Street Mobster

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DarkImbecile
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Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
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Street Mobster

#1 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Apr 23, 2019 11:37 pm

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A pivotal work in the yakuza movie genre and in the career of director Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale, Doberman Cop), Street Mobster presents an abrasive portrait of the rise and fall of a reckless street punk caught in the crossfire of a bloody turf war raging in the mean streets of Kawazaki.

When Okita Isamu (Bunta Sugawara, Cops VS Thugs) re-emerges onto the mean streets of Kawazaki after five years in prison for a string of brutal crimes, he comes face to face with prostitute Kinuyo, who immediately pinpoints him as one of the participants in her brutal sexual assault years earlier that left her shell-shocked and consigned to the life of a sex worker. While the two outcasts form an unlikely bond, Okita returns to his criminal ways. He is approached by veteran gangster Kizaki (Noboru Andô, Graveyard of Honour), who encourages him to round up a group of local chinpira street punks to shake up the uneasy agreement between the two rival yakuza groups, who between them control the city’s bars, gambling dens and entertainment areas. However, when the new outfit goes too far into the turf of the big boys, they find themselves caught in the midst of a violent reprisal, before an offer of patronage appears from an unlikely source.

Street Mobster is the first film in which Fukasaku’s vital and exhilarating approach to the contemporary-set gangster picture was paired with the untamed, raw charisma of Japan’s top screen mobster Sugawara Bunta. The film would change the life of both, paving the way for their subsequent collaborations on the landmark Battles Without Honour and Humanity series that began the following year.

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS
• High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation
• Original uncompressed PCM mono audio
• Optional English subtitles
• Audio commentary by Japanese cinema expert Tom Mes
• Theatrical trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Chris Malbon
FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector's booklet featuring new writting on the film by Jasper Sharp

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Street Mobster

#2 Post by zedz » Thu Apr 09, 2020 5:44 am

This is what I love about Kinji Fukasaku: the first five minutes of Street Mobster uses narration, massive story jumps, frantic action and freeze frames to summarize what amounts to a non-existent prequel film. Scorsese was surely cognizant of this precedent before he made Goodfellas, but even he doesn’t come close to Fukasaku’s breathless narrative economy.

Unfortunately – as is often the case with Fukasaku – everything slows down into a much more ordinary film after the credits roll. The big exception seems to be the first Battles without Honour and Humanity film, where he miraculously manages to keep the radical compression going for an entire feature.

The frequent action scenes effectively evoke a chaos that’s more ‘realistic’ than much Japanese genre fare of the period, and I guess the film’s appalling misogyny will also be defended on the grounds of ‘realism’, but I don’t buy it, and it’s very hard to sustain an argument that we’re not supposed to sympathise with the film’s rapist hero given the craven wannabe-tragic finale.

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