Shinji Somai

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#26 Post by feihong » Sun Jun 28, 2020 1:00 am

I just came across an article from 2013 saying some company in Japan was establishing a "Kinema Junpo Collection" of VOD streaming movies. The two movies they were starting with caught my eye: Typhoon Club and Tokyo Heaven.

I've seen a 1080p version of Typhoon Club, which makes me wonder if it came initially from that VOD service. If that's the source, then I wonder if Tokyo Heaven might be out there somewhere, too. I don't know if anyone has seen this, but used DVDs of Tokyo Heaven currently sell for between $800 and $1500. VHS tapes go for $100. But maybe there's a hi-def source for the movie, via VOD?

Last year I earned a large paycheck and decided to get Somai's Luminous Woman on DVD. The disc isn't great, but the film looks really cool. Still, it set me back quite a bit. There was an amazing ad for the film on Youtube, a really quick thing (probably a TV spot?), that sold me on it, making it look like Somai doing a more earthbound version of The 5th Element. Now I've seen a single scene from Tokyo Heaven on Youtube, where the lead actress sings, scat-sings, and dances along with a trombonist in some restaurant. Really beautiful. Then I read about the film, and it has this crazy plot. It like these two films are a sort of brief 90s diversion into splurging romantic fantasy for Somai. It's too bad the films aren't more accessible.

On another note, yay! The Somai thread made it to page 2.

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bad future
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Re: Shinji Somai

#27 Post by bad future » Sun Jun 28, 2020 2:32 am

I recently discovered Shinji Somai through a project I started for the quarantine season(s) where I decided to pick out a time frame and go through each year in order relatively thoroughly for anything that looks interesting. I landed on 1985-1999 almost arbitrarily...
SpoilerShow
(well, seemed like a fun range of stuff mainstream to SOV and in between, vhs relics and recently canonized stuff, but not like SO MUCH widely acknowledged greatness that it would take forever just to get through one year, as I imagine the 60’s would be for example, and ‘84 felt like it might be a good stopping point for a future similar project.)
Anyway, that’s a long preamble to explain why I’ve seen Love Hotel, Typhoon Club and Lost Chapter of Snow (LOVED the first two, the third not so much), not any of his earlier stuff that’s readily available, but instead looking ahead and really hoping for a way to see Luminous Woman and Tokyo Heaven, you know, without literally spending a grand. I hope you’re right that there might be versions out there! Please report back if you uncover anything, and I’ll do the same...

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#28 Post by feihong » Sun Jun 28, 2020 3:02 am

There's also an HD version of P.P. Rider on iTunes in Japan. It looks great, and that is, for my money, the best of Somai's movies, and one of the three or four best movies of the 80s in my admittedly eclectic headcannon. I haven't seen a bad Somai movie yet, though I'm less fully on board with Moving as others. But I ended up liking Lost Chapter, without being totally overwhelmed. It's interesting to me probably more as another screenplay by Yozo Tanaka, who's on the credits for Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za and Yumeji. That was intriguing, and I thought the marionette in the closing credits reminded me of the puppet figure in the last parts of Yumeji. I have but have yet to see The Terrible Couple (and I found english subs for it). But Tokyo Heaven seems like a weird sort of holy grail of missing movies for me now.It's frustrating to hit such a brick wall trying to track this movie down.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#29 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:37 am

Too much Somai (and Jun Ichikawa, for that matter) remain "out of reach". Very frustrating.

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#30 Post by feihong » Mon Sep 21, 2020 5:49 am

I should start this by saying I that I can't read or speak Japanese, and so I'm entirely dependent on subtitles and translations to understand what's written about Japanese films, what's on screen, and what's available on Japanese DVDs and blu rays. Of course, usually Japanese DVDs and blu rays have no English subtitles, and generally speaking they have very few special features. Sometimes there's a trailer, or a brief photo gallery of publicity stills. The 2 Nikkatsu DVD collections of Seijun Suzuki movies feature director commentary tracks, and it's a shame those haven't been optioned as special features on U.S. releases of the films. Most often on Japanese discs the movie starts up immediately, and the disc menu only appears if you call it up, or if you reach the end of the film. So this is a preface to say that I discovered something really interesting on a Somai disc I'd acquired, and I can't read anything to determine what it is I've found.

