Breath

" Breath opens unremarkably. Jang Jin is on death row and attempts suicide by sharpening a toothbrush and stabbing himself with it. (He's played by Chen Chang, the sexy outlaw suitor to Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.) The incident makes the evening TV news.
One another amazing Kim Ki Duk!! I just wish that the film was longer and the story and characters developed even more and deeper. The plot have a lot of potential to become something like "Secret Sunshine" does, but unfortunately "Breath" doesn't reach the that depth. The director's sensibility is one in a million and I am really looking forward to see his future works, as he is master of the senses and visuals now, I really expect that he reaches the depth that deserves his talent. I must admit that the cast for the main roles is amazing, especialy the taiwanese Chen Chang win my hear with his minimalist in-depth acting.
This is very balanced movie, composed like a architectural masterpiece , there is nothing too much in this movie. However, I wish that Kim left more space for irrational wandering of the viewer.

Speaking to reporters Sat Kim Ki-duk said: "The film highlights the lack of communication in Korean society. I have difficulties with that and I wanted to show a different type of cinematic image and to express the inexpressible even if it seems impossible"
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Yeon's husband is having an affair. He tells her to get out and meet people instead of staying at home making sculptures. On an impulse, she goes to visit Jang Jin. On a subsequent visit, she decorates the visiting room with blown-up pictures of spring, fills the area with artificial flowers, and sings to him. She wears a summer dress even though it is mid-winter. Yeon's poetry of life has a profound effect on Jang Jin. They fall passionately in love. But trouble brews from Jang Jin's jealous cellmates and Yeon's violent husband.

When Breath started, I admit I found it less than engaging. But suddenly these scenes that Yeon constructs for Jang Jin explode with a powerful emotional force. Have you ever been on one of those simulator machines where you step in and it starts moving about, replicating sensations that match the screen in front of you? It's that sudden. One second you are watching an ordinary prison drama, interspersed with inconsequential domestic stuff. Then Wham! You are suddenly catapulted, knocked sideways, jolted out of your seat. And that, of course, is a pale reflection of the effect we realise it must be having on Jang Jin. We start living for these intense (yet emotionally draining) moments in the film, just as Jang Jin does.

Throughout precisely architectured cinematography, Ki-duk Kim weaves a poetry of life and death. "We are already crazy inmates on death row. Until we can breathe no more." Contrasts between the two protagonists' lives outside the meeting room and what goes on inside are mirrored in verbal contrasts where one person will speak and the other stays mute. Breathing in and breathing out. Locked in a passionate kiss. Or holding one's breath underwater."

Lust, caution (Ang Lee)

Starring Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen, and Wang Lee Hom

Shanghai, 1942. Japan's World War II occupation of this Chinese city continues in force. Mrs. Mak, a woman of sophistication and means, walks into a café, places a phone call, and then sits and waits. She remembers how her story began several years earlier, in China in 1938. She is not in fact Mrs. Mak, but shy Wong Chia Chi. With WWII underway, Wong has been left behind by her father, who has escaped to England. As a freshman at university, she meets fellow student Kuang Yu Min. Kuang has started a drama society to shore up patriotism, As the theater troupe's new leading lady, Wong realizes that she has found her calling, able to move and inspire audiences--and Kuang. He convenes a core group of students to carry out a radical and ambitious plan to assassinate a top Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee. Each student has a part to play; Wong will be Mrs. Mak, who will gain Yee's trust by befriending his wife and then draw the man into an affair. Wong transforms herself utterly inside and out, and the scenario proceeds as scripted--until an unexpectedly fatal twist spurs her to flee. (Focus Features)

