Yoshiyuki Morishita Movies

A violent and outrageous revenge comedy with a thoughtful undercurrent, director Lee Sang-il's Scrap Heaven opens with three characters united by fate on the same city bus: toilet cleaner Tetsu (Jô Odagiri); police department administrative assistant Kasuya (Ryo Kase), who wants to work his way up into homicide; and pharmaceutical company employee Saki (Chiaki Kuriyama). The three strangers have ostensibly no connection to one another, save a shared presence on the bus one fateful night -- the night that a political secretary goes completely psychotic and decides to take the three passengers, at random, as hostages. He strong-arms the three into violent and sadistic mind games, including lethal versions of Rock, Paper, Scissors and Russian roulette. The perpetrator inflicts Kasuya with deep-seated psychological scars and shoots Tetsu, pushing the man to the brink of death. The gunman then turns the weapon on himself. Months later, Kasuya meets up with Tetsu once again, and saves him from a potentially lethal act of violence. The two men subsequently join forces and devise a wild plan to set up a revenge-for-hire business, designed to "right wrongs" for victimized persons. In the mean time, Saki is pouring all of her time and energy into the construction of a liquid bomb -- a project that threatens to invite further destruction. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Director Gen Sekiguchi and screenwriter Taku Tada, phenomenally successful award winners in Japan's advertising industry, make their feature-film debut with the fast-paced omnibus film, Survive Style 5+, which incorporates five strange tales that occasionally intersect. The ubiquitous Tadanobu Asano introduces the film, playing a man who has apparently just murdered his lovely wife (Reika Hashimoto). He drives out to the woods, buries the body, and returns home to find her waiting for him, and not in a particularly good mood. In the second story, Yoko (Kyôko Koizumi), a driven copywriter who constantly spews ad ideas into her handy minicassette recorder, has just had quick, unfulfilling sex with Aoyama (Hiroshi Abe), a sleazy, conceited TV hypnotist who proceeds to insult her work and her personal hygiene. Yoko takes it well, but she's got plans for the jerk. In the third story, Kobayashi (Ittoku Kishibe), a good-natured salaryman, is hypnotized by Aoyama into believing he's a bird. His family has a whole new set of problems when Aoyama is incapacitated before he can break the trance. The fourth thread follows three dimwitted burglars (Yoshiyuki Morishita, Jai West, and Kanji Tsuda) as they grapple with both professional and sexual confusion. The final plotline concerns a hot-tempered English hitman (Vinnie Jones) and his goofy employer (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), who also serves as his translator as the hitman asks nearly everyone he meets, "What is your function on this planet?" Sonny Chiba has a cameo as the hen-pecked president of a drug company. Survive Style 5+ was shown at Subway Cinema's New York Asian Film Festival in 2005. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide