Kôji Yakusho sidebar at Japan Cuts festival includes Takashi Miike’s brilliant 13 ASSASSINS
FOCUS ON KOJI YAKUSHO: 13 ASSASSINS (JÛSAN-NIN NO SHIKAKU) (Takashi Miike, 2010)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, July 21, $12, 8:20
Japan Cuts series continues through July 28
212-715-1258
www.13assassins.com
www.japansociety.org
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. “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 at Japan Society on July 21 at 8:20 as part of the Japan Cuts sidebar “Focus on Kôji Yakusho” and will be introduced by the actor; the July 20-21 mini-festival also includes such other Yakusho vehicles as his directorial debut, Toad’s Oil, as well as Shuichi Okita’s The Woodsman and the Rain, the New York premiere of Masato Harada’s Chronicle of My Mother, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, and Masayuki Suo’s original Shall We Dance?
Two years ago, Japanese auteur Toshiaki Toyoda presented 
Brazilian filmmaker Eryk Rocha’s feature narrative debut, Transeunte (Passerby), is a beautifully poetic, lyrical examination of loneliness and connection. Fernando Bezerra gives a brilliant performance as Expedito, a sixty-five-year-old man who spends his days in Rio de Janeiro walking the streets and riding buses as he puts flowers on his mother’s grave, picks up his benefits check, takes a nap on his couch, goes to the doctor, listens to his old-fashioned transistor radio, and stops by a bar for a few drinks. A simple man who seems to be content in his small life, Expedito is an innocent bystander in the world; Rocha often cuts to extreme close-ups of Expedito’s eyes as the character watches and listens to other people singing, dancing, preaching, celebrating a birthday, and just having regular conversations as he takes it all in from a distance. He rarely even speaks, saying only what is absolutely necessary as he goes about his daily business. Yet he does all this with a quiet confidence, his deeply chiseled face, rigid brow, and slow gait (in opposition to his name) revealing him to be a simple man with simple pleasures instead of a sad, lonely man leading a nowhere life. Rocha, who has made such documentaries as Rocha que Voa and Pachamama and has also been an editor, actor, composer, and cinematographer (though still only in his thirties), uses that varied background to create a mesmerizing tale that mixes fiction and reality, set to a lively score and shot in a lush black-and-white, recalling such seminal films as Charles Burnett’s 
Born in 1945 in rural Georgia to a mother who abandoned him when he was three months old, Winfred Rembert grew up picking cotton, dropped out of high school, spent time in jail and on a chain gang, and lost nearly all his teeth. But it was his years behind bars that turned him into a new man, as he learned to read and write and developed a unique art style that soon had him carving out the tales of his life on leather. Longtime journalist, producer, and writer Vivian Ducat tells Rembert’s amazing story in her engaging feature-length debut, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Ducat follows the oversized Rembert, who regularly bubbles over with joy, as he returns for a show in Cuthbert, Georgia, and prepares for a big opening in New York City. “I know he’s here for a reason,” his sister Lorraine says in the film. “To help people and to be a witness through his art.” Throughout All Me, Rembert discusses many of his works, in which he uses indelible dyes on carved leather, in great detail, each one representing a part of his life, focusing on being a poor black man in a white-dominated society. It is quite poignant late in the film when he points out that his art seems to be most appreciated by whites even though it is meant as a visual history for blacks. But what really makes the documentary work is not just that Rembert is such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure but that his art is exceptional, his self-taught, folksy style reminiscent of such forebears as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, capturing a deeply personal, intensely intimate part of the black experience in twentieth-century America. The film was previously shown at the Maysles Institute this past January, but it’s now back for a return engagement July 11, with Rembert and Ducat participating in a Q&A following the screening of this extraordinary story.