“a sequence that finds Miike holding his own against any Kurosawa, Inagaki or Leone set piece”
truly.
HDNet Movies is playing it tomorrow night at 8 pm ET.
My wife works that night
I am so bummed. 
Isn’t that usually grounds for celebration?
lol
I have a kid and I can’t justify a sitter for this. I was excited about seeing 13 Assassins in a real live movie theater on a big screen (with some old fencing buddies even) but not this time. No worries. The film will come to me. They always do…
[QUOTE=GeneChing;1091778]I have a kid and I can’t justify a sitter for this. I was excited about seeing 13 Assassins in a real live movie theater on a big screen (with some old fencing buddies even) but not this time. No worries. The film will come to me. They always do…[/QUOTE]
That’s what Grandmas are for!
Grandma is too far away
And it’s a school night. To add insult to injury, my wife leaves for a week working at a zen center the following Monday, so I’ll be a single parent for a week.
No worries. I’ll see this eventually. A review DVD is sure to cross my desk in due time.
Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai
Indie Focus: Takashi Miike picks up a genre’s sword for ‘13 Assassins’
The filmmaker behind ‘Audition’ and ‘Ichi the Killer’ charges into the samurai movie tradition.
By Mark Olsen, Special to the Los Angeles Times
April 24, 2011
In the waning days of Japan’s feudal era, an army marches into a village and is ambushed by a small band of samurai determined to topple the merciless lord leading the much larger force. As “13 Assassins” moves toward its dazzling, dizzyingly over-the-top climactic battle sequence, it gains a momentum of startling inevitability, as if these events simply must come to pass. The lengthy frenzy of blood, mud, arrows, swordplay and honor righteously defended that ensues is furious, intense and unrelenting.
Takashi Miike’s first take on Japan’s venerable samurai genre, “13 Assassins” is a remake of Eiichi Kudo’s 1963 movie of the same name and adheres with an unexpected faithfulness to the story and structure of the original.
Miike, 50, an outlandishly prolific filmmaker credited with more than 80 films since the early 1990s, has become a fixture of the international festival circuit and is known to American audiences for the flamboyant visual style and subversive humor of such genre-hopping films as 1999’s “Audition,” 2001’s “Ichi the Killer” and 2007’s “Sukiyaki Western Django.”
In “13 Assassins,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles and is already available on video-on-demand, he surprises by playing the action with a straight face. But Miike still finds a way to include idiosyncratic imagery, such as a haunting look upon a woman who has been mercilessly disfigured by the film’s villain or the odd humor of flaming cattle rampaging through the village’s narrow streets.
The young feudal lord (played by Japanese pop star and actor Goro Inagaki) brandishes his power to rape and kill with impunity. With the ways of the samurai on the wane and many onetime warriors reduced to serving as government functionaries, an aging samurai (popular actor Koji Yakusho) assembles a small band of fighters to avenge one of the lord’s victims. In a way, they are following the code of the samurai to bring an end to the era of the samurai, hoping for one last heroic battle in which to die with honor.
Much as many U.S. directors might harbor a not-so-secret desire to make a western, with that genre a means to explore the American psyche and national expansion, Miike noted that the samurai movie occupies a similar space for Japanese filmmakers.
“I would say westerns and samurai films are similar,” said Miike, speaking by phone from Tokyo. “What is similar is a sense of older values, and I think how we often have a desire to hold onto these values. And like westerns the audience is mainly male; men who want to see the kind of men they want to be, strong and living up to expectations.”
Though there are many parallels between samurai films and westerns portraying a violent, honor-bound world of male-oriented aggression there are key distinctions.
“There are a lot of similarities, in terms of the genre and the place the genre has, but the western is so about the lone individual taking a stand, and samurai movies only exist in a social context,” said Grady Hendrix, a co-founder and co-director of the New York Asian Film Festival, which has shown numerous Miike films over the years. "The western is about the West; it’s big, and it’s unlimited. Samurai, that’s a job title. It’s like a salaryman movie; it’s middle management with a sword instead of a suit.
“Certainly in Japanese cinema the samurai film looms large, kind of like the western does in the sense it is a really hidebound, stilted, rule-heavy genre,” Hendrix added. “I think a lot of directors view it as a challenge to see what they can do within those limitations.”
