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‘Love Exposure’: Sion Sono’s mindbender gets an American theatrical release
09.04.2011
05:39 pm
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Sion Sono and the 400 page script for Love Exposure.
 
I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of praise for Sion Sono’s (Suicide Club, Cold Fish) epically weird and wonderful Love Exposure.

Three minutes short of four hours long, Sono’s metaphysical black comedy is never boring and completely unlike any film you’re likely to see now or in the near future. Imagine a diabolically funny mix of John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Hughes and David Lynch and you might get a sense of what Sono is up to in Love Exposure. Gory, romantic, spiritual and completely bonkers, this is a trip definitely worth taking. Somehow Sono (a poet turned film maker) performs the magic act of juggling what seems like a dozen film genres in the air with supernatural grace.

I dig film critic Simon Abrams’ take on the movie:

Love Exposure is, in a sense, Sono’s equivalent of the Great Russian novel. In it, his substantial disaffection for societal conventions is matched only by his monumental love for his spectacularly messed-up protagonists. These characters become deranged because they have to create their own belief system. There’s no God except for the ones that Yôko, Aya Koike (Sakura Andô), and Yû Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) make for themselves. God is represented by mundane authority figures, people who simultaneously project their own fear of loving someone else and lustful need to be loved. In other words, father/Father figures are all rotten to the core in Love Exposure, though they’re all rotten in unique ways.

Made in 2008, Love Exposure is finally receiving a limited American theatrical run two years after I first encountered it at Austin’s Fantastic Fest.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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09.04.2011
05:39 pm
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Cold Fish: Sion Sono film festival at Cinefamily
06.09.2011
02:20 pm
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I’ve been raving about the work of Japanese film director Sion Sono for a few days here on the blog. This weekend at Cinefamily in Los Angeles, several of Sono’s films will be shown and there will either be an introduction or else a post-film Q&A with the director. Friday night there will be a special free screening of Sono’s latest film, Cold Fish:

Right from its sucker-punch opening with its jagged hand written titles and razor editing, Sion Sono’s Cold Fish grabs you by the hair and drags you through an intense narrative of betrayal, infidelity and murder. Ostensibly inspired by the story of a real-life Japanese serial killer (who raised dogs, rather than fish), Cold Fish has all of Sono’s trademark brilliance and nihilism in its tale of sad-sack Shamoto (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), who’s stuck with a failing fish store and a family who hates him. When Shamoto meets the the charismatic and rich Murata, owner of a popular high-end fish shop and a hot-red Ferrari (Denden, in one of the greatest serial killer portrayals of the last few decades), his life changes irrevocably. Easily manipulated and coerced into progressively worse situations, it’s not long before Shamoto realizes that not only has Murata car-jacked his life, but he’s also shut the windows, locked the doors and is driving them full-speed off of a cliff.

Series co-presented by Giant Robot and Bloody-Disgusting
 

 
Watch the trailer for Cold Fish blow. Register for free tickets to the screening here.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.09.2011
02:20 pm
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