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Lady Snowblood - Love Song of Vengeance The short answer? I liked this film this much (opens hands up really wide).

While this isn’t great cinema, it is certainly entertaining cinema. Wildly so. A steely eyed-murderess slashes her way through a corrupt cabal in charge of Meiji era Japan?

Yes.

Toss in some black death (as a biological weapon!) and a half dozen blood geysers and you’ve got the makings of a to notch pass-the-popcorn genre flick.

I am a sucker for this period and genre, so your mileage may vary, but if you’ve ever seen and enjoyed a Zatoichi movie then this will be a film for you.

Lady Snowblood

Overheard in an alternate reality:

“Man, they totally ripped off Kill Bill”

Another fantastic entry from one of my favorite periods in cinema history- samurai films in the post-Yojimbo, blood geyser manner. Vicious, stylish and filled with memorable characters, chan-bara in the 60s and 70s is almost as good as it gets for me. With the exception of Hong Kong’s balls-to-the-wall 80s output (think Police Story,) there’s no genre/era convergence I like better.

In specific, this is a fine revenge film. Meiko Kaji plays the title role with great style. Lady Snowblood is a steely-eyed murderess of the highest caliber out to complete a path of revenge started by her mother some twenty years before. In fact, she’s literally born into the role. Her mother passing on the onus of revenge with her dying breath. Which, for my money, is worth double bonus points. There’s not much more to the plot other than that, but that’s enough when the setup is that diabolical and there’s as much swordplay as there is in this film.

Definitely worth a rental if you’re a fan of the genre.

Happy friday.

okay… here’s a little explanation.

I’ve been trying to get out to LA this year to see all my Angelino peoples. This makes me want to make it out there even more. /Takashi Murakami is 14 flavors of awesome.

Why not check out some …

Tokyo Street Style

Japanese street fashion is five hundred flavors of awesome (which approaches the theoretical limits of awesomeness.)

I was reading this article- Technorati: Big business with bogus data; when I came across this Japanese word: “gomiburoggu”

gomi (trash*) + buroggu (blogs**)

Now you know how to refer to fake blogs in Japanese. I bet you didn’t think that was going to happen today.

*one of the handful of japanese words I know and while many are down to my chanbara obsession, gomi I actually owe to William Gibson. William Gibson’s new book comes out tomorrow. See, it all makes sense on some level.

**The Japanese aren’t particularly down with Ls or ending words in consonants. Hence buroggu for blogs or Arisu for Alice (Yeah, I’m thinking of the character from the excellent anime Serial Experiments: Lain)

The trailer for Takeshi Kitano’s new movie is on the internets and it looks impossibly weird.

It’s a good weird at least.

This is a great film. Truly one of my favorites. This trailer captures the feel of it pretty well.

By the way, if anyone has a copy of Tokyo Nagaremono that they’d like to share with me I’m all ears.

Touch of Zen (Ws Sub Dol) A real classic. I’ve got a crazy backlog of half-finished reviews that I really ought to work through, but this film really deserves a write up. I’ve actually kept it, instead of sending it back for just that reason. Maybe this weekend.

The short review? A true genre classic. Maybe not a perfect film, but its quality and place in history make it a vital film in the history of Hong Kong martial arts cinema.

No Regrets for Our Youth I was surprised by how much I liked this. I mean, I expect to like Kurosawa’s work at this point, having seen and enjoyed so many of his films, but this really had some unexpected high points. I won’t go into too much depth as it’s late and I’m tired, but No Regrets for Our Youth is absolutely littered with brilliant moments and functions almost equally well as a whole. One shorthand metric I like to use when evaluating a film is the number of distinct instances I can remember a few days or a week after watching a film and here I can remember probably a dozen.

The Amphibian Man A bizarre, bizarre film. It’s like (and it probably is) a bunch of Russians got some bootleg American sci-fi films from the 50s, watched them all in a weekend and then decided to make their own freaky Russian version that espoused the Soviet ideal.

While drunk.

And on acid.

And this particular post is just about off the charts…

Street Use: Bling Trucks, or Dekorota, in Japan