Recently someone created fansubs for Shinji Somai's 1987 film Luminous Woman, so I finally was able to put my exorbitant DVD of the film to use. I watched the film with subtitles. The film is very strange. It reminds me a little of a Jean-Jacques Beineix film, or it sometimes seems a bit like City of Lost Children; and it generally comes across as loopy and disconnected from the zeitgeist as a film like The Fifth Element. I've read it described as the weirdest film in Somai's canon, and while I've only seen around half of Somai's filmography, I'm inclined to agree. The film it precedes, Tokyo Heaven, has a narrative which is also based in the fantastical, making these two movies a brief foray for Somai into magical realism. Like the earlier Lost Chapter: Passion in the Snow, it is scripted by Yozo Tanaka (who also scripted for Seijun Suzuki on Branded to Kill and is the credited screenwriter for all of the Taisho Trilogy movies). There are still plenty of Somai's patented long takes, but here they are briefer than in Typhoon Club or P.P. Rider or Love Hotel. The acting is generally good in the way of most Somai pictures, but the singer Monday Michiru stands out, playing one of the leads with extreme sincerity. She seems to sing a ton of opera for the film, and whether or not it is actually her voice, she seems to be creditably matching the playback all the time she's on screen.

The movie has some clear, simple themes––there is the contrast between a dissipated countryside and a vibrant but sinister city, the contrast of opera and bare-knuckle brawling, and a strong contrast between smarts and feeling, or intuition, which makes for a kind of phantasmagorical love story between burly mountain man Sensaku––the film's self-styled "pathetic god of nature"––and Yoshino, the opera singer corrupted by her search for fame, who refuses to sing in protest against the violence of her manager's bare-knuckle fight club. Sensaku comes to the city looking for the woman he has promised to marry, and gets involved in the fighting in order to survive there. His naivety is no match for the sophistication of the city folk, but his earnest nature earns him intense friendship with the fight club's singing drag queen (another transplant from Sensaku's native Hokkaido) and an intense romantic connection to Yoshino, the club's mutely protesting opera singer. Meanwhile, the club owner, Yoshino's covetous manager, has already stolen and corrupted Sensaku's bride to be. The film plays out like a fable, or perhaps like an opera, and the tension between fable and opera dominates the proceedings. Are the emotions the different characters feel grandiose enough to kill for, or simple enough to be self-evident? The visual style of the film is super-expressive. The images are all post-processed with an entropic color shift, making the film composed primarily of shades of blue and red. As a result, Tokyo looks like hell in this movie; but a kind of vivid, candy-colored hell of the imagination, all pulsing blood and cool vesicles. The scenes in the fight club are shot without any traditional combat coverage, and instead are treated with Somai's typical limited take, plan-shot approach. This really does something strange to the film, making these fight scenes very frustrating and diffuse affairs to watch, but this is a self conscious part of the film's narrative structure; strong and indefatigable as he is, Sensaku never wins a fight in any clear, satisfying way––even his victories look like defeats. Rather they are shot to emphasize the way in which Yoshino and her manager react to them––especially as Yoshino develops feelings for Sensaku, and finds she is able to sing only when he is in danger. I have to say I didn't like this movie nearly so much as I like P.P. Rider (one of the best films I've ever seen) or Typhoon Club (pretty high up there, too), or Love Hotel, and while I mostly like it better than Moving, I think Moving is far more coherent on a first watch. But there are a lot of interesting ideas jangling around in Luminous Woman, and there is very conscious and often clever explication of those ideas. It is more ambitious and interesting than the previous Tanaka-scripted Lost Chapter: Passion in the Snow.

However, watching the film on my computer, with the subtitles, I discovered something about the disc I hadn't known about until now; there are two separate files on the disc for the film. In other words, there are two versions of the film, two different cuts you can watch.

