Easy peasy, Japanesey1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWith cult director Takeshi Miike’s jidai-geki (that’s Japanese for period dramas) samurai epic 13 Assassins – a remake of Eiichi Kudo’s 1963 black-and-white Japanese film of the same name Jusan-Nin No Shikaku – opening in cinemas tomorrow, coupled with the upcoming Japanese Film Festival Singapore (July 2 to 10 at the Gallery Theatre, National Museum Of Singapore), we’re expecting a not-so-small group of fans to commence geeking out.
Japanese cinema is exceptionally inimitable, and has been rabidly popular, boasting legions of die-hard aficionado geek fans and constantly intriguing the rest of the film-making world. Why the constant fascination with Japanese cinema?
Japanese film expert Donald Richie once wrote that Japanese cinema is “singular in its closeness to popular literature”, with an identity that is “more constructed than discovered”. And while Japanese films often feature violent humour and sex, the violence is seen as “an aesthetic spectacle, the patterns of disorder are composed into compositions which filter the excitement and render beauty from chaos.”
So in other words, unlike Lindsay Lohan, there is a method to the madness.
