Sion Sono- 愛のむきだし/Love Exposure (2008)- DVD9 (PAL Format)

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is...Love Exposure!

That silly Sion Sono. Up to his perverted hijinx again, with no movie studio up his skirt...I mean ass, and allowing him to do whatever the hell he wants because he's an artist. That's blatantly un-American!But wait. He's Japanese. And his fellow compatriots such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tetsuyo Nakashima (yes I'll get around to posting Memories of Matsuko. I swear!), and Hirokazu Koreeda, etc., etc, are outputting films that actually have a soul.

Ugh. I'm so borrrrrrrrrrred with the U.S.A., but what can I do? I'm serious. Cinema is practically dead in this country, and I'm sick of having to live vicariously through another country's films.

Fuck it. I'm making a movie. And it will be blessed by the Virgin Mary, and then her and I will be on pins and needles hoping that God has a twisted sense of humor. If not, we're fucked, and we'll be banished to the coast of Spain.

By the way, Here's Love Exposure. Enjoy it, or don't. I could care less.




From Adam Wing at 24 Frames Per Second:

Four hours in the company of love, obsession and romance, it’s enough to make a grown man reach for the remote control. But don’t be too hasty with that there wandering hand, because looks can be deceiving, and that’s definately the case with cult director Sono Sion's quirky marathon feature Love Exposure. Having already won me over with films like Suicide Club (a dark, delicious favourite) and Noriko's Dinner Table (a rare sequel that arguably outweighs the original), Sono serves up a twisted opus of love, obsession, martial arts, underwear and violence. Nishijima Takahiro (he was in a pop group) makes his film debut alongside Mitsushima Hikari (Death Note) and Ando Sakura (Kaze no Sotogawa), as a teen who takes upskirt photos. Yup, the guy is quite clearly the prince of perverts, and the rest of the cast don’t fare much better. In Sono’s twisted world, each and every one of them has their own quirky cross to bare. Winner of the Caligari Film Award and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, Love Exposure takes on religion, family and sexuality. Miraculously, at close to four hours long, it also manages to be an absolute riot from start to finish.

17-year-old Yu (Nishijima Takahiro) is the son of an upstanding widowed priest (Watabe Atsuro) who has recently become involved in an illicit relationship with a troubled parishioner (Watanabe Makiko). It all goes a bit wrong and Yu’s father takes a turn for the worst, it soon becomes apparent that the only way he can satisfy his father’s dark demon-ds is to commit sin after woeful sin. Yu is saving his first sexual experience for the ideal girl, and he finally meets her in the form of Yoko (Mitsushima Hikari), a sassy schoolgirl who beats up guys for the hell of it. Yu falls hard for Yoko, but in order to fulfil his obsession he has to take on the identity of a kick ass femme fatale by the name of Miss Scorpion (don’t ask). Add to the mix a fanatical cult recruiter called Aya (Ando Sakura), who has her eyes on both Yoko and Yu, and it all gets a little bit complicated. But then, we are talking about love here.




Love Exposure is a love story of sorts, but that’s not even telling half the story. In fact, to fully appreciate Sono Sion’s latest movie marathon, you really need to get acquainted with his back catalogue. Suicide Club was a quirky, offbeat offering that found a cult following world wide, but it certainly isn’t his best movie. Love Exposure owes more to the style and themes of its sequel, Noriko’s Dinner Table. I say sequel, the two films are loosely connected but show off different sides to the Sono Sion coin. Exte: Hair Extensions was Sono’s surprisingly effective attempt at Asian horror, but as with all of his previous films, it came with a knowing charm and deftly comic touch. Love Exposure mixes all of these elements in an off beat movie blender and comes fresh out the oven as his defining moment, and I hasten to add, his defining moment so far…

The performances are spot on, the characters are enthralling and the movie themes are compulsive. Four hours appears daunting on paper but the time just flies, such is the richness and depth of the characters and circumstance on display. We have love, honour, faith, perversion, sexuality, cults, religion and martial arts to cover here, thinking about it, four hours is not enough. It’s probably wise that you take a breather half way through though, to fully appreciate the charm and flavour, you’ll do well to embrace the eccentricity of Love Exposure in one sitting. Sion Sono has crafted a unique, quirky, colourful and memorable ode to love, and he’s done it without resorting to the stereotypical conformities which blight modern day love stories the world over. If you’re a guy, and your not totally convinced, consider this. Love Exposure is a romantic endeavour that takes up-skirt shots, erections, martial arts face-offs and bloody carnage as seriously as it does the big L, what’s not to love? Take a chance, expose yourself today. Just don’t tell anybody I told you so…




Disc 1 Technical Information:

Title: 愛のむきだし/Love Exposure (Disc 1)
Year: 2008
Country: Japan
Director: Sion Sono

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.78 GB
Length: 2:00:20
Programs used: Unknown

Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~6200 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: Japanese- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Making of Love Exposure, Original Japanese Trailer


Disc 1 Megaupload Links




Disc 2 Technical Informtaion:

Title: 愛のむきだし/Love Exposure (Disc 2)
Year: 2008
Country: Japan
Director: Sion Sono

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 6.73 GB
Length: 1:56:08
Programs used: Unknown

Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~6200 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: Japanese- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source


Disc 2 Megaupload Links

Sion Sono- Kimyô na sâkasu/Strange Circus (2005)- "Extreme Makeover Edition!"- DVD5 (NTSC)

We apologize. The staff at ForTheDishwasher (who am I kidding. There is no staff...) put up the most God-awful Strange Circus post when we were first starting out. It was an XviD, and I really f'ing hate XviD, and to make things worse, it was split into two sections and rar'd into a zillion parts. I wish I could blame this faux pas on drunkeness or a horrid crack cocaine addiction, but the bottom line is that it was pure and unadulterated stupidity on our (my) part.

