Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

The second movie in Ozu's Noriko Trilogy, a series of films that stars the fabulous Setsuko Hara as a character named Noriko, although none of the films have the same characters. Thematically, many of Ozu's later films feel connected due to their emphasis on women's roles in post-war Japan and their similar English titles. They often deal with relatives who want to help marry off their single family members. In this one, the character Noriko is living in her family's home when her uncle (Kokuten Kodu) suggests that since she is 28, she should get married. Ozu always handles this common theme with subtlety and understanding of family dynamics.  Complications arise fairly quickly, and the family's plans go awry. They want Noriko to marry her boss's forty-year-old businessman friend, Mr. Manabe, but she has different plans. The mother of her widowed childhood friend Kenkichi Yabe (Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi) asks Noriko to marry her son. When she says yes, it aliena...

Snow on spruce boughs, The second coming of a rabbit Disrupts the morning silence I think of you asleep miles away In clouded memories of fog Here in the snowy north, The temperature dropped to negative 25 Even the birds are silent, But the spruces still contemplate our Tiny backyard, unaware of our plights.

An adaptation of Italian cartoonist Guido Crepax's erotic Valentina series, Corrado Farina's film  chronicles her experiences with the title witch. Effective cinematography and frames that resemble comics abound, yet the slow-paced narrative could use more action. Eastman plays Valentina's (Isabelle De Funes) considerate lover, Arno, who helps her fight Baba Yaga.

A spiritual successor to Anthropophagus , Joe D'Amato's  Absurd borrows heavily from John Carpenter's  Halloween , adding gore in the inimitable Italian fashion. Eastman plays the hulking killer who was the victim of an experiment that gave him healing powers at the cost of his sanity.