| Zach Staads | Kuroneko plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, October 10 to Sunday, October 12. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. “We are all unwavering bands of light.” – Kurt Vonnegut I’ve used this quote at the top with almost no context for where… Continue reading
|Noah Frazier| The beginnings and ends of movies often function as microcosms of the whole, enclosing the film’s central ideas within a few shots. Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai opens on a silhouette of a pigeon flying across a dark blue sky. After softly mumbling through the background… Continue reading
|John Moret| The samurai film is, in essence, a very conservative genre in the same realm as the western or horror film. Before you freak out, I don’t mean conservative in terms of politics (though, really…) but in form. The conventional film would witness a ronin finding his honor after losing his way… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| Way back in cable television’s Mesozoic era—when networks like the Independent Film Channel showed, you know, independent films, in the wee hours of Saturday morning right as Friday night’s winos and third-shifters were drifting off to sleep—one could… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| Looking at the history of cinema, I gravitate the most toward the works produced in the golden age of Japanese cinema during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although I’m not overly fond of Westerns, a lot of samurai films have been heavily influenced by them. Even Akira Kurosawa took… Continue reading
|John Moret| Ronin, noun, historical (in feudal Japan): a wandering samurai who had no lord or master.
On a wintry day in 2012, a friend and I met for our weekly movie and lunch meetup. It was his choice that week and he brought a new release from the Criterion Collection, Three Outlaw Continue reading
