New Japanese film reviews appear every last Friday of the month.

Survive Style 5+ **

Ex-ad director Gen Sekiguchi and fellow Dentsu ad planner Taku Tada created this deliberately wacko tale of five vague characters in search of a plot, or at least an intersection. If only the pair had spent some of their time and resources on character and plot development. Instead we have five ciphers in vignettes - albeit extravagantly designed and gorgeously costumed vignettes. In a house that is an orgy of color, Tadanobu Asano plays a rich guy faced with the daily chore of murdering his cos-play wife Reika Hashimoto. In a Technicolor bedroom, hypnotist Hiroshi Abe mocks his ad-creator lover Kyoko Koizumi while she plans his murder. A trio of housebreakers, a dad left permanently chickenized and an international hit-man combo also make colorful appearances - but Tada seems incapable of linking these one-note crazies and sartorial disasters together even tangentially. Fun for fans of "Samehada Otoko" nuttiness.

Koi no Mon *****

Theater actor and director Suzuki Matsuo makes his feature film debut with this wacky tale of lovesick manga artists in Tokyo. For a first film, it's an assured performance: a riot of sight gags, colorful characters, quick-cutting, rock-tempo silliness. Mon (Ryuhei Matsuda) is a scuzzy, furry "manga artisan," a hopeless failure who draws comics on stones. He meets and falls in love with cute Koino (Wakana Sakai), an OL with a "cos-play" fetish and a secret manga artist to boot. Koino and Mon's love affair is complicated by the involvement of an older man, manga coffee shop owner (Matsuo), with claims on Koino's art and heart. While exploring a similar world to the low-budget film "Ai suru Yochu" (which also featured Matsuo as an older lover), this is altogether more satisfying. A complete guide to the workings of the obsessive otaku mind. A few cult directors show up in fun cameos: Takashi Miike as a brothel keeper and Shinya Tsukamoto as a soon-dead customer at the manga coffeeshop. Tokyo geek love.

Yaku Sanju no Uso **

Wry romantic comedy director Kentaro Otani takes on the double-cross caper flick with this one, and turns it into another of his stagy, one-set wrymances. It starts with an unlikely premise: a gang of five conmen board a midnight express for a new scam (featuring a guy in a panda suit) where they are joined by the girl who betrayed their last big grift three years before! Kippei Shiina plays the gang leader, Miki Nakatani his romantic interest, with decent support from Satoshi Tsumabuki, Anri Ban and other well-known TV actors. Otani, who did the complicated couple-swapping teases "avec mon mari" and "travail," unfortunately again seems more interested in the romantic angles of the caper. It's a claustrophobic talky piece, played out inside a single train carriage, and never breaks free of its stage-play origins. If only a more exciting director had taken the material and opened it up into a grand "Oceans Eleven" style adventure...

Koshonin (DVD) ***

Between "Izo" and "Gozu," the hardest-working man in show-business Takashi Miike knocked off this cable TV movie entitled "The Negotiators." It starts brilliantly, with a trio of hapless foreign criminals robbing a convenience store before taking an entire hospital hostage - all for no apparent reason. Veteran police negotiator Hiroshi Mikami calls in ex-partner Mayu Tsuruta to help him negotiate for the lives of the patients. The first hour is efficiently staged, crisply edited and tensely directed by Miike, and genuinely fascinating as the audience gradually realizes things are not as they seem. Only in the second half, wherein dogged cop Shiro Sano starts to investigate the negotiators themselves does the mood shift radically from tense thriller to maudlin melodrama. Instead of a second climactic showdown between negotiators and cops, all we get is a weepy whimper.

Pornostar (DVD) *****

The precocious debut feature by director Toshiaki Toyoda, who arrived in style in 1998 with this impressive, visionary film about mindless teen aggression. (The title refers to the pornographic planet we live on, not an adult movie player.) It stars Koji Chihara (an Osaka comedian) as a modern surly youth, the type you'd be scared to ask to stop smoking on the subway for fear that he'd lash out with a flick-knife. Koji is filled with wanton violence, dreams of knives raining down from the sky, and is soon recruited by some Shibuya pimps for their battles with their yakuza bosses. There's some business with a case of drugs, orgies with ko-gal floozies, callow pimps and plug-ugly yakuzas (including an impressive Onimaru), but these are incidentals. Toyoda is out to make a "Taxi Driver" for modern Japan, and Koji is a Japanese Travis Bickle in an olive-green parka and a permanent quizzical sneer.