Sooooooooo...

Here's the Strange Circus "Extreme Makeover Edition!" in hopes that it sates those who downloaded the sucko version. Japanese R2 DVD source with custom subs. This version is damn near impossible to find, but don't thank me, thank chochoc at ADC. Enjoy some Sono! Suicide Circle and Love Exposure are on tap in the near future.




From Midnight Eye:

We've signalled it before in these pages: the fantastique in Japanese film is undergoing a radical metamorphosis. J-horror was living on borrowed time, a corpse temporarily re-animated with foreign blood after its initial death five years ago, now decaying so badly that all it can muster is an occasional twitch and spasm. Instead, the nation's filmmakers are looking elsewhere for inspiration, to a past that offered a more full-blooded, garish, wild, unrestrained, even celebratory way of looking at the dark side of humanity. Ero-guro is back.

Takashi Miike's contribution to the Asian horror omnibus Three... Extremes, Box (2004), already signalled the direction, while Shinya Tsukamoto was, as usual, way ahead of the crowd with 1999's Gemini (Soseiji), an adaptation of a short story by the single most important figure in the ero-guro tradition, Edogawa Rampo. But it is the glee and the vibrancy of last year's magnificent Rampo Noir that seems to have acted like a sort of cold shower: a unexpected shock at first, but one that kickstarted the circulation and made the juices flow again.




Ero-guro themed productions are lining up to be unleashed onto an unsuspecting audience: waiting in the wings are several new adaptations of Rampo's equally kinky colleague Junichiro Tanizaki (including Shisei, based on Tanizaki's first published work The Tattooist and directed by Hisayasu Sato, responsible for Rampo Noir's most impressive segment The Caterpillar / Imomushi), Firefly Dreams director John Williams' departure into more mysterious realms with Starfish Hotel, Miike's American debut Imprint, plus the aforementioned Shinya Tsukamoto's latest offering Akumu Tantei. However, it is Suicide Club director Shion Sono who emerges first out of the gate.

Equal parts gorgeous and grotesque - perhaps the most defining characteristic of ero-guro - Sono's Strange Circus is a luridly stylised, at times disturbing plunge into the mixed-up mind of Taeko (Miyazaki), a writer of erotic novels whose latest opus delves deep into the sexual traumas that mark her own psyche: the all-devouring desire between her and her brutish, perverted husband (former glam rocker and artist Oguchi) that ruptured their family when it began to ensnare their teenage daughter. She is assigned a young assistant, Yuji (the androgynous Ishida), who slowly begins to uncover the truth behind Taeko's fictional version of her life story.




The premise of Strange Circus clearly echoes Rampo, whose stories often acknowledged their own fictional nature, often going so far as to incorporate the author himself in their narratives. A good example is his novel The Beast in the Shadows (which served as one of the templates for 1994's trite, flaccid biopic The Mystery of Rampo, but don't let that stop you from picking up the recently published English translation), a first-person account of a mystery author investigating a murder case laced with kinky sex, in which the prime suspect is a literary colleague. Just as Rampo reversed the roles by having the villain resemble himself and modelling the narrator hero after his more traditional detective writer friend Seishi Yokomizo, Sono casts doubt upon exactly who in the story is meant to represent Taeko: the mother or the daughter?

With its allusions to incest, paedophilia and transsexuality, Strange Circus also embraces Rampo's penchant for perversities, giving it more than its share of shock potential. Director Sono, however, cleverly plays the old game of "is it real or imagined?", making creative use of the blurred lines between fantasy and reality to neatly avoid the pitfalls of exploitation. Where Suicide Club saw him lose the plot in spur-of-the-moment weirdness that had only the most tenuous connection with the rest of the film, in this story of a writer's delusions his tendency to go off on tangents finds the perfect environment. The paradoxical result is a far more focused and consistent film.




In addition to the genre's preoccupation with perversion and death, Strange Circus also wholeheartedly embraces the ero-guro aesthetic. There is solid dose of the carnivalesque, particularly in a key recurring scene from which the film derives its name. The European-style mansion that forms its main location is rendered damply claustrophobic despite its spacious rooms and the bright sunlight streaming in through high windows, its hallways occasionally transforming into blood-dripping, crimson corridors that look like the insides of a giant beast. The heroine's publisher (played by ubiquitous but always welcome Tomorowo Taguchi) holds court in a shack whose decorations seem to have been bought at the liquidation sale of Akihiro Miwa's hideout from Kinji Fukasaku's ero-guro classic Black Lizard (Kurotokage, 1968). A cello case takes the place of Rampo's human chair, while wheelchairs, leather strappings and dangling chains add to the air of fetid fetishism and a buzzing chainsaw brings the whole thing in line with a more contemporary take on corporeal horror. Strange Circus is a film full of kicks, in every sense of the word.




Technical Information:

Title: Kimyô na sâkasu/Strange Circus
Year: 2005
Country: Japan
Director: Sion Sono

Source: Japanese DVD9 retail
DVD Format: DVD5 NTSC R2J
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 3.87 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter, ImgBurn, Subtitle Workshop, DVD Lab Pro, DVDSubEdit, DVD Shrink
Avg. Video Bitrate: 5800 kb/s
Resolution: 720x480 16:9
Audio: DD 2.0 Japanese @ 384 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: stripped
Video: untouched
DVD Extras: stripped


Thanks to chochoc for the original upload and custom subs!





(Use JDownloader to automate downloading):

Strange Circus Megaupload Link