In this portrait of small-time hoods rendered in rhythm-of-life anecdotal detail, Gao is the leader of a circle of layabouts including his sidekick, Flathead, and their girlfriends, Pretzel and Ling. He is also the originator of petty crime schemes, which promise to get the gang nowhere fast.
When troubled teen boy Stevie (Cameron Van Hoy) and his girlfriend, Rocky (Mischa Barton), attempt to rob a bank without any forethought, the situation rapidly deteriorates. Soon the young couple is holding bank customers and employees hostage, while law enforcement gathers outside. Daniel Bender (Burt Reynolds), a veteran negotiator for the FBI, is charged with assessing the crime scene and ending the standoff as quickly as possible, but Stevie's short fuse considerably complicates matters.
The world's first human-android acting duo, called Android Theater Project, is the collaborative brainchild of noted Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata and the leading robotics scientist Hiroshi Ishiguro. "Sayonara" is a remakable android play and has been adapted to feature film by the acclaimed filmmaker Koji Fukada (Hospitalité, Au revoir l’été). In this film project the setting of the story is largely expanded, depicting time and space in a way which can only be achieved in film, examining life and death though the communication between dying human and immortal android.
Based on 16-year-old writer Sarie Hinakura’s award winning story Jellyfish is centered around two adolescent girls disconnected from their immediate environment of school and mates. They first get together while staring into a jellyfish tank at a local aquarium. The relationship that ensues eventually faces tension from the divergent personalities of the two protagonists, one of whom explores a heterosexual relationship with a fellow student. Jealousy and the wrath of a lover spurned are inevitable spillovers.
An actress preparing to play in a historical epic is terrorized by someone faxing her pages from her stolen diary; has colorful flashbacks of her affair with a now-deceased man; and imagines black-and-white film-within-a-film scenes of the movie she is about to appear in.
A small time Yakuza thug is thrown into a bloody battle after a bank robbery he was forced into goes wrong when all the men begin to turn on each other a hitch-hiking serial killing couple decide to steal their loot.
Movie adaptation of a novel by Rampo Edogawa.
