ACF 848: MAR to debut on VizAnime.com & Hulu on Monday, January 17, 2011

VIZ MEDIA DEBUTS MÄR ON VIZANIME.COM AND HULU

An Ordinary Boy Becomes A Hero In The Land Of His Dreams

VIZ Media has announced the launch of MÄR (rated ‘T’ for Teens) available on VIZAnime.com, the company’s premier website for anime, as well as the streaming content provider HULU (www.Hulu.com), starting on Monday January 17th.

VIZAnime.com and HULU will stream for FREE episodes 1-5 of MÄR (subtitled). Two additional FREE new episodes will launch each Monday.

MÄR is based on the hit manga series by Nobuyuki Anzai (creator also of FLAME OF RECCA), published in North America by VIZ Media. An ordinary middle-school boy with an overactive imagination, Ginta Toramizu dreams about fairy tales and make-believe lands. One day at school, a gate appears and he enters the World of MÄR, the world of his dreams.

Within the World of MÄR exist ÄRM: accessories with unique powers. Soon, Ginta stumbles upon Babbo, an ÄRM that can speak, and learns that he has been summoned to this mythical world to stop the Chess Pieces, a group of rogue soldiers, from destroying the World of MÄR. Now part of Team MÄR, Ginta and Babbo fight in War Games against the Chess Pieces to save the MÄR World. But will Ginta’s mission be compromised by his ally’s secrets?

To learn more about MÄR anime and manga series, visit VIZAnime.com or ShonenSunday.com (free Chapter 1 manga preview available).

ACF 542: Two Wives at Japan Society

All images (c) Kadokawa Pictures, Inc.

Two Wives / Tsuma futari
Directed by Yasuzo Masumura
Japan, 1967, color, 94 min.
Showtime: Sunday, April 18th, 2010 at 8:45 PM

Japan Society's Mad, Bad.... & Dangerous to Know film series concludes tonight with this film, the fourth starring Mariko Okada. Since it has not previously been shown outside Japan and there was no screener available, I can only pass on the following description from the Japan Society website. It looks terrific and I'm quite bummed that I won't be able to make the screening tonight. But I think that if you can, you won't be disappointed.

For the first time outside Japan, Masumura’s Two Wives will be on the silver screen. When did you last see a film that offered two great roles for women? Everything you need to know about Two Wives is there in the faces of the two actresses: Mariko Okada and Ayako Wakao, who hold the camera’s attention without strain or scheming.

After a random encounter at a bar, two couples collide. Two men, two women, embroiled in a love-and-hate drama that threatens to engulf them. The sexual anxiety between the interwoven couples tautens right up to the nearly unbearable tension of the climax, in this rare masterpiece by the director of Manji and Blind Beast.

For info or to order tickets online, click here.

And keep in mind that there will be an earlier, separate screening of Woman of the Lake at 6:30 PM tonight.

Mad, Bad.... & Dangerous to Know: Three Untamed Beauties is made
possible through the generous support of The Globus Family.

ACF 541: Woman of the Lake at Japan Society tomorrow, April 18th, 2010

All images (c) Shochiku Co., Ltd.

Woman of the Lake / Onna no mizuumi
Directed by Kiju Yoshida
Japan, 1966, B&W, 94 min.
Showtime: Sunday, April 18th, 2010 at 6:30 PM

Japan Society' s film series Mad, Bad.... & Dangerous to Know: Three Untamed Beauties concludes on Sunday, April 18th with two films starring Mariko Okada. Woman of the Lake will be shown first, at 6:30 PM. A separate screening, with a separate admission charge, of Two Wives will follow at 8:45 PM. I'll be putting up a separate post about Two Wives.

For now, let's take a look at Woman of the Lake, first the description of it from the Japan Society Website, then my impression based on the DVD screener I watched. (Again note that the link immediately below for the Japan Society Website also provides for purchasing tickets online if you desire.)

Japan Society Website:

Based on a novel by Nobel prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata, Kiju Yoshida’s film approaches the topic of sexual encounters in the manner of a fogbound documentary and the nocturnal gravity of a requiem. In this surrealist erotic story reminiscent of Antonioni’s visual universe and some of Bergman’s formal experiments, it is indeed hard to tell where character ends and texture begins—so much of the film seems to unfold near the skin.

Here, Okada’s trademark character—a woman of quiet intensity and strong will, yet fumbling for undefined sexual fulfillment—takes a lover to escape the somber dissatisfaction of her loveless marriage. One night, she allows him to take nude pictures of her, but the negatives are soon stolen and she faces threats of blackmail from an anonymous stranger. She complies with the blackmailer’s demands and travels to recover the negatives, embarking on a journey that soon aligns her darkest desires with those of her shadowy aggressor.

ACF Review Thoughts:

This is the final film starring Okada that I had a screener for, so I'll use this as an opportunity for some general comments about the three of her films I've seen as well as about Woman of the Lake specifically.

First off, I've fallen in love with this actress. At times she looks a bit like a Japanese version of young Natalie Wood, circa West Side Story. But there's an icy coolness - not to be confused with lack of emotion - that reminds me of Grace Kelly. It's not for nothing that her segment of the series has been deemed The Discreet Charm of the Adultress, and nobody I know of pulls off the inner conflicts that often accompany an adulterous affair better than Okada.

Also, unless a double was used - which I doubt - she had the most gorgeous, long slim fingers I've ever seen on celluloid, or in real life for that matter.

There's an intriguing segment in the film where Okada's character and her blackmailer come across a film crew working along a shoreline. I'm a sucker for these kind of scenes and thought it worked very well here.

