It's not quite a fight to the death in THE BLOOD OF REBIRTH
THE BLOOD OF REBIRTH (YOMIGAERI NO CHI) (Toshiaki Toyoda, 2009)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, July 2, 9:00
Saturday, July 3, 3:45
www.japansociety.org/japancuts
www.subwaycinema.com
Following a nearly five-year absence because of drug charges, Japanese director Toshiaki Toyoda (HANGING GARDEN, 9 SOULS) resurrects his once-burgeoning film career with the fascinating, meditative, and sometimes just plain silly BLOOD OF REBIRTH. In the Middle Ages, a famed traveling masseur named Oguri (Tatsuya Nakamura) has been summoned by STD-riddled lord Daizen (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) to help cure the playboy leader’s pumpkin-sized testicles. Daizen wants Oguri to stay on in his somewhat sheltered domain, far from any other society, but Oguri prefers to remain beholden to no one. Forced to hang around a while longer, Oguri becomes enamored with virgin slave Terute (Mayuu Kusakari), whom Daizen is preparing to conquer once he is rid of his disease. When Daizen learns that Oguri wants to take Terute away, he has the masseur violently murdered — and that’s only the beginning of the movie, which is centered around a sacred resurrection spring that legend says can bring people back to life. There’s also a watermelon-devouring St. Peter-like figure, an odd little person struggling to drag Oguri’s ghost body to the next life, and a wild, percussion-heavy progressive psychedelic acid rock soundtrack by Twin Tail, which features Nakamura on drums and for whom Toyoda creates the visuals for their live shows. Forget some of the clichéd characterizations and subplots and instead let the overall mood of the film carry you through some very beautiful, existential scenes, leading to one helluva different kind of one-on-one battle. Toyoda will introduce both screenings, followed by Q&A sessions.
After being framed for the assassination of the prime minister, delivery man and Beatles fan Aoyagi (Masato Sakai) is on the run in the Japanese thriller GOLDEN SLUMBER. Adding in a bit of Mel Brooks’s HIGH ANXIETY into his Hitchockian wrong-man homage, director Yoshihiro Nakamura (FISH STORY) follows a Lee Harvey Oswald-like conspiracy against goofy man-child Aoyagi, who has to grow up in a hurry if he is to survive. Everywhere he turns, the police, led by Inspector Sasaki (TOKYO SONATA’s Teruyuki Kagawa), are a mere one step behind, ready to bring him in – or blow him away. There’s no place for Aoyagi to hide, as he has one of the most recognizable faces in the country, having saved a pop princess (Shihori Kanjiya) from harm only a few years earlier. On the lam, the national hero turned villain recalls his small, intimate college group, shown in a series of flashbacks, all of whom become involved in his tale; meanwhile, he is befriended by an anarchic serial killer (Gaku Hamada) who enjoys surprising people. Adapted from the novel by Kotaro Isaka, GOLDEN SLUMBER is an absolute joy, a well-made genre picture with likable characters and an engaging story line that never gets boring, even at 139 minutes.
From June 2007 to July 2008, journalists Sebastian Junger (THE PERFECT STORM) and Tim Hetherington (LIBERIA: AN UNCIVIL WAR) made a total of ten trips to the dangerous Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, documenting the full deployment of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. With snipers hidden all around them, the fifteen soldiers of Second Platoon built a remote, strategic outpost they named Restrepo after PFC Juan Restrepo, the well-liked company medic who was killed early on. Junger and Hetherington film such men as Captain Dan Kearney, Staff Sergeant Kevin Rice, and Sergeant Brendan C. O’Byrne as they go about their daily duties, joking around, playing the guitar, meeting with Afghan locals to get information about the Taliban, and digging trenches while prepared to be shot at at any moment. The journalists took more than 150 hours of footage, supplemented with interviews with several of the soldiers after they were safely back at home base in Italy, talking about what they went through. There is nothing political about RESTREPO, nor does it pull at the heartstrings with melodramatic, overemotional scenes; instead, it depicts the harsh realities of battle, including the long stretches of boredom punctuated by sudden life-or-death situations. There is no narration, no one discusses the possible merits of the war, and no generals or politicians are on hand to defend America’s involvement in the region. There’s no ethnocentric yahooism, nor is there racist treatment of the mostly unseen enemy. It’s just war, pure and simple, seen from the perspective of men who chose to join the army and risk their lives for their country. The film won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival and recently screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Sgt. O’Byrne will participate in a Q&A at the Angelika following the 7:45 show on June 25; Junger was going to do the same after the 7:45 show on June 26 but has had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts.