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Tickets for the 2007 New York AsianFilm Festival are on sale now, and as always it’s a mind boggling array of films. There are quite a few manga/comics tie-ins, and Grady Hendrix was kind enough to give us the low-down:

DEATH NOTE and DEATH NOTE: THE LAST NAME – the big, fwapping manga turned into live action movies that are like Agatha Christie meets Edgar Allan Poe. And director Shusuke Kaneko will be here, too.

BIG BANG LOVE, JUVENILE A – the best gay men in prison movie ever made. And it’s based on a manga (ELEGY FOR BOY by Masaki Ato). Plus it has a rocket in it. Sort of LOVE AND ROCKETS for gay men.

DASEPO NAUGHTY GIRLS – based on a Korean webcomic. It’s a muscial about teenagers at Dasepo (Useless) High School who spend their days getting perverted. Totally fun, and sex-positive. The kind of movie where you leave wanting to lynch right wingers!

FREESIA: BULLETS OVER TEARS – yet another manga adaptation. This flick is pretty amazing but has a very low profile. The mange it’s based on is FREESIA by Jiro Matsumoto.

And then, not adapted from manga, there’s ZEBRAMAN which is all about superhero fandom:

And, of course, the terrifically racist, sexist, offensive, joyous AACHI & SSIPAK – one of the most amazing animated movies ever made.


Click on links for tix.

1 COMMENT

  1. Death Note (the manga, the anime and the movie) are GREAT! Each are unique in their own way… although the movie has a more fixed “end” for obvious reasons due to a finite medium.

    And I find it more like COLUMBO meets Edgar Allen Poe – because right from the beginning you KNOW who the villain is… the trick of the entire series is in HOW the villain is caught. Fun mind games and entrapment stuff.

  2. Ouch. Who wrote those movie descriptions?

    Zebraman is my favorite superhero movie ever. I can’t recommend it enough.

    Dasepo Naughty Girls is the tamest “sex comedy” you’ll ever see. It’s fun, but you’ve seen most of the jokes a hundred times before, so don’t expect too much. It’s not anything worth getting holier-than-thou over for left-wingers, either. It’s PG-13, tops.

    Both Death Note movies are terrible, but “The Last Name” is probably the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Maybe those who have never been exposed to the manga or the anime will be able to overlook the… “acting” (for lack of a better word) and poorly compressed plots enough to enjoy the novelty of the idea on which they are based, but I couldn’t.