"Lust, Caution" (shot by Rodrigo Prieto) at least has a suitably retro-dreamy look: This is a tasteful-looking picture, one that seems to have been buffed to a soft glow, like a piece of mellow vintage brass. And Lee couldn't have chosen more perfect actors for these roles. It's always a pleasure to watch Joan Chen. She doesn't have much to do here, but playing an aging, possessive beauty, she still manages to cast a quiet spell over the picture. Tang, with her fine features and always-questioning eyes, plays the seductress Wong with a deft balance of delicacy and toughness. She'd need to have both of those things in luxurious quantities to stand up to Leung. He is one of the finest actors in Asian cinema, and if nothing else, "Lust, Caution" may at least bring him a wider, more appreciative audience in the West.The love scenes in the last third of "Lust, Caution" are intense, affecting and beautifully filmed; they're also emotionally raw in a way that's surprising in a film that's otherwise so ponderous and inoffensive. One of the sex scenes essentially depicts a rape; later, the sex is consensual, and Lee shoots these scenes in a way that's unapologetically erotic, not just safe and "pretty." In these scenes, Mr. Yee and Wong play out a world of aggression in bed, perhaps directed not so much at each other as at the unruly, dangerous universe they're living in -- when they lash out and claw and bite, it's almost as if they're relieved to come into contact with real human skin, instead of just elusive, maddening air.
Wonderful movie, excellent sex scene , one of the best and most passionate. The actors are excellent also.

Tanaka Hiroshi no subete (2005)

Director: Makoto Tanaka

Release date: 2005

Genre: comedy 

Cast: Minoru Torihada, Mariko Kaga, Koichi Ukeda, Hijiri Kojima ect.

Tanaka Hiroshi is a lonely 32 years old man working in a wig factory. He doesn't expect much from life, doesn't even give much. He is a lonely guy not looking for companions or girlfriends,  and becomes lonelier when he lose his mother and father in a very short interval of time.There are many women around him but it seems like he doesn't open his heart to any of them-he doesn't know how to do it. Hiroshi Tanaka is a man who can sense the change in the nature and express it by words in haiku, but he is not able to understand if the woman he likes is lesbian or not. The prostitute he pays to teach him on sex for the first time feel sorry for him, and teaches him that he needs to really open his heart to the person he loves and serenader totally to the feeling of love. Losing the last member of his family-the cat, Hiroshi starts fighting for love and life. He ends up on the street with the bento -girl walking towards the future in which "something good must happen"(something will happen anyway..."nantoka naru"). They almost get killed by falling constructions blokes. Being so close to death he realizes that he need to take the opportunities that  life  offers to him. 

Mayonaka no Yajisan Kitasan

"Quentin Tarantino could have made this if he were Japanese," I thought, stumbling out of "Mayonaka no Yajisan Kitasan." That brain bubble, however, soon popped as I realized that no one, even the genre-scrambling Tarantino, could have come up with the film's particular blend of samurai and pop surrealism.

Kankuro Kudo, the film's writer and a first-time director, is a wunderkind who got his start as a comic actor (and still takes the occasional role), but began writing scripts, scoring a hit in 2000 with the TBS series "Ikebukuro Westgate Park." Since then nearly everything he has touched has turned to ratings or box-office gold, including the films "Go" (2001), "Ping Pong" (2002) and "Kisarazu Cats Eye" (2004).
Unlike most Japanese scriptwriters, who even when successful have the public profile of a lobster, Kudo has become a celebrity -- his lanky frame, long face and trademark floppy hats are visible all over the media. For his first film, "Yajisan Kitasan," he had the sort of carte blanche rarely extended to tyro directors since Orson Welles was given the run of the RKO lot for "Citizen Kane."
Welles-like, he promised a film utterly unlike any seen before. What he has delivered is . . . another Kankuro Kudo movie, albeit one with narrative and visual fireworks that make his other films look, if not sedate, almost normal.

But then, Kudo has defined the new normal for the mass of under-25s who rarely go to a movie, but are connected to a media source nearly every waking minute. Who get their laughs from the TV manzai routines that range from crude slapstick to cutting satire, but seldom draw a quiet breath. Who get their traditional culture -- the guys with the topknots and all the rest -- more from manga and anime than the films of Kenji Mizoguchi.

