Why go to Okinawa for movies? For anyone familiar with the international festival circuit, especially at its higher, artier end, the Okinawa International Movie Festival may well prompt this question — and a negative answer. "It's not a real film festival!" a fellow foreign journalist exclaimed to me on the cab ride back from the closing party on Sunday.
Granted, the 11 films in the main Laugh and Peace competition section for the festival's 6th edition, which ran March 20-24, were mostly commercial entertainments, not typical festival fare. The winner of the Golden Shisa Award, the fest's top prize, went to "Sanbun no Ichi (One Third)," comic-turned-director Hiroshi Shinagawa's love letter to the talky, violent films of Quentin Tarantino and other Hollywood flicks about robberies gone wrong.
For all the head-scratchers in the competition, however, such as "Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa," star Johnny Knoxville's latest essay in lowbrow prank comedy, there were also films that would not be out of place in a regular festival, as long as it accepted the proposition that genre fare can also be good.