Takanobu Hozumi Movies
When has-been baseball player Jack Elliot (Tom Selleck) is signed by a Japanese team, he is initially reluctant to take the game seriously. Elliot is very successful, though, as he teaches the team about American chutzpah, and they remind him of the value of respect. He must fight his way out from under a slump to show that he deserves the title. ~ John Bush, Rovi
- Starring:
- Tom Selleck, Ken Takakura, (more)
- 1983
If Western nations had the juvenile delinquency depicted in this Japanese film about a delinquent teen, they would be grateful. The teen does not do drugs or alcohol, she does not murder school children with her parents' rifles, she is not promiscuous, she does not commit armed robbery or belong to an abusive and immoral street gang, or torture anyone. Her crimes consist of having questionable taste in clothes and make-up, once in awhile sniffing a paint thinner, sometimes skipping school, and hitting her mother once. It is not clear what motivates her admittedly less-than-ideal behavior, though it is suggested that her father's extra-marital affairs and her mother's subsequent anger sparked the teen's rebellion. A sure sign of her strangeness is the fact that her hair permanently turned red from a childhood illness, and nothing is quite as descriptive of something totally foreign, totally Western. Maybe in the end, that is meant to be a subtle reference to delinquency as a Western cultural import - if so, it is the only subtlety in this otherwise conventional film. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Ayumi Ishida, Noriko Watanabe, (more)
- 1969
East China Sea is a "life is cheap" melodrama in which the American characters are the least appealing. A sociopathic gangster offers to shepherd a Japanese boat crew to safety. What the crew doesn't know is that the gangster is leading them into a trap. The U.S. Air Force is on maneuvers, and the crook hopes to provide a target for American gunners. Just why he does this is made clear (though not abundantly so) within the storyline. East China Sea was originally shown under the title Higashi Shinakai. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- 1969
In this Japanese romance, a writer travels to a hot-springs resort and finds himself falling in love with a geisha. He completes his vacation and then returns to his wife and family in Tokyo. The next winter he again goes to the resort to see the geisha. Unfortunately for her, he cannot offer her a commitment, and so he decides to return home and never see her again. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
