A Few Screenings of The Makioka Sisters (1983) in Los Angeles This Week

Janus Films is doing a limited run of Kon Ichikawa's The Makioka Sisters (Sesameyuki) (1983), which comes to Los Angeles this week on June 9th, 11th and 12th at both the Laemmle's Playhouse 7 in Pasadena and Laemmle's Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica, only on the 11th and 12th at Laemmle's Claremont 5 in Claremont and Laemmle's Town Center 5 in Encino and an other screening the following week on the 14th at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Hollywood (too many times to read Laemmle, no?). Not as wide as a release as last years House (Hausu) (1977) or Kuroneko (Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko) (1968), but it's getting a release at a few theaters equipped with digital projection, so this won't be a 35mm print of the film, but a pretty close digital approximation.

Auteur(ists?) 8-Bit Conversion: Sweet Home (1989) for Cinemas and the NES

As long as video games have been around, there's always the guarantee that if a movie is marketable enough, then a video game version can't be far behind. In the United States alone there are dozens of games based on famous film franchises like Star Wars (1977) or the numerous characters Disney owns. Recently different developers have made video game adaptations of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983), but usually it's incredibly rare to see an auteur's vision made into a video game. It's even more difficult to name cases in the early days of gaming when the scope of what was possible in a game was limited mostly because of the hardware limitations. But Sweet Home (Suite Homu) (1989) is one of the rare instances where a collaboration by two of Japan's most famous auteurs of the last thirty years, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Juzo Itami, resulted in a highly influential video game adaptation of the same film.

Sweet Home (Suite Homu) (1989) Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Sweet Home (Suite Homu) (1990) for the Famicom/NES - Dev. Capcom.