[JAPAN MOVIE 2010] ノルウェイの森 NORWEGIAN WOOD

[Guest t3n5h1_chu_k015h173]

"Norwegian Wood," "13 Assassins" to compete at Venice

Thu, July 29, 2010 (9:21am EDT)

This year's Venice Film Festival (September 1-11) will have two Japanese movies in the competition section, vying for the prestigious Golden Lion award. One is Tran Anh Hung's "Norwegian Wood," adapted from Haruki Murakami's novel of the same name, and the other is Takashi Miike's "13 Assassins" remake.

American director Quentin Tarantino is heading this year's judging panel, who will decide the Golden Lion recipient on the festival's final day. The award has been won by three Japanese films so far: Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" in 1951, Hiroshi Inagaki's "Rickshaw Man" in 1958, and Takeshi Kitano's "HANA-BI" in 1997.

"13 Assassins" (starring Koji Yakusho) is opening in Japan on September 25, while "Norwegian Wood" (starring Kenichi Matsuyama and Rinko Kikuchi) is slated for December.

UPDATE: It has also been announced that Sion Sono's "Cold Fish" will compete in the Orizzonti section of the festival.

[Guest COOKIE.BANDIT.]

Norwegian Wood is having its North American premiere at the Toronto International film fest this year!

i love that Kiko will be playing Midori

does she have any previous acting experience? i know she models for ViVi

[Guest t3n5h1_chu_k015h173]

Movie: Norwegian Wood

Romaji: Noruwei no mori

Japanese: ノルウェイの森

Director: Anh Hung Tran

Writer: Haruki Murakami (novel), Anh Hung Tran

Producer: Chihiro Kameyama, Shinji Ogawa

Cinematographer: Pin Bing Lee

World Premiere: September 2, 2010 (Venice Film Festival)

Release Date: December 11, 2010

Runtime: 100min

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Plot

Set in the 1960's Toru Watanabe & Naoko become closer after the suicide of their mutual friend. The pair eventually fall in love, but after they consumate their love, Naoko feels guilt and leaves Toru. Toru then meets a fellow drama classmate Midori, whose bright personality attracts Toru. Midori is also attracted to Toru and their friendship grows during Naoko's absence.

Cast

Ken'ichi Matsuyama - Toru Watanabe

Rinko Kikuchi - Naoko

Kiko Mizuhara - Midori Kobayashi

Kengo Kora - Kizuki

Tetsuji Tamayama - Nagasawa

Reika Kirishima - Reiko

Eriko Hatsune - Hatsumi

Tokio Emoto

[Guest ovovoovo]

From what I seen in the trailer so far, it looks pretty promising. I just recently finished the book, it will be interesting how the movie will turn out.

[Guest xboleex]

i'm a big fan of this novel & i just cant wait to watch this

Tran presents tense 'Norwegian Wood' at Venice film festival

AFP

The pacing, the blowing wind, the music and other atmospherics all helped create the tension in "Norwegian Wood," says Tran Anh Hung, presenting the haunting movie at the Venice film festival.

Based on a best-selling novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, the story of love, sexuality and loss - mainly through suicide - is set in Japan in the volatile 1960s.

"The film is rich in physical variation," the Vietnamese-born Tran told AFP, discussing scenes in which the lead character Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) paces around an apartment with the troubled Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), and later tries to keep up with her in a green field.

Watanabe falls in love with Naoko despite her imbalance over losing her sister and boyfriend to suicide.

While promising to wait for Naoko until she overcomes the trauma at a special sanatorium, Watanabe gets deeply involved with another woman, Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), tumbling into romantic confusion.

"In the field scene the conversation is very physical, Naoko is talking about not being able to get aroused with her previous boyfriend," Tran said. "In fact it's a confession, which in church you would do sitting down."

Scenes in which blowing wind competes with the dialogue "also adds tension," Tran, 47, said of a story that in book form "has a very intimate relationship with the reader."

The film adaptation "was not just adapting a story... it was also adapting all the poetic ramifications, all the emotional ramifications that the book provokes in you," said Tran, who won the top prize Golden Lion here in 1995 for "Cyclo".

"I had to find a way to unlock this personal side," Tran said.

Even the language gap - Tran used interpreters to direct the all-Japanese cast - was a way to "find a different energy," he said.

