Sad Vacation and AA: Two New Titles From Shinji Aoyama

When you hear the name Shinji Aoyama it's always best to pay attention. One of Japan's most consistently intriguing directors Aoyama, like his friend and mentor Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is a bit of a chameleon who loves to skip between genres subverting as he goes. And while I still have yet to see a website or trailer for 2006's Crickets websites have recently turned up for two new Aoyama related films.

Up first is Sad Vacation, his latest fictional drama starring Tadanobu Asano, Joe Odagiri, Aoi Miyazaki and - surprisingly - Lady Snowblood's Meiko Kaiji. Here's a synopsis:

With a mother who left him and a mentally ill father that committed suicide, Kenji grew up with no parents. Working as a designated driver, he meets Mamiya one day. At Mamiya's transport company, a variety of people on the run or with pasts they don't talk about exist together without scrutinizing their lives. Due to a certain coincidence, Kenji intuitively senses that Mamiya's wife Chiyoko is his mother who left him. From some certain speculation, the two start living together. Does their strong, inescapable bond make them do it? Is his mother playing with fate as Kenji must choose to oppose or be cursed by his blood relative? What awaits these two as they live together?

Though there is little more than a holding page at present the website for Sad Vacation is now active.

The second Aoyama film is AA, a documentary about legendary Japanese music critic Aida Akira that runs more than seven hours and was constructed collaboratively with Aoyama and students of The Film School of Tokyo over more than five years. AA now has a full featured website with trailer included.

There are also rumblings about an Aoyama helmed doc about filmmaker Kon Ichikawa but the website for that does not appear to be currently functioning.

Sad Vacation Website
AA Website
AA Trailer (embedded Quicktime)
More AA details at Ryuganji

Thanks to Verisimilitude for posting notes on these in our forum.