The version the subtitles synch up to is 1 hour, 58 minutes long. When I look up the film all over the internet, that's the runtime which is always listed for the movie. But there is a second version on the disc, a whole separate file, which is 2 hours and 37 minutes long. That's a...a what? A director's cut? One which is nearly 40 minutes longer than the theatrical cut. Admittedly, when the 2-hour movie was over, I was very, very ready for it to be over. But I would love to know more about this second cut of the film. Scrubbing through the timeline, I see some additional singing scenes for Monday Michiru, some additional scenes where Sensaku confronts his bride-to-be, and what looks like a very expanded sequence near the end of the film, where Sensaku returns to Hokkaido and finds some kind of massacre in his village. He then seems to take the survivors of his village and essentially re-establish their community as a farming cooperative (very reminiscent of an earlier-era agrarian scenario) in another location. It does make some sense to include this big sequence of material; in the theatrical cut, there is a whole suite of scenes near the end where Yoshino goes looking for Sensaku in Hokkaido, and keeps arriving at places he has recently been, without actually encountering him. When we see Sensaku afterwards, he's working on building a bridge, but we assume he is a day-laborer on a commercial project (earlier in the film this is work he lists as having done in the past). After the final confrontation, we see Sensaku and Yoshino in the fields outside Sensaku's village. She is placed on a pedestal in the middle of a field of crops, singing while the villagers work. Sensaku looks on, contented, seemingly the master of all he surveys. This final scene seems dreamlike and a little insubstantial next to the grim tale that has come before. But if we get this final movement of the story where Sensaku rebuilds his village from the ground up, this ending seems to gain a richer foundation in the narrative. Now Sensaku seems like the village headman, or, possibly he is a benevolent god of nature, as Yoshino comes to think of him. And at that point Yoshino seems like an avatar of human endeavor in a verdant wilderness. I don't know if it's worth 40 more minutes of material, but sometimes a movie that long can lose my interest and recapture it again later. Whatever the case, I can't find anything online to indicate the nature of this second cut of the film. Is it a director's cut? An extended TV cut? I have no idea. It would be fascinating to know.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#31 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Sep 21, 2020 9:26 am

Alas, so little has been written about Somai in English. I can try asking about this on the KineJapan mailing list.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#32 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Mon Sep 21, 2020 2:05 pm

Looking around in Japanese, it seems that the extra scenes were cut before any sound editing, and some have no audio and use subtitles to convey the missing dialogue (obviously this would be easier to confirm with the disc on hand). Some apparently also show the clapperboard at the beginning of the shot, which suggests to me they were taken from a very early rough cut. Besides the changes already noted, they're also said to include performances by two actors (Shimokawa Tappei and Kawai Michiko) who were left out of the final cut altogether. Unfortunately I can't find anything confirming whether the longer version actually reflected Sōmai's preferences.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#33 Post by feihong » Mon Sep 21, 2020 7:12 pm

When I take a closer look at some of these scenes, I can see the subtitles, and it seems like most of these expanded and added scenes have no soundtrack whatsoever. I don't see a clapperboard yet, but the cut footage is in slightly rougher shape, with some greasepencil markings and print damage.

