Saturday, April 7, 2007

A famous Film director

Shunji Iwai
Shunji Iwai was born in Juanary 24, 1963 in Japan. He was a video artist before he started his director career. His films always has a strong personal style. THe most famous film of his is Love Letter which I thought is more like a poem than a film. Love Letter received not only the success in art but also in commerce. I also like the poster of this film very much and I have one at CHina.
Love letter was released in the year 1995 which his feature film
Actually before the film love letter there is another work of Shunji Iwai must be mentioned which is Picnic. This film tells a story about three people who have mental disorders. Shunji Iwai tried to reflect some problems in the modern socity of Japan by telling this story.
In 1996 came the commercial and critical success of Swallowtail Butterfly, a multifaceted story of the fictional Yen Town, a city of immigrants in search of hope and a better life with three separate and distinct main characters. Ageha, an orphaned teenage girl, Glico , a prostitute turned pop star, and Feihong, an immigrant who manages Glico's career and owns the Yen Town club. I really apreciate the movie that I watched this movie more than five times. And I also like the music and songs of this movie. I recommend an old ENglish song "my way", this song was used in the movie for several times and Glico's voice makes it perfect. I think that Swallowtail Butterfly is the best movie of SHengji's work.
After that Shengji started to shoot some movies about teenagers life. THe tow tipical one are Hana and Alice and All About Lily-chouchou. To be honest, I don't really feel like this movies are good. SOmetimes they are a sort of difficult to understand maybe they are talking about something very deeply. However, I still like the images of these tow films.

Hana and Alice
All about Lily-chouchou.

5 comments:

anna said...

Hi Estella,
I've always been surprised how Japanese film directors do manage to find new and fresh scenarios for their films. Holywood, for example, is full of remakes.
Yulia.

Scott Douglas said...

Those movies sound great! I'll keep an eye out for them next time I'm in the video store. Usually, I only watch Japanese cartoons (I love Spirited Away and Totoro), but I'm going to get some of the ones you mentioned.

Steven said...

It is very interesting, and I am surprised that you have a great deal of knowledge about film. Unlike you, I only concern about the story of a film, and know little background knowledge of a film.

June said...

Hi, Estella,
The movies that you mentioned sound great! I think i may try to watch they after our final exams.
By the way, i really like Japanese cartoons. I am watching Death Note recently. Have you heard about that? It's very interesting.

Unknown said...

I wander whether those films are in English or Japanese because they are Japanese movies. I would also go to the movie store to find them.