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Chronicling the resurrection of Japanese films The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film By Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp

Review by Kevin McGue

Five years ago, Donald Richie’s "A Hundred Years of Japanese Film" seemed destined to be the definitive resource on the topic for years to come. We now have "The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film," which serves as the perfect companion piece.

While both books offer an overview of the cinema of Japan, they couldn’t be more different. Richie’s study traces Japanese film from its earliest days of silent movie adaptations of kabuki plays and devotes many of its pages to Akira Kurosawa and Richie’s favorite director Yasujiro Ozu. "Midnight Eye’s" new guide hits the ground running with an in-depth look at Seijun Suzuki, the famed maverick director and idol to Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch, and goes on to cover the generation of Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) and horror master Takashi Miike.

This volume was originally conceived as a print version of the MidnightEye.com website, which would have been an essential resource for any fan of Japanese films. Fortunately for us, authors Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp decided to add new essays interspersed with insightful interviews with the filmmakers themselves, as well as a foreword by Hideo Nakata, who kicked off the whole J-horror boom with his celebrated film adaptation of Koji Suzuki’s novel "Ring."

In his foreword, Nakata paints a very grim picture of the Japanese film industry in the late 1980s/early ’90s. Talented and creative directors were forced to work like slaves for the struggling studios, cranking out soft-core porn or cookie-cutter yakuza flicks for the straight-to-video market. Japanese contributions to international film festivals had all but come to a halt, and many outside Japan wondered what happened to the country that gave the world Kurosawa and Ozu. In the early ’90s, the major film studios, all with histories of nearly a century, started to severely cut back on production or go bankrupt, and it seemed as if the entire industry was prepared to finally concede defeat to TV and the internet.

Then the unexpected happened: a renaissance revitalized Japan cinema. Shinya Tsukamoto’s ultra-low budget "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" (1989) took Rome’s Fantastic Film Festival by storm, winning its top award and sparking a new international interest in Japanese film. "Shall We Dance" (1996) became the top grossing foreign film in the U.S. and inspired a Hollywood remake. Nakata’s "Ring" (1998) introduced J-horror to the world, and was remade first in Korea and later in Hollywood. In 1999, Kiyoshi Kurosawa accomplished the astonishing feat of having three separate films play in three of the world’s biggest film festivals in Cannes, Berlin and Venice. Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacle "Spirited Away" (2001) became the biggest earner of all time at the Japanese box office, a record previously held by Titanic.

This resurrection of Japanese film from the very brink of oblivion has been carefully and joyously chronicled by Mes, Sharp and company on their starkly designed site MidnightEye.com. Ninety-seven of the best film reviews from the site are gathered together here, along with new and informative profiles on 20 of the most vital directors working in Japan today. Their reviews display a deep understanding of the film history and culture of Japan, as well as an appreciation of the influence of Western cinema on Japanese directors and vice versa.

Mes and Sharp are as enthusiastic about their subject as they are knowledgeable, and they achieve one of the basic functions of film writing, which is making readers interested enough in the movies to actually seek them out and view them. Film buffs will be thankful that all of the reviews include the original Japanese film titles and information on available DVD editions.

The director profiles give us candid portraits of internationally known figures such as Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike and Hideo Nakata. They also introduce us to Sogo Ishii, known as “the punk Japanese filmmaker,” Naomi Kawase, the most successful female director in Japan, and Ryosuke Hashiguchi, one of the first filmmakers to portray gay characters living normal lives within Japanese society.

Mes and Sharp largely ignore the weepy melodramas of the boy-meets-girl (with terminal illness) type that are still the meal ticket for the Japanese studios, preferring to stick with more cutting-edge work from up-and-coming directors. Even within this group, some important recent films such as "Ju-on" (The Grudge) or Shunji Iwai’s "Hana and Alice" are conspicuously absent. Even so, "The Midnight Eye Guide" is required reading for anyone interested in Japanese cinema.

December 18, 2006

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