Films with: Minamida, Yōko

Buta to gunkan Pigs and battleships /

Portrays postwar Japan through the power struggles between small-time gangsters in the port town of Yokosuka, where American soldiers are based.

DVD 9982

Chikamatsu monogatari A story from Chikamatsu /

"An exquisitely moving tale of forbidden love struggling to survive in the face of persecution. Based on a classic of eighteenth-century Japanese drama, the film traces the injustices that befall a Kyoto scroll maker's wife and his apprentice after each is unfairly accused of wrongdoing. Bound by fate in an illicit, star-crossed romance, they go on the run in search of refuge from the punishment prescribed them: death"--Container.

DVD 12867

Hausu House /

Tokyo teenager Gorgeous is upset with her long-widowed father--he wants to marry his new girlfriend Ryoko. Seriously miffed, Gorgeous hits the road to visit her aunt in the country, bringing along her best girlfriends Sweet, Melody, Fantasy, Prof, Mac, and Kung Fu. The titular house belongs to the wheelchair bound aunt, whose large white cat has been immortalized in artwork throughout. Things soon start to go very badly for the teenagers. While there are pinwheeling body parts, there are also bits of homage to avant-garde cinema, Looney Tunes cartoons, schlock Italian horror, chop-socky martial arts--all in a dreamlike, phantasmagoria of brightly colored Seventies-era kitsch. This is hardly to everyone's tastes, but it is old-school Japanese insanity of the very best kind.

DVD 10654