Miwa Nishikawa also used the motif of a salaryman pretending to still work (replacing earnings by borrowing from loan sharks) in her (sadly under-appreciated) Wild Berries / Hebi ichigo (2003). (her focus was on the adult children of the family, however).

Everything looks gorgeous. You definitely have my money, though you probably would regardless of the website's presentation. I watched Kurosawa's excellent and very underrated Barren Illusions a couple days ago so I'm definitely excited for more "not so J-Horror" efforts.

Has this come out with subs somewhere?

Not that I know of, but subs aren't necessarily needed anyway.

Custom subs have been around for awhile. They're rough but serviceable, and as already noted, they're barely necessary: just 140 lines all told, including opening titles.

It would still be nice to see a proper English-subbed release. The film needs revisiting anyway -- the R2J looks surprisingly bad, even considering the low budget.

Not sure if I completely agree with that (Cure still seems to me his "perfect" film) but it's certainly his best non-"horror" work so far (although there's much that's horrific in it). More accomplished to my mind than Charisma and Bright Future, much as I like both those films. Tokyo Sonata seems to me to be a critique of modern Japan in the guise of a domestic melodrama, and it's extremely successful on both counts. And just to reassure the viewer that they are indeed watching a KK film, the last third veers off into some pretty wild directions, both comic and tragic, only to be resolved beautifully in a final scene that's surprisingly moving.

Another reason why KK is one of my favorite living directors - the motherfucker knows how to end a film. So many iconic final shots in his filmography: the almost unnoticeable movement of the waitress with the knife in Cure, the crowd of teenagers wearing the Che Guevara t-shirts in Bright Future, the robot committing 'suicide' in Doppelganger. You can definitely add the ambiguously hopeful conclusion of Tokyo to this list.

Kudos to MoC for picking this one up for release. Although from what I understand the film is getting a theatrical release in both the UK and US in early 2009.

Eureka's website lists the video edition as a June release.

...and now it lists a May release.

Is the Blu-ray still gonna happen? Only the SD edition is up at amazon.

We're going to do both DVD and Blu-ray. The major reviews here over the last week have been very good, it's been holding its own against REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and a re-release of BARRY LYNDON. So we're pretty chuffed.

Is the Blu-Ray all-region? I feel like it was discussed on the forum somewhere but there's no info on the Amazon listing, now that it's available for pre-order.

We're about to start authoring it. We only ever intend to release non-crippled, region-free Blu-rays -- like Artificial Eye are doing...

Awesome news! Thanks peerpee. I'll order my copy now.

Saw this last night, and am not quite sure what to make of it... The first 2/3s are great, but I was left a little bemused by the last act's jarring metaphorical shift to (rather overt) surrealism. Kurosawa certainly has an amazing eye for uncanny compositions, and he builds the first half's domestic scenes as well as Kore-eda in Still Walking. However, whilst I was prepared to forgive Kore-eda anything by the time Still Walking veered off into slightly drippy territory towards the end, I didn't feel quite the same way about the absurdist shift in this one. Perhaps I'm just not yet attuned to what Kurosawa is up to (more than likely, having only seen Pulse), so would be interested to hear if anybody else has had a similarly divisive response...

Thanks. The 27% preorder discount is nice.

I'm happy to hear this. I'm unfortunately not set up for multi-region DVDs so I haven't picked up any of the MOC DVDs, but I just picked up Mad Detective on Blu and I was more than thrilled with it. I'll most certainly be picking this up after hearing so much about it (and any other Blu titles from MOC.)

The official MoC trailer for the UK theatrical release of TOKYO SONATA -- about a month late... but it's travelling around the country for a few months.

I know exactly what you mean. The first 1/2 - 2/3 is great, but especially the absurdistic part feels forced, as well as Kurosawa's statement about Iraq. They just served to reveal a character's feeling or make a statement, but added nothing to the film.

I don't agree with you about Koreeda though. I felt this was his first film where he totally abandoned the documentary genre. (I haven't seen Hana) While his main themes are present in the film, he did make something quite different from his other films. But I guess that's all a bit off-topic here.

This is great to hear. Please also bear your global audience in mind when planning supplemental features. "Mad Detective" is splendid in this regard -- thank you. One other minor query: are there plans to release a MoC BD spine #1?

Amy Taubin's review in the new issue of Artforum. (registration required/contains spoilers)

DVD Times currently has the special features listed.

Their rating system seems pretty inconsistent. I mean, their "movie" ratings are totally ridiculous, but it makes sense given that they have reviewers focusing on very different areas of filmmaking. But I wonder how this equates to a four-star "video" rating:


I mean, they didn't mention a single negative trait about the transfer. Mostly they just listed flaws the transfer could have had but didn't. A very strange review.

Is the SD release NTSC or PAL? Amazon lists it as the former while the website mentions that extras on the BD are in NTSC.