Ore wa matteru ze

The earliest film in Eclipse's new Nikkatsu Noir set, this one stars Yujiro Ishihara and Mie Kitahara, the two stars of the previous year's Crazed Fruit (these are only two of about two dozen films they made together). I Am Waiting is a pretty good crime flick about a retired boxer who meets up with a lounge singer who is trying to run away from her gangster employer. The boxer has been waiting a year for his brother to contact him from Brazil, where he hopes to move and help his brother farm. Turns out that his brother never made it there. His mysterious disappearance is linked with the aforementioned gangsters. The story here is really good, and, in general, it's well directed and performed. It does move a tad too slowly, though, and the two halves of the plot, the romance and the mystery of the missing brother, are connected by a pretty big and hard-to-buy coincidence. It's a good film, but it's one that feels like it could have been done a little bit better (the perfect film for a remake!).