Tiny smattering of great Japanese films
I'm just finishing the EXCELLENT "Azumi"--- a sorta-samurai film about a young girl who is saved by a group of swordsmen, only to grow up being forced to help her master kill ruthlessly in the name of his life-long 'mission'.
The film is directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, the hyper-energetic (if not extremely silly) "Versus". It's gone into numerous film festivals, and it's easy to see why. The action is part comic-booky, but there are scenes that extremely poignant and human as well. The characters and the situations stay fresh and interesting, up to the end.
Suprisingly, the main actress is by far no Ziyi Zhang - (few are)- when you stop and look at her movements, it's pretty clear that she's not that fast (though her character is supposed to be this amazing warrior-swordswoman)- but the directing is so well done, it works out more than fine (and I'm REAL picky when it comes to movie fighting choreography).
There are SO many bad swordfighting films with next to no story (or if they do have one, its so trite and plodding that it's drudgery to get through it) that finding "Azumi" is a nice treat.
There's a featurette talking about how the dubbing crew really fought to make the dubbing have quality- and from having to dub my own films (because of bad audio recording)--- I can relate to the pain of doing it.
As an aside:
For a time, I used to subscribe to this local 'art house' movie theatre and I really dug trying to keep up with foreign films--- but the odd thing is that even though so much is available now on dvd, I find myself keeping up a lot less. I think in watching foreign films, I miss the whole event of going to the art house and the audience in an art house (which for the most part are the kind of people that want to see the show when they're there), and without it, it's a lot less fun, I think to watch a foreign film on tv.
Anyhow, some of the Japanese films that were particularly great I'll mention here:
* Fireworks by "Beat" Takeshi. Slow moving, but one of "Beat"'s best films ever. Beat is sort of like the Japanese version of Harvey Keitel.
* "Battle Royale"- amazing, not so easy to find film about a government program that recruits (against their will) high school students to enter a real 'survivor' type game wherein the students are forced in an environment there can only be one survivor at the end allowed to live. Rather than focusing on the exploitive elements on the story, the director focused on the differences of how the kids individually decide to face the threat of death... some resist the idea of killing, regardless of consequence, some aren't strong enough to face the whole situation, and choose suicide, instead- and some actually get turned on by the idea of killing others.
* "Princess Mononoke" - actually, ANY Hayao Miyazaki film is highly reccomended, but what's particularly cool about the English dub version of this one is that the translation is done by famous novelist Neil Gaiman, and so, the lines have even more grace than usual for translated films. Also, though people have different favorites ("Kiki's Delivery Service" and "Lupin 3: Treasure of Fujima Castle" are extremely charming as well)- "Mononoke" I feel is his highest achievement so far. If Miyazaki was an entertainer, that would definitely be more than enough, but his movies often present difficult social problems to mirror society as well - making one think as well as feel (as do most great films), but, fortunately, he doesn't give any false simple answers to any of them.
Ok, I'm getting tired... it's 2:21am in the morning and I'm JUST finishing (hopefully) doing the best job I can with the audio editing of my stupid last film. The bad thing is that the audio, is, well, bad- but I'm glad that there does come a point where you really can get rid of a project with flaws and whatnot, and not feel bad about not looking back.