Grendel's abbreviated asian thread

I tried to read all the posts in the last one but load times were, for odd reasons, making me their unwilling bitch so here I am, HOPEFULLY not retreading too much of the ground covered in the LONG-ASS ASIAN FILM THREAD...

I checked this forum going back 60 days and I saw no mention of VERSUS, SAMURAI FICTION, or SHARKSKIN MAN AND PEACHFLOWER GIRL (or something akin to that), or, lastly, DOUBLE VISION and THE AUDITION.

Do these films exist only in my dimension, or have any of y'all out there seen them as well?

Of those I mentioned, I would recommend all of them, depending on who you are. The last two, DOUBLE VISION and AUDITION, are two that I definitely would not recommend to the faint of heart, stomach, or spiritual stamina. They are films that come prepared to fuck you, do so, jizz on your bloody, torn cheek, slap you with their cock, and leave the room after paying you in rupees.

Brutal, is what they are.

Not BATTLE ROYALE brutal, but brutal in far, far more subtle senses.

Oh, and since I am such a fan of the slants and nips in this thread (anyone about to go ballistically PC on me for the slants and nips thing: I've been gone, get to know me and you'll get how I can say this with no malice just as most people can say "my nigga" and not be saying it to someone carrying their bags) ANYONE in the WORLD should see TABOO (only the BEST gay samurai movie EVER...or perhaps the only...dammit) which is impeccably filmed and acted, and SWORD OF DOOM (if you can find it), which is a near-perfect character study that merely uses the samurai format to help define the gradations of good and evil, and the small slips which lead toward one and away from the other. Think (kind of) Paul Newman's performance in "Nobody's Fool", only with blood vendettas and Toshiro Mifune.

Sharkskin Man and PeachBlossom Girl (if that's the title) is just fucking fun, as is VERSUS (think the final Rowdy Roddy fight in THEY LIVE, but for several hours, with reincarnation, demonic powers, guns, swords, and in the deep woods...perhaps it could be called the BLAIR NIP PROJECT).


Anyhow, the most recent that I have seen was SAMURAI FICTION, which triply cracked me up (firstly: Jap comedy, secondly: samurai spoof done WELL) because the bad guy looks just like a good friend of mine's drug dealing boyfriend, only Japanese, yet the resemblance is more than uncanny, all the way down to the inscrutable moodiness. Heh heh heh.

So, reply away, PLEASE, as I have only potato-consuming neanderthals around me who don't watch such great works of art as these.

OHMYGOODGODDAMN!!!

You still exist and were not a figment of my imagination!!!

I...

...will private message you in a bit here. Something is burning with breakfast and I'm trying to teach Maddie to poop and both are happening at once.

Well, looking at that statement I realize the idiocy of it. Maddie KNOWS how to poop, I'm just trying to get her to do it in the toilet. Back soon.

-grens

How we see these films...

It entails a whole lot of searching if you live in a CITY-type-city, with Blockbuster and Hollywood videos being your primary rental locale. At the time I watched these I lived behind "The Redwood Curtain" in Humboldt County, WAAAY up on the North Coast of California where they do nothing but protest everything in a passive and ineffectual manner and smoke the chronic that, it seems, everyone there grows.

There is, in Arcata (pop.16,000 + 8,000 18-24 yr. old college students), a moratorium on major corporate growth in the town itself until something like 2009, which means no McD's, no KFC's, no Taco Bell, and no Blockbuster Video.

The result is two small chain stores owned locally, one called VX and the other called Figueredo's, both manned (and womanned) by film nut college students who, if they don't ALREADY have more foreign films than one could watch in a year of bedrest, will order whatever the hell you want because they want to see it too.

So, for a person living in a REAL city, that believes in commercial industry, etc., find out if you have a HASTINGS (like Borders, but more chaotic), and get a rental membership there. They (at least here in Boise) have all but two of the movies I mentioned.


-grens

ISAO: Your offense is duly noted and more care will be taken with my levity in the future. Note also: Half of my family is Asian, I grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore, I speak passable Japanese, and I studied Asian martial arts for going on thirteen years now. Whiteys, such as myself, are crackers, honkies, and trash in equal measure. We are also thieves, drug addicts, and pornographers, not to mention imperialists on a scale not seen since Tojo tried to take the Pacific Rim circa 1939-1945. Not everyone is good, not ANYone is all bad, and, as my extremely racist friend Thomas said after an African American saved his life from some white guys in a pot buy gone bad, "Y'know, I'm realizin' there's niggas in every race."

So, in closing: Gomen nasai. Sumimasen.

Heh heh heh to both of you.

And since we're on the topic, has the director of SAMURAI FICTION directed anything else of feature length since then (he's an MTV-JAPAN lensman prior)?

Or is this another film that exists only in my own imagination?

Sweet, thanks for the heads up.

All apologies for the extra thread, Dave.

I do, however, think that what the world needs is more jaunty ninja tales.