Akaji Maro Movies

Prolific cult director Takashi Miike adapts Yuji Aoki's popular comic book into this black comedy about the life of a humble businessman struggling to stay afloat during Japan's economic doldrums. The film opens with the bankruptcy of a big Osaka supermarket chain. The news hits a family run printing business hard, which makes flyers for the store -- and if the supermarket's check bounces then most likely they'll go belly up. Umemoto (Yu Tokui) begs the head of the defunct supermarket (Maro Akaji) to honor his company's check, but the man demurs, saying he hasn't a penny to his name though his trophy wife continues to live a life of luxury. Just as Umemoto is preparing to take a long suck from his car's tail pipe, his suicide attempt is interrupted by a gang of yakuza roughing up a homeless shantytown next door. When Umemoto rushes one of the injured homeless to a local hospital, he finds himself made an honorary member of the camp, which they call Togen village. Umemoto soon befriends Kuwata (Shiro Sano), a failed writer who hit hard times, and the town's enigmatic "mayor" (Sho Aikawa sporting a fright wig). Moved by Umemoto's tale of woe, Kuwata vows to help him save his business. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

The fantastically prolific Takashi Miike directs this dizzyingly stylish thriller -- one of four in the year 2000 alone -- about love, cocaine, and exile. In the film's near-wordless opening, half-Japanese Brazil Mario (Teah) wipes out a room full of his fellow criminals in a bar in Sao Paolo and then strips naked in the dust storm outside. Mario is next seen one year later rescuing his Chinese girlfriend, Kei (Michelle Reis), from being deported. The event, which involved the hijacking of a helicopter, a gun fight amid the Joshua trees of the vast Japanese desert (!), and a harrowing 80-foot leap into Tokyo's Shinjuku district, instantly becomes the stuff of legend among Japan's large and beleaguered foreign population. Desperately wanting to get out of the country, Mario and Kei get entangled with a coke deal that goes sour between Mr. Ko (Mitsuhiro Oikawa), an effete though deadly Chinese mobster with unwholesome designs on Kei, and Fushimi (Koji Kikkawa), a psychotic yakuza who brutally kidnaps a blind orphan for his own terrible ends. Kung-fu cockfights, murderous Ping-Pong matches, and religious miracles ensue. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

After the success of Hana-Bi (1997), Takeshi Kitano, or 'Beat' Takeshi, as he is often called, made another film in which once again he is the director, screenwriter, editor, the leading player and the talent behind the art work. Unlike many of his films about the violent lives of the yakuza, Kikujiro is a bittersweet road movie about two characters who have very little in common. Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) is a sensitive nine-year-old boy who has to spend his summer vacation alone with his grandmother. Soccer practice is suspended and all his friends are away at the beach. In his boredom, he decides to look for the mother he has never met; with only a photo, an address, and very little money, this does not seem like a good idea. A friend of his grandmother's volunteers to send her husband along. The problem is that the irresponsible, loudmouthed, and greedy Kikujiro (Kitano), a low-level yakuza, is hardly the ideal companion for a child. He does not even like children. Starting with the excursion to the cycle races, this mismatched couple goes through a fanciful journey full of oddball characters and pleasant surprises. The best surprise of all is to discover how much they have in common. By the end of the journey, sullen Masao gains the sense of magic that had been missing from his life. As for Kikujiro, he now has a better understanding of who he is and what has been wrong with his life, although it takes a child to make him realize this. Kitano has declared that his own father, who passed away when he was a little boy, was the inspiration for the character of Kikujiro. The man was a house painter, carpenter, and master of traditional Japanese dance, but also a gambler who let his family down on many occasions. Another Japanese director, Makoto Shinozaki of Okaeri fame, has made Jam Session, a feature-length documentary on the making of Kikujiro. In competition at the 52nd Cannes Film Festival, 1999. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Rovi

Japan's favorite hard-boiled but bungling detective Maiku Hama (Masatoshi Nagase) returns for the third time in this disturbing crime drama. As the lurid tale begins, Hama-san is enjoying a rare good period in his life. With plenty of new clients he finally makes a decent wage. His new girlfriend Yuriko is mute and but for her being a Christian convert, offers him a lot of fun. But when he learns that a crazed killer has been poisoning women around the city and planting Hama's fingerprints on their corpses, the intrepid gumshoe must leave his cozy office behind the movie theater projection booth to clear his name. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this rather experimental festival piece, Yoriko Doguchi plays a real estate agent who has been given some odd instructions by a client: he wants an inexpensive room which is quiet, and has a window with no views of Tokyo's many skyscrapers. The real estate agent travels all over Tokyo to find such a room (it turns out to be a really rare commodity). It also turns out that the real estate's client (Akaji Maro is an assassin, who needs something like the room he described in order to recover psychologically from the rigors of his latest assignment. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

This is an enigmatic and challenging film in many ways. It is set in the 1930s and colored with nuances of the strange and sinister, one component of the Nazis' "world view" at that time. Japan's connections to Germany during this period leading up to World War II are brought forward in the German title, the name of a song by Pablo Sarasate that is a part of the story. This tale features the relationship between a Japanese professor of German and Nakasago (Yoshio Harada), a former friend he runs into while on vacation. Nakasago has been charged with murdering a married woman who ran away with him. As the two former friends become more and more involved, the professor begins to get a glimpse of Nakasago's odd life, and undertones of witchcraft provide an eerie overlay to the fate of the missing woman. Cerebral and intriguing, the film seems to take place on several levels at once. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi