30. Lady Snowblood Part 1 and Part 2
While American comic books have struggled for legitimacy as adult entertainment for decades, their Japanese counterparts have long enjoyed acceptance as legitimate elements of mainstream culture. So while the American comic book movie only properly took off in the last fifteen years, jidaigeki adaptations of popular manga have been a staple of Japanese pulp cinema since the early 1970s. The best of these remains Lady Snowblood, director Toshiya Fujita’s two part revenge opera of a woman checking off a kill list of the gangsters who killed her family and left her for dead. Any familiarity to Kill Bill is entirely intentional, with multiple visuals, soundtrack elements and plot points lifted whole cloth by Tarantino. But even for those only familiar with the update, Fujita’s films remain feats of hard edged efficiency, actress Meiko Kaji a goddess of death in a world of opposing colors and sudden violence.
While American comic books have struggled for legitimacy as adult entertainment for decades, their Japanese counterparts have long enjoyed acceptance as legitimate elements of mainstream culture. So while the American comic book movie only properly took off in the last fifteen years, jidaigeki adaptations of popular manga have been a staple of Japanese pulp cinema since the early 1970s. The best of these remains Lady Snowblood, director Toshiya Fujita’s two part revenge opera of a woman checking off a kill list of the gangsters who killed her family and left her for dead. Any familiarity to Kill Bill is entirely intentional, with multiple visuals, soundtrack elements and plot points lifted whole cloth by Tarantino. But even for those only familiar with the update, Fujita’s films remain feats of hard edged efficiency, actress Meiko Kaji a goddess of death in a world of opposing colors and sudden violence.
- 9/2/2015
- by Staff
- SoundOnSight
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