Shinya Tsukamoto
Ok, so I've watched 2 Shinya Tsukamoto movies in the last couple days. They are both amazing.
Bullet Ballet. I loved this movie. Loved it. So tense, violent, brutal. And so emotionally real. The main character comes home to his apartment to find that his girlfriend of ten years has killed herself--with a gun. Guns are uncommon in Japan--and he starts to obsess about where she got the gun, and then decides to get one himself. Chaos ensues.
I'm a big fan of movies where ordinary people lose it, and this film delivers for me in a big way.
The actress Mano Kirina plays a punkish girl gangster; her looks and fierceness absolutely glow in the black and white world that Tsukamoto paints with his camera.
A Snake of June( Midnight Eye review) is, you could safely say, an erotic movie. But it's not pornographic, and it's not sexist.
A conservative woman lives with her cleaning-obsessed husband. They have a companionable, but not intimate relationship. One day she receives a package of photos in the mail. They are photos of herself, masturbating. The photographer blackmails her into doing in public what she's heretofore only done privately.
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Both films are shot in black and white (A Snake of June in a kind of blue tinted monochrome), and they have a distinct editing and visual style. Tsukamoto is the screenwriter, D.P., producer, dirtor and actor in these movies. So it's fair to judge that these movies bear his indelible style.
I watched both of these on DVD. Both were Chinese DVDs, and Bullet Ballet had English subtitles.
One more thing. Tsukamoto's musical collaborator, Chu Ishikawa, does a brilliant job with the score in both movies. The soundtrack is a real pleasure.