(Box!) A Tale Of Two Friends - Richard

Hello JFFers! The festival has just a few days remaining in Melbourne before moving on down to Hobart, so don't miss out on the chance to see some great films! Today we take a look at the very popular "Box!", from the director of "Detroit Metal City". We are running a special Buy 1 Get 1 Free deal for "Box!", so we hope you take advantage of it! And don't forget to send in your festival reports for the chance to be featured on the blog!

"Sport films tend to follow a fairly standard pattern, and are always good for a bit heart-string pulling in the audience. We’ve already had one sports film this year at the Japanese Film Festival in Feel the Wind, two if you count the competition performance calligraphy of Shodo Girls, both of which featured the underdog battling against the bigger competitors for the ultimate prize. Boxing films have always been at the heart of this genre, possibly due to the protagonist having to literally fight his or her way to the top. Going back to at least 1976′s Rocky and the operatic heights of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull,  it seems that strapping on the gloves and stepping into the ring is Oscar gold, with the more recent Million Dollar Baby earning four Academy Awards including Best Picture.

Box! distinguishable from Richard E. Kelly’s similarly titled The Box by the handy ‘!’ at the end of the title, follows this grand tradition with the tale of two friends. When high-school student Yuki (Kengo Kora, Solanin) is rescued from some street toughs on a train by Kabu (Hayato Ichihara, Rookies), they realise that they were childhood friends prior to Yuki moving away. Reunited, Kabu convinces Yuki to join the high school boxing club, and eventually compete in regional tournaments. The most feared boxer in their weight division is Inamura (professional boxer Suwa Masashi), and it is only a matter of time before one (or both) of them must face him.

Box! follows a fairly predictable path, with a fairly set path towards the final confrontation between newcomer Yuki and his foe Inamura. By the time they meet, it isn’t so much about winning for Rocky…erm… Yuki, it is about going the distance. So the path they follow is a predictable one, but the real appeal of any sports film are the characters and their ability to illicit emotion from the audience.

Kengo Kora plays completely against his terrific drifter role in Solanin, where he spent most of his energy simply existing. Here he is single-mindedly driven, although is character is similarly singular in his motivations. This isn’t really surprising when your primary foe is non-actor Masashi, whose own performance is restricted to a series of snarls and menacing (and occasionally homoerotic) stares in the direction of our two leads. Only Ichihara, as the all-brawns-no-brains Kabu, is given a bit of depth to play with, especially during his own downslide and the unresolved relationship with the terminally ill Satoko (Mitsuki Tanimura, Summer Wars).

One can be fairly certain of what they are getting when they step into the ring with Box! While this will undoubtedly garner some interest from fans of Toshio Lee and his previous cult hit Detroit Metal City, it merely remains another crowd-pleasing trip of one man going the distance." - Richard Gray, DVD Bits.

Cheers to Richard for the review. You can see his recap on the entire Sydney JFF14 on The Reel Bits, including what his favourite films of the festival where! He managed to catch 18 of the 22 films at the festival, so their is a great range of reviews and thoughts on the festival line-up.

See you at the festival!

(Shodo Girls) Martial Crafts - Richard

Today saw 800 plus students and teachers fill Cinema 4 at Event Cinemas all in the name of "Shodo Girls". In what has become a major annual event, our special school screening at the Japanese Film Festival was a massive hit. The session sold out in a matter of days, with tens of schools having to be turned away due to high demand. See what all the fuss is about with the repeat session of "Shodo Girls", this Saturday at 1:00pm. Tickets are still available but will surely be in demand. Richard Gray continues his look at the festival with a review into the martial arts calligraphy piece that is "Shodo Girls".

"The thing that has always excites me about cinema is that I am constantly learning new things. Prior to Shodo Girls, I had no idea that there was such a thing as competition performance calligraphy. Yes, the gentle art of fancy lettering is a no-holds-barred bloodletting that gets pretty fierce. Plus, it’s all based on a true story! Well, except for the bloodletting part. I just got kind of carried away. One has to admit, that theatrical poster (to the left) does make this look like an action epic. That aside, Shodo Girls is one of the most unlikely delights I have seen in quite some time.

Satoko (Riko Narumi) leads her high-school calligraphy club, but struggles to keep the numbers of people up. Their little world is rocked when a new substitute teacher, Ikezawa (Nobuaki Kaneko, Crows Zero II) arrives and brings a fresh new approach to calligraphy. Resigned to the fact that their calligraphy is boring, the girls decide to revitalise their economically ailing town by staging a bit of performance calligraphy. After some false starts, and a Rocky-style training montage with music (the second of the festival, following Feel the Wind), the girls enter themselves in the “Shodo Girls Koshien”, in which they must make calligraphy on giant sheets of paper to music.

The tension between traditional and radical modernisation is a theme that runs strong throughout Japanese cinema, and indeed throughout Japan, and Shodo Girls conveys this tension effectively. Yet in some ways the films can’t escape another cinematic tradition: that of a small team of misfits overcoming great odds at competition level. Indeed, some of the similar themes can be seen in this year’s festival hits Feel the Wind and Solanin to a lesser extent. However, Shodo Girls manages to transcend this cliché to some degree via a cast of terrific characters that the script spends some time getting to know.

The film’s lead, Riko Narumi, has been in a number of similar films over the last few years. Indeed, her most recent film before this one, Bushido Sixteen, is about a rivalry that grows during kendo training, leading up to one final tournament. Her character is at first somewhat overbearing, but thanks to the other members of the team – including singer/actress Mitsuki Takahata, who is absolutely wonderful in the role of the overly earnest Kiyomi, whose beaming enthusiasm inspires the rest of the group – manages to become a rousing leader capable of drawing words on big pieces of paper with the best of them.

