTIME KILLER and MAD DETECTIVE. As Johnnie To says about him, “In our company, he is the creative driving force. Wherever he goes, we follow.”

Lau Ching-wan and Wai Ka-fai first worked together as writer/director and actor on the fractured gangster flick TOO MANY WAYS TO BE NO. 1 back in 1997 and now, 12 years later, they’re back for the equally experimental WRITTEN BY a movie that can best be described as a Hong Kong melodrama twisted into a new shape by Charlie Kaufman.

In WRITTEN BY, Lau Ching-wan plays a lawyer who dies in a car wreck, leaving behind his wife and daughter. To console herself, his daughter writes a novel wherein she and her mother have died in a car wreck but her father has survived. To her surprise, the character of her father in her book decides that HE needs to write a novel to console himself and in his novel he has died but his wife and daughter have lived…and on and on in an endlessly recursive loop as wounded characters desperately apply fiction to try and dull the sharp edges of their grief.

CENTERPIECE PRESENTATION

The World Premiere of

VAMPIRE GIRL VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN GIRL (Japan, 2009)

Directed by: Yoshihiro Nishimura & Naoyuki Tomomatsu

Starring: Yukie Kawamura, Takumi Saitoh, Kanji Tsuda.

With a special appearance by

TOKYO GORE POLICE’s Eihi Shiina

With a special appearance by director Yoshihiro Nishimura, action choreographer Tak Sakaguchi and visual effects supervisor Tsuyoshi Kazuno.

Yoshihiro Nishimura

Tak Sakaguchi

Last year, special effects genius Yoshihiro Nishimura directed TOKYO GORE POLICE and people sat up and noticed. Now he returns with VAMPIRE GIRL VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN GIRL a movie that makes TGP look sedate by comparison. Nishimura makes his home in the world of low budget movies but his imagination and style aren’t limited by the cash on hand and any movie he touches bears his distinctive stamp: high pressure blood spray, human bodies mutated beyond recognition and a gore-drunk celebration of the new flesh. Part of a loose cabal of collaborators that includes Sion Sono and Takeshi Shimizu (JU-ON), Nishimura directs like a David Cronenberg who grew up on exploitation cinema and comic books rather than European arthouse cinema.

As for the film itself, the title says it all. It’s a duel to the death between schoolgirl vampires, reanimated corpses and a Dr. Frankenstein who teaches science and has a lab underneath the gym. The freaky touch of co-director Tomomatsu (ZOMBIE SELF DEFENSE FORCE, STACY, EAT THE SCHOOLGIRL) is also not to be underestimated and the movie is filled with bizarro send-ups of Japanese culture, Chinese culture and the shallow Japanese obsession with African American culture.

CLOSING NIGHT FILM

The World Premiere of BE SURE TO SHARE (2009, Japan)

Directed by: Sion Sono

Starring: Akira, Eiji Okuda

With special guests, director Sion Sono and the film’s star, Eiji Okuda.

Sion Sono

Eiji Okuda

Sion Sono is best known as a cinematic provocateur who first came to Western attention with his 2002 film, SUICIDE CLUB. Since then he’s kept up his reputation for extreme cinema with movies like EXTE, and LOVE EXPOSURE. But what you don’t know is that he’s equally well known in Japan as a poet and that softer side of his personality gets exposed in BE SURE TO SHARE.

Featuring pop star Akira from the band EXILE in one of his first motion picture performances, BE SURE TO SHARE is a quiet meditation on death and the relationship between fathers and sons. Director and actor Eiji Okuda plays a tough-as-nails father who makes the Great Santini look like a wimp. Now, diagnosed with cancer he’s trapped in the hospital and his wife and son (Akira) spend their days visiting and trying to keep his spirits up. Just when it looks like he’s about to recover, Akira finds out that he has cancer too, and that his father may out-live him. Determined not to worry anyone, he keeps it to himself and vows that he’ll beat his disease.

