kiyoshi kurosawa Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When the average American film fan thinks of Japanese movies, they'll probably picture one of three things: either a samurai or a gangster -- Toshiro Mifune and his sword, or Takeshi Kitano and his gun -- or a stringy-haired ghost girl. Die-hard fans will know that Yasujiro Ozu, Nagisa Oshima and Mikio Naruse also made contemporary dramas about modern-day citizens, often trying to figure out their lives in the post-WWII turmoil. But those dramas were hindered by the times, or by the censors; the characters were polite and functional and hid their own true emotions in an attempt to do what they were supposed to be doing. But there's something in the air over in Japan right now; they're making melodramas, big, roiling, red-blooded ones filled with anguish and torment and heartbreak.

Earlier this year, Kiyoshi Kurosawa -- who is thus far best known for his truly terrifying films like Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) -- came out with Tokyo Sonata, a devastating (but defiantly odd) look at a crumbling family. The father loses his job, the eldest son contemplates joining the U.S. military and the youngest son sneaks off for secret piano lessons, while the mother finds herself kidnapped by a charismatic burglar. Kurosawa somehow ties together these plot threads with a few scenes at the family home, in which little of the stuff that we can see happening actually gets discussed. It's a brilliant portrait of disconnect and lack of communication.

(All this month we'll be bringing back some of our favorite Halloween-themed posts, as well as digging up some brand new stuff from beyond the grave. Enjoy!)

By: Peter Martin

"The answer is not in the avoidance of remakes. The plain fact is that remakes of very good original films sometimes fail because they have not been remade by people as talented as those who made the first versions." -- David O. Selznick, 1956.

The famed producer of Gone With the Wind and Rebecca was on a downward slide when he wrote the above in a memo to the president of 20th Century Fox. Selznick spent much of the 1950s repackaging and selling his earlier productions to studios, pocketing tidy fees for his efforts. The modern-day equivalent is Roy Lee. As explained in a profile in The New Yorker: "What Lee does for a living sounds simple enough, but no one in Hollywood had thought of it before. He watches videos of every Asian movie ever made, picks the biggest hits, and then, on behalf of their Asian distributors, sells the 'remake rights' of those films to studios here, so that they can be turned into big-budget American spectacles."

That article was published in June 2003, on the heels of the financial success of The Ring in the fall of 2002 but before the coming horror onslaught that included The Grudge, The Grudge 2, Dark Water and The Ring Two (all involving Lee), plus Pulse and others. Lee quickly expanded into other countries and other genres, but the most appealing remake target for Hollywood in general remains Asian horror. This year has seen the release of One Missed Call (Japan), The Eye (Hong Kong/Thailand), and Shutter (Thailand); awaiting release are The Uninvited (AKA A Tale of Two Sisters, South Korea), and The Echo (the Philippines), with Alone (Thailand), The Ring 3 and The Grudge 3 all listed in various stages of production on Lee's upcoming slate.

While he's perhaps best known for directing the original Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's new film, Tokyo Sonata, is an unexpected pleasure -- not only because it's a departure from the J-horror films that made his name, but because it's also a startlingly rich, funny and strong drama, without a hint of the supernatural or unearthly. That's not to say it's not exciting, or scary or startling, but rather to say that it concerns itself with normal, average (which is hardly normal, and rarely average) life as its main concern. Ryhuei (Teruyuki Kagawa) is a chief administrator in a medical-supplies company ... or, rather, he was; he's been downsized, his position outsourced. He can't bring himself to tell his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), and has even less an idea of what he'd say to his sons Takashi (Yu Koyangi) and Kenji (Kai Inowaki), so for a while he dresses for work, leaves in the morning and goes to the park. Or looks for new work that simply isn't there.

At heart, Tokyo Sonata is about the difficulty of necessary conversations, and the necessity of difficult conversations. Ryhuei isn't the only person not talking about what's really going on; Megumi's deeply unhappy in her life, for reasons she can't even explain to herself; Takashi is thinking about embarking on a bold, if ill-advised, adventure; Kenji wants to study the piano, and does so in secret after his father's dismissal of the idea. Watching some films, you think that the plot's complications and character's stresses could be cleared up in one simple conversation ... and watching other, better films, you think that the plot's complications and character's stresses could be cleared up in one simple conversation and think of all the times that's been the case in your own life and how you may have failed to do so at the time, too.

Certain movies get under my skin and refuse to leave. Case in point: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Pulse (AKA Kairo). There are several startling scenes in those movies that left me on edge for days. Both are horror flicks, but differ in their approaches. Cure is a police procedural with an unsettling string of deaths, while Pulse imagines what happens when there is no more room in the spirit realm for dead people. Kurosawa has a gift for creating indelible imagery married to sometimes head-scratching stories. Even when things don't really add up, as in Bright Future, his films leave a distinct aftertaste.

Kurosawa's Retribution, from 2006, hit Region 1 DVD earlier this week, and it's an odd little beast. In the opening scene, a woman in a red dress is brutally drowned by a mysterious man in a shallow pool of salt water on a reclaimed piece of land near the ocean. Kôji Yakusho (Babel, Shall We Dance?) plays Yoshioka, a weary police detective (similar to the one he played in Cure) investigating the case. Before he can get too far, we witness a respected doctor kill his son, for little apparent reason, by the same method. Is the doctor a serial killer? Why are Yoshioka's fingerprints on the first victim's body? Why does Yoshioka start having nightmares about a woman in a red dress?

Deliberately paced, Retribution veers between an effective freak-out and a disappointing, frustrating mystery, but Kurosawa fans may want to check out its low-key artistic despair.