And while the sexuality of the film, presented on Thursday, is replete with 1960s overtones, Tran sought to minimise visual references to the era, notably in the clothes, all neutral, even prim.

"We eliminated anything too hippy," he said.

Apart from the emblematic Beatles' song of the title, he shunned familiar tunes from the era, preferring to use "less well-known music but with strong emotional power... mosty to avoid the nostalgic side," Tran told reporters earlier.

"The story could otherwise be seen as something softer, nicer," he said. "Instead it's seen as harsher, crueler because of the music."

The many love scenes in the film are for the most part awkward, with the focus on the lovers' faces.

"I wanted to show the impact on Naoko when she made love with Watanabe. The rest could only distract from what is most important in the film," Tran said.

The Paris-based director had several exchanges with Murakami at the start of the project, but eventually, Tran recalled, the author said: "Do the film you have in mind. All that is needed is for you to make the best film possible."

"Norwegian Wood" is one of 24 films vying for the Golden Lion at the festival, which opened Wednesday and runs through September 11

@Venice

[Guest misswa]

wow they have a movie for this book...can't say 'm that excited (I was a bit disturbed by the book) but I'm open to watching the movie.

[Guest jollibee]

the book was really great..if your in that adolescent stage it actually makes sense...

[Guest .tianmi.]

I've yet to see this! I read the book on the way to London like 2 years ago, and I still remember the story. It's such a great story, but I'm scared the movie won't portray it much like Murakami intended... I think it's a hard story to make into a movie... it's so, complex. Haha. :'D But I'm gonna watch it with an open-mind!

[Guest wanderlust.]

I really want to watch this! It looks promising.

[Guest lala-123]

I think I've watched the trailer about a bajillion times and I'm still so dissappointed that it's not coming to my city. I'm so impatient for it to be uploaded online

[Guest creaturedreams]

'Norwegian Wood (2010) japanese DVDRip x264 AC3 - zdzdz'

http://www.fileserve...z.mkv.part1.rar

http://www.fileserve...z.mkv.part2.rar

http://www.fileserve...z.mkv.part3.rar

http://www.fileserve...z.mkv.part4.rar

Or

http://www.filesonic...z.mkv.part1.rar

http://www.filesonic...z.mkv.part2.rar

http://www.filesonic...z.mkv.part3.rar

http://www.filesonic...z.mkv.part4.rar

English Subtitles - http://www.mediafire...m5dx24z1hqdf9lu

taken from: http://www.asianload.com. Also if you have an account at http://www.asiatorrents.com you can download the torrent version instead. 

[Aziraphale]

There are spoilers in this post - for those who haven't read the novel or watched the film. Just so you're warned.

~

I just watched Norwegian Wood a couple of days ago. Let's just say that I had set my expectations at the lowest possible, and the film stomped them into the mud. I feel I need to write this, or it'd simmer and fester inside me and then I'd explode.

I'm writing this as a huge fan of Murakami's works, with Norwegian Wood my favourite (Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World a very close second), and that when I had first heard about a film adaptation, my heart sank and my reaction was an instant "NO!". I had watched the trailer and was not impressed. Still, a friend had asked me to keep an open mind and I told myself the film deserved that much - I would try to ignore the baggage of "film adaptation never lives up to book original" and be neutral about this.

First off, I totally understand that it's difficult to squash everything into a 2-hour film, and certain details have to be left out. That it is Norwegian Wood, arguably Murakami's most intense novel, just multiplies the difficulty. Plus, it is notorious for its "untranslatability" (to screen, that is), and I had no doubt the director and cast had had a monumental task ahead of them. That said, it was a flop. As a film adaptation of Norwegian Wood the novel, it was a big fat flop.

I couldn't connect with the characters in the film. The novel was a page-turner for me and I could relate to the protagonists - even Naoko, whom I didn't really like but could empathise with. There was that ennui and melancholia permeating the pages of the novel that was completely missing from the film. Granted, the novel had the luxury of being able to develop the characters properly, details that seemed little at first glance but would be important in the larger scheme of things. The film did not have that but it was more the cherry-picking of details and its inability to string them into something coherent that irked me.

