Departures

Director: Takita Youjirou

Starring: Masahiro Motoki

        Tustomu Yamazaki

        Hirosue Ryoko
 

This movie is not a horror Japanese movie. It is not boring for a single instant and will make you cry by the end of the movie.

Daigo Kobayashi decides to start over his life, he moves back to his hometown with his wife to look for work. And he got a job is actually funeral professional who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry into the next life. His wife and other people all despise that job. But he takes a certain pride in his work and begins to perfect it as art. He just acts as a gentle gatekeeper between life and death, the departed and the family of the departed. The film follows his heart goes deeper and deeper. It tells about joy and meaning of life and living. 

This movie is very unique and inspired. With the beautiful story, performance with the picturesque surroundings and wonderful score, the movie really deserves the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film.

Love Letter

Directed by: Shunji Iwai

Starring: Miho Nakayama
Etsushi Toyokawa
Bunjaku Han
Miki Sakai
Takashi Kashiwabara
Ranran Suzuki

<Love Letter> is the first long story movie directed by Shunji Iwai. After the release in Japan, it became the most popular Japanese movie in 1990s. A lot of critics thought it was the most important work as the new Japanese film movement.

I watched it when I was in high school, I couldn’t fully understand at that time. But I could tell it is so delicate, psychological records small changes that with the increase of age, I can start with a lot of back reliving the memory.

In this film, it shows not only kind of a distant memory, but also performs the pure flavor of first love. It certainly reflects the trail exhaustive; it is so beautiful and sweet. Even growing up, when we look back over the events of that period of time, we will also be difficult to calm down.

Hana & Alice



Director: Shunji Iwai

Producer:Shunji Iwai

Screenwriter: Shunji Iwai

Starring: Anne Suzuki

                Yû Aoi
Tomohiro Kaku

This movie is not only about puppy love, but also about two girls. The focal points are their friendship and the turmoil of puberty.

Two best friends named Hana and Alice go to high school together. They are inseparable. They take train to school everyday, and they both notice and become interested in a boy who takes same train with them and he is their schoolmate. Hana likes to follow him home secretly. One day the boy banged his head against the wall by accident. Hana lies and convinces him that he gets amnesia, because she was his girlfriend when he wakes up. During the time of Alice helps Hana to keep her beautiful lie, she starts to be attracted by this boy. She exposes Hana’s lie to him finally and tells the new lie to him.

The whole movie likes a nice painting with light music. There is no intense plot or sudden, surprising turn, but you still can remember many beautiful images, savor this warm story, and it stirs your sympathy.

The Love of Siam

Director: Chukiat Sakveerakul
Screenwriter: Chukiat Sakveerakul
Cast: Witwisit Hirunyawongku
Mario Maurer
Laila Boonyasak

What are humans do in a real world that is not tamed by our rule?
What can we possibly do if we cannot bear to lose the one we love?
What if we go on life without loving anyone at all?

Through the interconnected lives of two boys who are on the verge of self-awareness amidst their own individual conflicts and the people surrounding them, The Love of Siam as simply a gay teen romance is to misjudge its power and intention. Within the two and a half hour running time of the film, it’s not only the two young leads' reunion and inevitable attraction but also a family's slow and painful road to accepting a long-delayed reality.

The director ended up choosing as plot construction regarding characters' emotions and actions. Instead of picking the conventional expression that would usually indicate 'sad', 'she is going to blow up', and 'angry', the scenes selected to continue the flow and plot of the movie are rather life-like.

Therefore I suppose the reason so many people like this movie because it exemplifies humanity's constrained reaction. This movie doesn't construct explicitly the events and personality surrounding each character as concrete context of the story, which is often a technique used by mainstream films to materialize climax and logic of a movie's plot. Also, I enjoy the mellow and subtle plot-weaving, and the overall picture painted by the music.

