Noticias

“Only ignorant fools say ‘ninja.’” So claims Taki, the mysterious matron of the Tawara family, as she sternly corrects her grandson in the old ways. Played by veteran actress Nobuko Miyamoto, there’s much more to Grandma Taki than meets the eye. Such is the way of the world in Netflix’s new series, House of Ninjas. The proper term is “shinobi.” It’s what was used historically.

House of Ninjas is a new action dramedy that follows a modern-day shinobi family who has forsaken the lethal trade of their ancestors for a “normal” life. And like in every dramedy, the Tawaras are comically and tragically dysfunctional. The family patriarch, Soichi (Yosuke Eguchi) struggles to maintain a low-key profile whilst his wife Yoko (Tae Kimura) and daughter Nagi (Aju Makita) succumb to their old devious habits, stealing stuff just for the rush. Their thievery goes from grocery store shoplifting to museum art object theft.

Spoiler Alert: This story contains mild spoilers for “The Brothers Sun,” available to watch on Netflix now.

On May 22, 1992, three men brutally stabbed Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami outside his Tokyo home, just days after the release of his satire “Minbo no Onna,” or “Mob Woman.”

The director of “Tampopo” and “A Taxing Woman” suffered slash wounds across the face, neck and shoulder, but ultimately survived. Police suspected the attack may have been the yakuza’s retaliation for Itami’s “Mob Woman,” which portrays Japanese gangsters as crude bullies who are outsmarted by lawyer Mahiru Inoue (played by Itami’s wife Nobuko Miyamoto).

This assault inspired writer-producer Byron Wu to develop “The Brothers Sun,” the crime family dramedy starring Michelle Yeoh as matriarch Eileen “Mama” Sun, which premiered on Netflix early this year.

“I just thought it was so funny that these gangsters were so insecure about their jobs that they beat up a comedy director,...

Festivals

On Aug. 24, Ukraine independence day, the Venice Film Festival has revealed that it will host a Ukrainian Day on Sept. 8, as part of the festival’s Venice Production Bridge initiative. The day will kick off with a panel discussion introduced by the president of the Biennale, Roberto Cicutto, and the artistic director of the 79th festival, Alberto Barbera.

Panelists include the Ambassador of Ukraine to Italy, Yaroslav Melnyk; the head of the National Cinema Institution of Ukraine, Marina Kuderchuk; the director of the film “Luxembourg, Luxembourg” (which will screen in competition in the festival’s Horizons strand), Antonio Lukich; the director of the film “Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” (screening out of competition), Evgeny Afineevsky; the exhibiting artist in the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th Biennale Arte, Pavlo Makov; the curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th Biennale Arte, Boris Filonenko; the representative of Ukraine’s...

Mana Yasuda is a Japanese movie director and scriptwriter, member of the Japan Writers Guild. She started her career making 8mm films at the Kobe University Cinema Club. After she graduated from Kobe University, Yasuda worked for Panasonic for 10 years. In 2006, she directed and scripted her first commercial film; “The Switch to Happiness”, in which Juri Ueno and Kenji Sawada played the main roles. For this film, Yasuda received:

– Special woman Director Award at the 16th Japanese Movie Critics Award

– Best Script Award at the 2nd Osaka Cinema Festival.

After giving birth to a baby boy in 2006, Yasuda mainly worked on script-writing. During these years, there were many dramas with Yasuda’s script:

– “Yasashii Hana (A Tender Flower)”

– “Osaka Loop-line part2 Ashiharabashi Station — Dadada yuute Don”( Broadcasted on Kansai Television Co. Ltd.)

participated in the National Arts Festival by Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Yasuda came back to filming with...

Juzo Itami may be mostly known in the west for movies like “Tampopo” and “A Taxing Woman” but his most significant film is probably the current one, ” particularly because it was the first realistic movie about the practices of Yakuza. Alas, the repercussions of this portrayal were even direr than Itami expected. Yakuza considered the movie a scathing attack on their pride, and its realistic content apparently hit a sore spot with real gang members who, eventually, waited outside of Itami’s home and slashed him across his face with a knife. As per his own words in a New York Times interview, “They cut very slowly, they took their time. They could have killed me if they wanted to.” Furthermore, there are many who consider his alleged suicide on December 20, 1997, after a weekly magazine wrote about his extra-marital affair, a murder by the same gang who slashed his face,...

