A BOY AND HIS SAMURAI offers an unusual take on the fish-out-of-water tale
A BOY AND HIS SAMURAI (CHONMAGE PURIN) (Yoshihiro Nakamura, 2010 )
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, July 3, $13, 12:30, and Monday, July 4, $13, 6:30
Series runs July 1-14, ten-film pass $99
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.subwaycinemanews.com
www.japansociety.org/japancuts
Following audience favorites Fish Story in 2009 and last year’s Golden Slumber, Japanese director Yoshihiro Nakamura returns to the New York Asian Film Festival with the North American premiere of the often silly but mostly charming heartwarmer A Boy and His Samurai. Based on a manga by Gen Araki, the family-friendly film focuses on single mother Hiroko (Rie Tomosaka) and her young son, Tomoya (Fuku Suzuki), whose lives get turned upside down when Kijima Yasube (Ryo Nishikido) suddenly shows up, claiming to be a samurai from the Edo Period some 180 years ago. In exchange for food and lodging, Yasube helps around the house, doing the cooking and cleaning and looking after Tomoya while Hiroko is at work. When Yasube shows a knack for making amazing desserts, he puts down his sword in favor of a pastry knife, but trouble awaits this mild-mannered samurai. Yasube adapts a little too quickly to the modern world in this fish-out-of-water tale, but every time it threatens to become too conventional, taking the easy way out, Nakamura adds just enough twist and turns to keep it fresh. Tomosaka and Nishikido are fine in their fairly standard roles, but Suzuki is the real star as the cute kid excited to have a father figure around. A joint presentation of the NYAFF and Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema, A Boy and His Samurai is screening July 3 at 12:30 and July 4 at 6:30 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.
The North American premiere of the wild and wacky, genre-iffic Milocrorze: A Love Story kicks off the tenth anniversary of New York City’s most exciting annual film series, the New York Asian Film Festival, running July 1-14 at Lincoln Center. Melding Michel Gondry with Quentin Tarantino and Takashi Miike filtered through Max Ophüls’s La Ronde and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, longtime commercial, video, and television director Yoshimasa Ishibashi makes his feature-film cinematic debut with this highly stylized three-part tale of love and romance. In the first section, seven-year-old salaryman Ovreneli Vreneligare, wearing one of the most charming costumes and hairstyles ever put on celluloid, falls in love with the beautiful, and adult, Milocrorze (Maiko) in a candy-coated fantasyland of lush colors and dreamlike sets. That bittersweet tale leads into the second part, in which bizarre youth counselor Besson Kumagi (Takayuki Yamada) abusively screams relationship advice to lonely boys over the phone, then breaks out into self-celebratory dance numbers with a couple of hot babes, a sort of Japanese version of Andy Kaufman’s Tony Clifton character. That story segues into the violent, vengeful mini-epic of rogue samurai Tamon (Yamada again), who starts out as a simple man who falls in love with Yuri the flower girl (Ann Ishibashi) but is soon trying to rescue her from a high-priced gambling and prostitution ring. Ishibashi then circles back to Milocrorze and Ovreneli Vreneligare (Yamada yet again, in his third role) years later for the tender finale. Milocrorze is a vastly entertaining, wonderfully absurd, and utterly ridiculous (and we mean that in a good way) exercise in multiple genres from the endlessly inventive Ishibashi. The samurai section goes on way too long, but otherwise this is a rousing success from start to finish, even when it is making absolutely no sense, which is very often. Milocrorze is the opening-night selection of NYAFF 2011, and both Ishibashi and Yamada will be at Lincoln Center on July 1 to participate in a postscreening Q&A; prior to the screening, Yamada will receive the Star Asia Rising Star Award. The film is being presented in conjunction with Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema, screening at Japan Society on July 10, followed by a Q&A with Ishibashi. Keep watching twi-ny for more reviews of select films from our two favorite film festivals of the year.
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.