There was little point putting Storm Trooper in, he was so marginal and negligible that it wouldn't have hurt to leave him out. Nagasawa ended up being some complete jerk when he was more complex than that, the student demonstrations got the short shrift when they had actually affected Toru, Midori was criminally marginalised when in the novel she occupied the bulk of the second half of the novel, Reiko's role was reduced so that the ending scene of her and Toru (and later Toru and Midori) made zero sense unless you'd read the novel, and Naoko turned into someone who obsessed so much with why she couldn't get wet for Kizuki that she had a mental breakdown.

The novel was about loss, memory, sexuality and love, there were so many layers to it. The film had one layer, and it was flat. I couldn't connect with the characters because of that sense of lethargy that seemed to have infected the actors and storyline. The novel's perspective began with an older Toru reminiscing about his past upon hearing the Beatles' song Norwegian Wood - this is about how we enshrine and fetishise memory, and how certain events and relationships can be so symbolic in our lives as to profoundly affect us. The film, by removing this perspective, effectively removes the connection between song and memory, making the song almost irrelevant to the story. It just reduced it to a straightforward love story of young adults with raging hormones, which mattered zero because I couldn't care for the characters. It then spirals downwards in a series of (sex) scenes that are pretty much meaningless, which is sad when you think they were supposed to convey how broken and flawed the characters were and how they struggled in their grief and despair. When you have Kizuki commit suicide within the first 5 minutes of the film without even bothering to let the viewer connect with him, how then can the viewer appreciate his importance to both Toru and Naoko? Midori's arrival perked things up, but sadly she appeared so rarely that the film was turning into the Naoko-Toru show. Reiko was a bit-part when she should have been Toru's confidante and pillar of strength during his difficult times with Naoko. And Naoko... what can I say about her that the film hasn't already destroyed?

As for the actors, with the exception of Kikuchi Rinko whom I first saw in Babel (and thought she'd done a great job in that mess of a film), I was new to the likes of Matsuyama Ken'ichi and Mizuhara Kiko. To be honest, I wish Tran Anh Hung had stuck with his original decision NOT to use Kikuchi, it was so obvious she was a 30-year-old acting as a 20-year-old. I think she captured Naoko's fragility, there was a gentle air about her, but she was not Naoko. No doubt the script had to shoulder at least half the blame for this, but even so, I wasn't drawn to her grief, her struggle to come to terms with her loss, her fight for sanity. Matsuyama was flat, I kept waiting for him to show a bit of spark, but he just looked dull. Toru can be passive and withdrawn, but not dull. Mizuhara was all right as Midori, it took me a while to get used to her but she got better as the film progressed, pity she was under-utilised. Ditto for Kirishima Reika (as Reiko), Tamayama Tetsuji (as Nagasawa) and Hatsune Eriko (as Hatsumi). So, so wasted.

The music was loud, obnoxious and intrusive. It had that orchestral feel that boomed in your ears, as though telling you how you should feel at appropriate moments. I'm not usually picky about music in films, but this one was overbearing and had the annoying habit of being cut off abruptly or introduced just as abruptly. One saving grace was the cinematography - the change in seasons was done nicely and I really liked the winter scenes. Colour use was fine. But when all a film has going for it is its aesthetic appeal, you wonder why something with such fantastic source material could come out so hollow and tedious.

Initially I was sad, thinking it could have been so much better - be it in the cast and crew (including the director) or script, maybe a more sensitive selection of details - but having stewed for a whole day and night on how screwed up it all is, I'm pissed. Really pissed.

Really, really pissed.

[zantac_2]

Tetsuji Tamayama - Nagasawa

they cast him pretty well looks wise. more importantly, who played storm trooper?

[lee-chan]

i am still on the process of reading the book.

It caught my eye caused the story seem interesting.

never knew they made a movie for it.

[Aziraphale]

they cast him pretty well looks wise. more importantly, who played storm trooper?

That would be Emoto Tokio: http://asianmediawiki.com/Tokio_Emoto

I also thought Tamayama was quite a good fit for Nagasawa. It's a pity he was under-used because they gave Nagasawa the short shrift.

This link gives you thumbnail pics of how the various characters looked in the film: http://asianmediawiki.com/Norwegian_Wood

[zantac_2]

haha i pictured storm trooper differently, but the guy they used isnt bad. midori looks well cast as well. i remember getting a boner when i was reading the descriptive scene of midori when she was cooking for toru at her house. i pictured reika to be a little older.