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)