Japanese films and movies
DVDs |
 | Title: A Man Vanishes
Title in Japanese: Ningen jôhatsu
Series: Masters of cinema
Director: Shohei Imamura
Starring:
Media: DVD
Region: 2 Running time: 130 min Year: 1967
Language(s): Japanese
Subtitle(s): English
Label: Eureka Entertainment. Release date: 24 October 2011
Price: $39.95
EAN/UPC: 5060000403435
Summary - It is difficult to summarise Shohei Imamura's legendary 1967 film, the first picture produced by Japan's countercultural Art Theatre Guild (ATG). Is it a documentary that turns into a fiction? A narrative film from beginning to end? A record of improvisation populated with actors or non-actors (and in what proportion)? Is it the investigation into a true disappearance, or a work merely inspired by actual events? Even at the conclusion of its final movement, A Man Vanishes [Ningen johatsu, or The Unexplained Disappearance of a Human Being] mirrors its subject in deflecting inquiries into the precise nature of its own being. A middle-class salaryman has gone missing - possibly of his own accord - and a film crew has set out to assemble a record of the man and the events surrounding his disappearance. As the crew meticulously builds a cachet of interviews with the man's family and lovers, their subject and his motivations become progressively more elusive - until the impossibility of the endeavour seems to transform the very film itself. Long unavailable anywhere on home video, Imamura's A Man Vanishes remains a unique and crucial entry in a provocative filmmaker's body of work, daring as it does to ask the big questions: what is reality, and what is a man?
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 | Title: The Ballad of Narayama
Title in Japanese: Narayama-bushi kô
Series: Masters of cinema
Director: Shohei Imamura
Starring:
Media: Dual Format Blu-ray & DVD
Region: 2 Running time: 130 min Year: 1983
Language(s): Japanese
Subtitle(s): English
Label: Eureka Entertainment. Release date: 24 October 2011
Price: $44.95
EAN/UPC: 5060000700350
Summary -
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 | Title: Empire Of Passion
Title in Japanese: Ai no borei
Series:
Director: Nagisa Ôshima
Starring: Tatsuya Fuji, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Takahiro Tamura
Media: Dual Format Blu-ray & DVD
Region: 2 Running time: Year: 1978
Language(s): Japanese
Subtitle(s): English
Label: Studiocanal. Release date: 17 October 2011
Price: $43.95
EAN/UPC: 5055201816474
Summary - In feudal Japan a young soldier begins an intense affair with an older married woman. Driven by passion, obsession and jealousy they decide to violently murder her husband and dispose of the body in a nearby well. Claiming her husband is working away from home the couple carry on their affair in secret. Three years later her husband returns from the dead to haunt the illicit couple, feeding off their guilt and pushing them deeper into the dark realms of insanity. With films such as Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Gohatto and the infamous In The Realm Of The Senses, director Nagisa Ôshima is one of the most celebrated and controversial figures in Japanese cinema. Made in 1978, Empire Of Passion is an atmospheric, unsettling and unforgettable experience. A huge influence on contemporary Asian horror it has lost none of its beguiling power.
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 | Title: In The Realm of The Senses
Title in Japanese: Ai no korîda
Series:
Director: Nagisa Ôshima
Starring: Tatsuya Fuji, Eiko Matsuda, Aoi Nakajima
Media: Dual Format Blu-ray & DVD
Region: 2 Running time: Year: 1976
Language(s): Japanese
Subtitle(s):
Label: Studiocanal. Release date: 17 October 2011
Price: $43.95
EAN/UPC: 5055201816481
Summary - Presented for the first time completely uncut in the UK, world renowned director Nagisa Ôshima’s In The Realm Of The Senses is one of the most controversial films ever made. When it was first released in 1976, the film was banned in the US, given a limited release in the U.K. and is still censored in Japan. Unlike any film you have ever experienced, In The Realm Of The Senses is a masterpiece notorious for its graphic sexual content, scandalous subject matter and its unforgettable climax. Based on one of the most shocking true stories to hit Japan, In The Realm Of The Senses tells the story of Sade Abe, a former prostitute working as a hotel maid in Tokyo in 1936. When Sade begins a torrid affair with the owner, they become completely infatuated with each other. Their increasingly experimental sexual encounters spiral into an all-consuming, obsessive and destructive love affair where even life is worth sacrificing.