Miike was only 3 when the original “13 Assassins” was released. He had never seen it until approached by producers about two years ago with the idea of a remake. Though the samurai film, like the western, comes in and out of fashion, Miike noted there has been a resurgence of interest lately.
Many recent samurai films, Miike contends, have been "made for what a modern audience wants. So this means part of the story is taking the connections between modern-day men and women and putting them into a historical context, a modern-day love story shown in the past.
“Of course, our movie is not that kind of story. We try to look at what life was really like 200 years ago. ‘13 Assassins’ is sort of more true to what a samurai movie really is.”
After avoiding the genre for so long, Miike has already taken on a second samurai picture: “Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai,” his remake of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 classic, “Harakiri,” will premiere next month at the Cannes Film Festival in a prestigious slot in the main competition and is his first work in 3-D.
Despite the recent boomlet of samurai films, Miike said one of the biggest challenges was that many of the technicians and behind-the-scenes craftspeople who used to make such movies are no longer working; even getting enough horses for bigger scenes can be difficult. In a way, he added, “13 Assassins” turned out to be a history lesson both on and off screen.
The film, he said, was a vehicle to “teach the next generation of filmmakers how to make this movie and not lose this art.”
Wow - Harakiri was a classic samurai film. I never saw the original 13 Assassins but you can’t call yourself a fan of chanbara and have missed Harakiri. Got to start a new thread on that right now.
Opens today
Limited release - boxofficemojo.com says only 3 theaters.
‘13 Assassins’ review: Samurai undertake a desperate mission
Published: Friday, April 29, 2011, 8:33 AM
Stephen Whitty
The great thing, typically, about a Takashi Miike film is that there’s no such thing as a typical Takashi Miike film.
Creepy, psychosexual horror? Yes, he did that in “Audition.” But then there’s the over-the-top splatter crime of “Ichi the Killer.” The goofy superhero story “Zebraman.” And even a children’s fantasy, “The Great Yokai War.”
His films — even the lightest ones — are often violent, and all of them are deeply connected to Japanese culture, both high and low. But apart from that — and his own determination to, first, serve the story — they’re all over the place.
And while that can make them hard for critics to characterize, it makes them wonderful surprises for audiences.
Miike’s new “13 Assassins” is another unconventional one. That’s because it embraces convention, remaking an Eiichi Kudo film from 1963, and looking back even further to the postwar Akira Kurosawa movies that helped re-establish Japanese cinema.
Set in 1844, it begins as a degenerate sadist emerges as the Shogun’s obvious heir — and his own nation’s worst enemy. So 12 samurai — aided, eventually, by one grimy little bandit — decide to kill him. Of course, they’ll have to take out his 200-strong personal army first.
It’s a desperate mission, almost destined to end in death — just the way the samurai like it.
The central idea of “13 Assassins” — that samurai would risk their lives, not for a feudal lord, but for such an amorphous concept as “the nation” — is a radical one, at least in the context of old Japan. So Miike has to establish just how despicable this villain is.
Movie Review
13 Assassins (R) Magnet (126 min.) Directed by Takashi Miike. With Koji Yakusho. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Now playing in New York.
Rating note: The film contains extreme violence and nudity..
Stephen Whitty’s Review: THREE STARS
Luckily, no one is better at dramatizing that kind of queasy sadism. There’s a brutal beheading early on, and an episode of sexual mutilation no American director would dare touch (although it honestly wouldn’t have been out of place in “Titus Andronicus”).
Yet for the rest of the film — even as dozens of nameless warriors are being slain — a kind of restraint prevails.
We hear the nauseating sounds of hara-kiri, but don’t see the details. Swords whip back and forth across the screen and blood flows like water, but this isn’t a film of entrails. (As in most samurai movies, the individual duels are over within moments.)
But then Miike’s interest here is in those classic tales (and the modern Westerns they sometimes inspired). Old friends become honored enemies. Young wastrels seek to redeem themselves through duels. Villains are dispatched with a terse “See you in hell.”
The film has a slow and confusing start (worsened by the fact that most of the early characters are interchangeable middle-aged men with identical costumes and haircuts). Characterization is rudimentary, and the subtitles could be better. (“Listen up”? I don’t think so.)
But Koji Yakusho gives a noble performance as the samurai leader, and the film’s climax — as the two forces face off in a deserted, booby-trapped village — has a kind of crazy grandeur to it. Two determined armies, fighting hand to hand, sometimes with sticks and stones, while everything around them burns to the ground.
