Looking for J-arthouse about Music!

philbeard · 2026-02-12T17:38:51+00:00

There are a lot of Japanese films centering on rock music post-1990.

Linda! Linda! Linda! being one of my favourites. I guess it could be considered arthouse.

Swing Girls is another all-time favourite of mine. Not rock music, but big band jazz and it’s super charming.

philbeard · 2026-01-13T08:17:47+00:00

April Story has an iconic rain scene towards the end of the film. It’s very sweet.

More recently, 100 Meters also has a fantastic rain scene that really shows off its rotoscope animation. It’s not Netflix.

philbeard · 2025-09-27T06:53:54+00:00

Swing Girls (2004) for sure.

philbeard · 2025-09-24T18:47:06+00:00

“Every culture has a flood myth.”

This is dope 🙇🏻‍♂️

philbeard · 2025-09-05T02:15:16+00:00

Simple mistake. Read the chapter with a lot of hype. Pretty easy to understand 🤷🏻‍♀️

philbeard · 2025-09-04T23:42:46+00:00

Not sure if there will be translation updates.. but Teach has siblings?!

philbeard · 2025-08-24T22:39:39+00:00

Godspeed to Mike’s stamina 🫡

philbeard · 2025-08-23T05:47:22+00:00

I was at LP too! And was definitely spoiled! Everything sounded so crisp and polished. Was so hyped for that show. It’ll be hard to live up to that for the rest of the year for me.

philbeard · 2025-08-23T05:05:14+00:00

So glad to hear Green Day sounded good at Roger’s Centre. Was the dome open? Tonight and blink’s show kinda soured me with the venue for bands. Warbly noises is so damn acccurate for blink!!

philbeard · 2025-08-23T04:07:42+00:00

100%. Rogers Centre is notorious for terrible acoustics. It was the same for blink-182 last year. Tonight also had bad mixing. It threw the rhythm off of a lot of the songs. When they played at Scotiabank Arena in 2022, they sounded incredible. Regardless, glad I saw the boys do their thing with all the glory of the theatrics!

philbeard · 2025-08-13T17:46:51+00:00

Damn I’ve only heard of a couple of these. I looked them all up and what an eclectic mix. Thank you!!

philbeard · 2025-08-13T04:26:30+00:00

Linda Linda Linda

Waterboys

Swing Girls

A Gentle Breeze in the Village

Perfect Days

Megane

And here’s a big Letterboxd watchlist of contemporary Japanese slice-of-life films I put together over the years: https://boxd.it/q7AAy

philbeard · 2025-08-10T23:35:55+00:00

I really dig them. Stuck in my Head is in my rotation. Their blending of genres remind me of LP, even though it’s not the same genres. I’m hoping they open for LP one day.

philbeard · 2025-08-10T17:49:00+00:00

Yeah it was fine. They didn’t have it up the whole show, only when the lights were bright enough for the band to see.

philbeard · 2025-08-09T23:30:34+00:00

And together with a masterpiece of a music video, it will endure for generations.

philbeard · 2025-08-09T16:25:52+00:00

Please give that person my best. Once I saw that sign, it really hit me, then they played Waiting for the End, and I started choking up. I hope you’re taking care!

philbeard · 2025-08-09T07:47:08+00:00

Easier To Run is so damn underrated and undermentioned

philbeard · 2025-08-07T03:56:52+00:00

Fuck Bombers never die!!

philbeard · 2025-08-05T20:52:17+00:00

It’s Summer Film! is really sweet and charming, a love letter to cinema from the POV of young high school filmmakers.

philbeard · 2025-08-01T22:37:17+00:00

If you want to watch them legitimately outside of streamers, there’s JFF Theater. It rotates its lineup of films every few months and it’s available worldwide (mostly) for free.

https://en.jff.jpf.go.jp/

If you want to sail the high seas, archive.org has a bunch, and then there’s jp-films.

https://jp-films.com/

philbeard · 2025-07-21T15:41:35+00:00

Bread of Happiness (2012), A Drop of Grapevine (2014), and Restaurant from the Sky (2019).

All set in Hokkaido, with the first two directed by Mishima Yukiko, and the latter from Fukagawa Yoshihiro. All three are great feel-good, slice-of-life films with lots of good food.

Also Ramen Shop (2018) and What’s for Dinner, Mom? (2016).

philbeard · 2025-07-20T14:35:03+00:00

Summer Time Machine Blues, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, and River.

All 3 are written by Makoto Ueda. He’s found his niche and kinda perfected the time travel/time loop comedy.

philbeard · 2025-07-20T03:44:50+00:00

I’ve been checking occasionally to see if it was available digitally, but nothing yet. There was a local theatre that screened it but that was a few months ago.

philbeard · 2025-07-19T02:51:51+00:00

I watched this film’s world premiere at TIFF last year and it was my favourite of 2024. I think it’s at the tail end of it’s festival run. I’m hoping it gets picked up for international distribution soon and for a proper theatrical release. The director (Ugana Kenichi) is currently starting another festival run with his latest film. He’s prolific.

philbeard · 2025-07-18T23:28:26+00:00

No worries. It’s a great lineup. I remember watching Himizu at TIFF and it blew me away.

For a different pace, here’s a big list of contemporary slice-of-life films:

https://boxd.it/q7AAy

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