A small group of samurai sets out to end a brutal madman’s tyranny in Takashi Miike’s brilliant 13 ASSASSINS
13 ASSASSINS (JÛSAN-NIN NO SHIKAKU) (Takashi Miike, 2010)
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd.
Wednesday, August 13, free, 7:00
718-956-1819
www.socratessculpturepark.org
www.13assassins.com
Japanese director Takashi Miike’s first foray into the samurai epic is a nearly flawless film, perhaps his most accomplished work. Evoking such classics as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Mizoguchi’s 47 Ronin, Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, and Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, 13 Assassins is a thrilling tale of honor and revenge, inspired by a true story. In mid-nineteenth-century feudal Japan, during a time of peace just prior to the Meiji Restoration, Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki), the son of the former shogun and half-brother to the current one, is abusing his power, raping and killing at will, even using his servants and their families as target practice with a bow and arrow. Because of his connections, he is officially untouchable, but Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira) secretly hires Shinzaemon Shimada (Kôji Yakusho) to gather a small team and put an end to Naritsugu’s brutal tyranny. But the lord’s protector, Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), a former nemesis of Shinzaemon’s, has vowed to defend his master to the death, even though he despises Naritsugu’s actions. As the thirteen samurai make a plan to get to Naritsugu, they are eager to finally break out their long-unused swords and do what they were born to do.
It’s an intense battle to the bitter end in modern classic
“He who values his life dies a dog’s death,” Shinzaemon proclaims, knowing that the task is virtually impossible but willing to die for a just cause. Although there are occasional flashes of extreme gore in the first part of the film, Miike keeps the audience waiting until he unleashes the gripping battle, an extended scene of blood and violence that highlights death before dishonor. Selected for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and nominated for the Silver Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, 13 Assassins is one of Miike’s best-crafted tales; nominated for ten Japanese Academy Prizes, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (Daisuke Tengan), Best Editing (Kenji Yamashita), Best Original Score (Koji Endo), and Best Actor (Yakusho), it won awards for cinematography (Nobuyasu Kita), lighting direction (Yoshiya Watanabe), art direction (Yuji Hayashida), and sound recording (Jun Nakamura). 13 Assassins is screening August 13 in Long Island City as part of Socrates Sculpture Park’s free summer Outdoor Cinema series and will be preceded by a live performance, with Japanese food available for purchase as well. The sixteenth annual series continues August 20 with Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s Microcosmos and concludes August 27 with a double feature of Maxim Pozdorovkin and Mike Lerner’s Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer and Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D., both of which were rained out earlier this summer.
“I really don’t understand what this film you are making about me is all about. If it’s a film about a subject, I must know what role it is I am to play,” Iranian-born, Rome-based artist Bahman Mohassess tells director Mitra Farahani in the captivating, bittersweet documentary Fifi Howls from Happiness. “I don’t know the structure of your work. How does it start? What does it want to say? And where does it end?” he continues. A successful artist in his home country, Mohassess ultimately left Iran for Italy because of regime change and political unrest, which eventually involved government destruction of his work. He was so outraged that he destroyed even more of his own creations and eventually stopped showing his paintings, sculptures, and collages. Iranian artist and documentarian Farahani (Just a Woman, Zohre and Manouchehr) went in search of Mohassess, finding him living as a near-recluse in a hotel in Rome. The iconoclastic artist opens up to Farahani, talking about his parents and the end of his era while expressing his doubt about future generations. He also shares his views on the censorship and destruction of his art, political and social mores, inheritance, legacy, the general devastation going on around the world, and death. “I am only one John the Baptist, preaching alone in the desert,” he says. “It will make no difference. It never will.” In addition, he regularly tells Farahani what she should be doing with her film, directing the director, even though he points out, “I am not directing. I am only giving you my opinion.”
In Daniel Peddle’s debut feature narrative, Sunset Edge, four disaffected teens go slumming in a supposedly abandoned North Carolina trailer park and run into an unexpected part of its sordid past, with the park itself serving as a character all its own, a constant threat always lurking right below the surface. Just looking for something to do, Jacob (Jacob Kristian Ingle), Blaine (Blaine Edward Pugh), Will (William Dickerson), and Haley (Haley Ann McKnight) hang around the dilapidated park and the surrounding woods, riding their skateboards, shooting paint-ball rifles, and making an enormous, vile mixture of soda and sickeningly sweet candies, trapped between childhood and adulthood. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, local boy Malachi Smith (Gilberto Padilla) is slowly uncovering terrible things about his family history as a mysterious old woman in white (Liliane Gillenwater) appears and disappears in the background. As the two tales begin to intersect, an uncertain immediate future awaits them all. 
For a decade, the Rural Route Film Festival has been taking viewers to unique places around the world, far off the beaten track and away from urban centers, instead showing works “that take the road less traveled.” The festival is kicking off its tenth anniversary in a big way, with a fiftieth anniversary screening of Sergei Parajanov’s seminal Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Parajanov’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet announces exactly what it is in the opening credits: “A tale of times past, of the great love of Ivan and Marichka. . . . The folk tales and customs of the Carpathian region.” Made in 1964 in honor of the centennial of the birth of Ukrainian author Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, whose source novel was published in 1913, Shadows follows the friendship and romance of Ivan (Ivan Mikolajchuk) and Marichka (Larysa Kadochnikova), from childhood, when they are kids splashing water on each other, through marriage, war, and tragedy. In fact, there is a lot of tragedy throughout the film, even before Ivan’s family is cursed by a witchlike woman in their Hutsul village.
