Apr 7, 2021
“Zokki,” the introduction on the film’s website tells us, “is impossible to categorize … Zokki is Zokki.” Fair enough, but all films, by an iron law of reviewing, must have a label and the one that fits best in this case, if crookedly, is “quirky comedy.”
Seeing it at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, I went in expecting “Zokki” to supply belly laughs but left disappointed. Seeing it again, I realized that it was closer in sensibility to the work of celebrated maverick Yoshiharu Tsuge, whose surreal, absurdist manga has inspired several films, including “Nowhere Man” (1991), the directorial debut of actor Naoto Takenaka.
Zokki : Five stories, three directors, one goofy time japantimes.co.jp - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from japantimes.co.jp Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Feb 17, 2021
There’s something sinister happening in Oiso, a dead-end town on the Pacific coast, though good luck deducing what it is from Takuya Misawa’s “The Murders of Oiso.” Running at a pithy 79 minutes but in no hurry to get anywhere, this artfully inscrutable rural noir keeps teasing you to imagine the awful things that might be happening just off screen.
While the director’s debut, “Chigasaki Story” (2014), was a whimsical homage to the films of Yasujiro Ozu, his second feature owes more to the fractured narratives of Nicolas Roeg. This Japan-South Korea-Hong Kong co-production deflects you at every turn, and while some (this viewer included) will treat it as a riddle waiting to be solved, others are liable to find the whole thing maddeningly oblique.
The Murders of Oiso : A whodunnit in search of a crime japantimes.co.jp - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from japantimes.co.jp Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.