Midnight Eye. Returns.

Tom Mes has a long talk with set designer Noriyoshi Ikeya, "whose career spans everything from Ultraman to Rampo Noir." And in between: "There were several ideas I suggested that Seijun-san used in the films. The scene in Kagero-za where Michiyo Okusu is in the bath and the flower appears from her mouth, that was my idea. The director liked it and decided to do it. We only did one take and nailed it straight away."

"When Jasper Sharp invited me to write something 'personal' for Midnight Eye as it hit the 5-year mark, I decided it would be the perfect place to review Nippon Connection," writes Abé Mark Nornes, author of Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima and editor of the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies Publications Program's Motion Picture Reprint Series. "Both the German event and Midnight Eye itself are symptomatic of exciting shifts in film culture, shifts that I will narrate in my own experience of Japanese film as a distant observer of sorts."

Reviews:

• Mes on "a jawdropping collision of unrelenting grimness ([Miki] Nakatani spends much of the running time sporting a black eye or a limp) and a fantastical, candy-coloured lightness that makes Memories of Matsuko play like a fusion of Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. [Tetsuya] Nakashima deserves kudos for daring to juggle such extremes and pulling it off."

• Mes on Sway, "the only Japanese feature film selected for the 2006 Cannes film festival," a film "about Japan today - questioning, investigating, challenging, perceptive."

• Nicholas Rucka: "Too strong for cable TV! The sales angle is brilliant! Fans of Miike and his extreme side will rejoice; Imprint is twisted. But it doesn't work."

• Johannes Schönherr tells the story of and the story behind Yoshihiko Matsui's "radically nihilist" 1988 film, Noisy Requiem.

• Mike Dillon: "Half a Confession introduces itself as a thriller and abruptly changes gears, transforming into a tale of morality with deeper insights into its characters than we had anticipated."

And Mes, author himself of a book on Miike, Agitator, reviews Anime Perdute, a collection of essays published in conjunction with a Miike retrospective at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin in April. The book is "entirely in Italian, but then, you're never too old to learn."

Posted by dwhudson at September 18, 2006 7:36 AM