Kiyoshi Kurasawa's latest is a bittersweet, gentile, lightweight but enjoyable romantic-ghost story about a women who's reconnecting with her dead but apparently okay anyway husband. Journey to the Shore well uses Kurasawa's superlative horror chops as its secret weapon, making the most of the strangeness of the relationship between the dead and the living husband and wife, but its not really a horror movie. There's lots of funny parts, but its not really a comedy. Is it about a widoweder's grieving process, a what-if story about an incomplete relationship made whole, a wistful non-horror bus still sometimes scary ghost story? I don't know what to call it exactly, but I did like it.
Aferim! is the funniest movie about slavery I've ever seen. A slice of life film about bawdy and endlessly profane Romanian constables hunting down an escaped gypsy slave, it painstakingly recreates the early 1800's of Eastern Europe, a place where a rich stew of humanity comes together and continually cusses each out. It feels like an accurate representation of the miserable lives that so many would have had to live back then (not just the Roma), but its a very entertaining film, playing out like a ye olde epysode of Cops. In stark black and white, it looks like an art film, but its not really anything else except a snapshot into a unheralded era of history, and a very lively one at that.