Woman of the Lake gets a 3.5 out of 4 star ACF Rating; very highly recommended. It's my favorite of the three Okada films I've seen, edging out The Affair by just a hair.

Mad, Bad.... & Dangerous to Know: Three Untamed Beauties is made
possible through the generous support of The Globus Family.

ACF 538: The Affair at Japan Society

All images (c) Shochiku Co., Ltd.

The Affair / Joen
Directed by Kiju Yoshida, A.K.A. Yoshishige Yoshida
Japan, 1967, B&W, 101 min.
Showtime: Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 7:30 PM

As I did with my post on Impasse, I'll offer the blurb from the Japan Society, then my thoughts based on the DVD screener I watched. (Note that the link immediately below for the Japan Society Website also provides for purchasing tickets online if you desire.)

Japan Society Website:

With this radical erotic “anti-melodrama”, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida became not only the cineaste of women but the cineaste of one woman: Mariko Okada, starring here as an unhappily married woman confronting the decadent legacy of her mother, who made no secret of her affairs with younger men. Okada faces this inheritance by initiating sexual relationships herself, forming a strange love triangle between her, a sculptor who had been her mother’s lover, and a rough construction worker to whom she surrenders with the reluctant passion of a Japanese Lady Chatterley.

Events unfold—flashes of warmth, wintry blasts of ire—in a patient procession of details and descend calmly into the uncontrolled. All the while Yoshida’s cautious camera hovers over the quakes of jealousy and tidal surges of desire, filmed like the progress of a haunting.

ACF Review Thoughts:

This pairing of Yoshida and Okada was released later earlier in 1967 than Impasse. Both films feature shots through glass windows and ones employing mirrors. There is also some of the hand-held camera work circling the subject(s), but it is much more judiciously and smartly utilized than in Impasse.

Again like Impasse, The Affair can be characterized as an art house film. And while it too jumps around in time, it is shot more like a conventional, rather than an avant-garde, film. Okada is marvelous as Oriko Furuhata, whose was embarrassed by the love affairs her mother had with various men and who is dissatisfied with her marriage to the president of a securities company. Interspersed throughout the film are various fantasy imaginings of her mother's death as a pedestrian hit by a truck. As Oriko's life begins to mirror her mother's, she is the one struck by the truck.

I was even more impressed by The Affair than I was by Impasse. So The Affair gets a 3.5 out of 4 star ACF Rating; very highly recommended.

Mad, Bad… & Dangerous to Know: Three Untamed Beauties is made

possible through the generous support of The Globus Family.

ACF 536: Impasse to be shown at Japan Society tomorrow, Wed, April 12th

All images (c) Shochiku Co., Ltd.

Impasse / Hono to onna
(A.K.A. Flame and Women & Flame of Feeling)
Directed by Kiju Yoshida, A.K.A. Yoshishige Yoshida
Japan, 1967, B&W, 101 min.

Showtime Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 7:30 PM

The third segment of Japan Society's Mad, Bad.... & Dangerous to Know film series starts this Wednesday with Impasse, the first of four films starring Mariko Okada and linked by the theme of The Discreet Charm of the Adultress. Below I've presented some info about it from Japan Society, then my thoughts based on the DVD screener I watched. (Note that the link immediately below for the Japan Society Website also provides for purchasing tickets online if you desire.)

Japan Society Website:

As the title implies, Mariko Okada and Kiju Yoshida's fifth collaboration is a moral furnace of a film, stoked with guilt and vengefulness. A labyrinthine exploration of the decomposition of a middle-class couple, the bewitching, fractured narrative artfully shuffles the time scheme, as the protagonist, Ritsuko (Okada, in a highly nuanced and restrained performance), stumbles out of the sluggish half-life of her sterile marriage and towards a troubled search to restore her emotional self. After giving birth to a son through artificial insemination (presented here as science fiction), she starts nourishing a forbidden but irrepressible desire for the biological father of her child.

ACF Review Thoughts:

Impasse definitely struck me as an "art house" film, and a rather avant-garde one at that. It has a true international feel and look. Aside from the actors and a certain sensibility, there's practically nothing "Japanese" about it: the costumes and especially the house in which Ritsuko, her husband, and their son live are totally "Western."

My best suggestion of what the film is like is to imagine an Ingmar Bergman film, though one not nearly as heavily metaphysical as his works tended to be, shot in a John Cassavettes kind of style.

Many shots are done looking through glass, so that the reflections create a multi-layered look. Mirrors are also frequently utilized, sometimes obviously, at other times so that you are fooled into thinking that you're looking directly at what's going on, only to find out at "the reveal" that it's actually been a reflection you've been watching.

But the most prominent technique was the use of a hand-held camera to circle around the subject, sometimes two people, but most often an individual. This is an effective technique to introduce camera movement economically. No need for tracks or cranes. (Keep in mind that steadicams were not introduced to the industry until 1976).

However, I must confess that for me the technique was overused here. Not that it produced "motion sickness," not at all. Just that, for me, it was employed too often. Sometimes a simple lock-down on a tripod or a smooth pan would have been welcome instead of another round-and-round we go. Simply put, the problem is that this circling technique all too quickly draws attention to itself, thereby taking the viewer out of the film.

Impasse was the first film I can recall seeing Okada in and the first I've seen directed by Yoshida. Despite my issues with the hand-held circling camera-work, I enjoyed watching it very much. Keeping in mind what I said about it being an avant-garde art house film, I give it a 3 out of 4 star rating, highly recommended, a movie well-worth seeing.

The Mad, Bad.... & Dangerous to Know: Three Untamed Beauties series is made possible through the generous support of The Globus Family.