BE SURE TO SHARE isn’t an easy-to-swallow disease-of-the-week movie about fathers and sons. Sono opens the film up and makes it an essay, colored with regret, about how we’re constantly running after each other, and never catching up. We’d say it will break your heart, but Sono might object to such an easy sentiment. So how about this: by the time this movie is over, you’ll feel like your chest has been cracked in two.

Co-presented with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film

Comments (0) May 22 2009

Next week we announce the opening, closing and centerpiece presentations of the New York Asian Film Festival, as well as special guests. And we’ll be announcing our Hong Kong New Action program. Next week! Can you survive until then?

This week, however, a bunch of movies are screening all over the city. Most importantly, BIG MAN JAPAN (aka DAINIPPONJIN) from last year’s New York Asian Film Festival will be screening through this weekend and into next week. Don’t believe the grumpy review in the Village Voice: this movie is smarter and more fun than a barrel of hyper-evolved monkeys. Starring superstar comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto as a heritage superhero who fights giant monsters, half the fun is the somnolent life he leads when he’s not super-sized. And stick around for the ending which is the funniest, strangest, most anti-American piece of film screening in the city all year! (Read more about it) (More info)

The documentary about the political uprising in Burma back in 2007, BURMA VJ, will finally open at Film Forum (we mistakenly announced it for April 20, not May 20, because we are dum). Pieced together out of footage cobbled together from dozens of video journalists who smuggled their tape out of the country at great risk to their personal safety, the least you can do is buy a ticket. Plus, on May 20 and May 22 at the 8pm shows, there will be a Q&A with the Buddhist monks who “led” the uprising, Venerable U Gawsita and Venerable U Agga Nyana. (More info)

On Friday, May 22 the last installment in the inexplicably super-popular Tora-san film series will screen at Japan Society. Yes, that’s right, it’s time to say sayonara to Tora-san in TORA-SAN, MY UNCLE. From 1989, shot by the cinematic master Yoji Yamada (THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI and dozens of Tora-san movies) and all about Tora-san helping his nephew find love. (More info)

Korea Society is right in the middle of their Films From the North 2 series. Running from May 7 – 28, it features screenings of ultra-rare North Korean movies every Thursday night at 6:30pm. On Thursday, May 21 at 6:30pm it’s WOLMI ISLAND, which gets the following stunning description:

“In this gripping and imaginative war movie a small troop of North Korean soldiers, armed with just four guns between them, defeats General Douglas MacArthur and 50,000 American soldiers at Inchon.”

Damn you, MacArthur! Taste our four guns! (More info)

Also, coming up this May 29th at the Landmark Sunshine and the City Cinemas on 69th and Third Avenue, it’s DEPARTURES. This Japanese movie is a touching, humorous story about a young, out-of-work cellist who becomes a mortician, a job that’s still pretty taboo in Japan. It’s directed by Yojiro Takita who won an Academy Award for his work here, which blew the minds of most Japanese because over there he’s better known as a director of softcore pink films, including dozens of installments in the GROPER TRAIN series. But don’t worry, this summer at the New York Asian Film Festival, we’re teaming up with Pink Eiga to screen two of Takita’s GROPER TRAIN movies, featuring ET spoofs, treasure maps hidden inside female genitals, locked-door murder mysteries, death traps and riffs on CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. (More info on DEPARTURES)

Comments (0) May 15 2009

This year’s New York Asian Film Festival runs from June 19 – July 5 at the IFC Center (June 19 – July 2) and Japan Society (July 1 – 5). Keep your eyes peeled for us to announce our Opening Night Film, our Closing Night Film and our Centerpiece Presentation, as well as our Hong Kong New Action Line-Up.

But this year we say “fiddle dee dee” to the economic apocalypse and we’re singing in the rain of fire and brimstone that heralds the end of the world. It’s our biggest, most ridiculous festival ever!

Also, we want to thank our official airline sponsor, American Airlines, and our official hotel sponsor, the Kitano Hotel, who are going to help us bring over the jaw-dropping number of guests we’ve got coming up.

