Author: Korlis

Joe Kanuritch is a British writer, climber, and insufferable Japanese cinema enthusiast.

Leeds International Film Festival 2019

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It’s November, which means the Leeds International Film Festival has returned to my city. Last year I wrote up a quick rundown on the Japanese films that would be showing. This time around, things are a little more subdued – there’s nothing as high profile as Hirokaze Kore-eda’s headline-grabbing (and later Oscar-nominated) festival favourite Shoplifters, for example, or the previous year that featured not only Takashi Miike’s 100th film Blade of the Immortal, but the prolific director’s 101st film, too.

Still, just because Japanese films aren’t being showcased in quite the same way doesn’t mean they aren’t featured across the two weeks of the festival. There are three anime features, with Studio Trigger’s visually acclaimed Promare and the latest film from Lu Over the Wall director Masaaki Yuasa perhaps representing some of the most anticipated of the festival’s Japanese catalogue. There’s also a Werner Herzog drama, a retrospective screening of Osaka Elegy (1936), and a couple of quirky looking features in the form of Five Million Dollar Life and We Are Little Zombies.

Jump below the cut for a breakdown of each film.

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Heatwave!

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With my native UK sweltering in a heatwave that makes the weather more reminiscent of my time in Tokyo, what better time to revisit a hot and humid classic – Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog? Check out this breakdown from the BFI over how Kurosawa wields the weather in his films, with a shot by shot approach to the heat in Stray Dog.

Here’s my review – has it really been two years since I watched it? Time for a revisit of my own…

Coming from Kurosawa’s prolific early period, Stray Dog easily stands up next to some of his later classics. It’s a fascinating look at post-war Tokyo: the ruined city slowly coming back together, the American influence under occupation, the fashions of the late 1940s (including some truly outrageous collars). Yet the story itself is equally valuable; a gripping detective story and prototype for countless genre conventions.

Stray Dog (1949) – The Kino 893 Review

Review: Lake of Dracula (1971) & Evil of Dracula (1974)

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A while ago – my reviews this year have been scattershot at best – I wrote a quick piece on The Vampire Doll, an odd Japanese horror film from 1970 that was the first of three loosely related, vampire-themed films Toho made in the early ‘70s. I didn’t particulaBloodthirsty Trilogy Coverrly care for The Vampire Doll, and it took me a while to get around to watching the remaining two films: Lake of Dracula (1971) and Evil of Dracula (1974). Like The Vampire Doll, they’re both directed by Michio Yamamoto, and all three feature a writing credit for Ei Ogawa. Unlike The Vampire Doll, these two films are actually about vampires!

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Two Decades of Ring

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One of my favourite things to do recently is find cinemas screening older films I either missed the first time around or that I never had a chance to see on the big screen. Often this coincides with a big anniversary for a film, which means I had a chance to catch Alien for its 40th anniversary and Die Hard for its 30th. We’re just past the 20th anniversary of Hideo Nakata’s 1998 adaptation of Ring and Arrow Films have put out a stunning new restoration in collaboration with the original filmmakers. I picked up the box set they released that includes Ring 2, Ring Zero and the lesser seen Rasen/Spiral and while I haven’t checked them all out yet, I did manage to catch Ring at my usual cinema.

I ought to write up my experience revisiting the film after nearly twenty years – I’m fairly sure I haven’t seen it since the early 2000s, when I would have watched it on an old CRT. It’s perhaps the rare film that loses something in being on a giant screen, kind of the opposite of Tampopo and its wonderful opening sequence looking out from the ‘screen’ into an ’80s Japanese movie theatre. Even watching it at home on a Blu-Ray and a flatscreen television wouldn’t have the same impact. Whether or not I get around to writing a review, Dan Martin and Sam Ashurst of the Arrow Video Podcast have a great discussion of the film that I would highly recommend.

Review: The Vampire Doll (1970)

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Every now and again I stumble across a film whose premise is so fascinatingly odd thaThe-vampire-doll-postert I just have to see it. Japan’s Toho studio reacting to the success of British Hammer horror in the 1960s and putting out a loosely connected trilogy of Dracula-inspired vampire films? Sign me up. Like many of the more oddball Japanese titles I watch this came via Arrow Films, who put out a Blu-Ray collecting all three of the so-called ‘Bloodthirsty Trilogy’. I picked it up when I saw it in the January sales and then promptly forgot about it until indecisively browsing for something to watch on a chilly February night. This long-winded preamble to me sitting down to watch The Vampire Doll (1970) is, sadly, probably more entertaining than the film itself.

