Midnight Movies

Giant Monster Comedy Opens in Theaters Across America on May 15
Source: Magnet Releasing
Official Movie Site (US): sixshooterfilmseries.com/bigmanjapan
Official Movie Site (Japan): dainipponjin.com
Special Thanks to Janeal Bernhart

.“Decidedly odd, even by Japanese standards, this mockumentary about an electrically charged, skyscraper-high superhero saddled with misfortune, bad press and even worse TV ratings is tears-down-the-face funny and a genuine, jaw-dropping oddity. A must for midnight madness slots as well as Asia and fantasy-themed fests, pic will astound auds of all stripes. A long and healthy life as an ancillary cult item awaits.”— Russell Edwards, Variety

A middle-aged slacker living in a rundown, graffiti-ridden slum, Masaru Daisatou (Hitoshi Matsumoto) is the subject of a documentary that follows his banal daily routine. That is, until he prepares for his job, which involves being shocked by bolts of electricity that transform him into a stocky, stick-wielding giant several stories high who is entrusted with defending Japan from a host of giant monsters. These ridiculous villains include a stretching freak with a comb-over and a revolting farting beast.

Dai Nipponjin is a sixth-generation superhero guarding his country from these outlandish “baddies,” as Daisatou calls them. But while his predecessors were national heroes, Daisatou is a pariah among the citizens he protects. His battles are broadcast late at night to diminishing television ratings while the public bitterly complains about the noise and destruction of property he causes.

Masaru Daisatou (Hitoshi Matsumoto) stands in front of his giant purple shorts
and prepares to transform into Dai Nipponjin.

And Daisatou has his own problems— an agent insistent on branding him with sponsor advertisements, an Alzheimer-afflicted grandfather who transforms into a giant in dirty underwear, and an ex-wife and daughter who are embarrassed by his often cowardly exploits.

A wickedly deadpan spin on the giant Japanese superhero, BIG MAN JAPAN is an outrageous portrait of a pathetic but truly unique hero.

After an enthusiastically received premiere at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, a successful theatrical run in Japan, and appearances at festivals both in the US and abroad, BIG MAN JAPAN will be released to theaters across America on May 15, 2009. The movie concludes the first wave of films in the “Magnet 6-Shooter Film Series” from Magnet Releasing, the genre division of Magnolia Pictures. The series features US theatrical releases for six films representing the vanguard of genre cinema from around the world. Previously released in the “6-Shooter Film Series” were the critically acclaimed Swedish vampire film LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, the American superhero comedy SPECIAL, the Spanish time travel caper TIMECRIMES, the French sci-fi thriller EDEN LOG, and the British thriller DONKEY PUNCH.

Source - http://www.scifijapan.com/articles/2009/04/26/big-man-japan/

Even before Park Chan-Wook’s “Thirst” made its Cannes bow, there was buzz about the availability of remake rights. The nightmarish tale centers on a priest who is infected by a virus and becomes a vampire.

Bloodsuckers are a popular theme in Hollywood right now thanks to the success of “Twilight.” That only increased interest in the latest offering from Park, who is fast becoming a magnet for English-language remakes.

Park’s “Old Boy” is being developed at DreamWorks as a potential pairing of director Steven Spielberg and Will Smith; Vertigo’s Roy Lee and Doug Davison will be producers.

His “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” is being developed by Charlize Theron as a vehicle for the actress to star and produce through her Denver and Delilah Prods.

And his “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is being developed by “Transformers” producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

While Park’s Korean producers on those three pics were able to deal directly with the interested U.S. parties, “Thirst” is a co-production between CJ Entertainment and Universal-based Focus Features Intl., so Focus gets first look on any potential English-language remake.

While CJ Entertainment’s head of international film financing Mike Suh said it is still early days in terms of discussing a remake of “Thirst,” it is another CJ project generating heat.

Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother,” about a feisty widow fighting to prove her emotionally fragile son is innocent of murder, is being circled by a number of U.S. producers.

“There is a high interest in the film, but we’re still in the early stages of talks,” said Suh. “As for Park’s films, they are unique dramas with strong storylines, which is why they could work in other countries.”

In November, Gore Verbinski acquired remake rights to Bong’s monster movie “The Host.” Verbinski will produce with the Vertigo partners and Paul Brooks.

As for Park, the helmer is weighing options for his next project. Aside from producing Bong’s forthcoming adaptation of French comicbook “Le Transperceneige,” he has no specific directing projects to which he’s attached. But the free schedule doesn’t mean he has any desire to get involved in the English-language remakes of his own pics.

“I want them to treat my films as if they were books and I was an 18th century writer who has long been dead,” Park told Variety.

Source - www.variety.com

A genius of dread, known for his unnerving horror films and eerie thrillers, the wildly prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa tends to ply his trade with spooky silences, a lived-in feel for everyday, droning life and a sense of social unease. Though his latest to hit the American big screen, “Tokyo Sonata,” looks like a family melodrama — if a distinctly eccentric variant on the typical domestic affair — there is more than a touch of horror to its story of a salaryman whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events.

