Jun’ya Satô

Quote:
Jitsuroku is usually translated as “true story,” which in the yakuza movies of the seventies meant not so much historical accuracy as it did fights and blood of a new kind. The most famous of the jitsuroku yakuza movies are Kinji Fukasaku’s 5-part Battles Without Honor or Humanity, whose title neatly summarizes the change. The sixties yakuza movie had shown plenty of fights and, as effects gradually improved, increasing gore and blood spatters, but the core of the story was almost always a point of honor within the Yakuza Code and a hero with a sense of human feeling and responsibility. In the seventies, The Code disappeared along with the humane hero and we were offered only the battles and the blood.Read More »

A war breaks out on the streets between rivalry Yakuza clans.Read More »

Letterboxd-Review:
A superb proto-jitsuroku type yakuza film by Junya Sato. Fumio Watanabe (in probably his best role) is a wonderfully cast against type as a crime boss who actually cares for his men and is the first one to barge into fight when rivals come knocking on the door. Powerful political figure Eijiro Yanagi becomes his consultant, after which short tempered rival boss Ryohei Uchida starts feeling the fire under his arse. Things get even more heated after Watanabe takes a Ginza gambling joint from the Chicago mafia with the assistance of machine gun happy lone wolf Noboru Ando. Tetsuro Tamba, Hideo Murota and Rinichi Yamamoto are a detective squad in a desperate battle against red tape while trying to bring the gangs down. The story is fictional, but the film feels like a jitsuroku movie. Sato draws an entire underworld map with cops, gangsters and political players all placed on the same chess table. The film is talkative, but never boring, feels extremely matter of fact, and comes with a fabulous musical score by Masaru Sato.Read More »

Synopsis (from Letterboxed):
Aiba is a gang boss who has just got out of jail, and finds everything has changed. His old gang has broken up, and only a few people still respect him. So he becomes a consultant to another gang who are about to be clobbered by a much larger gang moving in from out of town. Aiba proves a crafty tactician, and does very well at playing gangs off against each other in order to save the smaller gang. His advice is not always taken by those he tries to help, but he is generally proved right.Read More »

Golgo 13 travels to the underworld of Tehran, Iran, to track down a shadowy target… Max Boa, the boss of an international crime syndicate that smuggles weapons and drugs and kidnaps women. But Boa catches wind of the cold-blooded killing machine’s intentions and has his organization go on the offense. When a mesmerizing game between murderers begins, the only result can be kill or be killed!Read More »

Ken Takakura stars as a mad bomber who plants a device on a high-speed Japanese train, programmed to detonate if the train’s speed drops below 80 kilometres per hour. The trains conductor (Sonny Chiba) must keep the train moving whilst the police track the madman down.

Most well-known for inspiring the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster Speed, The Bullet Train is a remarkably tense thriller from director Junya Satō.Read More »

Quote:
An Osaka gangster Shimamura just got married. His new bride, Mineko is also involved in drug trafficking. When she goes to China to make a deal, things get botched pretty badly. Shimamura must travel to save her and recoup his employers’ losses.Read More »

Quote:
“The Go Masters” begins and ends with the same game of Go, but 32 years separate the opening and closing moves. In between, there is war and heartbreak, death and disease, doomed lovers, families separated by fate and united by chance. The movie is a melodrama on an epic scale, an Asian “Gone With the Wind,” filled with romance and action but built on a foundation of Eastern philosophy.Read More »