Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Koji Yakusho, Kumiko Aso, Sho Aikawa, Shun Sugata, Ren Osuji
Genre: Drama

HE SAID:
License to Live is the tale of a young man trying to discover his place in the world after being lost to a coma for 10 years. Only fourteen when he lost consciousness, Yutaka (Hidetoshi Nishijima) emerges mentally the same as the day he left, a boy in a man’s body. Now a stranger in his own hometown, he finds the world around him has moved on. Everyone from close friends to family has …

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Chishu Ryu, Shima Iwashita, Kiyoko Kishida, Keiji Sada
Genre: Drama

I’ve been sitting on this review for quite some time now, but I guess it’s time to get it out the door. Having not been able to come up with a suitable introduction, I’m just going to jump right in.
Yasujiro Ozu’s final film has been almost universally hailed by critics as a masterpiece, but to be completely honest, I’m a little puzzled by their unanimous acclaim. I’m not as familiar with Ozu’s body …

Director: Takashi Miike
Starring: Kenji Sawada, Keiko Matsuzaka, Naomi Nishida
Genre: Japan, Comedy, Curious, Fantasy
When Chris and I first saw Happiness of the Katakuris several years ago, we weren’t exactly impressed. Sometimes it just takes a second round. Lately I find it delightfully campy like the Rocky Horror Picture Show with its random wacky balls-out awkwardly endearing song and dance numbers (even enka karaoke), or harkening Beetlejuice when it employs grim prosthetics and surreal stop-animation, or even Sound of Music on acid. Anything now, it seems, is amazingly tame …

Director: Costa-Gavras
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek
Genre: Drama
Release Date: October 21, 2008

For those of you who think that George W. Bush is the first president to willfully attack a foreign country to rake in the spoils under the guise of protecting America, be aware that there were many before him… they were just sneakier.
In 1970, Salvador Allende was the first Socialist to be democratically elected; the 29th president of Chile. Not only was he a Socialist, but also a Marxist, with strong liberal opinions and radical revisions steered towards an …

It’s always sad when a film you’ve waited to watch disappoints. It’s even worse when it bombs. Udon has been in our queue for near three months now, and now that we’ve finally seen it, we have another entry on our list of the worst films we’ve seen this year.
The basic story of Udon concerns a young man, Kosuke Matsui (Yusuke Santamaria ,Bayside Shakedown), who returns home to his native prefecture following a failed attempt at comedic stardom in the USA. Something of a dreamer, Kosuke always found his family’s …

Given my reaction to Sion Sono’s Suicide Circle (you can read the rather embarrassing review here), one might be surprised I went out of my way to view another film by him. To be honest, I’m not the type to dismiss a director for a single bad run. And you know what? I’m pretty glad I did. Writer and Director Sion Sono’s modern tale of the Erotic-Grotesque, is at once repulsive and fascinating, and shows a near exponential evolution in his skill as a film craftsman. However, viewer …

Michael Kang’s The Motel, an adaptation of Ed Lin’s Waylaid, is a painfully funny take on adolescence and the inherent isolation felt by those undergoing puberty. It is the tale of a thirteen year-old boy, Ernest Chin, whose family runs and lives in a low rate motel along a New Jersey bypass road. Being that the motel offers “weekly, daily, and hourly rates”, Ernest sees more than his fair share of questionable human interactions. His overbearing mother chides him incessantly, his grandfather calls him fat, his younger sister has a …

Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (review) is one of my favorite horror films. Maybe because Kris and I are avid road trippers, or maybe because I saw it at an impressionable age, Craven’s film has found a permanent home in my collection. The tale of a non-violent family pushed to acts of savage violence in the wake of relentless attack by desert cannibals may seem comically absurd, but in execution proves raw and affecting long after the final frame. As with many of the horror remakes of late I …

Being in a love flourished from passion and trust is the most exhilarating emotion, but if you realized that your betrothed was really in love with someone else –someone who could pass for your twin– could you forgive him? What if the opposite were true – you realized that you were in love with someone who, by your own fault, would only remain an unrequited ghost? Could you learn to forgive yourself? Locked away in an appropriately titled book, “In Remembrance of Things Lost,” in a teeny school library, possibly …

Is this really happening? Like an old memory based in both surreal and logical demise, Oldboy reminds us of how unrealistic and unreliable reality can be. Held for fifteen years in a secret “holding cell hotel” by an anonymous kidnapper, main character Daesu Oh must (Shiri’s Min-sik Choi) sift through his old memories to figure out who the hell did this to him. The ironic thing of course, is he is the one “to blame, more so in his captor’s eye. Daesu Oh in Korean …

KILLER WEREWOLF MAN IS COMING.. AND HE’S HORNY
HE-SAID: After the major disappointment that was the Dawn of the Dead remake, I felt the need to get some honest to God, 100% pure indie horror back in my system. Lo and behold, the San Francisco Horror fest had exactly what I needed.
Last night was the US Premiere of Ginger Snaps II, and unfortunately the only theatrical showing before it makes its way to DVD. Sadly, this is one film that could definitely benefit from a theatrical run, but nevertheless …

FAMILY IS EVERYTHING
HE SAID: In America is the story of an Irish immigrant family searching to escape their past and start anew in the wonderful land called America. Unable to be approved for direct passage, the family travels to Canada and sneaks across the Canadian/American border under the guise of holiday. Upon reaching New York the family takes up residence in a run down tenement building and hopes that fortune will smile upon them. But America is quite a strange place. Everything from dreams of opportunity, the scary neighbor …

WHEN IS A FAMILY NOT DYSFUNCTIONAL? The novelty of Katie Holmes portraying a former punk twistette should be reason enough to check this movie out. She’s beautiful, talented and lends the ironically innocent edge her character demands. But there are many more wicked goobers of greatness in _this recipe. Stir in one estranged family consisting of a doting doltish dad, a last-born sibling trembling with perfection, a spacey grandma, an estranged uber-critical mother ornery from terminal illness, and a slacker middle child as her willing slave. Toss the latter …