Where Takeshi Kitano has drawn a clear, bright line between his TV clowning and his arty film work, Kudo makes no major distinction. His films may be more tightly structured than his TV shows, but both assume the same over-stimulated, easily distracted audience.
"Yajisan Kitasan" is a period drama set in no known universe, save Kudo's fertile brain. Yajirobe (Tomoya Nagase, frontman of pop group Tokio) and Kitahachi (kabuki actor Shichinosuke Nakamura) are a happy gay couple in old Edo (today's Tokyo), but Kita, an out-of-work actor, has a drug problem and Yaji, of no obvious occupation, is suffering from bizarre dreams and fears that he is losing his sanity. Then, inspired by a flier saying, "The real is here" at Ise Shrine, they set off for that venerable landmark -- Kita to shake his addiction, Yaji to regain touch with reality.
They follow the Tokkaido, that storied road from Edo to Ise, and since they are in a hurry, they blast off down a modern highway on a motorcycle, but a cop in a helmet and kimono (Susumu Terajima) pulls them over and tells them they have to walk (as a punishment for violation of the space-time continuum?).

They comply and forge on until they reach Hakone and the first barrier, called Warai no Yado (The Inn of Laughs). The scowling barrier keeper (Riki Takeuchi) will only let travelers pass if they can make him laugh, which is not an easy task. The unfunny are tortured and, in extreme cases of humor impairment, put to death. Yaji and Kita stumble their way into a skin-saving gag, but Kita, unable to control his cravings, gets busted by the guards and a weeping Yaji is forced to traipse on alone.

They manage to reunite -- no need to say how, but this is hardly the end of their troubles. Back in Edo, the body of Yaji's wife turns up in the river and the cops suspect foul play, with Yaji and Kita as the prime suspects. Dubious allies appear along the way, including a druggie manzai comic and his boy partner, as do various odd characters, including a group of singing high-school girls and a cute-but-tone-deaf girl whose music-loving father is the keeper of a second barrier, Uta no Yado (The Inn of Songs).
After various adventures, Yaji and Kita reach the third and last barrier, O no Yado (The Inn of the King), whose keeper is none other than King Arthur of the Round Table. Here the boys meet their final test -- and temptation.
Based on a manga by Kotobuki Shiriagai that is in turn based on Ikku Jippensha's classic picaresque novel "Tokkaidochu Hizakurige," "Mayonaka no Yajisan Kitasan" is less Kudo riffing on his source material, than a complete departure from it, into a cloud-Kudo-land where eras and cultures collide and logic takes a holiday.
Unlike Kitano, who has taken the ijime (bullying) endemic in Japanese show business to new sadistic heights, Kudo is a gentle-spirited sort, who may put his heroes though hell, but is always on their side. Also, where Kitano's film comedy is often pawky, deadpan, chilled-out and borderless -- Laurel and Hardy meet Jim Jarmusch -- Kudo's comic style is knock-about, rapid-fire and culturally in-groupy -- the Keystone Cops cops meet comedy duo Downtown. At the same time, "Yajisan Kitasan" is, not just a series of slapsticky manzai routines, but Kudo's unbuttoned essay on the nature of friendship, love and the whole meggilah of this journey called life.
There is much brilliance in it, to be sure, but, like the nonstop, high-volume pop culture it draws on, much static as well. About halfway through I was longing for a sound and speed control -- and dreading the headache to come. A problem I never had with "Citizen Kane."

Original title of this article: A trip through cloud-Kudo-land
By MARK SCHILLING, Japan Times.

My first top 20

Here is my top 20- list of directors that has influenced me a lot, impressed me even more with every film, or every shot in every film. The rating starting from 1 to 20 is not pyramided like i.e. number one is not my favorite director, it is just a free chronology about which one I was in love first . I will speak about many films and how they moved me, about their visual and narrative part. There are  only few films that changed my life, more than few that changed my days, and thousands that thought me so much about places, people, emotions and much more. This is  a love diary, where I’m going to write my love letters  of gratitude to all directors, actors, writers, artists…all who gave me so much love and passion for cinema.

1. Charlie Chaplin
2. Ingmar Bergman
3. Krzysztof Kieslowski
4. Akira Kurosawa
5. Emir (Nemanja)Kusturica
6. Bernardo Bertolucci
7. Leo Carax
8. Ozu Yasujiro
9. Peter Greenaway
10. Milcho Manchevski
11. Yimou Zhang
12. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
13. Takeshi Kitano
14. Tom Tykwer
15. Wong Kar Wai
16. Kim ki Duk
17. Chen Kaige
18. Michel Gondry
19. Deepa Mehta
20. Chang-dong Lee