All about Lily Chou Chou

Director: Shunji Iwai
Cast:Lchihara Hayato 
Oshinari Syuugo 
Ho Itoo 
Aoi Yuu 

When I was in high school, I saw a number of fine films, but the one that has stuck in my mind the most, indeed haunted me at that time, was Shunji Iwai’s All about Lily Chou-Chou.

All About Lily Chou-Chou a teenager film set in Japan. But it’s not much like any other teen film that I have ever seen. It’s a history of pain and humiliation: bullying among 13 and 14 year old boys and girls moving from various forms of petty theft, enforced prostitution, rape, and murder. And all this is shown primarily from the point of view of the victims, though the film also bears witness to the startling rapidity with which friendships can shift, so that a victim suddenly becomes a torturer.

The film is leisurely and contemplative, even when it presents scenes of painful brutality. The movie takes its time to reach its goals; it even seems to be drifting randomly at times, only to lead up to scenes that knit everything together with extraordinary force and concision.

The conjunction of sound and image is of course a big part of what makes the film so powerful. Because of this, the events that the film narrates are secondary to the feelings that those events evoke; through evocative music and fragmented images, Iwai tracks the minutest shifts of affect in the lives of the characters.

Many individual scenes from All about Lily Chou-Chou stick in my mind so far. And they remind me about my youth memory. I think I should watch it again this weekend.

the Road Home (My Father and Mother)

Director: Yimou Zhang
Cast: Ziyi Zhang
     Honglei Sun
     Hao Zheng

The story is about the “Remembrance”. A teacher wants to give his knowledge to the next generation and a farm wants to share her soul with the man she loves. They meet and fall in love. Even though the story doesn’t have a happy ending, it still make audience cry with smile.

There are thoughts about life, death, love, loss and loneliness. The contrast of the black and white present with the ecstatic color flashback scenes of the past are so sharp, it is almost emotionally overwhelming. Snow drifts across the frozen earth and there are scenes of the bitter cold. Your vision is in complete bliss as an aesthetic awareness of nature swirls around you in pictures and sounds in a rural Chinese setting. 

This movie is beautiful because its simplicity. It is pure in its deepest emotions of hope and longing and rich beyond material possessions in the beauty of love. 

Not One Less

 Director: Yimou Zhang
Cast: Zhimin Wei
     Huike Zhang

This is a real story. The whole cast of this movie are real and ordinary people. They play themselves in the movie.

Yimou Zhang went to the poverty-stricken area parts China to tell a story about a 13 year old peasant girl Mizhi Wei's be the only teacher of the only primary school in that area. She tries so hard to keep her all students studying at school.

This movie is Zhang's daring experiment to use "normal reality" to tell reality, and he has achieved convincingly his goal. All characters in this movie are real as in reality. So all their emotion is real, and they tell their life to audience. it’s very easy to be touching.

Unlike many other Yimou Zhang's movies which are persistently followed with complaint by Chinese audience for "being tailored and catering to foreign taste and curiosity", "Not One Less" is very well received in China

Lust, Caution

Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Tony Leung .....Mr. Yi
     Wei Tang .....Wang Jiazhi
     Lee-Hom Wang .....Kuang Yu-Min

The project, set in World War II-era Shanghai, reunites Ang Lee with "Brokeback" distributor Focus Features and his longtime collaborator, Focus CEO James Schamus, who will executive produce. The screenplay will be adapted from Ailing Zhang's short story by Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" screenwriter Hui-Ling Wang.

This film is about a woman enticing a top ranking official in the occupying Japanese government, in order to assassinate him.

The film is two and a half hour long, but I don’t feel that. In fact, I am glad that Ang Lee gives us enough time to appreciate the beauty of the film. The plot is gripping, and there is a lot to be pondered on. Men have to caution against lust, while for women, they may have to caution against something else.

This film is a really beautiful masterpiece. By the way, the sexuality in this film is so extremely the polar opposite compared to Ang Lee's last film "Brokeback Mountain". I find this very interesting.