USA-Japan / 2013 / 82 Mins / In English and Japanese with English subtitles / Colour
Starring: Gaku Hamada (Fish Story, The Foreign Duck The Native Duck & God in a Coin Locker)
Eugene Kim
Marlane Barnes (Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Mad Men)
On DVD August 25th, 2014
Special Features:
“Yellow Curry on White Rice” – Short Film, Interview with director Junya Sakino plus stage Q&A at the Raindance Film Festival, Theatrical Trailer
Synopsis
A “Sake-Bomb” is a cocktail created by dropping a shot of sake into a pint of beer. It’s also a comedic road movie about a sarcastic Asian American and his Japanese cousin.
Sebastian is a bitter, self-deprecating wannabe Internet star from Los Angeles. He has recently been dumped by his girlfriend and on the look-out for someone new. When his cousin Naoto, a naive sake maker from Japan, shows up to find his own ex-girlfriend, Sebastian takes him to north California to find her. They are a clash of cultures waiting to happen. Someone has to break first. Together they meet a colourful group of characters as they come to grips with who they are and the true nature of the girlfriends they are pursuing.
Junya Sakino – Director, Producer
He was born and raised in Japan. He moved to the United States in 2000 to pursue his directing career. In Japan, Sakino produced and directed television programs. In the states, his directorial debut The Jazz Addict was an official selection for Crested Butte Film Festival. Soon after he attended California State University Long Beach’s film program where he went on to direct Vanity Mirror, The Spiral Ring and Orizuru. Vanity Mirror won the Grand Prize for UTB Picture Battle competition. Orizuru hit the worldwide film festival circuit in 2006 and received a generous handful of awards including the Hollywood International Film Festival award for Best Period Drama, the Best Screenplay award at the Media Arts Festival, Best Film at No Nuke Festival. The film was eventually aired on PBS. Currently, Sakino has been working in the commercial and film industry. He has also worked with acclaimed directors such Kazuaki Kiriya and Shunji Iwai. His credits include"Takamine", "Bandage", "Bokutachi no Playball", "Stolen", "Halfway", "Etienne!", etc.
[Filmography]
Orizuru (2006) Short Film
The Spiral Ring (2006) Short Film
Vanity Mirror (2005) Short Film
The Jazz Addict (2004) Short Film
Directed by Junya Sakino
Written by Jeff Mizushima
Executive Producer Yuko Shiomaki, Toru Kajio
Produced by Hiromitsu Senoo, Junya Sakino
Co-producer Hiram Chan
Music by Daichi Yoshida
Edited by Jeff Mizushima
Director of Photography Sam K. Yano
Casting by Brad Gilmore, CSA
Line Producer Matthew Helderman
Production Manager Luke Taylor
CAST
Naoto Gaku Hamada
Sebastian Eugene Kim
Joslyn Marlane Barnes
Michael Josh Brodis
Takanori Hiroyuki Watanabe
Tamiko Samantha Quan
Olivia Jenn Liu
Long Wang Dat Phan
Dark Pool is the new studio album from Black Rain, the project’s first in 18 years.
Produced in New York City by Stuart Argabright, Black Rain’s founder and figurehead, Dark Pool is a work of hard-edged sonic fiction rooted in cyberpunk's quintessential neo-noir cityscape/dataspace but projecting into a farther future of biotechnological advancement and alienation.
Partly inspired by the writings of Philip K. Dick protégé K.W. Jeter (particularly 1996’s Edge Of Human, which picked up where Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner left off), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2009 novel The Windup Girl, a vision of 23rd century Thailand plagued by genetic and economic terrorism, Dark Pool’s humid dystopia is also acutely Ballardian in its vision of manmade and natural worlds encroaching upon each other: a vivid psychogeography of half-submerged high-rises and hidden jungle laboratories.
Stuart Argabright first landed in New York in 1978. By day, he worked as a landscape gardener for the upscale likes of Rock Hudson and Bob Dylan, while at night involving himself in all manner of subcultural activity – the reverberations of which are still being felt today. He co-founded seminal no wave minimalists Ike Yard (whose early 1980s work has been cited as an influence by the likes of Kode9, Young Echo and Silent Servant), collaborated with the late Rammellzee in futurist hip-hop outfit Death Comet Crew (recently reactivated for an LP on Powell's Diagonal label) and as Dominatrix scored a bona fide club hit with the downtown electro classic ‘The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight’ (1984).
