The Toronto Japanese Film Festival continues. Saw three more films below the cut.
Friday I saw Life is Climbing, a really striking documentary about Paralympic gold medalist Koichiro Kobayashi and his sight guide Suzuki Naoya doing some perilous climbs in Utah. Koba and Naoya were in attendance to answer questions while director Sokichi Nakahara visibly died of stage fright. Those two owned and a friend of mine posed some good questions to Nakahara about how he got some of those really nice shots of the climbs at claustrophobic angles.
Then Saturday I saw One Last Bloom and Revolver Lily. Revolver Lily was a nonsense action film and 1920s costume drama. It was fun. It was what I expected. Lots of Imperial Army soldiers got shot in the shoulder and fell down, things exploded, and the underlying politics was at best incoherent but mostly weird. The female lead shoots people with a gun while physics took a hike for anime logic. Love her for it.
One Last Bloom’s your sports drama centred around boxing, but the fight choreography and attention to detail is incredibly on point without needing to exaggerate or make the action hyperreal. That does some cool things. It’s a film about an aged out boxer instructing new talent who’s hungry for a win in the local featherweight championships, so it’s just as much about watching the deuteragonists train as anything else. You can see that progress and development. It’s an absolute force multiplier for the character drama, which is suitably ambivalent and doesn’t rest on a clean conclusion.