There is an added scene in a bus (earlier in the theatrical version there is a flashback to this snowed-in bus in Hokkaido, where Sensaku promises to marry this girl from his home village), and that's where Tappei Shimokawa appears, along with a splendid cat, which hardly figures in the scene. Sensaku speaks to his sort of reverently. I can't get a context for that scene––and the bus scene in the movie, though it ultimately makes sense, is pretty hard to parse as the movie plays. There is not much context given for what is going on in that earlier scene, and without being able to read the subtitles, I can't figure it out. Some of the only closeups on Sensaku in the film are in this later, excised bus scene. Michiko Kawai, who appeared as Bruce in P.P. Rider, giving a wonderful performance, seems to figure in one of the cut scenes where Sensaku returns to Tokyo, and to the brothel his Hokkaido girlfriend worked at. Kawai sits opposite Sensaku, never facing the camera, in a delicate white dress, flanked by an ornate mirror (earlier scenes of this brothel are shot with wider-angle lenses and lower light, making the set appear distorted like a carnival fun-house, but this later version is framed more conventionally, drawing attention to the baroque detail of the place). As Sensaku talks very politely to the madam, Kawai wolfs down a bowl of noodles with zest, cutting into the conversation occasionally. It seems as if this scene points Sensaku to the hospital/asylum where he ultimately finds his former girlfriend, and eventually finds Yoshino as well, caring for her. Of all the scenes I see added here, this one seems like one that could definitely afford to be cut, though there is also a beautiful scene right after the drag queen lights himself on fire in the bus, a scene that plays out a sort of aftermath to the bus fire, with Yoshino trying to hold on to Sensaku, who now seems determined to return to Hokkaido, which could easily be cut as well. That scene looks amazing––both characters are standing in about a foot of water, in a flooded set that looks remarkably unique. Still, I think I'd prefer to see this more gradual movement of characters away from and then towards each other. The later half of the theatrical version of the film gets very choppy, and I think it makes it hard to understand what the movie is going for in the later scenes. Even the scene at the brothel makes a certain amount of sense, because we see there a Sensaku who has made himself more polite, more civilized, in order to navigate the dangers of the city when he returns to it. When Sensaku first arrives at the brothel he is hugely disruptive, and seemingly unaware of how little his bellicose aggressivity is communicates what he wants to know. He pushed people around when they stand in his way, and he looks like the wild, threatening mountain man he proves to be. In this later scene, Sensaku has shaved and donned a dapper suit (albeit of a florescent red color); he speaks politely and listens to the madam and the other prostitutes. Michiko Kawai's performance hardly makes an impact, but I am so partial to her for her acting in P.P. Rider as a child that I want to see her in this film anyway. It looks like she also appears in Somai's later 90s film, Wait and See, and after that she appears in The Sea is Watching, amongst other movies.

There's a part of me that thinks the longer, nearly three-hour cut of the movie might be better, not just for the way in which it more fully explicates the characters emotional states and grounds their decisions in the second half of the movie with a larger amount of gravitas, but also for the way in which stretching a fairly simple drama of violent human passions to an unbearable length is such a hallmark of opera. I don't know if I mentioned it before, but the arias Yoshino sings throughout the movie mostly all have lyrics that express the state of her existential distress of the moment. It's very clever writing from Tanaka. There is also some funny stuff done throughout the movie with allusion––Yoshino calls Sensaku "King Kong" when she first meets him, and in bookend sequences in the film Yoshino is placed atop a pile or other makeshift pedestal, like Fay Wray on top of the empire State building. Ultimately it's a movie that calls out for just a little more than is provided in the 2-hour cut. So it's quite interesting to see how much more they intended to have in the film, at least at some point in the editing. From what I can see, a lot of the early part of the extended movie is cut exactly as it appears in the 2-hour version; it's really the ending that gets chopped up in order to bring the movie in at a reasonable length.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#34 Post by feihong » Sun Jan 03, 2021 1:20 am

The new most expensive movie in my collection is Shinji Somai's Tokyo Heaven, for which no English subtitles seem to exist. I managed to special order the DVD for way lower than the standard price––nowadays it has climbed up to an incredible range. There is supposed to be a hi-def streaming version of the film you may be able to see in Japan, but I have seen hide nor hair of it, so I decided to take the least-worst deal I could and so I was finally able to watch this movie, without subtitles. The DVD, released by Pioneer at about the same time as the disc of Typhoon Club, is very awful. It is non-anamorphic, and sports an image full of pixellated grit and a glum deficiency of adequate color separation. While it doesn't have the black tone and macroblocking issues the Typhoon Club disc, it is hardly any better quality. Extras include biographies of the 4 main actors and of Somai. It also has a menu for scene selection. So, not very deluxe.

