The New God DVD, Adachi, Underground Archive

[M Arnold]

I hope everyone had a good Golden Week holiday.

On my way back from Tokyo I bought the new DVD of "The New God".  It's very 
well done.  It's region-less (I believe) with fairly well done English 
subtitles (in the film only), so overseas and English-speaking viewers 
should be happy.  The disk has a number of special features, including 18 
minutes of interviews from screenings at Euro Space, a Q&A section about the 
film and production and a sort of "life advice" Q&A column with Amamiya 
Karin that I'm not quite sure what to make of yet.  A number of the comments 
in that section mention the Ehime Maru... incident (?), so it must have been 
put together recently.  Amamiya's answers are fairly blunt and to the point, 
condemning American insensitivity towards (only?) Japan, etc.

I don't remember whom it was with, but during one of the interviews on the 
disk the interviewer compared The New God to Blair Witch Project, and 
Amamiya mentioned that some people who watched the film didn't realize it 
was a documentary.

There's also a website up for the film, including all sorts of information 
about the movie, Amamiya's recent publications, her journal entries, concert 
dates and so forth...  http://www.st.rim.or.jp/~yt_w-tv/home.htm

I had a little bit of trouble finding the disk.  I checked a number of 
stores but only saw it at Tower Records and Aoyama Book Center.  At ABC 
there was one package on display with a note, "Display case only.  Come to 
the counter to purchase."  I didn't see any other DVDs in the store getting 
that treatment.

The new issue of Eiga Geijutsu is also out, with a feature on Roman Porno 
films.  There's a long "my favorite roman porn" section with opinions from a 
number of critics and scholars, etc.  I liked "ichijo sayuri: nureta 
yokujou" when I saw it several months ago so I ended up taking the advice of 
the first column and renting two of Kumashiro's other 1973 films, "koibito 
tachi wa nureta" and "yojohan fusuma no urabari."  "X X masu" indeed.

In one other interesting section of the magazine there were a few responses 
to Aaron Gerow and Abe Mark Nornes' "20 questions to Adachi Masao" that 
appeared in the special issue around the time of the Adachi retrospective 
last year.  Actually only 5 out of the 20 questions were answered, so it 
will take a while before we get to see all of the director's comments, but I 
was very interested to see this published.

Apparently there's going to be a series called "Underground Archive 
1958-1976" shown at Cinema Shimokitazawa from the 12th of this month to the 
29th of June.  (http://www.cinekita.co.jp/lineup/lineup.html)  Among the 
films are a couple of the Adachi movies that were shown at the retrospective 
last year, along with 70+ other titles I know nothing about.  There's not a 
lot of info on the films on the site or in the flyer, so can anyone out 
there offer opinions on which of these are worth seeing?

Mike Arnold
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com