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byneddiedingo · 1 year

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Moonlight Serenade (Masahiro Shinoda, 1997)

Cast: Kyozo Nagatsuka, Hideyuki Kasahara, Jun Toba, Shima Iwashita, Hinano Yoshikawa, Michiko Hada, Junji Takada, Sayura Kawauchi. Screenplay: Katsuo Naruse, based on a novel by Yu Aku. Cinematography: Tatsuo Suzuki. Art direction: Noriyoshi Ikeya. Film editing: Hirohide Abe. Music: Shinichiro Ikebe.

Moonlight Serenade is a mélange of several genres: historical drama, coming-of-age tale, and family drama, with a touch of road movie and two romantic subplots, all kept more or less in focus by a framing story that turns it into a film about the endurance of the Japanese people in the face of everything that life can throw at them. It begins with Keita Onda (Kyozo Nagatsuka), a man in his 60s, watching the news reports about the 1995 earthquake that devastated Kobe. The film flashes back to 10-year-old Keita (Hideyuki Kasahara) watching, from a safe distance, the red sky over a burning Kobe after an American air raid. Like the other boys watching the fiery sky, who claim that the sight gives them an erection, Keita is more excited than frightened. Then the war ends, and Keita's family is marshaled his father, Koichi (also played by Nagatsuka), into a difficult journey from Awaji, where they now live, to the ancestral home in Kyushu. Keita is entrusted with seeing after the box that supposedly contains the ashes of his elder brother, who enlisted in the Japanese navy at 17 and was killed two years later when his ship hit a mine. (What the box actually contains is one of the film's surprises.) The family also consists of Koichi's wife, Fuji (Shima Iwashita), and their 18-year-old son, Koji (Jun Toba), and small daughter, Hideko (Sayuri Kawauchi). The neighbors are astonished that anyone should be making such a perilous trip across American-occupied Japan; the trains are unreliable and overcrowded and ships are still prey to undetonated mines. Gossip builds that Koichi, a tough police officer and a notoriously hidebound traditionalist, intends for his family to commit ritual suicide when they reach the ancestral burial place. The journey is in fact difficult and often suspenseful, but director Masahiro Shinoda maintains a light touch, infusing the difficult journey with humor. The film develops a love interest for Koji in the form of Yukiko (Hinano Yoshikawa), an orphaned girl who is also going to Kyushu, to live with relatives she has never seen. Koji, who hates his father, plans to run away somewhere along the journey, and when he meets Yukiko, he tries to persuade her to join him. A group of secondary characters joins the family on shipboard, including a black marketer (Junji Takada), whose stash of whiskey helps break down Koichi's stiff reserve (along with his policeman's distaste for the black market), and a traveling film exhibitor whose collection of movies includes some illicit samurai films that have been banned by the occupying Americans for their militarism. Keita, naturally, is enchanted by the movies, and there's a charming scene late in the film in which he goes to a theater to see Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) with his father. Unfortunately, Keita can't follow the American romance -- some of the words in the Japanese subtitles are too hard for him, he says -- and his father only says he'll have to be older to understand it. Moonlight Serenade is one of the late films by Shinoda, who apprenticed with Yasujiro Ozu and became a prominent member of the "Japanese New Wave" in the 1960s. It displays his skill at storytelling, handling several subplots and surprises, and has a fine sympathetic treatment of the people caught up in the postwar crisis. But it's a bit old-fashioned for a movie made in the 1990s, too overloaded with characters and incidents for its own good, and the frame story seems unnecessary.

#Moonlight Serenade #Masahiro Shinoda

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recentanimenews · 6 years

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Azoland Pictures to Release "Gintama" Live-Action Film in North American Theaters January 2018

L.A. based film distribution company, Azoland Pictures has announced that they will partner with Well Go USA to release the Gintama live-action film in theaters across the U.S. and Canada starting January 19, 2018.

Ticket sales for participating theaters will begin today on the Azoland Pictures website :

http://http://ift.tt/1PoN514

They describe the movie

Based on the best-selling action comedy manga by Hideaki Sorachi, GINTAMA takes place in an alternate Edo-period Japan, where an Alien race has taken control, forcing Samurai to lay down their swords. Once feared as the “White Demon,” former samurai Gintoki Sakata now works as an everyday handyman – until a master swordsman tasks Gintoki and his friends with finding the cursed sword Benizakura to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Packed with the sword-swinging sci-fi action and offbeat humor that have made the manga a classic, GINTAMA is bound to delight both fans and anyone looking for a journey to a visually-stunning universe where fantastical action lurks just around every corner.

The action comedy film directed by Yuichi Fukuda (HK: Forbidden Super Hero) is a live-action adaptation of a popular manga series created by author Hideaki Sorachi, which is currently serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump Magazine and has sold over 51 million copies worldwide. The film premiered in Japan this past July, where it earned a total of 3.84 billion yen (approximately 34 million U.S. dollars) and was the top-grossing live-action film of this summer, beating out other major film franchises. GINTAMA features an all-star cast including Shun Oguri (Space Pirate Captain Harlock [voice], Lupin the 3rd) playing Gintoki Sakata, Kanna Hashimoto (Assassination Classroom), as Kagura, Masaki Suda (Death Note: Light Up the New World) as Shinpachi Shimura, and Tsuyoshi Domoto (member of popular Japanese idol group KinkiKids) as Shinsuke Takasugi. The main theme song, “DECIDED,” is sung by the popular Japanese rock band UVERworld. The film will be featured in theaters in the original Japanese audio with English subtitles.

The film has also seen great success across Asia including Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand. In China, GINTAMA was the most featured Japanese live-action film to date, screening in over 8,000 theaters across the country and earning over $9 million U.S. dollars on its opening weekend.

Staff Director: Yuichi Fukuda Screenplay: Yuichi Fukuda Cinematography: Tetsuya Kudo Production Design: Noriyoshi Ikeya Costume Design: Kazuhiro Sawataishi Cast: Gintoki Sakata: Shun Oguri Shinpachi Shimura: Masaki Suda Kagura: Kanna Hashimoto Kotaro Katsura: Masaki Okada Tae Shimura: Masami Nagasawa Gengai Hiraga: Murotsuyoshi Isao Kondo: Kankuro Nakamura Toshiro Hijikata: Yuya Yagira Sogo Okita: Ryo Yoshizawa Testuya Murata: Ken Yasuda Tetsuko Murata: Akari Hayami Nizo Okada: Hirofumi Arai Henpeita Takechi: Jiro Sato Matako Kijima: Nanao Shinsuke Takasugi: Tsuyoshi Domoto

------ Follow on Twitter at @aicnanime

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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