It looks like a nightmare but it feels like real life. Kind of like most Miike movies.
Sanguineous
Saw it last night at the Nuart.
Swords Drip Red With Revenge
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: April 28, 2011
A stirring, unexpectedly moving story of love and blood, the samurai movie “13 Assassins” opens with a dignified man seated alone in a large courtyard. Perfectly centered in the shot, he says nothing, his face a ferocious mask. But words are immaterial given his open shirt and the blade in his hand. The Japanese director Takashi Miike has no qualms about letting the red run down the screen. Here, though, instead of showing the blade sinking in, he moves in closer, letting the scene play out in the man’s crumbling face, the gray sky framing him as the moist, tearing sounds of the knife doing its terrible work fill the air.
View Clip…
Set at the close of the Edo period, not long before the Meiji restoration, “13 Assassins” is at once a tale of revenge and liberation, though it takes a little while to grasp the stakes. Mr. Miike, a jaw-droppingly prolific director who makes several movies a year and is perhaps best known in America for shockers like “Audition” and “Ichi the Killer,” plunges right into the action in “13 Assassins.” Initially that action is mostly bureaucratic and a question of strategy, one worked out by men plotting in darkened rooms, like the council of elders who convene after the ritual suicide and set the narrative on its course.
The dead man, it emerges, has committed seppuku to protest the baroquely barbaric excesses of Lord Naritsugu (a fantastic Goro Inagaki), the shogun’s half brother, who’s poised to assume even greater power. Pretty, petty and very likely insane, with a lazy walk and small twitchy smile, Naritsugu is the embodiment of outré imperial decadence. He doesn’t just rape the wife of a minion, he also murders her husband in front of her, hacking at the poor man’s (off-screen) body and lopping off the head with so much force it rolls across the floor. Later, during another convulsion of violence, while murdering a family, Naritsugu will kick a ball across a court and still later will boot another severed head in similar fashion. For him it’s all the same.
These cruelties and others serve as the evidence against Naritsugu, justifying the ensuing violence that will wash blood away with blood. This sanguineous deluge comes, but all in good time because first Mr. Miike has to round up his avengers, the 13 warriors of the film’s title. It’s a sign of difficult samurai times that the leader of the group, Shinzaemon Shimada (the great Koji Yakusho), enters perched on a fishing ladder, a pole in his hand. It’s unclear if he’s fishing for food or leisure, but the point is that he’s fishing, not fighting, having resigned himself to a quiet twilight. Like the not especially dirty dozen he assembles, Shinzaemon finds purpose in battle: he becomes a samurai again, with a flashing and wet sword.
Mr. Miike doesn’t offer a history lesson in “13 Assassins,” a remake of a 1963 film of the same title directed by Eiichi Kudo. But for those not schooled in Japan’s past (or period movies), it helps to know that during the relatively peaceful Edo period (roughly 1615 to 1868) the role of the samurai changed as the way of the warrior became the way of the heavily controlled and bureaucratized warrior. Rather than pile on the details or on-screen exegesis, the screenwriter Daisuke Tengan (working from an original story by Shoichirou Ikemiya) instead sketches in the historical context with bits of meaningful dialogue, as when Shinzaemon ruefully explains that he had all but given up on having a noble death. Needless to say, he gets his chance.
After assembling an initial team of 11, Shinzaemon heads out after Naritsugu. The journey is difficult, meandering and pleasurably eccentric, as a short fight with the opposition leads to an extended lope through a deep forest. There they pick up an unexpected addition, Koyata (Yusuke Iseya), the final assassin whom they find imprisoned in a basket dangling from a tree. A broadly comic figure, covered in dirt and rags, the rubber-limbed Koyata provides some of the movie’s easier laughs, but on the battlefield proves a fighter-philosopher. In the end, when bodies and blood cover every inch of ground, he shows that the way of the warrior isn’t a romantic and diverting fiction but an emblem of a harrowing, brutal reality.
13 ASSASSINS
Opens on Friday in New York, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas.
