Bumpkin Soup / Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl / Blood of the Do-Re-Me-Fa Girl Roars / Do-re-mi-fa musume no chi wa sawagu (1985)

The country girl Akiko appears at a university campus in search of Yoshioka, the boy she has determined to marry (apparently because he took her virginity) and wanders into not a world of study but of continuously weird behavior. As she says, it's more like a constant festival or circus than a school. Yoshioka hasn't …

Play It, Boogie-Woogie / Slow na boogie ni shitekure (1981)

A young girl picks up a kitten on a street; a man in a Mustang picks up the girl*; he makes a pass at her, but they can’t agree on a price; he stops suddenly and throws the kitten out the car window off a bridge then throws her out of the car and drives …

Youth Killer / Seisun no satsujinsha (1976)

After a pause when the “New Wave” of the early sixties faded, Japanese movies saw a major revival in the early seventies of movies about confused or tormented youth, though most were released by ATG rather than the major studios. Of these, Youth Killer, which chronicles the complete collapse of a young man’s life in …

Street of Joy / Akasen tamanoi: Nukeraremasu (1972)

I don’t think I have ever come across a movie with more sex yet less skin than Street of Joy. Set in a brothel in 1955, when the brothels were still openly legal, it is awash with constant sex. Yet there is only one flash of female nudity, so the movie is the polar opposite …

Take Care, Red Riding Hood / Akazukinchan kiotsukete (1970)

Kauro is a high school graduate trying to decide what to do with his life. He has a childhood sweetheart that he keeps breaking up with and then getting back together. It is assumed that he will go on to Tokyo University like his two brothers and become a lawyer, which he sees as a …

Coup d’etat / Martial Law / Kaigenrei (1973)

The coup of 1936 has been the subject of several significant movies. The most straight-forward presentation can be found in Memoirs of Japanese Assassins, with the same coup reflected in the romance of Utage and the teen-age bullies of Fighting Elegy. Yoshida’s Coup d’etat looks at this failed coup through the life of Ikki Kita, …

Punishment Room / Shokei no heya (1956)

By the end of the fifties, Kon Ichikawa was probably second only to Akira Kurosawa in his international reputation, based on Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, but it was Punishment Room, made just after Burmese Harp, that cemented his reputation in Japan. Though critics like to place Punishment Room within the context of …

The Affair / Flames of Love / Joen (1967)

Oriko (Mariko Okada) is an unhappily married woman when she meets a sculptor who had previously had an affair with her mother. Her husband mistakenly thinks she is having an affair with the sculptor and divorces her. Meanwhile, she has at least once slept with another man, a common laborer, who also may have been …

Woman of the Lake / The Lake / Onna no mizumi (1966)

Onna no mizumi personifies so much of what most people think an "art house" movie is like that it is difficult to actually get to the content of the movie itself. Yoshishige Yoshida technically had left Shochiku after Escape from Japan and formed his own production company with his now wife Mariko Okada, and together …

Escape from Japan (1964)

My first reaction when I saw this movie was that its director, Kuji Yoshida, was pulling a Suzuki by taking an absurd script and filming it as absurdly as possible. However, that does not seem to be the case. Yoshida wrote the script and then walked out of Shochiku reportedly because the studio cut the …