A.K.A. Serial Killer is inspired by the story of a 19 year old who killed four people in four Japanese cities with a stolen gun. Those familiar with the life and work of Masao Adachi, best known for his collaborations with Koji Wakamatsu, could guess that he's taken a radical experimental approach in examining his subject.
Adachi fictionalizes the content to an extent to get to the heart of the matter: what may or may not have prompted the boy…
As inventive and playful as number of other Oshima films from the period. Yet it contains darker undercurrents reminiscent of Antonioni. The politics purely belong to Oshima however.
"We do not remember days, we remember moments." - Cesare Pavese
Dramatically sound and socially relevant, Harmful Insect takes an unsentimental look at the life of a 13 year old girl named Sachiko who hails from a broken home. It's not an uplifting movie to say the least, as it follows the downward spiral of her life in minute detail. The few moments of happiness she experiences are snatched away by some of the wrong decisions she makes due to the situations she finds herself in. Fans of Hirokazu Koreeda's Nobody Knows should definitely seek it out.