SPECIAL EVENTS

PINK POWER: PINK EIGA PRESENTS JAPAN’S UNKNOWN FILM INDUSTRY
Japanese pink films are the last bastion of analog filmmaking in a digital world: softcore, sixty-minute sex films shot on film, edited on flatbeds and released theatrically. They’ve been around since the 60’s and not only have many mainstream directors gotten their start shooting pink films (including Kiyoshi Kurosawa), but 2009’s Academy Award winning director, Yojiro Takita (DEPARTURES), has a long string of pink films on his resume, and we’re showing two of them. We’ll be screening two double features in association with US-based pink film distributor Pink Eiga, who have begun releasing these treasures on DVD in the US this year.
Program One will be Yojiro Takita’s ridiculous MOLESTER TRAIN: SEARCH FOR THE BLACK PEARL and the comedy/drama BLIND LOVE. Program Two will consist of Yojiro Takita’s MOLESTER TRAIN: WEDDING CAPRICCIO and hilariously bawdy send-up of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s TEOREMA, JAPANESE WIFE NEXT DOOR, PART 1. Daisuke Goto, the director of BLIND LOVE and Masahide Iioka, the cinematographer of BLIND LOVE, are expected to attend the festival and introduce the screenings.

TOKYO GORE NIGHT
One of the most insane new voices in cinema is the screaming howl of Yoshihiro Nishimura, director of TOKYO GORE POLICE, and special effects genius (who also did the effects for LOVE EXPOSURE and SAMURAI PRINCESS, screening in this year’s festival). He couldn’t join us for the premiere of TOKYO GORE POLICE last year so for one weekend only we’ll be hosting him at the New York Asian Film Festival and holding a special TOKYO GORE NIGHT event. First up will be screenings of several completely nuts short films from Nishimura and his cabal of lunatics all set in the TOKYO GORE POLICE and MACHINE GIRL universe. Then there will be a special onstage presentation by these madmen followed by a screening of TOKYO GORE POLICE during which we’ll record a live audio commentary for the movie’s upcoming special edition DVD. Accompanying Nishimura will be Noboru Iguchi, the director of MACHINE GIRL and the maniac responsible for the short film SHYNESS MACHINE GIRL which we’ll also be screening that night. Also coming will be Tsuyoshi Kazuno, a visual effects supervisor on SAMURAI PRINCESS, MACHINE GIRL and many others. More surprises are in store, so make sure you wear something that you don’t mind getting soaked with blood.

TOKYO GORE NIGHT will blow your minds.

BE A MAN THE TAK SAKAGUCHI WAY
Also at this year’s festival is a small focus on Japanese stuntman, director and action choreographer, Tak Sakaguchi (VERSUS, AZUMI, GODZILLA: FINAL WARS). He’ll be presenting his films YOROI SAMURAI ZOMBIE and BE A MAN! SAMURAI SCHOOL. He also did the action for LOVE EXPOSURE. He’ll be accompanied by stuntman and action choreographer Isao Karasawa (who worked on the Hong Kong film, FLASHPOINT, and who holds two world records for being hit by cars, and is hard at work on a third) and the two of them are apparently going to be doing some onstage stunts before the screenings.

Mandom.

MSFF KOREAN SHORT FILMS
For the third year in a row, selections from Korea’s most popular genre short film festival are hitting the New York Asian Film Festival in two programs. But this time there’s more animation than ever before, and some of the funniest movies we’ve ever screened. Line-ups include the animated gems LOVE IS A PROTEIN (about a world of fried chicken restaurants haunted by half-human, half-chicken mutants) and A COFFEE VENDING MACHINE AND ITS SWORD (about a martial arts master reincarnated as a coffee vending machine). Also, the nastiest send-up of local TV news, SHAGGY-DOG STORY, as well as the usual line-up of elderly gay lovers, vindictive butchers, angry cats, dead moms and riot cops on the rampage. Presentation of MSFF Korean Short Films at the NYAFF 2009 is made possible through the generous support of the Korean Cultural Service in New York.

