In the early Showa era, Okoma, a female yakuza who was highly successful as a gambler thanks to her skill and beauty, also incurred the envy of others, making her an enemy of the local yakuza group, the Ishioka-gumi. At one point, the Ishioka gang killed the boss of their rival, the Nishimura gang. All of the remaining Nishimura gang members defected to the Ishioka gang, and the Ishioka gang then imprisoned Yukishiro, the only daughter of Nishimura, who had resisted them to the very end. Okoma, who owes a great debt of gratitude to Boss Nishimura, learns that Yukishiro is being abused and heads to the brothel to rescue her, but what awaits her is a gruesome torture and ecstasy.
Disney has kept its word and allowed a new generation of Black and/or African storytellers to tell their own original stories. The question remains, will the public keep their word?
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie comes on the heels of its billion-dollar grossing predecessor, and seeks to do absolutely nothing other than repeat its success. In this, the film is eminently effective. If you have seen the previous film, you can expect something extremely similar in this package. That is, a barrage of references to Nintendo intellectual property wrapped in a plot that provides the thinnest layer of emotional payoff for the characters.
A wholesome love story that's perfect for fans of romance movies and animal lovers.
Stranger Things season 4 ups the ante to the max! The show’s scope has been expanding for the past three seasons, and boy do they give us a spectacle to behold. As much as I love spectacle, this season occasionally buckles under the weight of its own ambition.
I suppose you could argue that the story wasn’t what Director James Cameron was aiming for, it was the visuals. The spectacle of it all was the point, and it certainly shows.
Perhaps the most amazing and groundbreaking quality about The Birdcage is how removed it is from both illness and insensitivity. Whereas films preceding it were often somber stories about the tribulations of being gay in a conservatively straight world, Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May expose the fallacies of conservatism as traditional values are thrown into a more open-minded space. They don’t care how far the community has fallen so much as how high they can rebuild themselves.