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 | Title: Harakiri
Title in Japanese: Seppuku
Series: Masters of cinema
Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Ishihama, Shima Iwashita
Media: Dual Format Blu-ray & DVD
Region: 2 Running time: 133 min Year: 1963
Language(s): Japanese
Subtitle(s): English
Label: Eureka Entertainment. Release date: 26 September 2011
Price: $44.95
EAN/UPC: 5060000700343
Summary - Of all Masaki Kobayashi's attacks on the cruelty and inhumanity perpetrated by authoritarian power (including The Human Condition and Samurai Rebellion), perhaps none are more brilliant than his visceral, mesmerising Harakiri [aka Seppuku]. In a magnificent performance, Tatsuya Nakadai (Yojimbo, The Face of Another, Ran) stars as Hanshiro Tsugumo, a masterless down-and-out samurai who enters the manor of Lord Iyi, requesting to commit ritual suicide on his property. Suspected of simply fishing for charity, Hanshiro is told the gruesome tale of the last samurai who made the same request but Hanshiro will not be moved... With its intricate structure and pressure-cooker atmosphere, Kobayashi's first jidai-geki period drama is a full-scale demolition job of samurai ideals and feudal hypocrisy, filmed with artistry and surgical precision, and scored by celebrated composer Toru Takemitsu. Adapted from the same source novel in 2011 by notorious auteur Takashi Miike, the original winner of the 1963 Special Jury Prize at Cannes still stands as a startling moment in Japanese cinema.
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 | Title: Black Belt
Title in Japanese: Kuro-obi
Series:
Director: Shunichi Nagasaki
Starring: Akihito Yagi, Tatsuya Naka, Yuji Suzuki
Media: DVD
Region: 2 Running time: Year: 2005
Language(s): Japanese
Subtitle(s): English
Label: MVM. Release date: 08 August 2011
Price: $29.95
EAN/UPC: 5060067004460
Summary - No wires, no CGI--just real martial arts: In 2005, Ong-Bak set the martial arts world on fire again, bringing REAL martial arts back to movies. Now Black Belt brings the real force of karate to the screen. No wires, No CG and acted by Japan's leading black belt karate experts, Black Belt is a real martial arts tour de force. The year is 1932 and the Japanese military is dismantling each Karate dojo across the country. Amidst this chaos, the master of one dojo dies before passing on the "Kuro-obi" (black belt) to a successor. Three men of the dojo compete to earn the Kuro-obi and must face the might of the Japanese army. This leads them on very different paths, pitting each man against the other, and ultimately thrusting them into a terrible encounter with fate.
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 | Title: Norwegian Wood
Title in Japanese: Noruwei no mori
Series:
Director: Anh Hung Tran
Starring: Rinko Kikuchi, Kenichi Matsuyama, Kiko Mizuhara
Media: DVD
Region: 2 Running time: Year: 2000
Language(s): Japanese
Subtitle(s): English
Label: Soda Pictures Ltd. Release date: 04 July 2011
Price: $29.95
EAN/UPC: 5060238030441
Summary - Published in 1987 and since translated into 33 languages, Norwegian Wood is a story of loss and heartbreak in a time of global instability. Haruki Murakami’s bestselling novel is brought to the screen by Tran Anh Hung (Golden Lion winner for Cyclo and Academy Award nominee for The Scent of Green Papaya) and features Japanese rising star Kenichi Matsuyama (Death Note, Detroit Metal City) and Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi (Babel) alongside newcomer Kiko Mizuhara. Tokyo, the late 1960s… Students around the world are uniting to overthrow the establishment and Toru Watanabe’s personal life is similarly in tumult. At heart, he is deeply devoted to his first love, Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman. But their complex bond has been forged by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Watanabe lives with the influence of death everywhere. That is, until Midori, a girl who is everything that Naoko is not – outgoing, vivacious, supremely self-confident – marches into his life and Watanabe must choose between his past and his future.
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 | Title: Pigs & Battleships / Stolen Desire
Title in Japanese: Buta to gunkan / Nusumareta yokujô
Series:
Director: Shôhei Imamura
Starring: Jitsuko Yoshimura, Hiroyuki Nagato, Masao Mishima
Media: Dual Format Blu-ray & DVD
Region: Running time: 201 min Year: 2001
Language(s): Japanese
Subtitle(s): English
Label: Eureka Entertainment. Release date: 27 June 2011
Price: $49.95
EAN/UPC: 5060000700329
Summary - With this, his fifth film, Shôhei Imamura finally answered his true calling as Japanese cinema's most dedicated and brilliant chronicler of society's underbelly with the astonishing Pigs and Battleships [Buta to gunkan]. A riotous portrait of sub-Yakuza gangsters battling for control of the local pork business in a U.S. Navy-occupied coastal town (Yokosuka), Imamura conjures a chaotic world of petty thugs, young love, tough-headed women, and underworld hypochondria, with one of the most unforgettable climaxes ever to grace the screen. Featuring dynamic black-and-white 'Scope cinematography, the director's typically sly sense of social commentary, and a host of outstanding performances (including Jitsuko Yoshimura from Onibaba), Pigs and Battleships immediately became a cornerstone of the Japanese New Wave and remains perhaps Imamura's most sheerly entertaining work. Pigs and Battleships is a much-loved, major classic of Japanese cinema, and part of the established canon along with Seven Samurai, Onibaba, Kwaidan, Ugetsu monogatari, and Tokyo Story, etc.
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