rowerivers

Smokey jazz bar in the rain. Shadowy characters. A sax-heavy soundtrack. All the hard-boiled noir clichés are here. Shunichi (Hironobu Nomura) is a university student who plays a mean sax. He left his father's vigorous training to find the essence of jazz, joining a club group named Tahiti at a jazz bar called Cabaret Stardust. Gangster Takigawa (Takeshi Kaga) often comes in and requests "Left Alone", the old Mal Waldren standard. He likes the way Shunichi plays it, and the two start talking about it and music in general. But Takigawa shoots another gangster, which Shunichi witnesses. He meets the mama-san of K's bar (Mitsuko Baisho), a friend of Takigawa. And he starts an affair with a singer at the bar (Watanabe) and breaks up with his nice, clean-cut girlfriend Hideko (Junko Mihara). Then bad stuff happens. The atmosphere works well, though it's set it in the present – 80s Yokohama. But now the 80s are retro, and that adds another layer of nostalgia. And with a story that's entertaining without diving into stupidity, it's still worth watching. Especially with a bottle of Wild Turkey on a rainy night.

Like something out of a B-grade Western, Shinji (Kobayashi), the Watari-dori (rambler) arrives on the outskirts of a town in southern Kyushu on a horse, carrying a guitar. He meets his old nemesis/comrade in arms: the hired gun (Jo Shishido). Then he stops at the Sagara Ranch, where he stops an incident. The ranch is the target of a local casino owner and mobster Matoba (Akira Yamauchi), who wants to turn it into a golf resort. The ranch's owner, young lush Sagara (Kinoura), refuses to sell. At the same time Sagara's sister, Kyoko (Ruriko Asaoka) returns from Tokyo. Shinji decides to stay and help. And the action begins. I like the cheesy pseudo-western overtones, and I like the dryness of the main characters as they go through the ordeal. Things get a little inventive when Matoba has Shinji and Shishido shoot each other in his office. There are other fight scenes and gratuitous festival scenes. Kobayashi is cooler than cool, while Asaoka perfects her headstrong girl role.

How does free money affect people? That's the question director Yoshimitsu Morita proposes in this story. Maya (Koyuki) comes back to her hometown of Hakodate after several years in Tokyo. Her mother is in a coma in a high-tech hospital, so she plans to stay there for a while. She meets up with her classmates and gives them money to fulfill their dreams. That arouses suspicions and speculations. And for Maya, she finds giving money away won't always make the world a better place. Koyuki (The Last Samurai) gets deep into Maya's role. She turns off her glamor to portray Maya as a plain, slightly naive young woman. It's a pretty straightforward drama, but with a few directorial flourishes. Morita (The Family Game) makes use of several locations around Hakodate, too, giving it a peaceful, slightly detached feeling.