Directed by Takashi Miike; written by Daisuke Tengan, based on a story by Shoichirou Ikemiya; director of photography, Nobuyasu Kita; edited by Kenji Yama****a; music by Koji Endo; art director, Yuji Hayashida; costumes by Kazuhiro Sawataishi; produced by Michihiko Umezawa, Minami Ichikawa, Toichiro Shiraishi, Takahiro Ohno, Hirotsugu Yoshida and Shigeji Maeda; released by Magnet Releasing. In Manhattan at the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Koji Yakusho (Shinzaemon Shimada), Takayuki Yamada (Shinrokuro), Yusuke Iseya (Koyata), Goro Inagaki (Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira), Masachika Ichimura (Hanbei Kitou), Mikijiro Hira (Sir Doi), Hiroki Matsukata (Kuranaga) and Ikki Sawamura (Mitsuhashi).
pretty interesting interview. i want to see the kid ninja film he is talking about.
Takashi Miike on his Samurai epic, ‘13 Assassins’
The prolific Japanese genre maestro discusses arguably his greatest work
Japan’s Takashi Miike is one of the world’s most prolific filmmakers, having made an average of three films a year since 1991. He is best known in the UK for his 1999 J-horror shocker ‘Audition’ and his gleefully violent Manga adaptation, ‘Ichi the Killer’ (2001), though he prides himself on not being shackled to a genre or audience. His new samurai film, ‘13 Assassins’, was premiered to acclaim at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, while his next, ‘Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai’, has a competition slot at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.
‘13 Assassins’ is a remake of a 1963 film by Eiichi Kudo. Do you recall the first time you saw it?
‘The film was released when I was three years old, so I didn’t see it when it first came out. It’s a popular work among samurai movie fans. When I was locked in to the remake, I watched the original for the first time. What impressed me was the power and energy that the film industry in Japan had at that time. But what saddened me was the sense that we had lost the ability to make films like this. We didn’t have any stunt horses in Japan when we started this film. Over half of the 13 assassins had never held a sword.’
Do you see yourself as a connoisseur of samurai stories?
‘Not really. I can honestly say that I have probably watched fewer films than any director in the world. Sure, I like to go out and buy a beer and drink it while watching a movie on a Friday night. But watching a movie for work? As a reference? No thanks.’
When you talk about old-fashioned Japanese filmmaking, the work of Akira Kurosawa comes to mind.
‘It was important for me to make the film in an old style, not rely on modern day techniques like CGI or flashy editing. And no romantic subplots! Over the years, people have remade Kurosawa movies – but have failed because they’ve been unable to adapt the story so that young audiences can appreciate it. Plenty of young people came to see “13 Assassins” in Japan and enjoyed it, but I imagine they had to work a little harder than they usually do.’
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It was made in collaboration with British producer Jeremy Thomas, a great champion of Asian cinema.
‘I don’t think I can say enough about how important Jeremy was to this film. I first met him at Venice when we presented “Sukiyaki Western Django” in 2007. He said, “I haven’t seen all your films, but I’ve seen enough of them to know that you make great movies. Here’s a book that I own the rights to – I want you to make it.” I was floored. He was so cool! He was very helpful with the script and in the edit. At the same time, he did what all good producers do: keep the people who were trying to interfere off my back.’
You work at an incredible rate. Are you usually planning your next film while making the current one?
‘I plan the next film during post-production. I don’t allow myself to think about the next one while shooting. I am often asked what the average shoot time is for me. I used to shoot a lot of films in two weeks. “Audition” was three weeks. I don’t aim to make lots of movies. It’s just my pace. Since “13 Assassins”, I have made two, a children’s ninja school action film called “Nintama Rantaro” and an orthodox period piece like “13 Assassins” called “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai”.’
Author: Interview: David Jenkins
Nintama Rantaro Teaser.
This so deserves it’s own thread
Nintama Rantaro thread - used the admin copy function to clone your post, wenshu. 
U.S version cuts 25 minutes
‘13 Assassins’: 1 of 2 big Takashi Miike remakes
G. Allen Johnson, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Takashi Miike has been making films for 20 years (83 in total), and only now is becoming something other than a cult favorite.
This month, he has a film in the Cannes Film Festival’s official competition for the first time (“Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai”), and his fierce, impressive throwback samurai picture “13 Assassins” opens in the Bay Area.
At age 50, after years of direct-to-video films, low-budget gangster movies and bizarre cult items (“Ichi the Killer”), Takashi is Japan’s top director, and its most famous.
“It’s not my goal to make so many movies,” Takashi said via Skype from Tokyo through an interpreter. “It’s just sort of a natural process, and I’m just doing my job. And I’m not tied to any genre; I’m willing to do anything. I just keep going.”
