Monday, August 31, 2009
What do you think of this version?
Friday, August 28, 2009
STRAY CATS ROCK: WILD JUMBO
Noraneko Rokku - Wairudo Janbo - 1976 - Color - 16:9 Anamorphic - Extras
The second in the movies series that made KAJI Meiko an international star!
The Pelican Gang is well known on the beach for their wild antics, scams and fights
with rival gangs. Their lives make a sudden turn when one member starts digging up
the grounds of a local high school and their leader meets a strange girl, and devises
a complicated place that will either make them rich or destroy them…
Directed by: FUJITA Toshiya
Cast: KAJI Meiko, HAN Bunjaku, CHII Takeo, FUJI Tatsuya
DELINQUENT BOSS: WOLVES OF THE CITY
Furyo Bancho - 1968 - Color - 16:9 Anamorphic - Extras
The first in the FURYO BANCHO series of movies, starring
legendary Toei actor UMEMIYA Tatsuo!!!
Kosaka Hiroshi is a small time swindler and the boss of a motorcycle gang in
Shinjuku. Living only to make money, he never made the big time until he gets
involved with a Yakuza's daughter. But when he gets involved in a scheme to
blackmail a Yakuza gang and a land developer, he realizes he's gone way over his
head…
Directed by: NODA Yukio
Cast: UMEMIYA Tatsuo, TANI Hayato, OHARA Reiko, SMUROTA Hideo
Thursday, August 27, 2009
another interesting story approach...
ONE NIGHT, she doesn't show up after work. He stays up and waits for her but the door never opens. As he's getting ready for work, she enters the apartment with a big black eye, she's beaten and bruised but she dismisses it as a simple accident- "some guy at work" OR "i fell down the stairs"
a jealous boyfriend? what the fuck is going on?
Our hero decides to get to the bottom of this, the next day he takes off work and follows her. At first her chores are mundane (a trip to the supermarket, etc). But as the day goes along they get weirder and weirder- a meeting in a sketchy place here, a meeting in a sketchy place there. He soon finds out that she's not a waitress. She's full blown yakuza. Not only is she full blown yakuza, but her father is japan's biggest mob boss....
from here, our hero confronts his fiancee and SOMEHOW gets catapulted into this seedy underground yakuza world...
AT SOME POINT his pregnant fiancee could get kidnaped, which would enable our hero to get in close with this mob boss. This could become a revenge story.
yakuza moon synopsis
Yakuza Moon is brutal, honest, and scary. Shoko Tendo takes you through her turbulent childhood and the life built around her yakuza father. She recounts the many times he came home drunk in the middle of the night and tore the house apart and later beat Shoko. Soon she has fallen in with a tough crowd and has become a yanki, what basically amounts to a juvenile delinquent.
When she gets older she moves on from sniffing paint thinner and ditching school to shooting up and dating married men. She quickly becomes a kept woman who is shuffled about, never really being her own person, and all of this before she is even 23 years old.
Yakuza Moon is hard to read at times. The almost constant abuse that Shoko went through is heartbreaking and painful to read about. It is written in such a direct manner. The hard core drug use, the different boyfriends beating her, attempted suicide, and rape is presented to the reader as simple fact, with a sort of detachment through which you can only feel horror or pity for this young woman.
A lot of things happen off stage, as it were, and you are only treated to the highlights of a very painful past. There are incidents mentioned in passing that are never fully explained. But for the most part it does not distract from the flow of the story. The overall impression is of a young woman who went through hell but came out the other side a stronger person. This is a woman who has earned respect finally, and is not afraid to demand it.
After everything she is strong. The world is full of people struggling to survive and overcome - striving to be the person that they always dreamed that they could be, that they hoped deep down was still inside and had not been killed off by their mistakes. Sometimes the hardest thing to overcome is yourself, the person in the mirror can be your own worst enemy and learning to put the past behind you the hardest lesson to learn in life. Yakuza Moon is a triumph simply because Shoko Tendo overcame the atrocity that her life had become.
INTERESTING STORY ANGLE?
one day, through a series of coincidences, our hero ends up saving the life of this random person on the street. let's say this person is crossing the street and is about to get hit by a car but our hero pushes him out of the way. OR, Maybe there's a mass suicide in the middle of a public area (say a bunch of people about to jump in front of a moving train). Our hero takes notice and prevents this ONE person from doing so - then walks off.
This random jester of heroism and kindness (whatever is it) has really affected the guy who was saved. He decides he must find our hero and express his gratitude- he follows our hero, he stalks him even, write down his every movement for A MONTH. EVENTUALLY, he confronts him and we REVEAL that his father is the head mob boss to the biggest crime family in japan. He takes our hero under his wing and we are introduced to the seedy underworld of japanse yakuza
BRAINFARTS
-yakuza own an arcade business and rig the machines to loose on certain levels. They extort all these young video game playing fanatic nerds. They loose on a certain level which keeps these kids popping in their quarters- this will keep our story young....
