best 80's and 90's Japanese movies ? Please post more

[Joseph Murphy]

>Michael Singer wrote:
>I imagine that no one else posted titles because everyone else was smart
>enough to know that it's dangerous to pick ten out of dozens.

I'm guessing it's more likely that most of us are lucky to have seen ten
films from the 80's and 90's.  Unless you're in a major metropolitan area
or a city with a film festival, there's really very little chance to see
these films outside Japan.  The major subtitled video catalogues (Facets,
New Yorker, Movies Unlimited), on which most university collections are
based are heavily weighted toward 1945-1975 titles (with the exception of
anime), or the lingering output of the auteurs from the 50's and 60's.
This produces a picture of Japanese film in North America at least where
the 80's and 90's almost drop out.
This site (KineJapan) is partially meant to change that, I think, but I
often wonder when any given film is taken up, such as Tokyo Biyori, or Kids
Return, or Swallowtail Butterfly (I've seen one of them), or Aaron's list
of 30, how many of the people on the list have had a chance to see it.
It's not like discussion lists on an author or literary genre's website,
where, when someone brings up a novel everyone can pick up their copy and
join in.  The politics and economics of international and subtitled video
distribution shape the image of Japanese film in tendentious ways, and the
number of people who can make statements about them, or compile a top-ten
list is quite limited.

Though you couldn't limit this to Japanese film it would be nice if a
critics' top three could be released outside the commercial distribution
system every year in some kind of publicly accessible format.  Something
like public radio.  Public Cinema.

By the way, thanks to Milestone and Miramax for some creative choices lately.

JM