The Bloodthirsty Trilogy

Blu ray

Arrow Films

1970 – 1974 /2:35 / Street Date May 22, 2018

Starring Yukiko Kobayashi, Chôei Takahashi, Toshio Kurosawa

Cinematography by Kazutami Hara, Rokurô Nishigaki

Written by Ei Ogawa, Hiroshi Nagano

Directed by Michio Yamamoto

Hell-raising vampires invade the normally serene confines of Japanese cinema in three elegant 70’s shockers directed by Michio Yamamoto. Joining far-flung contemporaries like Jean Rollin, Harry Kümel and Stephanie Rothman, Yamamoto’s trilogy helped rejuvenate a genre always hungry for fresh blood.

In 1970’s The Vampire Doll, a restless spirit’s killing spree is the product of a tragic family secret – a storyline out of a Ross Hunter weepy with arterial spray taking the place of tears.

In search of her wayward brother and his girlfriend, Keiko arrives at a lonely country home only to find the sibling gone and his fiancee Yuko dead. Yuko’s saturnine mother is unusually tight-lipped about the circumstances surrounding her...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Abundant Acreage Available (Angus MacLachlan)

Faith-based cinema is as diverse a genre as there is, from the extreme, often violent portraits of devotion from established directors like Martin Scorsese and Mel Gibson, to the attacks on logic in the God’s Not Dead and Left Behind pictures. Angus MacLachlan, a great storyteller of the not-too-deep south, offers a nuanced example of what this genre can bring, returning with the moving Abundant Acreage Available.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Antichrist (Lars von Trier)

Like the majority of Lars von Trier films, from the first moments of Antichrist, one will be able to discern if it’s an experience they want to proceed with. For those will to endure its specific unpleasantness, there’s a poetic, affecting exploration of despair at its center. Chaos reigns, indeed. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: FilmStruck

Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly)

Last year marked...

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This April will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

To sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Monday, April 3 The Chaos of Cool: A Tribute to Seijun Suzuki

In February, cinema lost an icon of excess, Seijun Suzuki, the Japanese master who took the art of the B movie to sublime new heights with his deliriously inventive approach to narrative and visual style. This series showcases seven of the New Wave renegade’s works from his career breakthrough in the sixties: Take Aim at the Police Van (1960), an off-kilter whodunit; Youth of the Beast (1963), an explosive yakuza thriller; Gate of Flesh (1964), a pulpy social critique; Story of a Prostitute (1965), a tragic romance; Tokyo Drifter...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson)

Charlie Kaufman, the writer behind Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, teams up with animator Duke Johnson to create a complex emotional drama starring lifelike puppets. The premise is riddled with existential dread of modern-day life, presented uniquely through Kaufman’s idiosyncratic point-of-view. For protagonist and self-help author Michael Stone (voiced soulfully by David Thewlis), everyone around him has the same voice (thanks to...

I spent the weekend creating and updating enough financial spreadsheets to make my eyes cross. It's tax time, and this week, my favorite person is the accountant who will make sense of all these numbers and hopefully do magical yet legal things with them that will prevent me from having to write too ginormous a check to the IRS. I know I'm not the only one who's thinking happy thoughts about tax accountants and the nobility of their profession right now. As Max Bialystock says in The Producers (1968), the word "count" is in their title.

I remember watching The Producers as a teenager and thinking that I wanted to be anything in a life rather than an accountant. One of my favorite scenes in movies ever is that scene at the Lincoln Center fountain: "You think you're not in prison now? Living in a gray little room, going to a gray little job,...

Director Walter Hill.

Kicking Ass with Walter Hill

by Jon Zelazny

Action flicks. Two-fisted tales. Guy movies. Whatever you want to call them, writer, producer, and director Walter Hill is one of the living masters, with a resume full of classics from The Getaway (1972), to the Alien series, and the definitive eighties action-comedy blockbuster, 48 Hrs. (1982).

2009 marks the 30th anniversary of The Warriors (1979), Hill’s surreal “street gang on the run” cult classic, and his breakout success as a director.

Jon: A couple years ago, you did an audio commentary and on-camera intro for a new DVD edition of The Warriors. It was the first time I’d ever seen you; is it my imagination, or have you kept a low profile over the years?

Walter Hill: I’d never done a commentary before on one of my films. I don’t like the idea of explaining a movie; I...

By Craig Phillips Yet another in my series of fully biased reports on movies that are frustratingly absent a current DVD release here in the United States (the other two lists are here, and here.) Here are ten more neglected films -- and this is one article I wouldn't mind seeing become dated, when/if these films finally do arrive on disc:

The List of Adrian Messenger: I'll confess that I haven't seen this one since I was a pre-teen (on television one night), but it was one of the first mystery films I both really loved and even understood, aside from the 70s all-star Agatha Christie films. Even if there's a chance it's now dated, the pedigree -- director John Huston, actors Kirk Douglas, George C. Scott, Robert Mitchum, et al -- should alone be enough to get this one its due on DVD. A real head-scratcher that it's...