I've suspected for a while that this movie was closer to the Somai I like––the Somai of P.P. Rider, Love Hotel, and Typhoon Club––than the Somai I didn't like as much, as in the one who did Moving, The Catch, etc. To put it another way, there's a side to Somai that favors grounded realism, and another that reaches for surrealism––not just diegetic magic in a movie, but the kind of postmodern play with the structure of his cinema that I so love in P.P. Rider. While I did mostly like Luminous Woman––my previous most expensive single film in the collection––I did feel as if the larger scope and scale of that movie did not suit Somai as well as a more intimate approach. Almost as if my feeling travelled back to the past and into Somai's ears, here's Tokyo Heaven, a film which stars mostly just 4 actors, and caps off with a trombone-and–scat–singing jamboree that magically empties out a restaurant for the film's central couple. This single scene--by far the highlight of the movie in terms of exuberant, P.P. Rider–level surrealism––is watchable on Youtube, I believe. It made me ache to see the film, and while there isn't another scene like it––and while I couldn't understand exactly what was going on in the film because I don't speak or understand Japanese––the rest of the film does not really seem disappointing.

It seems to follow an emerging teen pop star of some sort, who appears to be stuck in a relationship she regrets with a pervy older manager. She steps out of his car after an argument, and gets killed by another driver. After some charmingly cheap special effects shenanigans, as well as some quirky studio-set "heaven" sets raining snow with brilliant sun, she gets sent back to Earth. What follows appears to be an earthier Wings of Desire, with a little more narrative commitment, as the girl attempts to capture all the vivid sensations of life before she is returned to the world of the dead. She befriends a jazz trombonist who seems to work at a publicity firm that seems to be somehow profiting from her death. If she can turn friendship into love, she will have fulfilled her task on earth. Some version of her sicko manager seems to follow her to heaven and down to Earth, acting like Jimminy Cricket to her Pinocchio. But her real manager is also out there, trying to do dirty deeds. There are nice Somai touches of subtle surrealism, including the trombonist's loft, which is bathed in color gels to artificially recreate the feelings of the characters in particular scenes, and the giant billboards showing the young girls' face advertising perfumes, which confront her everywhere she goes. None of the characters seem to make the connection between the ghost and her doppelganger on the billboards.

While Luminous Woman used a more extravagant range of camerawork, Tokyo Heaven appears to have been made much more cheaply, and the result is the kind of pleasing Somai long-take work there is so much of in P.P. Rider, Love Hotel, Lost Chapter: Passion in the Snow, and Typhoon Club. Often the camera is simply placed in a room, and it pivots on a tripod as characters move closer to the lens, further into the background, and into and out of the frame. Sometimes the camera sits outside the trombonist's apartment and films in the windows, moving in handheld scuttling from window to window to keep the characters in frame. This level of innovation usually results in very involving, physical performances by the actors––another prime element of Somai's style (and one he takes, I think, from Seijun Suzuki), and the performances in this movie have that vigor. At one point Riho Makise walks with Kiichi Nakai through a commercial parkway, and she skips across the top of a public fountain, rather than walking on the sidewalk next to it. There is the same joy at the actors physically transgressing an arranged urban space as there was In P. P. Rider and Typhoon Club. Riho Makise seems to have lots of energy, but that energy is clearly being modulated and sometimes suppressed by the morbid nature of her prolonged existence. There is a sense of a chill in even her most exuberant moments, but she modulates perfectly when called upon to rise above her own melancholy or fear. This is, I believe, her first film role, and she clearly does well. Kiichi Nakai seems like an interesting actor. Sometimes he appears dopey, and sometimes a hip, cool, jazzbo. He seems to me as if he would have been the perfect actor to have played the lead in an adaptation of Haruki Murakami, maybe of the "Boku" tetralogy, or as the lead, Toru Okada, in a film of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. You get from him the overwhelmed feeling of a man with simple needs, caught up in a complex urban space. Though I don't know exactly what was always transpiring between them, the general drift of the film came clear because of what these actors were doing, so, good on them.

