The Honolulu Academy of Arts offers up “six cinematic views of Japan” over the next two months, many favoring that country’s youth in its various states of turmoil and aspiration. For the Japanophile, this six-parter is a treasure, but casual moviegoers might need a little help. We hereby present our take on three of them.

K-20: The Fiend With Twenty Faces (2008) This highly-derivative superhero flick (starring heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro) is Japan’s bid in the international action-film franchise sweepstakes. This thing steals from every established superhero series in the book. In the interest of being fair, let’s just say that this movie is interestingly banal, with poor Takeshi trapped in a cyclone of clichés.

The newest of those clichés is interest in the electrical-energy theories of inventor/eccentric Tesla (treated far more intriguingly in Chris Nolan’s The Prestige). In K-20, WWII has been avoided, and we see a 1949 conference endorsing Tesla’s wireless electricity interrupted by K-20 himself, a master of disguise who wants to take over the world. If we may say so, blah, blah, blah. If you can’t fill in the blanks here, you haven’t been to a movie in 25 years.

20th Century Boys (2008) A slam-bang cinematic jamboree that has to be seen to be disbelieved. The story is a sci-fier based on the manga book phenomenon by Naoki Urasawa.

Designed for kids and people with kid-like minds, this puzzler needs a high-energy audience–its conceits are priceless–and a definitive suspension of disbelief. As they say, there’s less here than meets the eye. In the late 1960s, our main character, called Kenji, and his kid friends write the Book of Prophecy, about a sinister group out to destroy our planet. Twenty years later, the book seems to come to life, at the hands of a mysterious figure called Friend. Only Kenji and company have the knowledge to thwart Friend’s plans. To and fro in time we go as the action picks up.

Adrift in Tokyo (2007) A low-key grown-up movie, quirky and engaging, this slices-of-Tokyo life comedy has an improbable conceit but shows us more of Tokyo (outside of lurid, neon-haunted downtown) than any movie yet shown here. Here’s the deal: college law student Takehara, nice but naïve, has an 840,000 yen debt, and is visited by loanshark Fukuhara with a warning to pay up within 72 hours. Later, however, a disturbed Fukuhara changes his mind, and says he’ll pay the debt for the student if Fumiya will accompany him on a walk to a police station across town to give himself up: the loanshark has just killed his unfaithful wife. Off they meander, with no time-frame (it could be thee days or three months, Fukuhara says) to the world of the “other” Tokyo: mom-and-pop shops, localized street festivals, places which hold memories for the loan shark and, eventually, his companion. We see Tokyo characters of every stripe (played by character actors familiar to Japanese audiences) and kind, a treasure of local color and locations. One of those rare movies in which we get to know the characters at the same time they get to know each other. (And that’s a very good thing, too). Fumiya and Fukuhara might not be out to save the world, but they seem to understand that perhaps it’s best, anyway, to start out by saving oneself. Highly recommended.

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