LOVE EXPOSURE
(Japan, 2008, Sion Sono, New York Premiere)
The director of EXTE and NORIKO’S DINNER TABLE returns with one of the most amazing cinematic achievements of the year. A four-hour epic about pornography, Catholicism, families, fathers, true love, cross-dressing, kung fu, cults and mental illness, this movie will cleanse you of your sins and leave you horny as hell. This is your only chance to see it, and if you ever loved movies you cannot afford to miss it.
Director Sion Sono will be present to bless the audience at the screening.
(Presented in association with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film)

The Line-Up (so far)

CHINA
THE EQUATION OF LOVE AND DEATH
(China, 2008, Cao Baoping, New York Premiere)
A twisty Chinese thriller anchored by an award-winning performance from Zhou Xun as a chain-smoking, obsessive-compulsive cab driver desperate to find her missing boyfriend.

IF YOU ARE THE ONE
(China, 2008, Feng Xiaogang, North American Premiere)
Feng Xiaogang (THE BANQUET, ASSEMBLY) turns in this gorgeous, sharply-written romantic comedy starring a radiant Shu Qi and a razor-tongued Ge You. No surprise: it’s the second-highest-grossing Chinese movie of all time.

OLD FISH
(China, 2007, Gao Qunshu, North American Premiere)
Written by and starring actual Chinese cops and bomb squad officers, this movie belongs to real life ex-cop and non-actor Ma Guowei, who plays the titular Old Fish in this gripping, ultra-realistic look at China’s bomb disposal procedures, which apparently include putting a ticking explosive device in your bicycle basket and pedaling like hell for the river.

HONG KONG
AN EMPRESS AND THE WARRIORS
(Hong Kong, 2008, Ching Siu-tung, North American Premiere)
Directed by Ching Siu-tung, this bubblegum pop martial arts movie stars Cantopop star Leon Lai, Hong Kong pop idol Kelly Chen and the kung fu-tastic Donnie Yen. Imagine if Disney made a musical version of Zhang Yimou’s HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS starring a clever princess and full of cute, talking animals. Then replace the songs with martial arts and the cute, talking animals with Donnie Yen and Leon Lai and you’ve got this flick.

FIVE DEADLY VENOMS
(Hong Kong, 1978, Chang Cheh)
A retrospective screening of the iconic old school Shaw Brothers martial arts flick that introduced the world to the onscreen dream team of martial artists supreme, the Five Venoms. If you decide to see one old school kung fu movie before you die, make it this one. The Five Venoms are like angels in the form of shirtless, charismatic young men who punch you in the face.

IP MAN

(Hong Kong, 2008, WIlson Yip, US premiere)
But just to prove that Hong Kong action isn’t dead, Sammo Hung choreographs this astounding kung fu flick starring Donnie Yen and directed by Wilson Yip (SPL, FLASHPOINT). Based on the life of Ip Man, who was Bruce Lee’s martial arts master in real life, it’s a throwback to the glory days when Hong Kong action movies made the screen catch on fire.

IP MAN will hurt your face.

INDONESIA
THE FORBIDDEN DOOR
(Indonesia, 2009, Joko Anwar, North American Premiere)
The director of last year’s festival favorite, KALA, is back and boy is this one twisted. Like a 19th century gothic novel adapted by Alfred Hitchcock and directed by David Lynch, this movie about a sculptor and the horrible things he does to become successful is one of the sickest, kinkiest movies we’ve ever screened.

RAINBOW TROOPS
(Indonesia, 2008, Riri Riza, New York Premiere)
This Indonesian blockbuster gives feel good films a good name. Set in the 70’s, it’s about a small, rural Muslim school that needs ten students to stay open. Ten enroll and the movie follows them over the next five years of their lives as they struggle to cope with what the world throws at them.

