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

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Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Assassin (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964)

Tetsuro Tanba in Assassin

Cast: Tetsuro Tanba, Shima Iwashita, Eiji Okada, Isao Kimura, Tamotsu Hayakawa, Eitaro Ozawa, Fujio Suga, Muga Takewaki, Takanobu Hozumi, Hideo Kidokoro, Tetsuji Takechi, Gen Shimizu. Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada, based on a book by Ryotaro Shiba. Cinematography: Masao Kosuji. Art direction: Junichi Osumi. Film editing: Eiichi Amano. Music: Toru Takemitsu. 

Masahiro Shinoda's Assassin (also known as Assassination and Ansastsu) is the story of Hachiro Kiyakawa (Tetsuro Tanba), an enigmatic figure who played both sides in the conflict between the Tokugawa shogunate and the imperial forces in 1860s Japan. Tanba gives a commanding performance, and the film is distinguished by Masao Kosuji's cinematography and Toru Takemitsu's score, but Shinoda's decision to tell the story in flashbacks is a challenge to anyone not well-versed in Japanese history, even though he provides several screenfuls of background text at the beginning of the film. 

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