Midnight Eye. Zainichi.

As Tom Mes notes in the introduction to his interview with Lee Sang-il, Sixty Nine, based on the novel by Ryu Murakami, is a departure for the director of Borderline (2002) and Blue Chong (2000), both of which were "musings on the unravelling of the social fabric of Japan and in particular on the identity of the zainichi, Japan's ethnic Korean community." Sixty Nine, though, "is an infectious, footloose procession of picaresque tomfoolery, [dispensing] entirely with the myths of the sixties," as Mes writes in his review.

Most of us probably have a clearer shot at eventually catching Yoichi Sai's Blood and Bones, "one of the most lauded films of 2004 on its home turf, riding high on most critics' top ten lists and racking up nominations at the Japan Academy Awards" - once again, Mes. "Not the slightest factor in this success was the overwhelming central performance by Takeshi Kitano as the short-fused, anti-social brute Shunpei Kim, a real-life figure who arrived in Osaka by boat from Korea in 1923 as a teenager."

Jaspar Sharp was in Frankfurt in April for Nippon Connection, "probably the most important annual celebration of Japanese cinema and culture in Europe," and offers capsule reviews of five features he took in there.

Otherwise, it's an all-Mes issue, rounded out by reviews of a survey of the work of Naomi Kawase and Masaaki Tezuka's "remake of Mitsumasa Saito's cheesy 1982 wannabe-blockbuster Time Slip (aka GI Samurai)."

It's a summertime kind of issue, but a fine reminder that Mes's Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto is now out.

Posted by dwhudson at July 25, 2005 3:36 AM