In many respects, the family members here don’t look much different from the characters who populate Mr. Kurosawa’s other movies, some of whom are inexplicably driven to kill. Inexplicably or perhaps just unexplained: Unlike most genre directors in Hollywood and other commercial provenances, Mr. Kurosawa spends little time illuminating the mysteries of life, death and murder, the great whys that preoccupy filmmakers and invariably reduce being to behaviorism or DNA. It isn’t that interpretation has no place in his work. It’s entirely possible, for instance, to see the multitudes of drifting jellyfish in his 2003 movie “Bright Future” as a symbol for Japanese youth gripped by anomie. Yet while that interpretation has its satisfactions, it doesn’t really explain why one character massacres an entire family.

The bloodletting is more metaphoric in his new movie, which, soon after the opening credits, cuts to a Tokyo office where corporate drones are briskly marching through the corridors. Minutes later, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa), an administrative middle manager, has packed his belongings in a paper shopping bag and headed out, having been rendered redundant. (One Chinese employee, a drone says, can do the work of two Japanese staffers.) Instead of telling his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), however, Ryuhei continues to leave the house every morning, wearing a suit and tie and carrying his briefcase, props in an elaborate, increasingly desperate pantomime that takes him from standing in the unemployment lines to scrubbing public toilets on his hands and knees.

As Ryuhei tries to keep up appearances, his family’s facade crumbles. The oldest son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), seeks to enlist in the American military, which, to support its expanding war in the Middle East, has begun to accept foreign recruits. (However satiric Mr. Kurosawa’s intent, this idea didn’t sound all that far-fetched when I first saw the movie last September.) The youngest son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), meanwhile, begins using his lunch money to pay for piano lessons given by a melancholic beauty, Kaneko (Haruka Igawa). Lying on the sofa one night, Megumi poignantly asks Ryuhei to pull her up, but he’s already left the room. Raising her arms, she entreats “Somebody, please lift me up,” but we’re the only ones listening.

Though no one does help her, Megumi ends up on a wild ride with a near-crazed would-be thief played by the great Koji Yakusho, the star of a handful of Mr. Kurosawa’s best films, including “Cure.” (Non-Japanese audiences might best remember him from the wistful romance “Shall We Dance?”) By the time she heads off, the family has scattered like leaves, blown down such divergent paths that there are moments when it feels as if each were inhabiting an entirely different movie. Yet as the family disperses, Mr. Kurosawa ceaselessly brings them together through the editing. Long before the movie’s unexpectedly moving finale, which pivots on an ethereal rendition of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” he keeps the discordant layers of his composition in harmonious play.

As it ticks through the familiar ills brought about by a country outsourcing and downsizing itself into crisis, “Tokyo Sonata” takes on increasingly uncanny and timely resonance for an American audience. Mr. Kurosawa’s social critiques rarely reverberate as loudly as this one: Ryuhei and Megumi even argue about his patriarchal authority, a fight that begins on a note of pathos but soon turns scarily violent: Having been victimized by his employer and, by extension, the country that creates the conditions for these harsh economic realities, the paterfamilias becomes a victimizer. But this being a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie, nothing else happens the way you expect, particularly given the lessons you glean from other movies, including the similarly themed, more despairing 2001 French film “Time Out.”

Despite the catastrophes visited on the family and a few other characters, and in spite of its deep well of melancholia, “Tokyo Sonata” ends on a strangely, almost insistently optimistic note. Much of that optimism emanates from the youngest son, whose desire to play the piano becomes a form of generational resistance against his father, who, without explanation, insists he do no such thing. Domination, like family life, has become a hollow ritual here. (“I’m home,” everyone says on returning to the house, as the mother answers, “Welcome home.”) An economic crisis shakes the family up — it brings the father to his knees, lifts the mother, almost destroys one son and liberates the other — but it’s art, useless art, that unites them.

“Tokyo Sonata” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Family dysfunction, two off-screen deaths and one bloody hit-and-run.

TOKYO SONATA

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa; written by Max Mannix, Mr. Kurosawa and Sachiko Tanaka; director of photography, Akiko Ashizawa; edited by Koichi Takahashi; music by Kazumasa Hashimoto; production designers, Tomoyuki Maruo and Tomoe Matsumoto; produced by Yukie Kito and Wouter Barendrecht; released by Regent Releasing. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes.

WITH: Teruyuki Kagawa (Ryuhei Sasaki), Kyoko Koizumi (Megumi Sasaki), Yu Koyanagi (Takashi Sasaki), Kai Inowaki (Kenji Sasaki), Haruka Igawa (Kaneko), Kanji Tsuda (Kurosu), Koji Yakusho (Thief).

Source - http://movies.nytimes.com