YOUNG ARTISTS ARE advised to portray what they know. Kazuhiko Nakamura followed that advice with his first feature film: 2002’s Bastoni is a gently rueful tragicomedy about a couple of nice kids who fall in love, get married, and then run into problems. It’s almost, but not quite, irrelevant to the plot that both are performers in low-budget sex films. Nakamura himself served his time shooting porn videos, and his script nicely balances the central narrative against a kind of docu-tour of the business as it’s conducted in Japan. It’s that latter element that makes the film interesting for non-Japanese: It’s eye-opening to see sex treated as a commodity as innocent as face cream or celery. On the other hand, it’s difficult to see how anyone could get excited watching it treated this antiseptically: When the hero comes, you feel the only reasonable response would be “Gesundheit.” (For the record, there aren’t any extras, other than subtitles, on this oddball release from July of 2003.)
Extra bonussecond DVD review! The street date for Avalon (Miramax, $29.99) is slightly fresher: Dec. 16 of 2003. Its director, Mamoru Oshii, is best known for his 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell, one of the first Japanese animated films to achieve something like commercial success in the West. It was six years before Oshii’s next film, and Avalon is an attractive oddity: a kind of live-action anime, shot in Poland and in Polish, but so thoroughly worked over in the lab that it achieves much of the freedom of animation while profiting from the empathic engagement that only live performers can generate. Plota young woman addicted to a virtual-reality role-playing game finds the game leaking into her “real” worldtakes second place to atmosphere in Avalon, but Anna Karina-look-alike Malgorzata Foremniak makes every frame she’s in sizzle. And since she’s in nearly all of them, the movie generates some emotional heat in spite of the omnipresent (and splendidly executed) special effects. Two extras will appeal strongly to fans of both Japanese sci-fi and CGI filmmaking. ROGER DOWNEY
JAN. 6 BRINGS Uptown Girls, Out of Time (with Denzel Washington), a Cary Grant collection, and John Ford’s 1946 classic My Darling Clementine to disc. Back on Dec. 30, the Polish brothers’ odd Northfork, the Heath Ledger bomb The Order, and the Holocaust doc My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports all debuted. EDS.