“13 Assassins” is a remake of a 1963 Japanese movie. There is an evil lord who threatens to drive the shogunate into a bloody, unnecessary war; a group of samurai band together with the single mission of killing the lord, and probably themselves in the process, thus saving the empire.
Starring Koji Yakusho (“Shall We Dance?”), it is an epic film with a masterfully directed 45-minute climactic battle.
“In terms of scale and the sheer logistics, particularly the big battle scene, (‘13 Assassins’) shows such a huge step forward for Miike - not only in what he can do, but also in what he is allowed to do by the industry,” said Tom Mes, author of “Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike” and co-founder of the Japanese film website MidnightEye.com, in an e-mail to The Chronicle.
"He has shown in the past that he can overcome any hurdles and unexpected calamities when shooting and end up with a very impressive film. … The main set for ‘Sukiyaki Western Django’ was blown away by a typhoon halfway through the shoot. He has proven his mettle artistically and logistically, and I believe this is why he is now the sole director in Japan capable of successfully mounting a movie of the scale of ‘13 Assassins.’ "
Takashi is known for explicitly depraved sequences, and if it seems he’s been held in check in “13 Assassins,” consider that 25 minutes (including a graphic rape scene) were cut from the original Japanese version for this U.S. release. Still, Takashi does seem to be moving toward a more classic feel: “Hara-Kiri” is also a remake of an early 1960s Japanese film.
“I think that Japanese movies made at that time were much more interesting and more powerful,” Takashi said. “For over half of the actors (of ‘13 Assassins’), it was their first time fighting with a sword. We had to train them. And of course, they didn’t have any experience riding horses. … So they were fighting for their lives as characters, but also as actors as well!”
As he enters his second half-century, Takashi is going strong. Any advice for the rest of us on how to keep up with such a busy schedule?
“Drink a lot and smoke a lot, like I do!” he laughs.
Well, I could probably skip the graphic rape scene as Miike has traumatized my retinas enough with his horrific visions already, but still, that’s a lot of footage.
Best. Samurai Film. Ever. (IMO).
10/10.
*Add: There was one thing I won’t mention that left a question mark for me, but other than that, I can’t really find much to fault with the movie. I felt it lived up to the hype.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/13-assassins,1178290/critic-review.html
Although some of the newer Japanese movies are in the “Crouching Tiger” style (i.e., wirework, etc., etc.), I find it odd but sadly predictable that this reviewer can’t seem to distinguish between the Japanese samurai and Chinese wuxia or kung fu genres. Kinda like confusing German and Italian cinema as being one and the same. It marrs an otherwise fine review.
*I don’t know how to transfer (or whatever the process is called) the article like Gene does.
Just gut and paste the article…
…I usually put it in quotes, then hypertext the title of the article to the original source. YOU MUST ALWAYS CREDIT YOUR SOURCE.
The DVD and BRD drops July 5th. We’ll see what we can do about that here. 
What we can do about that here
Enter to win a 13 Assassins on DVD! Contest ends 6:00 p.m. PST on 07/14/2011. Good luck everyone!
This DVD/BRD, which drops July 5th, has some the deleted scenes cut out of the U.S. version, including the deleted rape scene. I’m not sure if it has all 25 minutes but it has a lot. Most of the deleted scenes were trim for time, and they set it up well on the DVD so it begins with rather boring cutting room floor extras, moves to the rape scene which goes a completely different direction than I was expecting - after the amputee scene (which scarred my brain like only Miike can) I was wary of watching this but after watching it, well, it was a totally Miike character development scene that really adds to the film. Then the extras go on to deleted battle scenes, which of course, is the best part. The battles of more of the 13 have greater detail.
[QUOTE=Jimbo;1101266]Best. Samurai Film. Ever. (IMO).
10/10.
*Add: There was one thing I won’t mention that left a question mark for me, but other than that, I can’t really find much to fault with the movie. I felt it lived up to the hype.[/QUOTE]
mention it with a big SPOILER on top, im curious.
I just got it on DVD.
One thing I noticed is that there is a slight flicker in the picture, more in certain scenes than others. I noticed that flicker even more when I saw it in the theater a while back. I wonder if that was an intentional technique used my Miike, perhaps to give a feeling reminiscent of watchning old movies in theaters?