JAPAN
20TH CENTURY BOYS
(Japan, 2008, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, New York Premiere)

20TH CENTURY BOYS: CHAPTER TWO – THE LAST HOPE
(Japan, 2009, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, New York Premiere)
As revered as the DEATH NOTE series, 20TH CENTURY BOYS (named after the T. Rex song) is an epic, acclaimed manga series finally realized as three much-anticipated movies, with the third, concluding installment coming out in August 2009. In 1969, a group of kids start a club where they imagine the earth being destroyed by evil and they have to save the day. Decades later, they’re disillusioned adults and when their childhood fantasies of global destruction begin to come true they realize that it’s up to them to…gulp…actually save the world.
(The 20th Century Boys manga is currently being released in America by Viz)
(Presented in association with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film)

ALL AROUND US
(Japan, 2008, Ryosuke Hashiguchi, New York Premiere)
After a seven-year break, director Ryosuke Hashiguchi is back and the results are shattering. This movie observes eight years of a marriage, marking the passage of time with famous Japanese murder trials covered by the husband who is a courtroom sketch artist. Actress Tae Kimura won “Best Actress” for her performance as the wife at the Japanese Academy Awards and she deserves it.  An amazing, sensitive film that speaks quietly but makes everyone sit up and listen.
(Presented in association with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film)

BE A MAN! SAMURAI SCHOOL
(Japan, 2008, Tak Sakaguchi, New York Premiere)
An action comedy about a school where real men are formed in a crucible of bare knuckled brawling.
Tak Sakaguchi will introduce the movie with his fellow stuntman and action choreographer, Isao Karasawa.

CHILDREN OF THE DARK
(Japan,2008, Junji Sakamoto, North American)
A Japanese movie shot in Thailand about the child trafficking business (both for sex and for their internal organs) sounds awful, but this movie blew us away with its unblinking, hard-nosed howls of outrage. Full of more horrible sights per second than any other movie made this year. Of course, it’s been banned in Thailand.

CLIMBER’S HIGH
(Japan, 2008, Masato Harada, North American Premiere)
Masato Harada, director of last year’s SHADOW SPIRIT, gets his Howard Hawks on again with this gripping ensemble drama about a group of newspapermen covering the real-life tragedy of a 1985 plane crash in the mountains of central Japan.

THE CLONE RETURNS HOME
(Japan, 2008, Kanji Nakajima, New York Premiere)
It’s been compared to Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS, and they ain’t wrong. Debuting at the Sundance Film Festival this quietly shimmering science fiction movie starts as hard sci fi and then morphs into a surreal space opera set on earth. An astronaut dies in an accident while in orbit, but surprise! The Japanese Space Agency cloned him before he went up into space and now his wife gets the traumatized clone as a consolation prize.

FISH STORY
(Japan, 2009, Yoshihiro Nakamura, North American Premiere)
If you miss this dense, intricately plotted hymn to the powers of rock and roll, you’ll kick yourself. In 1975, one year before the Sex Pistols debuted, Gekirin was a Japanese punk band that recorded a single song called “Fish Story” and then broke up. Years later, their song saves the world. Literally.
(Presented in association with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film)

HOUSE
(Japan, 1977, Nobuhiko Obayashi)
A special screening of a restored master of Obayashi’s head-spinning, unbelievably surreal and completely amazing 1977 horror movie. The only horror film you’ve ever seen that was written by a seven-year-old girl (literally), this is the kind of mind blower that is whispered about but rarely screened.
Introduced by its devoted fans, directors Yoshihiro Nishimura and Noboru Iguchi.

K-20: LEGEND OF THE MASK
(Japan, 2008, Shimako Sato, New York Premiere)
Takeshi Kaneshiro (ACCURACY OF DEATH, FALLEN ANGELS) plays a masked thief in an alternate history where World War II never happened. One of the biggest Japanese productions of recent years, and featuring special effects by the team behind the ALWAYS movies, K-20 is an old-school, running-and jumping, two-fisted, pulpy, steampunk action adventure in the grand tradition of swashbuckling Errol Flynn movies. And, oddly enough for a Japanese film, it’s got a female director at the helm.

