Synopsis: Yoshida returned to feature filmmaking after a hiatus of thirteen years with this brave and moving film about the struggle to maintain dignity in the face of old age and approaching death. The Human Promise reaffirms Yoshida’s ability to deal with difficult and even taboo topics by exploring the question of euthanasia with a profound sensitivity and subtlety. The film’s unusually frank meditation on death is anchored by the restrained performances by its veteran actors, including Rentaro Mikni, who starred in several of Yoshida’s earlier works, including A Story Written on Water. The Human Promise’s use of water imagery enriches a motif central to the rich ambiguity at the heart of Yoshida’s cinema.
A Promise (1986) -- Yoshishige Yoshida.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 2h 3mn
Size: 1.89 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 720x568 ~> 1009x568
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Frame rate: 24.000 fps
Bit rate: 2 000 Kbps
BPP: 0.204
Audio
#1: Japanese 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
Late 18th century, Tohoku. An outcast girl, Rin lives in a village suffering from famine. She draws strength from Mt. Hayachine, where the spirits of humans ascend after passing.
Yamaonna.2023.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-MagicStar.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 37mn
Size: 6.39 GiB
Video
Codec: h264
Resolution: 1920x800
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Frame rate: 24.000 fps
Bit rate: 8 760 kb/s
Audio
Japanese 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 640 kb/s
When an American is murdered in a Japanese inn, Tokyo police Detective Munesue follows the trail of the killer to New York City. There he is joined by Detective Shuftan, and together they sort out the crime.
Proof of the Man.1977.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 2 h 12 min
Size: 3.28 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1024x554
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 3 000 kb/s
BPP: 0.221
Audio
#1: Japanese 2.0ch FLAC @ 494 kb/s
Quote: LEAD: EARLY in ”The Sea and Poison,” the harrowing Japanese movie now at Film Forum 1, a surgical team performs a lung operation on a young woman. It is probably the most graphic view that most of its audience will ever have had of the scalpel and forceps doing their work, and you may find yourself joining the young intern Suguro, who confesses, ”Today in the operating room, I had to close my eyes.
EARLY in ”The Sea and Poison,” the harrowing Japanese movie now at Film Forum 1, a surgical team performs a lung operation on a young woman. It is probably the most graphic view that most of its audience will ever have had of the scalpel and forceps doing their work, and you may find yourself joining the young intern Suguro, who confesses, ”Today in the operating room, I had to close my eyes.”
That episode prepares us for another operation, the climactic scene in which a captured American pilot is subjected to vivisection experiments. Again, there is the feeling of being trapped in an operating room; you can’t watch, but you can’t stop watching. In these scenes, the director, Kei Kumai, proves himself a master of a kind of super-realism.
Mr. Kumai’s script, drawn from a novel by Shusaku Endo, is less gripping. Mr. Endo based his controversial work on an atrocity committed in the spring of 1945 by doctors at the University of Kyushu medical department. Under orders of the military, they performed fatal experiments on eight American fliers. Twenty-five of those involved were convicted of war crimes.
Mr. Kumai tells the story through three participants in the operation -two interns (including Suguro, sympathetically played by Eiji Okuda) and a nurse. Their reasons for cooperating – careerism, weakness, jealousy – smack of a kind of fiction that doesn’t rise to its momentous subject. Perhaps the characters were better developed and more convincing in Mr. Endo’s novel.
At the end, Suguro’s friend Toda (Ken Watanabe) says, ”You never know what those who would punish us would do if they were placed in the same position.” Resonant words, but there’s not enough here to back them up. And Mr. Kumai seems to lose control altogether whenever military types are brought on; the American interrogator seems to have been borrowed from Japan’s wartime propaganda movies, and the cackling Japanese officers from Hollywood’s.
When he is directing his camera at the operating table or into hospital wards or along the hospital’s heavily shadowed corridors, however, Mr. Kumai is very much in charge. His vision, in black and white, is strong, steady, serious. The poignantly beautiful image we are left with, the residue of the experiment on the operating-room floor being washed away to the sea, suggests the depths of a deeply troubling theme. A Tragic Experiment THE SEA AND POISON, written and directed by Kei Kumai, based on the novel by Shusaku Endo; in Japanese with English subtitles; photography by Masao Tochizawa; music performed by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra; produced by Kanou Otsuka. At Film Forum 1, 57 Watts Street.
Kei Kumai - (1986) The Sea and Poison.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 2 h 3 min
Size: 3.01 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1024x556
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 3 293 kb/s
BPP: 0.241
Audio
#1: Japanese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s
Hirayama lives a life of blissful contentment, spending his days balancing his job as a caretaker of Tokyo’s public toilets with his passion for music, literature, and photography. His structured routine is slowly interrupted by unexpected encounters that force him to reconnect with his past.
Masayuki and Sachie had little to lose when they first met each other. They were young. Their lives unscripted. It did not take long for Masayuki to quit his job and for the two to move in together. In a neighborhood where the red paper lanterns lit up the alleyways at nightfall, they keep each other warm. Love takes its toll when they find that Sachie is pregnant.
Aka.chouchin.1974.DVDRip.x264.mkv
General Container: Matroska Runtime: 1h 33mn Size: 1.17 GiB DXVA: Compatible Minimum settings: Met Video Codec: x264 Resolution: 714x348 ~> 835x348 Aspect ratio: 2.40:1 Frame rate: 23.976 fps Bit rate: 1 566 kb/s Audio Japanese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s
Synopsis: A special effects filled fantasy adventure, in which an 8 year old boy encounters an ancient samurai warrior who is only six inches tall.
