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Yoshiwara: The Pleasure Quarter (1960)

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Posted on March 11, 2006 by Ben Jennings

In making its belated Australian debut at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year, Tomu Uchida’s 45-years-old Yoshiwara: The Pleasure Quarter veritably brought the house down. It is a gorgeous, sumptuously colourful widescreen melodrama in a similar vein to Uchida’s Chikamatsu’s ‘Love in Osaka’, but with an even more astonishing shift in tone in the final act.

Uchida’s standby actor Chiezo Kataoka stars as the disfigured Jirozaemon, a wealthy but naïve and lonely textile manufacturer. When his friends drag … (read more)

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The Seven Samurai (1954)

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Posted on November 25, 2005 by Jonathan

Seven Samurai is quite possibly the most overrated film ever. That’s a shame, because it’s a fine film — one of the finest, in fact — but there is a tendency among certain groups of people (who should know better) to refer to it as THE GREATEST ACTION FILM EVER MADE. Now, this really is stupidity, not only because everybody knows that The Killer is the greatest action film ever made, but also because, frankly, Seven Samurai isn’t an action … (read more)

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