LOVE EXPOSURE
(Japan, 2008, Sion Sono, New York Premiere)
The director of EXTE and NORIKO’S DINNER TABLE returns with one of the most amazing cinematic achievements of the year. A four-hour epic about pornography, Catholicism, families, fathers, true love, cross-dressing, kung fu, cults and mental illness, this movie will cleanse you of your sins and leave you horny as hell. This is your only chance to see it, and if you ever loved movies you cannot afford to miss it.
Director Sion Sono will be present to bless the audience at the screening.
(Presented in association with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film)

THE MAGIC HOUR
(Japan, 2008, Koki Mitani, New York Premiere)
Koki Mitani (UNIVERSITY OF LAUGHS) has turned in a film that could be a lost screwball comedy classic from Hollywood’s golden age. A low level gangster is caught having an affair with his boss’s mistress. To make amends he agrees to help his boss hire the world’s greatest hitman for an upcoming gang war. Unable to procure said hitman he finds an out-of-work actor to play the part, convincing him that he’s actually making a movie about the world’s greatest hitman. Lavish, unbelievably ridiculous filmmaking at its best.
(Presented in association with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film)

MONSTER X STRIKES BACK: ATTACK THE G8 SUMMIT
(Japan, 2008, Minoru Kawasaki, North American Premiere)
Preceded by GEHARA: THE LONG-HAIRED GIANT MONSTER
(Japan, 2009, Kiyotaka Taguchi, short film)
Guilala and Gehara are the two goofiest giant monsters in Japanese cinema and these two films lovingly recreate and satirize Japanese kaiju movies of the 60’s and 70’s. Plus: Takeshi Kitano as “Takemajin” the savior of Japan. Between these two films you’ll get more monster love than you’ve had all year.

SAMURAI PRINCESS
(Japan, 2009, Kengo Kaji, North American Premiere)
Yoshihiro Nishimura produced and is responsible for the outrageously gore-soaked special effects in this movie about a samurai girl who’s actually a cyborg. Her breasts are bombs, her feet contain rockets and she’s up against bad guys with chainsaw arms. As stupid and jaw-dropping as it sounds.
Presented by its producer and special effects director, Yoshihiro Nishimura and visual effects director, Tsuyoshi Kazuno.

SNAKES AND EARRINGS
(Japan, 2008, Yukio Ninagawa, North American Premiere)
Based on the best-selling novel about a woman who decides that her one goal in life is to have her tongue split, this is the sexy body modification opus you’ve been waiting for. Yuriko Yoshitaka gives an incredibly raw, totally exposed performance that’s cleaning up the awards and she’s the anchor for this emotional, erotic, disturbing and seductive movie for anyone who ever looked at a pierced tongue and thought, “Well, maybe…”

VACATION
(Japan, 2008, Hajime Kadoi, New York Premiere)
A warts-and-all look at the way Japan executes those it sentences to death. It quietly builds to a powerful punch in the guts as a guard volunteers to be the guy who holds down the legs of a condemned prisoner when he’s hung in order to get extra vacation time.
(Presented in association with Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film)

YOROI SAMURAI ZOMBIE
(2008, Japan, Tak Sakaguchi, New York Premiere)
What could be more fun that watching a bunch of rotting, samurai zombies rise from the grave and go after a happy little family on their vacation? Throw in some heavily armed crooks on the run and a gaggle of mentally unbalanced cops and garnish with hard-rocking horror action.
Tak Sakaguchi will introduce the movie with his fellow stuntman and action choreographer Isao Karasawa.

MALAYSIA
WHEN THE FULL MOON RISES
(Malaysia, 2008, Mamat Khalid, North American Premiere)
The best way to describe this movie is Guy Maddin taking on the history of Malaysian cinema. Most of Malaysia’s older movies have been destroyed by the ravages of time, so director Mamat Khalid makes a “lost” black-and-white thriller from the 50’s, that’s part loving homage and part sharp-eyed send-up. Full of secret communist cults, werewolves, were-tigers, ghosts, private eyes, midgets and eerie secrets, it’s so deadpan you don’t know if  you should be laughing or crying. An epic homemade achievement of brain-boiling strangeness and charm.

