PopSyndicate.com

(San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival)

Not sure how many Bay Area people frequent Pop Syndicate but…

Official SFIAAFF site:

http://festival.asianamericanmedia.org/2009/

For genre film fans, the main attraction is the Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse [aka Kairo], etc.) retrospective in which his latest, Tokyo Sonata - a drama that’s being tauted as his masterpiece, is playing.  Also playing are some of his older and more rare films: Eyes of the Spider, License to Live, the aforementioned Pulse, The Revenge: A Visit From Fate, The Revenge: The Scar That Never Fades, and Serpent’s Path.

Hong-Jin Na’s “The Chaser”, apparently this Korean director’s debut and compared to Oldboy, Se7en, and Zodiac in the promo, is playing.  Apparently, it’s lready slated for a US remake (cue groans).

Anyway, I’ll be going to the Friday Tokyo Sonata showing at the Kabuki for sure.  I really want to go see Kurosawa’s “The Revenge” movies as well but, so far, can’t find anyone else who wants to.  If any other fellow Bay Area folk are interested in meeting up and checking these two movies out, post here or PM me and we will make it an event.

I am totally down for all this. I’ll have to look at my work schedule to see how much of it I can squeeze in. When are the Revenge movies playing?

Thanks for the reply, DZ.  They are playing back to back (you would have to buy 2 tickets @ $10 a pop) at the PFA in Berkeley on Wed 3/18.  The showtimes are 6:30pm and 8:15pm.  Both films are yakuza oriented, produced in the late ‘90s for the Japanese V-Cinema (somewhat the equivalent of direct-to-video in the US) market, just before Kurosawa did Cure.  I’m not promising that these are seminal flicks of the sort,  but for yakuza film fans (like me), they should be a rare treat.