Popular reviews

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  Review by pirateneckbeard ★★★½ 13

  I found this interesting from a director that mainly used the samurai past to have this updated in a certain 60's modernity and that age of commitment to establish there dreams which at times seems a norm with Soto and Ohtani contracts where this level of determination equals social inadequacies to the level we will never know some greats that ruined there lives to achieve that we will never see. I feel one of my constant sad quotes of Ginsberg is ”I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked."
  Sorry that was a long build up cause this does have a unique story that fluctuates two gifted kendo swordsmen in school with two different…

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  Review by NECC_ ★★★½

  Ken is about obsession and how it can affect someone. A story about repressed homosexuality with a great performance by Raizō Ichikawa, beautiful to look at and a delightful score.

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  Review by Elliot ★★★★ 3

  The agony and ecstasy of ascetic discipline. Sadomasochistic and homoerotic impulses channeled into an ideal of martial orderliness and spiritual self-abnegation. All Yukio Mishima’s myriad contradictions, distilled into tense black & white widescreen compositions. The second entry in Kenji Misumi's Trilogy of the Sword is a radical departure from the classic chanbara format of its predecessor, feeling more of a piece with the early films of the Japanese New Wave than it does with Misumi’s own Lone Wolf & Cub or Zatoichi movies. In fact, it’s the only one of his 60+ films to have a contemporary setting. Shot in cool and precise monochrome, Ken takes a cold, distanced view of its subject. Is Jiro Kokubu (Raizō Ichikawa) a hero or a…

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  Review by noma ★★★

  all i wanted was a cool black belt and a martial arts program without all the funny live-or-die bits! no one thought kendo, a form that uses bamboo swords and body armour, would require such blind faith and bloodthirsty, regressive adherence to rules and modes that came before, almost incongruous to the shifting tides of western appeal and modern inventions. no one included these shifty elements in all the ground-rule guidebooks or pamphlets regarding kendo i ever read... and yet here we are, and here i am, me, standing in the middle of a long line of kendo students forming a perfect square (because of course, kendo only ever requires the best and the most precise) of willful listeners that…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★ 5

  General spoilers for both Ken and The Strange One in the last paragraph.

  Kenji Misumi's Ken feels like a funhouse mirror version of The Strange One. Though in the earlier film, Jocko is a gleeful sadist who indulges in all of the hedonist pursuits eschewed by the asceticism of Jiro Kokubun in Ken, both movies are set in fiercely masculine, violent, emotionally incestuous worlds riven by forbidden desire. And, even more importantly, both lead characters, despite their diametrically opposed ways of life, cling to the present with a desperation neither would ever acknowledge.

  Both men have identities and power within their current worlds; outside of them, they are nothing. In The Strange One Jocko is a proud villain, hiding his…

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  Review by Noah Cassidy ★★★

  Young men today are no good.

  Another film that was watched because it's pretty short and just got added to my watchlist a couple days ago. When I looked at the log line for Ken on Letterboxd, I thought to myself "Hey, that sounds like something Yukio Mishima would write about." In a turn that was the most "Yeah, that makes sense." thing possible, I find out shortly before pressing play that it is, indeed, based on a short story written by Mishima. It reminds me that there's a short story from Mishima called Star that I think is very good, and I'm kind of baffled that, to my knowledge, it has yet to be adapted, since it's about an…

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  Review by Alfred E. Hitchman 7

  Holy shit. Like a rebuttal to the Sun Tribe movies. Almost a polite, Y.A. Lord Of the Flies. Fearlessly explores a facet or aspect or whatever of youth that doesn’t make it to the screen too often - that meticulously cultivated joylessness and the ice cold comfort of self-hatred expressed through self-control and self-denial are a tragically ennobling option.

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  Review by Oli ★★★★

  Kokubu Jiro, the stoic and minimalist captain of his university’s Kendo team is an enigma to those who know him, whether it's the team's juniors who idolize him, his father who can't understand his son's obsession with the sport or his rival Kagawa, who desperately wants to understand him.

  Based on Yukio Mishima's short story "The Sword," Kenji Misumi's film deals with Mishima's obsessions with notions of masculinity, hagakure, bushido, suicide and homoeroticism. Framed and shot with Misumi's archetypal clean precision, we too, like his club mates, are forced to wonder about Kokubu. He is the ideal Mishima protagonist, athletic, focused and intent on living a "pure and beautiful life" at the expense of all earthly desires. How you view…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★½

  One of the more direct among the glut of Japanese films about threatened post war masculinity. That action specialist Kenji Misumi is at hand might help explain the film blunt no-nonsense approach.

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  Review by Corey ★★★½

  feudalism at the end of its rope as it clashes with naivety and post-war qualms with masculinity and the illusory threat of it being dismantled, shattered, misunderstood—simplicities in recreation and profession grapple with one-another as generational form and tradition trickles its way down and back up, leaving this stoic meditation on the wooden blade toiling behind the crisp, black-and-white grain that serves as its own critical character in the film itself. the culmination, though dark and reflective of the radicalism it studies (and, from surrounding characters, seldom understands—an effective compliment) is slightly muddy, but the story told through what’s treated as mundanities has a strong, rippling effect of aftershocks once the dust - that’s hardly even risen - settles.

  1960s

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  Review by granigranitasse ★★★★ 2

  Gay

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  Review by dan ★★★½ 2

  Pas aussi sensuel que la nouvelle de Mishima mais ça reste une bonne adaptation.

  On sent quand même cette posture de vouloir montrer le corps qui suinte, et une forme d'érotisme lié au corps en plein effort physique.

  Mais ça vaut pas la plume de notre homo-fasciste préféré.