SOUTH KOREA
ANTIQUE
(South Korea, 2008, Min Gyu-Dong, North American Premiere)
One of the surprise hits of 2008, this flick stars four of Korea’s hottest actors and is based on a wildly popular shojo manga series, “Antique Bakery” by Fumi Yoshinaga. Oh, and it’s a musical about gays of demonic charm, pastry chefs, and child abduction.

The beautiful, singing and dancing pastry chefs of ANTIQUE.

BREATHLESS
(South Korea, 2009, Lee Hwan & Yang Ik-june, North American Premiere)
Winner of the top award at this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival this movie is a labor of love by Yang Ik-Joon who wrote, directed and stars. Playing one of the most unrepentant thugs ever to grace the silver screen, he’s a debt collector who’s in it purely for the violence. But when he meets a high school girl who’s as unrelenting and tough as he is his world begins to come apart. From its first shouted obscenity to its last bloody beat-down, this is an uncompromising dissection of male violence that’ll leave you completely ravaged and violated.

CRUSH AND BLUSH
(South Korea, 2008, Lee Kyeong-Mi, New York Premiere)
This hysteria-fueled comedy from Korea has already acquired a cult following and it’s easy to see why. Produced by Park Chan-Wook (OLDBOY, and he also has a cameo – as does HOST director Bong Joon-Ho) it’s from first time female director Lee Kyeong-Mi and it stars actress Kong Hyo-Jin as a high school Russian teacher demoted to teaching English, a language she barely understands. Her solution? All-out war with the teacher she views as the source of her misery. The kind of movie that’s very, very funny until it goes too far and starts making the audience very, very uncomfortable.

CRUSH & BLUSH

DACHIMAWA LEE
(South Korea, 2008, Ryu Seung-wan, US Premiere)
Ryu Seung-Wan (CITY OF VIOLENCE) makes this pitch perfect send-up of Korean spy and action cinema of the 70’s and 80’s that stands alone as a gut-busting comedy, a breathtaking action flick and a satire of Korea’s motion picture past. An unholy blend of Stephen Chow, the Zucker Brothers and Jackie Chan it’s full of elaborate set pieces and ridiculous contrivances, sending up Korea’s anti-communist hysteria while serving up some ace martial arts

DREAM
(South Korea, 2008, Kim Ki-duk, North American Premiere)
From Korea’s number one cinematic transgressor comes this surreal, dark fantasy about two people who find that their dreams are connected. Kim Ki-Duk directs this dark fantasy starring Japan’s Joe Odagiri and Korea’s Lee Na-Young. It’s a return to form by a master director.

GO GO 70’s
(South Korea, 2008, Ho Choi, New York Premiere)
Do you wanna funk with Korea? After watching this infectious, period-perfect, butt-bumping, hip-grinding flick about the rise of real life 70’s funk band, The Devils, your answer will be: hell yes. These rock n’roll rebels were a flashpoint for social protest and GO GO 70’s offers up plenty of tacky fashions, groove-a-licious musical numbers and enough politics to set the night on fire.

GO GO 70’s!!!

ROUGH CUT
(South Korea, 2008, Jang Hun, North American Premiere)
Under-promising with its story of a pampered actor hiring a real-life street thug to co-star in his new gangster picture, this high concept action film ultimately over-delivers and becomes an intimate, intense dissection of its two main characters who are both very bad men in very different ways.

TAIWAN
CAPE NO. 7
(Taiwan, 2008, Wei Te-sheng, New York Premiere)

The highest grossing movie ever released in Taiwan, CAPE NO. 7 is less of a movie than a phenomenon. Things kick off when a pop star decides to hold a concert in a tiny seaside town and the civic booster mayor vows to form a local band to be the opening act. Think of it as THE FULL MONTY only with Mando-pop instead of stripping and you’ve got the idea. The director mortgaged his house and borrowed money from friends to make this film and it’s so carefully observed, full of weird characters and completely crowd-pleasing that it’s amazing it’s his first film to get a theatrical release.

Titles listed as such above are presented in association with JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film (June 30 – July 12). More info is over here.

Comments (2) May 07 2009