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Review: The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (1962)

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After being so pleasantly surprised with The Tale of Zatoichi and in particular Shintaro Katsu’s endearing performance as the titular blind masseuse and master swordsman, I tale of zatoichi continues posterwas keen to continue my “Zatoichi-gatsu” and watch the next entry in the series. I was also a little nervous: the series stretched to twenty-five films between 1962 and 1973, not counting later entries and remakes. Surely the quality would not be maintained for the duration, so it was just a question of when the drop would come. It was also not obvious whether a sequel would be an original story or merely a rehash of the first film; in watching many ongoing series from Japan’s 1960s and ‘70s like Outlaw Gangster: VIP or Lone Wolf and Cub, it’s clear that each film in the series follows a fairly rote formula, often with the same cast returning in “new” roles. Would The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (1963) buck that trend, or mark the start of a more formulaic martial arts film?

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Review: Godzilla: The Planet Eater (2018)

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Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a third time — and I’m godzilla planet eater posterpretty sure I’ve lost all moral high ground. In Godzilla: The Planet Eater, Netflix and Toho team back up to bore the ever-loving god out of me for a third and, hopefully, final time. Any wishful thinking that the third instalment might magically turn around the series after two utterly lethargic entries was misguided, and my hopes were very quickly dashed as The Planet Eater settled into a familiar rhythm of characters no one could possibly care about reciting pseudo-philosophy no one could possibly understand. Every criticism I’ve ever levelled against the series, from the stilted animation to the lack of action to the awful dialogue still applies. Nevertheless, I powered through and watched it, so here’s my review.

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Review: Nikkatsu Diamond Guys, vol. 2

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Tokyo Mighty Guy • Danger Pays • Murder Unincorporated

Earlier on the site, I reviewed three films from Nikkatsu’s golden years in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Presented in Arrow Films’ Nikkatsu Diamond Guys Collection vol. 1, I found Voice Without a Shadow to be a decent early taste of Seijun Suzuki, but Red Pier and The Rambling Guitarist were both pretty forgettable, aside from the latter’s unusual Hakodate setting. So when I sat down to watch the films from vol. 2, I wondered whether it was worth digging into each film with a meaty review. I could just binge all three, I figured, and recreate the feeling of watching what I expected to be pretty ephemeral, throwaway pieces of entertainment in the 1960s.

The irony is that vol. 2’s films are much more entertaining and stand out from a crowded field of mid-’60s yakuza films by being much more comedic in tone. It actually feels unusual that rote action films like Youth of the Beast or Massacre Gun get their own standalone release, but Arrow has chosen to practically hide away these gems on the second volume of it’s Diamond Guys series. Perhaps it’s that the directors or the films themselves lack name recognition (Buichi Saito is perhaps best known for his work on Lone Wolf and Cub, while Ko Nakahira’s 1956 film Crazed Fruit is critically acclaimed but he’s otherwise unknown in the West, and Noguchi is billed as a ‘new discovery’).

Nevertheless, I’m going to treat these films more as a ‘collection’ than I normally would. Below are the reviews I wrote up while working through the disc, first posted over on my Letterboxd feed. Here’s hoping that Arrow digs deeper into Nikkatsu’s expansive back catalogue and releases another volume of Diamond Guys in the future.

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Review: The Tale of Zatoichi (1962)

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I feel like I took a gamble on Zatoichi. It’s an old series whose legacy reaches far past the tale of zatoichi posteractual films, so I knew the basic premise of this blind swordsman from the ‘60s and ‘70s, even before the remake starring Beat Takeshi back in the early 2000s. I was hesitant to give the series a try, though, after struggling through six films of the seemingly similar Lone Wolf and Cub – and here was a series with twenty-five entries (and that’s just in the Criterion Collection, which sadly excludes the 1989 film also starring Shintaro Katsu, never mind the hundred-episode television show!). More or less totally unavailable in the UK, it was a moot point until Criterion brought their US collection over, and I finally rolled the dice.

Whether or not the rest of the series maintains the same level of craftsmanship is uncertain – or even unlikely – but the first film, Kenji Misumi’s The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) is a brilliant and surprisingly introspective drama rather than the schlocky martial arts exploitation film I expected. This is all the more surprising considering Misumi actually directed several of the Lone Wolf films that I disliked so intensely – and that Shintaro Katsu, who stars as the titular Zatoichi, is the younger brother of Tomisaburo Wakayama, most famous for his portrayal of Itto Ogami in Lone Wolf and Cub.

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Review: One Cut of the Dead (2017)

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I’m not sure when I first heard of Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead (2017) but it One Cut of the Dead Posterquickly grew to be one of my most anticipated Japanese films, and I watched it creep up the UK from London festival by festival until it finally arrived in Leeds. I’d heard all kinds of good things about it: that it was an excellent zombie comedy, that it featured an extremely long single take shot – the ‘one cut’ of the title. The praise was so effusive I was determined to see it, but I still didn’t really know what to expect. The rough plot outline that I had heard, and that I will share here again, is that a low budget zombie horror film is interrupted by actual zombies and the director is determined to incorporate the real attacks into his film – in Japanese, the title is カメラを止めるな！ or ‘Don’t stop the camera!’. While that’s a wonderful title, it only scratches the surface of what makes One Cut of the Dead great.

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