The trailer for Takeshi Kitano's new movie is on the internets and it looks impossibly weird.

It's a good weird at least.

This is a great film. Truly one of my favorites. This trailer captures the feel of it pretty well.

By the way, if anyone has a copy of Tokyo Nagaremono that they'd like to share with me I'm all ears.

Touch of Zen (Ws Sub Dol) A real classic. I've got a crazy backlog of half-finished reviews that I really ought to work through, but this film really deserves a write up. I've actually kept it, instead of sending it back for just that reason. Maybe this weekend.

The short review? A true genre classic. Maybe not a perfect film, but its quality and place in history make it a vital film in the history of Hong Kong martial arts cinema.

No Regrets for Our Youth I was surprised by how much I liked this. I mean, I expect to like Kurosawa's work at this point, having seen and enjoyed so many of his films, but this really had some unexpected high points. I won't go into too much depth as it's late and I'm tired, but No Regrets for Our Youth is absolutely littered with brilliant moments and functions almost equally well as a whole. One shorthand metric I like to use when evaluating a film is the number of distinct instances I can remember a few days or a week after watching a film and here I can remember probably a dozen.

The Amphibian Man A bizarre, bizarre film. It's like (and it probably is) a bunch of Russians got some bootleg American sci-fi films from the 50s, watched them all in a weekend and then decided to make their own freaky Russian version that espoused the Soviet ideal.

While drunk.

And on acid.

And this particular post is just about off the charts…

Street Use: Bling Trucks, or Dekorota, in Japan

Cribbed from Metafilter:

If I had the time I would surf the net learning all about HALCALI.