best 80's and 90's Japanese movies

Joseph Murphy jamurphy
Fri Apr 10 10:05:33 EDT 1998


Dennis Doros wrote:

>Instead of petitions to US distributors, I think we'd all love to hear what
>you'd like to see shown in the US. I can give you the names and addresses or
>email addresses of some of the other US distributors if anybody likes. Many of
>the emails on this list, by the way, go to our acquisitions colleague (who is
>Japanese so she can write to the companies and see unsubtitled films as well)

One thing you might take a look at are the two offerings by Toho's
prematurely discontinued YES! series.  The two titles they released are:

Like Grains of Sand (Hashiguchi Ryosuke, 1995)
My Secret Cache (Yaguchi Shinobu, 1997)

I haven't seen either of the YES! offerings, but I have seen their earlier
work for the PIA Film Festival, and I remember thinking immediately that
these films would translate for a US audience.  Hashiguchi's Last Night's
Secret (Yuube no himitsu, 1989) is a little gem about a drinking party that
degenerates after one of the friends reveals his doubts about his
sexuality, while Yaguchi's Rain Woman (Ame onna, 1990) is a truly absurd
comedy about two women who share a house and have no concern for social
norms or the effects of their actions on others, and everywhere they go it
rains.  We screened Yaguchi's first feature, Down the Drain (Hadashi no
picnikku, 1993, available subtitled in 16mm) at both a campus and a
community venue last year in Florida and they were really well received.
What I've seen of Hashiguchi's work has been drama about coming out or
exploring sexuality.  Yaguchi's is an extremely nihilistic comedy that
"impacts the psyche directly," as one promotion would have it, which I take
to mean it short-circuits the superego the way silent slapstick comedy did
and appeals directly to a kind of frightening internal anarchy, the seat of
laughter.

Anyway, these two directors have a very contemporary sensibility, and I'm
thinking the YES! series could connect with the US independent film market
or the college theater circuit.  So I hope you can take a look at them.
It's a shame Toho had to discontinue the series, but I hope these two
director's have a chance to keep making films their own way.

JM









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