Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/05/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967)

Annu Mari and Joe Shishido in Branded to Kill

Cast: Joe Shishido, Mariko Ogawa, Annu Mari, Koji Nanbara, Isao Tamagawa, Hiroshi Minami. Screenplay: Hachiro Guryu, Mitsutoshi Ishigami, Takeo Kimura, Chusei Sone, Atsushi Yamatoya. Cinematography: Kazue Nagatsuka. Art direction: Motozo Kawahara. Film editing: Akira Suzuki. Music: Naozumi Yamamoto.

Seijun Suzuki' s favorite leading man, chipmunk-cheeked Joe Shishido, plays a hitman who gets sexually charged by the smell of boiling rice. He also falls afoul of the yakuza and a mysterious woman who is fascinated by butterflies. And that's only the beginning of Suzuki's wildly fascinating cult film, which got the director fired from Nikkatsu Studios. Inspired in part by the James Bond movies, Suzuki's film has been cited as an influence on directors like John Woo and Quentin Tarantino, but it's very much its own thing.