Blogathon beginneth! Here are some of my favorite Japanese directors

So it’s time for my first contribution to the Japanese Cinema Blogathon (June 15 - 21), a list of some of the directors whose work I keep close tabs on from week to week, and why.

Notice the title says “favorite” and not “greatest”. I haven’t even scratched the surface of classic Japanese cinema yet. I’m no film historian. Also, I stopped at 10 even though I could have easily kept going with obvious names like Tetsuya Nakashima, Ryuhei Kitamura, Yukihiko Tsutsumi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, etcetc. On the bright side, my blatant omissions leave other bloggers plenty of room to create their own lists! Here’s mine, in no particular order:

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

I admit it: J-horror hooked me on Japanese cinema. Before I went on to discover all the great comedies and dramas Japan had to offer, it was Kurosawa’s atmospheric horror film “Kairo” that captured my imagination and made me realize there was an alternative to the lowest-common-denominator dreck being churned out by Hollywood year after year. Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) is probably still known best as a horror director, but films like “Bright Future” and “Tokyo Sonata” prove his style is more about expressing themes than conforming to genres.

Ryosuke Hashiguchi

I haven’t really had the chance to see some of his older stuff due to lack of distribution (hint, hint), but 2001’s “Hush!” and 2008’s “All Around Us” were enough to make a fan out of me. Hashiguchi brings an intense realism to his films without a hint of the cheesy melodrama and overacting that seems prevalent (and encouraged) in J-dramas.

Satoshi Miki

Miki’s career in comedy sketch-writing has given him an unmatched ability to find humor in the most insignificant aspects of life. Every once in a while his scripts go off the rails completely (The Insects Unlisted in the Encyclopedia), but 2005’s “Turtles are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers” and 2007’s “Adrift in Tokyo” are good examples of his whimsy done right.

Nobuhiro Yamashita

Yamashita is responsible for two movies I repeatedly go back and re-watch because they just flat out make me happy: 2005’s “Linda Linda Linda” and 2007’s “A Gentle Breeze in the Village”. Who says movies needs tension and conflict to be entertaining? Not I.

Shinobu Yaguchi

Over the years Yaguchi has slowly made the transition from tough luck comedies like “My Secret Cache” and “Adrenaline Drive” to zero-to-hero feel-good comedies like “Water Boys” and “Swing Girls”. His latest film, the airline comedy “Happy Flight”, is getting plenty of lukewarm reviews for its apparent lack of tension. Am I concerned? See above.

Takashi Miike

Well, duh. Everyone likes Miike. But I think his popularity has also caused people to pigeonhole him as some sort of “extreme cinema” dynamo when his ability to adapt other people’s stories to film and while adding his own flair crosses all genres. It really doesn’t matter if he’s adapting a simple horror novel (One Missed Call), a beat-em-up shonen manga (Crows Zero), or a 70s children’s cartoon (Yatterman). He works fast, he adds extra touches on the fly, and the end result is nearly always something entirely different than any other director would have created from the same source material.

Toshiaki Toyoda

Before getting busted for amphetamines in 2005, Toyoda wrote and directed a handful of unconventional, cutting edge dramas like “Pornostar”, “Blue Spring”, and “9 Souls” that were all picked up by western DVD labels. Toyoda’s work had very little to do with the “extreme Asian” titles that were being released at the time, but did successfully convince fans that Japanese cinema had had more to offer than horror, samurai epics, yakuza flicks, and anime. Here’s hoping his next film, the yet-unreleased “Yomigaeri no Chi”, will live up to his past work so he can pick up where he left off.

Sabu

Somehow Sabu’s films slipped through the cracks a few years back when myopic western DVD distributors like Artsmagic and Tartan were racing to release everything they could scrounge up by his contemporaries, the aforementioned Toyoda and Miike. To date his only western releases have been a limited theatrical release of his debut, “Non-Stop” (Dangan Runner) in 2000 and a BCI Eclipse’s 2008 DVD release of “Unlucky Monkey”. Unfortunately Non-Stop hit VHS shortly before DVD got popular, and then promptly went out of print. Unlucky Monkey is still available from distributor Navarre, but BCI Eclipse went under soon after the DVD hit shelves in the US. My favorite Sabu films to date, 1997’s “Postman Blues” and 2002’s “The Blessing Bell” are still stuck in distribution limbo. Hopefully “The Crab Cannery Ship” or one of his future projects will generate enough buzz to force labels to take a look back at his older stuff.

Katsuhito Ishii

Ishii tends to work exclusively in comedy, but hardly anyone has shown more range in the genre. From the fast-paced, sardonic crime comedy “Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl” to the slice-of-life family comedy “The Taste of Tea” and the freeform vignette style comedy of “Funky Forest: The First Contact”, you really never know what to expect next, but it’s probably going to be funny.

Keralino Sandorovich

A jack of all trades in the entertainment industry, Sandorovich cut his teeth as a musician and is the founder of a theater troupe called Nylon 100°C. Inspired by Monty Python, he writes and directs clever nonsense comedies that unfortunately have yet to get any DVD love in the west. His made-for-TV murder mystery/comedy, “A Delicious Way to Kill”, is a personal favorite.

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