Why are Japanese films so terrible?

(imdb lists 4, Dolls and Oharu and something Western. i don't remember the bit in Oharu and haven't seen Dolls)

((also puzzled by the fact 'hair-bun' is a thing people tag movies with))

I saw The Courier for Hell when I visited the Bunraku theatre in Osaka, it was heartbreaking!

Not a movie but Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles has a lot of bunraku in it iirc

I know there's some films made of bunraku performances, but I can't think of any that are part of the plot. a lot more with Noh plays etc
feel like I should mention Thunderbolt Fantasy here, a Japan/Taiwan wuxia puppet TV show created by Gen Urobuchi of Fate/Zero, Madoka Magica, Psychopass etc. fame. it's as daft as it sounds!

Shinoda’s Double Suicide uses bunraku as a narrative element iirc

a lot of the bunraku plays themselves seen to involve double suicides (based on the list of 10 or so top chikamatsu whatsisname plays i found online)

the bookseller in the film i watched last week had a bunch of double suicide titles too, i wonder if they were the same ones?

I watched A Colt Is My Passport the other day: a superb noir with a lot of western (the genre) touches including a very good Morricone-esque soundtrack

xp yeah the film is a bunraku adaptation

Colt Is My Passport very good yeah, def the highlight of that criterion Nikkatsu set

Samurai Wolf I & II. was expecting generic samurai stuff but there was a style to them that raised them above. this was post Fistful of Dollars ('66 and '67) and had obviously taken some cues from that (which, yeah, had itself taken cues from Yojimbo). pleasantly surprised.

i think the only other Gosha i have is Three Outlaw Samurai, his first, and the various others that are available are Yakuza based but I'll see.

in the meantime i have Ju-On and Sister Streetfighter on the way from arrow, to mix things up a bit.

Hideo Gosha is great, he reminds me of a Budd Boetticher or Phil Karlson - unpretentious artisan working in genre cinema whose sensibilities just happen to line up perfectly with his subject matter. Aside from the Samurai Wolf films I've also seen Sword Of The Beast (which was on Criterion) and his masterpiece, Goyokin (which I had to track down on a dodgy dvd). The only yakuza film I've seen of his is Violent Streets, a bit more outré than the swordplay stuff but well worth seeing.

One thing you can find in every one of his movies is the kind of hatred of authority that only a guy who lived through something like Imperial Japan could develop.

I caught Evil Does Not Exist on AppleTV and thought it was better than Drive My Car!

Maybe Hamaguchi needs his own thread?

a Ryûsuke Hamaguchi thread for all your Hamaguchi chat