Classic Japanese Cinema: A Love Story

[venom10463]

I am a huge fan of classic Japanese cinema. In fact, I prefer them to Hong Kong cinema. That was not always the case because if you had asked me 15 years ago, I would have said the opposite. I could never get into Japanese films, for the action was not up to standards of kung fu films. Fast forward a few years, my love for kung fu films was slowly declining; I had gotten bored with the same storyline and bad acting. I needed a change because the last thing I wanted to do was sell my beloved collection and regret it later.

 

Around that time, IFC began airing a number of samurai films; I recorded Three Outlaw Samurai, Kill, and Samurai Spy. These three films changed my perspective about Japanese cinema. The fight choreography was decent, but what I liked most was the superb acting and the lighthearted comedy in Three Outlaw Samurai and Kill. My interest grew, and I sought out a trading friend of mine who had a nice collection of samurai and yakuza films. After a few trades, he had nothing else to offer me, so I looked to the internet for recommendations. Finding kurotokagi and samurai DVD dot com became a database for me to seek out films that weren't in my collection. However, I never did forget about my first love, I occasionally added a few kung fu films to my collection, but what Japanese films did for me was open doors into different culture of films.

[Tosh]

I'm pretty much in the same place, though I always loved my Samurai movies, I was a Godzilla fan before anything. I went to Japan in December 2013 so a year before I watched exclusively Japanese movies trying to pick up some of the language and immerse myself into the culture, that probably ran a good year or so after(been catching up on some non-Asian movies the last year).

I watched a lot of the old Ninja movies from the 60's that are unbelievably great, I would of loved to watched these back in the 80's, hard to believe someone didn't dig these out to cash in on the ninja craze, also some fantasy like Demon of Mt Oe.

Posting on this site has gotten me back into wanting to watch some KF again, there's still a lot of movies I haven't watched yet.