Welcome

Welcome to Film Runner.

My name is David Willis and I'm just a regular guy who loves movies and TV shows and just happens to be British and living in Japan.

On this blog I will post short reviews of films I have watched during the week, and occasionally an update on any TV I'm watching. I will give movies a mark out of 5 as I feel this is the clearest scoring system.

A little bit about me. I am 32 years old. As I mentioned above, I live in Japan, where I work as an English language instructor. I have lived in Japan since 2012, and I love the culture, and especially the food in my new country. I studied Media Production in the UK at the University of Lincoln, and prior to that studied Media Studies, Photography and Art at college. I have held a deep interest in film since my early childhood. As a result I watch, I assume, an above average number of movies a week and have a pretty broad taste. I will not discount anything before watching it, but do tend to stay away from movies that have a too clearly defined target audience. I feel a great movie should be accessible to anyone with a love of film. If I could pick a favourite genre, although I feel the best films do not prescribe to a singular genre, it would be horror.

To get an idea of my kind of taste in for example, the horror genre, here is a top ten countdown of my favourite horror movies of the past 10 years, being those released in 2005 to 2015.

Under the Skin
Let the Right One In
Rec
I Saw the Devil
Hostel
The Descent
Sinister
Halloween 2
Kill List
Nightmare Detective

As you can probably guess from my list, I have a keen interest in foreign language cinema. I am particularly interested in contemporary Korean and older Japanese cinema. Here is a list of my favourite directors, in no particular order; David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Mizoguchi Kenji, Oshima Nagisa, Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Denis Villeneuve, Wes Anderson, Miike Takashi, Tsukamoto Shinya, Jonathan Glazer, Wong Kar Wai, Chan-wook Park, Jee-woon Kim, Ki-duk Kim, Guillermo del Toro, Lars Von Trier.

A little on my creative background. I currently have a self published novella on Amazon titled "Horumon". The story centers around a young Japanese man who works in the meat butchery section of his local supermarket and has an unhealthy fixation with knives. He experiences all kinds of strange incidents and characters and gets pulled into a dark and increasingly dangerous journey to escape his everyday life. I wrote the book a couple of years back, and am currently working on a new short novel about a man who is severely burned and undergoes a revolutionary treatment with dark consequences.

     As for my film background, I edited a couple of documentaries while living in England and made a music video which is still available to view on youtube for the song "Hang my Head" by Channel 83.

     On social media I am Willis_san on twitter. So, enough about me, and on to film chatter. Oh, and if you didn't guess, my blog title comes from my favourite film of all time.