Ken (1964)

I found this interesting from a director that mainly used the samurai past to have this updated in a certain 60's modernity and that age of commitment to establish there dreams which at times seems a norm with Soto and Ohtani contracts where this level of determination…

pirateneckbeard

The agony and ecstasy of ascetic discipline. Sadomasochistic and homoerotic impulses channeled into an ideal of martial orderliness and spiritual self-abnegation. All Yukio Mishima’s myriad contradictions, distilled into tense black & white widescreen compositions. The…

Elliot

Ken is about obsession and how it can affect someone. A story about repressed homosexuality with a great performance by Raizō Ichikawa, beautiful to look at and a delightful score.

NECC_

all i wanted was a cool black belt and a martial arts program without all the funny live-or-die bits! no one thought kendo, a form that uses bamboo swords and body armour, would require such blind faith and bloodthirsty, regressive adherence to rules and modes that came…

noma

General spoilers for both Ken and The Strange One in the last paragraph. Kenji Misumi's Ken feels like a funhouse mirror version of The Strange One. Though in the earlier film, Jocko is a gleeful sadist who indulges in all of the hedonist pursuits eschewed by the…

sakana1

Young men today are no good. Another film that was watched because it's pretty short and just got added to my watchlist a couple days ago. When I looked at the log line for Ken on Letterboxd, I thought to myself "Hey, that sounds like something Yukio Mishima would write…

Noah Cassidy

Kokubu Jiro, the stoic and minimalist captain of his university’s Kendo team is an enigma to those who know him, whether it's the team's juniors who idolize him, his father who can't understand his son's obsession with the sport or his rival Kagawa, who desperately wants to…

Oli

One of the more direct among the glut of Japanese films about threatened post war masculinity. That action specialist Kenji Misumi is at hand might help explain the film blunt no-nonsense approach.

Filipe Furtado

This film is as lean and ascetic as its protagonist, the captain of a kendo squad who practices rigorous self-control, and is the antithesis of a Sun Tribe or New Wave film, so it may not be for everyone. I have to say, I thought the repeated scenes of the captain drilling…

AntoniusBlock7