Quote:
The New York Times Review
An 8-year-old child finds a 6-inch tall samurai. The little boy is having his troubles with contemporary life and the ancient warrior, lost in the 20th century, is looking for a place to die. They consequently strike up a friendship and in the end the boy grows up and the samurai grows young and, like the Tom Thumb of legend, poles himself away in a teacup. Though not much is made of the attendant allegory, lots is made of this bonding of the generations and all the special effects necessary to illustrate the differences in height and age. Some are, indeed, quite marvelous – a friendly cat towering like an elephant, a bad crow looming like a berserk jet, a trip down a sewer with full detail. These, however, no matter how splendid, are there to make us realize the truly marvelous of the everyday. Director Nobuhiko Obayashi is a real fantasist. Through fast cutting, witty detail and extraordinary care, he effortlessly tosses off his prodigious events and turns a kid movie into emotion-packed magic.
-Donald Richie
Samurai-Kids-1993.mkv
General Container: Matroska Runtime: 1 h 46 min Size: 1.11 GiB Video Codec: x264 Resolution: 704x386 Aspect ratio: 1.85:1 Frame rate: 23.976 fps Bit rate: 1 022 kb/s BPP: 0.158 Audio #1: 2.0ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s
he Japanese remake of Robert Enrico’s french film The Last Adventure, where Alain Delon & Lino Ventura have respectively exchanged their place with Ken Takakura & Shintaro Katsu… This version also stars Meiko Kaji (Lady Snowblood) and Noboru Ando (many yakuza films).
The Homeless follows the story of two prisoners released the same day, who meets again at the brothel where they help a prostitute to escape from yakuza. And together, they go treasure hunting.
The Homeless (1974).mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 36 min
Size: 3.56 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 5 004 kb/s
BPP: 0.101
Audio
#1: Japanese 2.0ch AAC LC @ 265 kb/s
Quote: “Irezumi” (which means “tattoo” in Japanese) is an erotic costume film from one of the bad boys of ’60s Japanese cinema. Director Masumura used a full palette of primary colors (with very vivid reds) to tell us about the story of Otsuya, a beautiful young woman from a middle-class merchant family who is abducted into geisha work, and who catches one day the eye of Seikichi, a tattoo master who marks her back with a huge, monstrous spider. From that moment on, Otsuya will take her revenge with every man who shared her bed.
If you have an appetite for perverse stories, try this one. To play Otsuya, Masumura used beautiful actress Ayako Wakao, best remembered in the West for her part in Mizoguchi’s “Street of Shame” (1956), where she was Yasumi, the cold-hearted and money-greedy prostitute. She inspired Masumura throughout the ’60s, and “Irezumi” is one of their best collaborations. Adapted to the screen by Kaneto Shindo (the internationally acclaimed director of “The Naked Island” and “Onibaba”), the script goes far beyond Junichiro Tanizaki’s original short story. In Tanizaki’s work, a sadistic tattoo artist searches for his ultimate canvas, a beautiful girl, to create his masterpiece. The girl is innocent until the tattooer finishes “pouring his soul” into her tattoo, which represents a huge tarantula (it is better to know that “tarantula” in Japanese is “jorôgumo” and “jorô” stands for “prostitute”, as both attract men to suck their blood). She becomes thus the “femme fatale” of his dreams. In “Irezumi”, we never know if Otsuya is evil by nature or if the tattoo is the cause of her misconduct and bad manners, and that’s the most fascinating aspect of the film. As it is a “pinku eiga” of the ’60s, don’t expect graphic sexual scenes but highly suggestive shots (which are more than enough) and enjoy this shameless film. As for me, I still haven’t decided yet whether it is a misogynous film or its complete opposite. And what about the spider? It’s a… uh, very special piece of art.
Irezumi (1966).mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 25 min
Size: 1.43 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1920x800
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 2 250 kb/s
BPP: 0.061
Audio
#1: Japanese 2.0ch AAC LC @ 128 kb/s
Ho Jun is a student from Beijing who is working in a cattle slaughter house in Tokyo. He lives with other Chinese friends in cheap lodgings. All of them find it difficult to adapt to Japanese culture. To make matters worse Ho Jun and some friends devise a plot to rob a local pinball gambling house – the gangster who owns the house finds them out and threatens to send Ho Jun back to China.
Synopsis: In a world with an alternate history, a great war finally comes to an end leaving the earth diseased and polluted. The geneticist Dr. Azuma vies for support from the government for his neo-cell treatment that he claims can rejuvenate the body and regenerate humankind. The government leaders, guarding their own deeply entrenched powers, turn down the professor. Driven to complete his work, Dr. Azuma accepts a secret offer from a sinister faction of the powerful military. After an incident occurs in Dr. Azuma’s lab, a race of mutant humans known as the Shinzo Ningen are unleashed upon the world. Now only the warrior known as Casshern, reincarnated with an invincible body, stands between the Shinzo Ningen and a world on the brink of annihilation.
Casshern.2004.480p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
General Container: Matroska Runtime: 2h 22mn Size: 2.73 GiB DXVA: Compatible Minimum settings: Met Video Codec: x264 Resolution: 854x356 Aspect ratio: 2.40:1 Frame rate: 23.976 fps Bit rate: 2 297 kb/s Audio Japanese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s
Chisato and Mahiro were banned from performing tasks because they violated the organization’s rules. Needing money to make ends meet, they resumed their days as part-time workers. Suddenly two other assassins are after them.
Imdb: A university student has the usual dreams and aspirations. It turns out to be a pipe dream and so she murders her own flesh and blood. The usual media heads seek an answer in order to sell copy. A psychologist is writing a book about the character and incident. Her research for the subject matter turn the psychologist inward and things come out of the shadows that perhaps are better left buried deep in the shadows of the psyche.
