Youth, illness and love are the basic ingredients of many a movie, especially in Japan, where romantic dramas about dying teenagers are about as common as convenience stores.
The two films under review this week, Michael Arias' "Heaven's Door" and Daisuke Yamaoka's "Lost Girl," try variations on this formula, with widely varying success.
As for "Heaven's Door," a reworking of the 1997 Thomas Jahn film "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," the most obvious variation on the local norms of the genre is the director, an American who trained under special-effects maestro Douglas Trumbull in Hollywood before coming to Japan nearly two decades ago to work as a CG artist and software designer. Arias made his directorial debut in 2006 with "Tekkonkinkreet," an anime whose heroes are two street kids running wild in a fantasy cityscape straight from the Showa Era (1926-1989).