I haven't seen any later Somai films besides Moving (so I haven't seen The Friends, Wait and See, or Kaza-Hana yet), but from what I can tell, this film is the last gasp of surrealism or fantasy in Somai's filmography. It's too bad, because my feeling is that the rich engagement I get from his work has something directly to do with this reaching for the fantastic, the contrary, and the transgressive inside stories which aren't necessarily realistic, but which are built rather modestly, low to the ground. This movie clearly has that element to it, and, even though I can't really enjoy it fully without knowing what's being said, I certainly appreciated it a lot in spite of that. Maybe one day English subtitles will be invented for this, and maybe one day someone will magically discover a hi-def version of the film. That would sure be great.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#35 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Jan 03, 2021 11:28 am

It sounds like I prefer the other side of Somai from the one you do (since Ohikkoshi is my strong favorite). ;-)

I wish I had managed to get copies of more of his other films. I dilly-dallyed on Kazahana until it was too late. I do have Wait and See (actually "Ah, Spring). Never seen Tokyo Heaven or Luminous Woman, etc. :-(

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Re: Shinji Somai

#36 Post by feihong » Sun Jan 03, 2021 7:32 pm

Tokyo Heaven ended up becoming one of the hardest movies to see I ever sought out. a couple of months ago, the cheapest DVD on Amazon Japan was priced at something like $16,000––which must have been a joke? But I stared at it in disbelief day after day. I ended up finding it for a tiny fraction of that price, but it still ends up the most expensive single movie in my collection. Everything else I've ever tried to find on video has come more easily, from Tai Kato's Sasuke and his Divine Comedians to Dimos Avdeliodis' The Four Seasons of the Law. It's a real shame that Somai seems never to get any notice. Because he worked under such varied production schemes over the course of his career, there seems to be no way to bind these various movies together and package them for distributors. The rare "career retrospectives" of Somai often feature 4 or 5 films, and don't come close to capturing the compelling range of his filmmaking. I do like Moving, I should say, right up until the end, but we already covered that pretty comprehensively. I don't hate The Catch, either; I just have no special appreciation for it. I like Lost Chapter: Passion in the Snow a little better. And The Terrible Couple is pretty okay. But to me the streak of intimate surrealism that begins with P.P. Rider and seems to end with Tokyo Heaven is a run of what are for me some of the best movies I've seen (I know The Catch and Lost Chapter slot into that space as well; but I think that's a testament again to the range of schemes and approaches Somai takes to various movies).

But tracking down Somai on video is pretty crazy. The best sources I know of are the blu rays of Sailor Suit Schoolgirl with a Machine Gun and Love Hotel. There are hi-def streaming versions of Typhoon Club and––allegedly––Tokyo Heaven––they were part of the same deal, but I've never seen any proof Tokyo Heaven is viewable that way––and there's a moderately hi-def version of P.P. Rider on iTunes in Japan. Everything else is "available" on DVD, but I put "available" in quotes, because spending hundreds of dollars for a non-anamorphic DVD produced in the early aughts is still pretty frustrating. The Luminous Woman DVD was at least anamorphic, and released a bit later, but still––it would be so, so great to see these movies in high-definition one day.

Here's the beautiful climactic scene of Tokyo Heaven, featuring the trombone and scat singing duet, mostly in a patented Somai extended single take:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ardfYun ... e=youtu.be

The DVD does look better than this footage, but...not by that much. I do think this footage has been cropped a little on the top and bottom to fit the 16:9 ratio. The disc I have is, I think 1.78:1. Hopefully they'll be subtitles for this movie one day!

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Re: Shinji Somai

#37 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Jan 03, 2021 8:37 pm

Feihong -- Nice scene.

It would be great to see Somai's movies in any respectable form...