-tourist scams, the yakuza uses our hero (a white guy) to extort money from american tourists....
-exporting truckloads of porno into japan from america and eastern europe?
-does our hero become an informant for the police? does this movie turn into goodfellas?
-at some point i think someone should get plastic surgery on their face to hide their identity...
WHAT IS THE NEW ANGLE (CONTD.)....
1. maybe we take famous children's stories and meld them into our world:
ROMEO AND JULIET- two people from rival yakuza gangs fall in love.
LITTLE RED RIDING HOOOD-
THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF
THE UGLY DUCKLING
CINDERELLA
THREE LITTLE PIGS
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
2. children yakuza (a gang of highschool drop outs- think, City of god)...
3. maybe we follow a group of ASSASINS hired to wipe out an entire yakuza family
4. a MOCUMENTARY / DOCUMENTARY yakuza movie. Yakuza hire a crew to document their lives, shot with interviews, etc. the story is told through their eyes
5. a group of prostitutes form their own gang and vow revenge against the yakuza
What is the new and unique angle on Yakuza story --
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
OUR hero could somehow be involved in tourist scams
Sex-related enterprises are the yakuza's bread and butter, and they cater to the wild side of Japan's overworked, buttoned-down "salary men." The yakuza smuggle truckloads of pornographic films and magazines into Japan from Europe and America. They control prostitution rings throughout the country, commonly holding young women from other Asian countries captive as indentured servants and forcing them to work as "comfort workers." The Japanese euphemistically refer to the act of prostitution as "selling spring," and Japanese johns have a taste for very young women, as demonstrated by the national obsession with young women in school-girl outfits complete with short pleated skirts and knee socks. The yakuza buy unwanted female children from China--where the law restricts couples to only one child and the cultural preference is for boys--for as little as $5,000 and put them to work in the mizu shobai (literally the "water business"), the yakuza's network of bars, restaurants and nightclubs.
THE YAKUZA (EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING)
Wrestling
The Yakuza have a strong influence in Japanese professional wrestling, or puroresu. Most of their interest in wrestling activities and promotions is purely financial. The Yakuza have mostly gotten involved by financially supporting wrestling promotions with fading fortunes, or simple business loans.
Many venues used by wrestling (arenas, stadiums, and so forth) are owned by or connected to the Yakuza, and as such, when a promotion uses one of their sites, the Yakuza receive a percentage of the gate. The Yakuza as a whole is regarded as a great supporter of both puroresu and MMA.
BADASS RITUALS
Yubitsume, or finger-cutting, is a form of penance or apology. Upon a first offense, the transgressor must cut off the tip of his left little finger and hand the severed portion to his boss. Sometimes an underboss may do this in penance to the oyabun if he wants to spare a member of his own gang from further retaliation.
Its origin stems from the traditional way of holding a Japanese sword. The bottom three fingers of each hand are used to grip the sword tightly, with the thumb and index fingers slightly loose. The removal of digits starting with the little finger moving up the hand to the index finger progressively weakens a person's sword grip.
The idea is that a person with a weak sword grip then has to rely more on the group for protection — reducing individual action. In recent years, prosthetic fingertips have been developed to disguise this distinctive appearance.
Many Yakuza have full-body tattoos. These tattoos, known as irezumi in Japan, are still often "hand-poked," that is, the ink is inserted beneath the skin using non-electrical, hand-made and hand held tools with needles of sharpened bamboo or steel. The procedure is expensive and painful and can take years to complete.[10]
Yakuza in prison sometimes perform pearlings: for each year spent in prison one pearl is inserted under the skin of the penis.
When yakuza members play Oicho-Kabu cards with each other, they often remove their shirts or open them up and drape them around their waists. This allows them to display their full-body tattoos to each other. This is one of the few times that yakuza members display their tattoos to others, as they normally keep them concealed in public with long-sleeved and high-necked shirts.
Another prominent yakuza ritual is the sake-sharing ceremony. This is used to seal bonds of brotherhood between individual yakuza members, or between two yakuza groups. For example, in August 2005, the Godfathers Kenichi Shinoda and Kazuyoshi Kudo held a sake-sharing ceremony, sealing a new bond between their respective gangs, the Yamaguchi-gumiand the Kokusui-kai.[citation needed]
Origins
YA-KU-SA
Etymology
The term "Yakuza" comes from a Japanese card game, Oicho-Kabu (played with hanafuda or kabufuda cards). The worst hand in the game is a set of eight, nine and three. In traditional Japanese forms of counting, these numbers are called Ya, Ku and Sa, thus the origin of the word "yakuza." The yakuza took this name because the Ya-Ku-Za hand requires the most skill (at judging opponents, etc.) and, obviously, the best luck in order to win. The name was also used because it signified bad fortune, presumably for anyone who went up against the group.