Taiyô wo nusunda otoko

Very well make... there are car chasing, gun shooting and even more... after watching this movie you may know how to make an atomic bomb!! Try to pick up this film in Video or Vcd.

The best thing that can be said about The Man Who Stole The Sun is that it runs for 2.5 hours and never feels boring or overlong. The worst thing that can be said about it is there's a couple of time where it looks like they were mean to a cat while filming, which is never nice (it's thankfully briefer and less difficult to handle than an infamous scene in Satantango).

It follows a teacher who decides to build an atomic bomb, and then makes a series of demands by threatening to detonate it. It begins as a satirical crime movie, gradually morphs into a thriller, and then explodes into action in the last half-hour or so. Along the way, it can be pretty funny at times, having a tone where calling it light or non-serious would maybe feel inaccurate, but it's definitely fun (while being kind of dark, once you step back and look at the whole thing).

All in all, it's a riot. It's rare to get a movie that's around (or over) two and a half hours where I don't ever feel ready for it to end, which I think is a testament to how well-paced and creative this is, above all else just being very entertaining. As much as I'm looking forward to Oppenheimer, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the best movie about atomic weapons that I watch in 2023.

Kazuhiko Hasegawa is a great film director.

Though I have been an enthusiastic fan of Kazuhiko Hasegawa's, in the beginning I've had no connection with him, and moreover, I am an ordinary office worker. One day I heard a sad news, "Kubrick is dead", which made me decide to establish Kazuhiko-Hasegawa's website. That's because I believe it is only Hasegawa that can make films like Kubrick's works. After a while, I got a connection with him through the cyberspace, and exchanged opinions each other with e-mails, which we called "e-sessions". One day I suddenly received his phone call. He just said to me, "I want to begin my project on your site"........ Thus I have built up the website to let people submit their scenarios for his new film.

A high school science teacher steals plutonium and builds his own atomic bomb. A game of cat and mouse arises between him and a hard-nosed police detective.

Utterly preposterous stuff, but has moments of great fun, and an unusual East-meets-West sensibility, presumably because of being made entirely in Japan by Japanese folks but written by Paul Schrader's brother Leonard, who inserted some peak-1979-Hollywood car chases and action scenes.

It's not a great film, but it's got a lot going for it, and if you like strange Japanese films you should definitely check it out, as it's hard to think of anything else quite like it.

6½/10.

Make no mistake; this is an extremely violent film. At times, it is even ridiculously violent. There are no protagonists in this film, as all of the main actors and characters have severe limitations for being likeable. The Science teacher who builds a home-made atom bomb is psychotic and cruel. His love? Interest, a female DJ is self-centered and ridiculously irresponsible for her thirst for recognition, and the cop who doggedly tries to trap this fiend is immune to bullets, or so it would seem. Despite these drawbacks, the film is a perverse fantasy piece that easily entertains you for 90 minutes. There are some genuine moments of suspense and tension, but the excessiveness of the violence tends to lessen the impact of the entire film. Not a bad try.