2LDK (2003)
"The scenes in this flick are like a series of coke cans, the first few opened delicately, the rest opened after having been shaken up more and more, until the cans in the finale come straight out of a paint mixing machine. This claustrophobic flick is about two actresses/roommates that are vying for the same role in a movie. That these two women could not be more different only adds to the tension, and hilarity, of this short little black comedy. Beginning in contrived magnanimity, their civility degenerates into an all out war, ending in pure poetry." -
Psycho_d
13: Game Of Death aka 13 Game Sayawng (2006)
A Chinese Ghost Story aka Sien nui yau wan (1987)
A Page Of Madness aka Kurutta ippêji (1926)
"Based on a treatment by the 1968 Nobel Prize winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata, Teinosuke Kinugasa's self-financed landmark production
A Page of Madness (
Kurutta ippêji) is a legendary Japanese silent film made in 1926, and was re-released in 1973. Its reputation is widespread and it has been the subject of a number of academic essays, even an entire book. Kinugasa here sketches the story of a man who works as a janitor in a mental asylum in order to be near his wife whose madness he feels responsible for; although a synopsis like this can't begin to explain the power of the film, nor the depth of its vision.
The film's eerie, painted sets and stark lighting create an exterior manifestation of the patient's interior turmoil. The print of this first mature Japanese experiment film itself was believed lost, along with many other Japanese films from the silent and early era of sound, or destroyed during World War II...until the early 1970s, when the director himself miraculously found a print in his garden storeroom. A music soundtrack was added to it, which fits perfectly with the images.
What has made A Page of Madness such an acclaimed classic is its style. The film retains the power to knock the viewer over, using almost every technique known to the filmmakers of that time. Teinosuke Kinugasa was way ahead of his time. There are no inter-title cards explaining what is happening in the film, instead the film was made in the Japanese silent cinema tradition where the script was narrated live by Benshi or storytellers to furnish crucial information. Overall the film is not only a tour-de-force of visually striking and disturbing images, but also a film with narrative and subject matter which would later become one of the huge landmarks of the Jap-Horror sub-genre and is also celebrated as one of the masterpieces of silent cinema." -
Roshiq
A Tale Of Two Sisters aka Janghwa, Hongryeon (2003)
