Film 2006 with Mr Moshi Moshi

A couple of weeks ago I joined the local DVD rental shop. Cinemas are expensive here - a bare minimum of £7 for university students, in my experience. For that amount of money I can watch about 6 DVDs, and so for the last few weeks I've been picking out all sorts of films that I've always wanted to see but never had the time for.

Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003). I can't believe I didn't see this at the time and I really recommend this film if you haven't seen it. I saw it a few days ago and it's been lingering on my mind ever since. It's not quite the approach you'd expect a regular director to take on Columbine-style school shootings; it drew a lot of controversy at the time, for many reasons. Whether you end up loving it or hating it, you really should see this film. The actors are almost all untrained schoolkids and the film benefits enormously from this. It's hauntingly beautiful and frankly, just haunting full stop.

Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991). Jim Jarmusch is one of my favourite directors, and his film Dead Man (1995) is my favourite film of all time. Night on Earth is a really funny and touching set of five stories, set in LA, NYC, Paris, Rome and Helsinki, all set in taxi cabs. I found the NYC and Paris sketches hysterically funny - all of them really tap into the place and the people they depict.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999). Set in the contemporary New Jersey side of NYC, Forest Whittaker plays a lone assassin who lives by the code of the Samurai. It sounds naff, but it's a very powerful mix of cultures, philosophies and outsider characters.

The Last Samurai (Whoever, whenever). This would have been a really intelligent film about the demise of the Samurai in Meiji Japan had it not been for the last five to ten minutes when Hollywood studio bosses clearly had a greedy orgiastic wank-fest over it and completely rewrote one of the most defining points in the history of Japan so as to get a cheapo, schmaltzy, utterly ahistorical ending. In one shitty scene in the downward spiral of shittiness that concludes this film: the entire Samurai clan get wiped out in a hail of bullets except for fucking gaijin Tom Cruise who takes one in the shoulder just so as to survive and make it into the even shittier ending.

Maborosi/幻の光 (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 1995). Very painful film about loss. Exquisitely filmed without going over the top. One of the films that gave me the momentum to apply to do Japanese at university.

Nobody Knows/誰も知らない (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2004). Based on a true story: four kids between 5 - 12 years old abandoned by their nice but somewhat fucked-up mother who has kept them secret from the neighbours. The kids are the best child actors I have ever seen - the film is charming and funny to start with but heartbreaking and bewildering by the end.

Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004). As I mentioned in an earlier post, this year started off with me going to McDonald's far too often. By two weeks after that post I had gone to McDonald's more times in a month than in the whole of 2005, about 10 -12 times. Drastic action had to be taken. Having seen this film, I swear to God I will never, ever go to McDonald's again. I would rather go hungry. Everyone knows to some extent that McDonald's is not really good for you, and that it has a bad effect on local commerce, but it's too easy to put it at the back of your mind and keep going there. You need to see this documentary to have all the information laid out in front of you in one go and realise that they (as in McD's and the other fast food chains) are literally destroying the US. This film really opened my eyes to some personal truths about why McDonald's is such an easy habit to fall into - it's literally an addiction that they aim to get you started on in your childhood. It's really not an exaggeration: if you want to know what that means, please see this film.

Stealth (Some shithead, 2005). The worst film of all time. Hands down. Absolute barrel of cunty fuckshite. This film made me puke in the aisles.

All right, I lie. I haven't actually seen it, but the trailer alone was enough to lead me to this conclusion.