matteoB
@matteob
By day: lumpenproletariat. By night: Japan-based film critic and writer for Il Manifesto and other publications. Independently writing and researching about Asian documentary here:
and also Ishii's Mirrored Mind (205) and Master of Shiatsu (1989), Wakamatsu's The Woman Who Wanted to Die (1971), This is the Truth about Anatahan Island!! (1953), Bat Pussy (1971) /2
Kanazawa Film Festival 2026 "Tantric Cinema". The lineup is deranged, many rarely screened films: Dog and Aunt (Hamano, 1995) (look at the poster in the link!), Female Mantis Eats Male (Inoue Umetsugu, 1967), Genjitsu (Takechi Tetsuji, 1966) discovered in 2017... /1 note.com/eiganokai/n/...
怪奇! 死肉の男 Living Corpse (2026) directed by Sone Takeshi, cinematographer for One Cut of the Dead, is out in Japan today... Kinema Junpo: from an original manga by Hino Hideshi...script created using ChatGPT, and the voices of the characters are provided by...AI voices of real actors...
rewatching A New Dawn 花緑青が明ける日に... I'm definitely in the minority, but I think it's a fascinating piece of animation...
free reading space at a MUJI in the Gifu's shōtengai, a place that somehow function also as a small community space (not sure I have positive thoughts about it). Anyway, a few Garo from the mid-1970s...
today's movie is 鏡の中の裸像 Kagami no naka no razō (Nakamura Noboru, 1963) with Baishō Chieko, Kuwano Miyuki, and Mizushina Keiko... seems to be a rare film, or at least not much available...
蒼い記憶 満蒙開拓と少年たちBlue Memories: Boys, Colonizing Manchuria and Mongolia (Dezaki Satoshi, 1993)
The Past Ahead (2004) is an incredibly powerful and sophisticated work in which Idemitsu criticizes his own family in relation to Japan waging wars in Asia... one of the highlights of the exhibition for me
I was today years old when I found out documentary director Mori Tatsuya (A,A2) is the detective following the protagonist in Ishii's Shuffle (1981)
Interview with Ōta Shingo about his new documentary The Chimney Sweeper jdocshub.jp/english/1198/
七つの弾丸 The Murderer Must Die (Maruyama Shinji, 1959) one of the best costructed Japanese thriller I've seen recently (screenplay by the great Hashimoto Shinobu)
it's here Adachi Masao, Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw and Japan's Cinema of Revolution by @william-andrews.bsky.social Awai Books
saw Kiki Delivery Service in IMAX, I don't think the format adds anything, but watching it on the big screen reinforced my opinion that is a "different Miyazaki's", if that makes sense (it doesn't, but that's my feeling)
...but the Japanese government dismissed the results of the group's research. The movie is a theatrical version of the NHK Special "Simulation: The Defeat of Summer 1941" aired on TV last year (August 16-17) and it's 40' longer. /2
ending the day with a bleak one, 一万三千人の容疑者 A Thousand Suspects (Sekigawa Hideo, 1966) I understand why it's not really available...
ながい窖 (Long Cave?) is a manga by Tezuka Osamu published in 1970, and apparently not reprinted for a long time after 1972. The story is about a Japanese citizen of Korean descent and the discrimination he experienced in his life. The manga is available again from this month (Hōsei University Press)
not to be missed Idemitsu Mako - What a Woman Made (Jun. 18 — Sep. 21) is "a large-scale retrospective that surveys the full scope of Idemitsu’s artistic practice, including works that are being shown to the public for the first time since their acquisition." topmuseum.jp/exhibition/5...
in Japan summer has always been a period to reflect (through films) about war and its horrors, but recently the scale of the events has somehow increased...or maybe it's just my perception of it... Laputa Asagaya is holding a retro (6.14-8.15) 戦争映画をみる、感じる、考える See, feel, and think about war movies /1