After years of waiting for an English friendly version of Mamoru Oshi's 1985 masterpiece Angel's Egg, I picked up the unsubbed Japanese Blu Ray. I'm a little bit obessed with this film, having owned the Japanese DVD (also unsubbed), a subtitled bootleg DVD, the original soundtrack on vinyl and a book of the storyboard. Angel's Egg is one of the pinnacles of anime, and possibly Oshi's most personal work. It runs just 71 minutes, and what it all means is very much open to interpretation, but it's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. There are multiple rips of it on Youtube too.
Is there is Blu-ray for Carmen Comes Home (カルメン故郷に帰る) with English subtitles? I see the Japanese one from 2012 but it is without English subtitles. There's this page from Filmstruck: https://www.filmstruck.com/us/watch/detail/1300003153?cid=ppc_adwords_A200_A203_A020403 which seems to imply that there's a Criterion version, but I don't see it on their webpage. Does Filmstruck stream movies under the Criterion name that don't have a physical release? I'm not subscribed to their service so I'm not sure how it works. Or perhaps it will be released on disc in the near future?
I thought that one or both of those 4K restorations had been shown during the recent Mizoguchi retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, but it appears that Chikamatsu inexplicably wasn't screened at what was otherwise a fairly exhaustive survey of his work, and I can't find a mention anywhere of whether Sansho was the restored version or not. Perhaps it was the Venice screenings that I'm remembering having read about when they took place.
Biennale Cinema 2017 | Kenji Mizoguchi - Chikamatsu Monogatari (A Story from Chikamatsu) Biennale Cinema 2017 | Kenji Mizoguchi - Sanshō dayū (Sansho the Bailiff)
Zatoichi: Darkness Is His Ally (1989): This is the new Tokyo Shock BD of the 26th and final Zatoichi film in the original series. I only received it today, and haven’t watched it through yet, but I did a quick A/B comparison with my old Arrowdrome DVD, and I’m pleased to see a noticeable upgrade in video quality over that release.
I've been waiting for this one hoping it to be picked up by Criterion to finish off their set. At least I'll have the disk. Thanks for the heads up, Stepeanut!
My Blu ray of Teruo Ishii's Horrors of Malformed Men arrived yesterday. I've only seen this on a grubby VHS years ago so I can't wait.
Shame the A/V quality isn’t great. Arrow generally do excellent work, so I presume that, in this instance, the master provided to them wasn’t up to snuff. That’s so often the way with Japanese film studios. As the reviewer says, at least we have this on BD.
These days I'm mostly feeling burned out on Zombie films. The few exceptions have come from Japan: Sabu's 2013 Miss Zombie was a strangely moving slow burner, 2016's I am a Hero, based off a manga, was more action packed, and I preferred it to the same year's Korean effort Train to Busan. Most impressive out the lot is this year's One Shot of the Dead, about a film crew shotting a Zombie film which gets overrun by real zombies. Made on a tiny budget, it's the funniest film I've seen in ages, and it helps if you know little or nothing about it going in. Distributed in the UK & Ireland by Third Window Films, so there will almost certainly be a DVD/ Blu Ray release in the pipeline. Great stuff!