Streaming Lady Snowblood Online
Lundi, avril 19th, 2010 |
Streaming Lady Snowblood Online.
Movie Title: Lady Snowblood Lady Snowblood is available for streaming or downloading. |
LADY SNOWBLOOD (1973) is a starkly beautiful Japanese swordplay drama featuring a female fighter, Shurayuki Hime (Lady Snowblood), or Yuki for short, whose mission in life is to track down and slay three of the four villains who brutalized her mother and killed the mother’s husband and son. It takes place in the 1890s, in Meiji-era Japan, and includes several helpful flashbacks to provide the context for Yuki’s mission. Born in prison–her mother was there for killing the first of the villains and died after childbirth–Yuki is raised by a Buddhist reverend who calls her a “child of the netherworld” and trains her in the fighting arts. Tall and regal, beautiful and ghostly white, Lady S (played by Meiko Kaji) looks too pure to sully herself with bloodletting, a tack which gives her the element of surprise in her many swordfights.
The film is divided into four chapters and is based on a manga written by Kazuo Koike, who also wrote the “Lone Wolf and Cub” and “Crying Freeman” manga series. At one point in Chapter Three, Yuki meets a writer (Toshio Kurosawa) who publishes a newspaper (”a cheap little rag”) and tells Yuki’s story, accompanied by manga-like illustrations, making her a legend in her own time and causing her considerable dismay. There’s a bit of stylization in the fighting as Yuki leaps up impossible heights and causes blood to gush out like a fountain whenever she slices or dismembers an opponent, but otherwise the film has a deceptive simplicity as Yuki moves like a wraith through small villages and the back alleys of Tokyo in her inexorable quest for vengeance. There is a lot of action and bloodshed, so fans of samurai and yakuza films should be satisfied. The tape is presented in a flawless letter-boxed transfer, in Japanese with English subtitles.
Meiko Kaji (who also starred in the FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION series) plays the title role and sings the theme song, “Flower of Carnage.” Quentin Tarantino drew on this film as part of the inspiration for the Lucy Liu character, O-Ren Ishii, in KILL BILL VOL. 1 (2003) and also uses “Flower of Carnage” on his soundtrack. As impressive as KILL BILL is, fans who want to experience the formal beauty of the original form–seen here in a deftly-blended mix of samurai, ninja, yakuza, and manga motifs–need to go back to films like this. And judging from recent Japanese genre releases, e.g. RETURNER, ONMYOJI, and PRINCESS BLADE (itself a flashy contemporary reworking of LADY SNOWBOOD), to name a few, it’s clear that, aside from KILL BILL, “they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”
I’ll be honest, I rented this film strictly because I love Kill Bill and I was curious to see where Tarantino culled his imagery and ideas. I’m very glad I did, and it’s why I think Kill Bill is a very important bridge between modern cinema and cult and foreign film that, lets face it, most of us miss out on. This film is a very beautiful and poetic look at revenge and love. The title character, Yuki, is born into and raised with a single ideology, vengeance. She knows no love, except for that of her deceased parents and brother, nor hate, except for her enemies who killed her father and brother and tortured her mother. The film follows Yuki on her journey to find and enact her vengeance on these four villains. Though the plot is fairly simple, it’s well crafted and manages to sidestep what could be easy static characterization for very well drawn character arcs. The action and swordplay are beautiful and wonderfully over the top, as are the settings, story devices (like the use of paintings and manga to depict flashback and plot explanation), and special FX (lots of arterial blood sprays.) For fans of Kill Bill, this film is the basis for the O-Ren Ishii character. Other references are similar settings (the fight at the end of the House of Blue Leaves sequence), numbered chapters, music, the afore mentioned arterial blood sprays, very similar character development, freeze frames with character identification, a very similar rouges gallery upward camera shot, and a mixture of live action and animation/manga.
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