Science fiction has captivated Argabright’s imagination since an early age – perhaps unsurprising given his father worked at the Pentagon developing the earliest incarnation of the internet. A hyperconnector by nature, Argabright entered into a correspondence with William Gibson in 1984, the year that the author’s epochal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer was published, and the two later met in person at Biosphere 2, an experimental centre in the Arizona desert studying space colonization. When, in 1993, pre-production began on Robert Longo’s movie adaptation of Gibson’s short story, Johnny Mnemonic, Argabright was invited to create an original soundtrack for the movie. Argabright’s then current band, Black Rain, had hitherto dealt in industrial-hued death metal, but for the Johnny Mnemonic sessions they metamorphosed completely, core members Argabright and Shinichi Shimokawa producing an exhilarating, richly atmospheric score of doom-laden, synthesized drones and hypnotic tribal drumming that perfectly captured the essence of Gibson's hardboiled data-crime caper.
In the meantime, what had begun as an arthouse film had spiralled into a bloated $26 million studio production with Keanu Reeves installed as its lead and only a tangential relationship to the source material; predictably, Black Rain’s bleakly beautiful soundtrack was jettisoned in favour of a more commercial, all-Sony pick’n’mix (God Lives Underwater, anyone?). The mothballed tracks, along with contemporaneous pieces specially recorded for the first audiobook edition of Neuromancer, did eventually find their way into the public sphere - on Black Rain’s 1995 debut album 1.0 - but it wasn’t until 2011, when Blackest Ever Black reissued them on the compilation Now I’m Just A Number: Soundtracks 1994-95, that they received due recognition. An expanded 2xLP and CD edition of this compilation will be released in 2015.
Since reviving the Black Rain project in the wake of Now I’m Just A Number’s release, Argabright has toured extensively under the name and last year released an EP of live recordings, Protoplasm, on BEB. Three of the EP’s four tracks appear here on Dark Pool in radically revised and expanded form: the stuttering ribofunk of ‘Endourban’ is now anchored by ominous string pads faintly redolent of Argabright’s labelmates Raime, while ‘Data River’ revisits the accelerated beat-stream of Black Rain’s 1996 album Nanarchy, and the low-slung ‘Protoplasm’ has evolved into a sprawling, syncopated techno epic - the sound of red dawn rising on an illegal replicant rave.
A further seven new productions feature. ‘Burst’, its title perhaps a nod to Sogo Ishii’s 1982 biker gang saga Burst City, harks back to the scrap-metal-banging brutalism of Black Rain mk.1; ‘Xibalba Road Metamorph’, the album's angry, anguished centrepiece, externalises the sadness and self-loathing of Jeter’s oppressed post-human workforce. ‘Night In New Chiang Saen’ reimagines dub as the viral product of one of AgriGen’s morally suspect scientific initiatives in The Windup Girl, before ‘Who Will Save The Tiger?’ calls upon spidery, Metalheadz-esque breakbeats and wailing guitar drones to summon a 23rd century Ark. Vocals (on 'Profusion' and 'Profusion II') from Zoe Zanias (Keluar), and a brief spoken intervention from Sean Young (who of course played Rachel in Blade Runner) are simply the most audible manifestations of a dejected feminine presence that haunts the entire album.
soundcloud.com/blackest-ever-black/black-rain-endourban-album-version
Drummer and producer Tommy Ramone, the last surviving original member of the influential New York punk quartet the Ramones, died Friday at his home in the Ridgewood area of Queens, New York. He was 62 and had been in hospice care following treatment for bile duct cancer.
Born Erdelyi Tamas in Budapest, Hungary, and known professionally as Tom or T. Erdelyi, Ramone played on the first three epoch-making Ramones albums, “Ramones” (1976), “Leave Home” (1977) and “Rocket to Russia” (1977). He also co-produced the latter two albums with Tony Bongiovi and Ed Stasium, respectively. He appeared on and co-produced the 1979 live Ramones opus “It’s Alive.”
After leaving the Ramones to concentrate on studio work, he co-produced the band’s 1984 album “Too Tough to Die” with Stasium. He was replaced in the lineup by Marc Bell (Marky Ramone), a former member of Dust and Richard Hell’s Voidoids.
Source: Variety
Harry Potter villain Dave Legeno has died aged 50 while hiking in Death Valley in California.
The actor, who portrayed werewolf Fenrir Greyback in three movies in the wizard film franchise, was found by two hikers in the area on Sunday. The sheriff's department added that it appears Legeno died of heart-related issue.
The actor played roles in films like Batman Begins, Snow White and the Hunstman and Snatch. Legeno was also an expert mixed martial artist.
Kind of business as usual, but still good, not?
Anyway, judge it yourself!
