Midnight Eye, 12/15.

Jun Ichikawa "was anything but a nostalgist," writes Mark Schilling. "Like his cinematic heroes, including François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, as well as the inevitable Ozu, he was interested in revealing human truths behind seemingly ordinary and everyday surfaces, minus the sentimentality and melodrama endemic to Japanese 'humanistic' films." Dying at a Hospital (1993) is "Ichikawa's masterpiece," and Schilling screened it in Udine in 2004: "After the screening, and accepting congratulations from fans who faces were as tear-streaked as mine, Ichikawa and I walked out of the theater. 'I just make films that make people cry,' he said with a sigh not entirely ironic. By this time he had finished the film that most of the world would come to know him for - Tony Takitani (2004)."

Also fresh at Midnight Eye:

• Roger Macy on Still Walking: "There is never a moment when we are not anxious to know more of what fuels each character's resentments. [Hirokazu] Kore-eda is a marvellous director of actors and a true heir to the rich tradition of family dramas in Japanese cinema." Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

• "It is not Takashi Miike that has changed, but the industry around him." Tom Mes before turning his attention to Miike's latest: "[T]hose who manage to hang on for those first 60 minutes... will be rewarded with a most spectacular and enjoyable second half that serves up a mixture of sci-fi disaster movie and romance that finally makes God's Puzzle the movie Andromedia should have been."

• "I had never previously thought of Kon Ichikawa and Mikio Naruse as sharing the same muse, but in [novelist] Aya Koda they certainly did," writes Roger Macy. (Naruse's Flowing is based on Aya's novel.] "And, even as a Naruse devotee, I'd have to concede that Ichikawa's Her Brother is, visually and aurally, a much more advanced film."

• "Hiroshi Shimizu is a director who has frequently been singled out for his undeserved neglect in the west." But now, as Roger Macy points out, Shochiku has released two box sets in Japan - eight films in all, with English subtitles: "These are careful transfers of a standard that does justice at last to a master craftsman.... Introspection Tower is the last of the four 'children' films in the [second] set, made at the end of a period when he had been in favour and was given the resources to make these bright, skilfully woven films."

• Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimeters Per Second is "an eloquently told, and beautifully realised tale of bittersweet first love and the disappointments that come along with it," writes Paul Jackson.

And there's a new book review, too. In the "long-awaited" Kitano Takeshi, Aaron Gerow "presents Kitano as an almost schizophrenic personality," writes Tom Mes, "made of two distinct personas: the director Takeshi Kitano and the comedian Beat Takeshi. Two personalities that are usually at odds, sometimes at war and occasionally in harmony. Both straight man and buffoon, Kitano forms a one-man manzai act."

Posted by dwhudson at December 15, 2008 12:21 PM