u/slayrrr666

First Love: Litter on the Breeze

Few production companies hold the same strength of trademark from their creator as Wong Kar-wai’s Jet Tone Films. While many of us know the celebrated Hong Kong filmmaker for his sumptuous romantic works like “Chungking Express” and “In the Mood for Love”, his career as a producer for other directors holds some of the same trail-blazing intrigue he brought to Hong Kong cinema since the 1980s. Set up in 1991, Jet Tone Films has been responsible for funding Wong’s oeuvre and has recently expanded overseas to collaborate with Japanese and Thai directors (SABU and Nattawut Poonpiriya respectively) alike. But in this period of blossoming experimentation in the 1990s, Wong set prolific Hong Kong actor Eric Kot Man-Fai a challenge to direct a project about first love, and thus, the sprawling, affectionate “First Love: Litter on the Breeze” was born.

Read our review of Eric Kot Man-Fai's First Love: Litter on the Breeze on Asian Movie Pulse at the link below and let us know what you think of the film!

https://asianmoviepulse.com/2023/01/film-review-first-love-litter-on-the-breeze-1997-by-eric-kot-man-fai/

Suzaku

In her initial days as a documentary maker, Naomi Kawase’s films were very personal in their content. Her fictional debut “Suzaku” may not have been about her own life, but the subject was something certainly close to her heart, with an awful lot of reality incorporated within.

Read our review of Naomi Kawase's Suzaku on Asian Movie Pulse at the link below and let us know what you think of the film!

https://asianmoviepulse.com/2021/12/film-review-suzaku-1997-by-naomi-kawase/

Full Metal Yakuza

On the DVD release of “Full Metal Yakuza” by Artsmagic, the Japanese director addresses the origin story of the film, a tale which could be seen as one of the high times of Asian economy before it collapsed, according to Miike. As he was waiting in an office of a production company for V-cinema releases which went straight to VHS, Miike was aware of a couple of pages from a script which had the title Full Metal Yakuza written on top of them. He quickly read through the pages and decided he would make the film one of his projects, one which he finally realized in 1997.

Read our review of Takashi Miike's Full Metal Yakuza on Asian Movie Pulse at the link below and let us know what you think of the film!

https://asianmoviepulse.com/2019/08/film-review-full-metal-yakuza-1997-by-takashi-miike/

Uzumaki

In the early 2000s, when the era of J-horror was reaching its peak, there were already many features that changed the formula or diverted from the tropes of a genre that, by that time, had become a little too predictable. Whereas the works of Kiyoshi Kurosawa had been known for their uniqueness, showing strange worlds and characters instead of being “only” horror movies, there were also odd entries such as “Uzumaki, directed by Akihiro Higuchi, better known as Higuchinsky. Regarding the original manga by Junji Ito, the director explained how he was much more interested in the changed the uzumaki (“spiral”) ignited in people and places, turning a familiar environment into something quite strange and weird, which is precisely the atmosphere we wanted to capture in his adaption. As a result, “Uzumaki” is a true oddity within J-horror, with a focus on atmosphere rather than scares, making it a feature which many fans of the genre have yet to discover for themselves.

Read our review of Higuchinsky's Uzumaki on Asian Movie Pulse at the link below and let us know what you think of the film!

https://asianmoviepulse.com/2021/08/fantasia-film-review-uzumaki-2000-by-higuchinsky/