Midnight Eye. Samurai.

Well, "samurai" isn't the first word to leap to mind when you hear Shinji Aoyama, but much of the rest of the new issue of Midnight Eye cuts that way thematically. The "Round-Up," for example, is a "Rebel Samurai" special, the occasion being Criterion's release of Samurai Spy, Sword of the Beast, Samurai Rebellion and Kill!.

From Tom Mes's review of Alain Silver's The Samurai Film and Patrick Galloway's Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook (more), you'll find a link to Nicholas Rucka's "Samurai Cinema 101" of last year.

Robin Gatto argues that "if 'auteur directors' are to be found in artistic resistance to commercial dominion, then [Kenji] Misumi [more] deserves the right to be labeled an 'auteur.' His best jidai-geki display an elaborate visual language whose semi-abstraction often defied the commercial law of the time, which was to shoot entertainment pictures as fast as possible."

Then there are the reviews:

• Tom Mes on Eiichi Kudo's The Great Killing, "one of the finest examples of how directly the chanbara spoke about what was going on in the streets of Tokyo during the 1960s."

• Mes looks at a new one as well, Year One in the North, which sees director Isao Yukisada "unimaginatively tracing the contours of what he thinks an epic should look like."

• And Mes reviews Aoyama's latest, Eli Eli Lema Sabachtani? - not a samurai film, but rather, a "07-minute meditation on how noise music can save mankind from certain doom, especially when played really loud."

Which brings us back to Nicholas Rucka's interview in which he asks Aoyama about the influence of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and about his own technique; and, when it comes to his reputation as a maker of "dark" movies, Aoyama insists he keeps trying to make a comedy, "but it never happens. I wonder if there's something in me that's stopping this?"

Posted by dwhudson at October 24, 2005 9:57 AM