Perhaps what is most surprising about Shodo Girls is that it is all based on a true story. Like Happy Family Plan in 2009, Shodo Girls is designed to act as something of a cultural ambassador to the Japanese Film Festival, complete with language learning activities for the school groups who have no doubt bought out the first session of this film. After all, where else but Japan would performance calligraphy be met with such unbridled enthusiasm? It is the perfect antidote to the overbearing high-school glee clubs from High School Musical, Spectacular! or TV’s Glee, and instead takes us on a gentle journey through personal development, complete with male cheerleaders. Along with giving us an insight into the importance of this gentle art of the Japanese psyche, it is designed as a wholesale “feel good” picture that is guaranteed to having people roused and ready to enrol in calligraphy lessons by the end of its swift running time.

Like the art it portrays, Shodo Girls is a film with charms that become more apparent the longer one reflects on them. Director Ryuichi Inomata has a strong history of television film production, and his previous feature film – 2007′s weepy dog-drama A Tale of Mari and Three Puppies, a film I randomly managed to catch on television in Hiroshima late last year – had a distinctly “movie of the week” feel to it. Although Shodo Girls pays a strong debt to these traditions, it is nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable character-driven piece that is sure to be a crowd-pleaser at this year’s festival circuit." by Richard Gray, DVD Bits.

"Shodo Girls" is a part of our stellar Saturday lineup, which features 8 films across 6 sessions. Come along and experience the 14th Japanese Film Festival, before it moves on to Melbourne. See you at the festival!

(Kyoto Story) The Renaissance Of Film - Richard

It's official, the JFF Blog is a big hit! With over 1,000 views in just under a month, we are glad to provide some exciting content for you all to read over. Thank you for your passion of all things Japanese! Today we have our first entry from Richard Gray, editor of DVD Bits, who takes a look at the Tsutomu Abe & Yoji Yamada directed "Kyoto Story".

Kyoto Story will screen as part of our Special Double Screening session that takes place on Tuesday November 23rd at Event Cinemas on George St. This will include the feature film, plus an award winning short film "Wish You Were Here" and Panel Discussion with Tsutomu Abe (Happy Family Plan), Tadao Sato (Japan's leading film critic) and Shigeki Chiba (Vice Principal of JAMI).

A note to film students and lecturers, FREE tickets to this session are still available, with details about how you can get them here, thanks to Metro Screen.



"Uzumasa Daiei was one of the most famous shopping arcades in Kyoto, housing the now defunct Daiei Studios, producers of such films as Rashomon with Akira Kurosawa and the monster-mashes of Gamera. Now it forms the focal point of an experiment, combining the efforts of some up and coming filmmakers with some veterans in the field. Working with Ritsumeikan University's College of Image Arts and Sciences and Shochiku Co., Ltd., one of the worlds oldest film studios,  directors Yoji Yamada (About Her Brother, the opening night film of this year's Japanese Film Festival) and  his protege Tsutomu Abe (Happy Family Plan, 13th JFF) have guided this simple love story into cinemas across the world.

Using a combination of real conversations with local residents and a screenplay by Yoji Yamada ("Love and Honour" - 12th JFF), Kyoto Story weaves a beautifully simplistic tale of love in a small town. Kyoko (Hana Ebise) is a librarian (yay!) who is fairly settled with the idea that she will live in her small town with her laundromat owning parents until her dying days. However, she soon finds that her affections are torn between boyfriend and aspiring stand-up comedian (USA (EXILE)) and a bumbling visiting academic from Tokyo (Sotaro Tanaka - "About Her Brother") who has fallen head over heels in love with Kyoko. She must decide which path she will follow, and where her heart lies.

The title Kyoto Story naturally brings to mind the work of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story). In many of his films, Ozu explored the disintegration of traditional family life in post-war Japan. However, in the wake of the economic downturn of the 1990s, many Japanese filmmakers (including Tsutomu Abe) returned to reflect upon the importance of the family unit and the comforting joys it brings (as he so aptly did in Happy Family Plan).

So too is the case with Kyoto Story, a film that gently takes us through the lives of two families and reminds us all that there is no place like home. Kyoko's decision about deciding whether to leave the flock is reminiscent of Ozu's "Late Spring", where everybody seemed to have an idea of what was best for its lead character Noriko. Kyoko's ultimate decision shows that the men around her are far more dependent on her than she will ever be on them.

There is little about Kyoto Story that jumps out and screams at you of its brilliance, but it really isn't a jumpy-out-screamy kind of film. It is a sweet story that is as much a nostalgic love-letter to a bygone era as it is about the love triangle at the heart of the film. It is a rare thing that a film captures the slow vibe of a place yet simultaneously manages to be entertaining and charming all in one neat bundle. Kyoto Story is that bundle, a joyous one at that.

Kyoto Story is screening at the 14th Annual Japanese Film Festival with Eriko Onishi's "Wish You Were Here". Check out the website for further details." - Richard Gray, DVD Bits

Thanks again to Richard for that piece on the interesting production that was Kyoto Story. Does anybody else know of Student / Industry crewed films? Matt Newton's "Three Blind Mice" had a large contingent of Sydney Film School students amongst its crew, and Participate Film Academy has produced the likes of "Sweet Marshall", but it seems to be a very rare thing.

It must have been a wonderful opportunity for the students to work with the likes of Abe and Yamada, make sure you ask Abe-san about it during the Panel Discussion!

See you at the festival!