Yuuji Ishida Movies
Is bad love better than no love at all? A woman finds herself pondering that question in this dark comedy from filmmaker Yukihiko Tsutsumi. When she was a teenager, Yukie Morita (Miki Nakatani) was the sort of girl whom people tended to ignore, and her efforts to stand out among her fellow students invariably ended in failure. The one thing that made others take notice of Yukie didn't help her much -- her father attempted to rob a bank, but his scheme failed so miserably it earned him lasting local notoriety. Desperate to start over, Yukie left the coastal town where she was born and moved to Osaka, where she worked a series of unglamorous jobs. In her early thirties, Yukie waits tables at a diner, but she's head over heels in love with her live-in boyfriend, Isao Hayama (Hiroshi Abe). Yukie is so thrilled to have someone to love that she's willing to ignore the fact Isao drinks too much, throws away his money gambling, can't hold a job, and has a hair-trigger temper that results in broken furniture and upended dinner tables on a regular basis. But is she really as happy as she claims to be? ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- Starring:
- Miki Nakatani, Hiroshi Abe, (more)
After suffering years of abuse by his sadistic classmates, a vengeful Japanese boy develops a murderous alter ego in order to better deal with his traumatic past in director Yasuo Inoue's shockingly violent feature debut. As a high school student, shy Juzo was forced to endure the humiliation heaped upon him by the abusive Akai. Years later, when Juzo is hired to work at the same company where Akai is employed, he moves into the apartment directly above his former tormentor. As Juzo's revenge-minded alter ego slowly begins to eclipse his quieter, more withdrawn public persona, the people who have wronged him in the past begin to fall one-by-one to a mysterious psychopath. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
- Starring:
- Shidou Nakamura, Shun Oguri, (more)
Japanese pop stars Kyôko Fukada (of Takeshi Kitano's Dolls) and Anna Tsuchiya star as the titular hellraisers of writer/director Tetsuya Nakashima's coming-of-age fantasy comedy Kamikaze Girls. The film opens with an animated segment, then switches to live action as Momoko (Fukada), wearing a frilly white dress, is sent flying from her scooter by a high-speed collision with a cabbage truck. Flying through the air in slow motion, Momoko reflects on her life, as the film flashes back to the Rococo era in France, the time and place in which the spacy teen wishes she'd lived. Soon we're back in more recent times, as Momoko recounts her parents' first meeting in a back alley, her birth, and her mother's subsequent abandonment of her failed yakuza father for the obstetrician who delivered Momoko. As a teen, Momoko dresses in the girly Lolita style, carries a parasol, and lives in the country, pining for Tokyo and her favorite clothing store, Baby, the Stars Shine Bright. Disgusted by the slovenly, unfashionable bumpkins that surround her, who buy all their clothing from the local Walmart-style superstore, Momoko retreats into herself and her fantasies. While trying to raise money to support her expensive tastes, she encounters Ichigo (Tsuchiya), a "Yanki" roughneck biker gang member, who expresses herself through spitting and violent headbutting. Momoko is naturally repulsed at first, but the two girls gradually form an unlikely friendship and make a wealth of discoveries about themselves as they travel to Tokyo together in search of a legendary tailor to make Ichigo a special jacket to honor her gang leader's retirement. Kamikaze Girls was shown at Subway Cinema's New York Asian Film Festival in 2005. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi
- Starring:
- Kyoko Fukada, Anna Tsuchiya, (more)
2LDK is part of the "Duel Project," in which super-efficient directors Yukihiko Tsutsumi and Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus), who had both worked on the anthology Jam Films, were each challenged to take one week and make a feature with two actors dueling in a single setting. Kitamura wrote and directed the samurai film Aragami, while Tsutsumi created the urban warfare story 2LDK. The title is an abbreviation, as one might see in a Japanese classified ad, for a two-bedroom apartment with a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. In 2LDK, Nozomi (Eiko Koiki) is a quiet, compulsively neat country girl who has recently moved to Tokyo in hopes of beginning a film career. Her roommate, Lana (Maho Nonami), is also an actress, but she's been at it for a while. She's brash about using her sexuality to get what she wants, while Nozomi is repressed. The personal space issues that afflict every roommate situation are exacerbated by their wildly different temperaments. While Lana is racked with guilt over a past indiscretion that ended in tragedy, Nozomi is used to being a big fish in a small pond, and has trouble dealing with the pressures of big-city life. When they learn that they're up for the same part in a big film production, the tension mounts. Lana pushes Nozomi's buttons by implying that she's been intimate with a mutual acquaintance she knows is courting Nozomi. Nozomi, who diligently marks nearly every item in the apartment with the first initial of its proper owner, lashes out when she discovers that Lana has used her shampoo, and things gradually escalate from there into an all-out, kill-or-be-killed war. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi
- Starring:
- Eiko Koiki, Maho Nonami, (more)
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