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The everyday mechanics of gangster life - throat slittings, Frisbee and golf games, an eccentric boss who goes on paleontology digs as a hobby - take a backseat to Kurosawa’s dark meditations on culpability. An icy, deadpan mood dominates both movies, along with a strong undercurrent of sadomasochism and a sickening whiff of child-molestation fantasy. Eyes of the Spider turns the tables by casting actor Aikawa as the murdered girl’s father, taking revenge on the yakuza by joining a rival gang and whacking his tormentors in the approved gangland-assassination manner.įilm-school quotes and odd grace notes run through both films: the Goodfellas-style thump in the car trunk in Serpent’s Path that film’s comic golf-course snatch, and the dead-eyed female bodyguard known as The Cripple the little girl math prodigy in Nijima’s classroom the vision of Mitsuko’s ghost in Eyes of the Spider and the misfired country-road hit on Kinsei the crime boss. In Serpent’s Path, Aikawa plays a deceptively quiet math professor named Nijima who helps the dead girl’s father, a low-level hood named Miyashita (Teruyuki Kagawa), gain revenge by grabbing first one, then a string of yakuza, chaining each one to a wall in an abandoned factory, and then starving/beating a confession out of him - all in vain, as it turns out. Both films describe the aftermath of the same horrific crime: the kidnapping, rape, and murder of an eight-year-old girl, whose ordeal was evidently videotaped by the gangsters who later buried her.
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The two films star actor Sho (also called Show) Aikawa, a stoic tough guy with a face like an Easter Island monolith - if the monolith wore black shades. The latter two were made as a linked pair, as were the two the PFA will screen Friday night: Eyes of the Spider and Serpent’s Path (1998), both nominally yakuza dramas, but both outfitted with Kurosawa’s spooky, unsettling touch. His biggest impact so far has been in horror films, exemplified by the 1998 crime thriller Cure (which will play for a week at the Shattuck starting Friday, September 21), and in such yakuza updates as The Revenge: A Visit from Fate and The Revenge: The Scar That Never Fades (both from 1996). Kurosawa is touted as a genre-manipulator who works fast, cranking out two or more films per year.
KUROSAWA THIS IS THE POLICE 2 SERIES
Cosponsored by the Consulate General of Japan and the Japan Foundation as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the US-Japan peace treaty, the concise nine-film traveling series spotlights works by directors Naoto Takenaka, Kunitoshi Manda, Akihiro Suzuki, Yutaka Tsuchiya, Tomoyuki Furuyama, and Toshiaki Toyoda, but Kurosawa (no relation to AK) gets the lion’s share of the attention - and he deserves it. The revered Japanese international master died in 1998, but there’s another Kurosawa making a bid for overseas respectability these days: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a 46-year-old filmmaker prominently featured in the “Neo-Eiga: New Japanese Cinema” mini-series now underway at the Pacific Film Archive.
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Clearly, Kurosawa has long since left the house.Īkira Kurosawa, that is. On the mass-market side, the only recent Japanese film to make much of a dent here was Takao Okawara’s self-consciously parodic monster mash, Gojira Ni-Sen Mireniamu (1999) aka Godzilla 2000.
KUROSAWA THIS IS THE POLICE 2 MOVIE
The biggest Japanese crossover movie to hit US art houses in the past five years was Masayuki Suo’s 1996 Shall We Dance?, a sweet and harmless romantic comedy about lonely people finding love at a ballroom dance studio. Faced with stiff competition in the marketplace from imported Hollywood blockbusters, Japan appears at first glance to have traded its rich film heritage for a mixed bag of fanciful-but-empty animé productions, redundant made-for-TV samurai dramas and gangster pics, the occasional tongue-in-cheek super-monsters sequel, and a relatively scant supply of offbeat indie items. In common with national cinemas all over the world, the Japanese film industry has seemed fairly nebulous the past few years - at least from the American perspective.