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Re: Shinji Somai

#38 Post by feihong » Wed Feb 03, 2021 8:38 pm

Looks like a company called Odessa Entertainment will be releasing HD remastered versions of Typhoon Club and Kaza-Hana on May 1st...on DVD. Who is the market for this? I understand that these movies have been off the shelves for many, many years at this point, but Typhoon Club at least has been viewable for many people in a 1080p streaming version for years now. Why would anyone want to step backwards into a DVD edition––even though the original DVD of Typhoon Club was a terribly-authored trash fire––when they can already stream the movie in hi-def? The real shame here is that even though they've remastered it in HD, that they didn't see their way to a blu-ray release at all. Like Warner Brothers releasing hemming and hawing about blu-rays and then finally releasing their Hong Kong films only on DVD...you wonder what they thought we were all doing in the years and years they left these films dormant.

I e-mailed Odessa asking if there was any chance of a blu ray for Typhoon Club. If they choose to answer me at all, I'm sure the answer will be no, but honestly, someone has to shove this issue in their faces, at least. Just like the remastered DVD releases of P.P. Rider and The Terrible Couple a few years ago, these DVD-only releases are so bass-ackwards in their conception. Plus, if the movie is streamable in HD in Japan, why would anyone buy the DVD, then?

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Re: Shinji Somai

#39 Post by feihong » Mon Feb 08, 2021 6:10 am

Odessa actually answered me, to tell me that they don't plan to release Typhoon Club on blu ray. Okay. I mean, it sucks, but it surprised me I got an answer at all.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#40 Post by Calvin » Mon Feb 08, 2021 8:02 am

Are they the same company who released Ohikkoshi on an "HD remastered" DVD a few years ago?

I think the best chance of getting these films on Blu-Ray is to continue lobbying companies like Arrow or Third Window, the latter of whom said to me that they'd "thought about it, but need to look into who is selling the rights"

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Re: Shinji Somai

#41 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Feb 08, 2021 9:58 am

Calvin -- what did the remastered Ohikkoshi DVD look like (if you saw it)? The original DVD wasn't all that good.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#42 Post by feihong » Tue Feb 09, 2021 4:34 am

Yeah, it looks like the same company that re-released Ohikkoshi. Do they have all the independently-produced Somai mvoies? They also released "HD remastered" DVDs of P.P.Rider and The Terrible Couple. So...it looks like all of the best early works of Somai are under the umbrella of a company that thinks DVD should be fine for home video collectors. Yet...we've seen HD versions of P.P. Rider and Typhoon Club make it to streaming sources in HD. What a grim world these people see for these movies. Why make your home video version a genuine collectible item of value? There are literally better versions of these movies already available, but hey, maybe people will buy a crappy downgrade of the film on top of their iTunes version, of their streaming download. I know the blu ray market is pretty weird and random in Japan, but it just seems crazy to step backwards like this.

Definitely, Third Window or Arrow are the best chances we'd get to see these films...or maybe Masters of Cinema? I could see them going there, and it seems there are HD scans of these films, right? I presume when they do an HD-remastered DVD, they scan the film in hi-definition and then downgrade the image for the disc, right?

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Re: Shinji Somai

#43 Post by Calvin » Tue Feb 09, 2021 5:57 am

Michael Kerpan wrote:
Mon Feb 08, 2021 9:58 am
Calvin -- what did the remastered Ohikkoshi DVD look like (if you saw it)? The original DVD wasn't all that good.
I'm afraid that I've not seen it; I was skeptical at the time, as ytv only lists it as being available to license in SD but I suppose that it's possible that Odessa remastered it themselves.

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andyli
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Re: Shinji Somai

#44 Post by andyli » Tue Feb 09, 2021 6:16 am

Calvin wrote:
Mon Feb 08, 2021 8:02 am
I think the best chance of getting these films on Blu-Ray is to continue lobbying companies like Arrow or Third Window, the latter of whom said to me that they'd "thought about it, but need to look into who is selling the rights"
feihong wrote:
Tue Feb 09, 2021 4:34 am
Definitely, Third Window or Arrow are the best chances we'd get to see these films...or maybe Masters of Cinema? I could see them going there, and it seems there are HD scans of these films, right? I presume when they do an HD-remastered DVD, they scan the film in hi-definition and then downgrade the image for the disc, right?
Absolutely. The same thing has already happened for Zegen and Black Rain not long ago. I'd say Arrow's already onto it.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#45 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Feb 09, 2021 10:48 am

It seems like us Americans have to depend on our UK cousins for most interesting Japanese releases at this point.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#46 Post by feihong » Wed Feb 10, 2021 5:14 am

My impression is that there's still an active fan base for asian films––principally Hong Kong movies and Japanese movies––in the UK, whereas the resources to sustain that have dried up in the U.S. In Los Angeles the last theaters playing Japanese movies closed their doors by the year 2000. There is one 5-screen multiplex that has been playing Hong Kong movies, but while the films have been screened mostly with English subtitles, it was hard to know what was playing there pre-COVID, and the fare was all first-run films from Hong Kong and China, and only the most popular releases. Those haven't usually been great movies in the last decade or so. I went to Office, Three, and Tai Chi Zero at that theater. Office was probably the best experience of the group? They never did revivals. There was also Hollywood executive Roy Lee's long run through the Asian movie scene in the early aughts, licensing rights to movies and selling remakes to Hollywood studios; the result of that was that a lot of the coolest and most potentially successful Asian films of the era never got seen in the U.S., except in the form of an American remake. Lee got the remake of The Ring made; what wasn't as well known was that his option of the rights included controlling rights for the release of the original film in the U.S. and in other territories––so they could remove the direct competition and prevent comparison between their remakes and the original movies. Lee went on to do this a bunch of times after the success of The Ring, and if I remember right he was involved in the remakes of Pulse, The Lake House, Oldboy, The Grudge, Dark Water, My Sassy Girl, and Infernal Affairs. He also seems to be producing a remake of Battle Royale (and, to be fair, Lee has produced or executive produced on a lot of other hits and generally successful movies, including It and the Lego Movie). But his success also started a trend, where everyone wanted a controlling option. Robert De Niro got The Mission, and basically kept it out of circulation in the U.S., seemingly...for good? And every company wanted their little Asian cinema fiefdom. Warners got The Blade and Pedicab Driver (and a few others). This was damaging to the screening scene at the time. The group I worked with had trouble getting screening rights, because suddenly the Asian film companies thought they could drive up their licensing fees if the film had yet to play in the U.S. Companies in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan who had been dealing with us in friendly, open ways for our non-profit screenings abruptly cut off contact the week that The Ring became a hit. And then the "Asia extreme" home video market arrived, did its thing, and was gone. It used to be that Toho, Nikkatsu and Shochiku––I think––had theaters in Los Angeles, screening first-run films. But they're all gone. Those industry leaders are also mostly gone or diminished in their ambition and reach, as well. I guess maybe the U.S. is too big a space for a foreign-language film market to make too much of a dent? Anyways, in the UK it seems to be different.

I guess Somai's case is very much like King Hu's, in the sense that Hu's work had to be exported to the world before it became widely appreciated and available. That has rather miraculously happened for Hu's films, so maybe it can happen for Somai's movies as well?

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Re: Shinji Somai

#47 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Feb 10, 2021 2:27 pm

Possibly Somai is more likely a candidate for eventual posthumous acclaim than the smaller-scaled, quieter work of Jun Ichikawa (who I like even more than Somai).

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Re: Shinji Somai

#48 Post by Calvin » Fri Feb 26, 2021 12:11 pm

Aaron Gerow has uploaded a piece, originally published in Korean for the 2005 Jeongju Film Festival, on 'Shinji Somai on the Long Take' and has confirmed that Arrow are working on a Somai release

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#49 Post by feihong » Fri Feb 26, 2021 2:41 pm

Thats...that's very exciting. I wonder what release Arrow is planning. I'm scared to hope that it's a box set. But I want a box set.

I'll be interested to read that Gerow essay, as well.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#50 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Feb 26, 2021 7:46 pm

Maybe I should ask Aaron about this. ;-)

Calvin - I get a page not found when I click on your link to the article.

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