Bratton Online. October 2. MAIN STREET (now Pacific Avenue) and the intersection of Mission and Willow Streets. Pacific Avenue now goes right up north through those buildings behind the trolley car. Nowadays on the left side we have Bank of The West, Ron Lau’s empty lot, Lulu Carpenter’s Original location, and Mr. Goodie’s Antiques. Covello & Covello Historical photo collection. Additional information always welcome: email bratton@cruzio. DATELINE October 2. ![]() Read 'The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema'. As the World Cup kicks off in South Africa, now's the time to celebrate the. Mifune: The Last Samurai Online Watch 2016 FilmsThis story revolves around a Japanese samurai known as mifune. He is from a humble farm in Hiroshima who must protect his family from yet another attack by the. Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954) Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955) Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956) With Toei, the largest producer of period. March 25, 2016 Director Ben Wheatley discusses his favorite films, which include Godard’s Weekend. After watching it, he says, “I almost felt. He studied the movement of lions. He’s like a caged animal,” says Martin Scorsese in the (above) trailer. CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS. It’s really time to take a more careful look at where the big money is going in this next City Council election. Check out this list and see how many candidates Pamela Comstock gives money to, check out David Terrazas contributions, look who’s backing Robert Singleton, and that Martine Watkins has many, many of our biggest developers and investors behind her. Brown’s political and moneyed backers all know they can count on his votes. HITLER REACTS TO TRUMP GETTING THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION. Think ahead and realize what keeping this City Council and Cynthia’s . More of the same police practices, continuing financial favors for developers, to hell with the homeless, never mind the environment. Bring on Corridor stacking, and on and on. What again was the reason we moved here? To be this cruel to our growing middle class? We do need a Brand New Council. Read about these very courageous, and energetic candidates and remember they are on Bernie Sanders side. HILLARY CLINTON IN SANTA CRUZ. It seems strange that the Sentinel wouldn’t bring up and inform our newcomers about Hillary Clinton’s visit to Santa Cruz back in 1. Karen and Darrell Darling (right wing Democrats) had a son, Adam. He worked with Washington officials including Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. Ron and Adam were killed in the crash of an . Hillary came here to attend Adam’s memorial and also dedicated a special placque to him in the Soquel Cemetary. The Sentinel did say something about this back in February, but it does show that very human side of Hillary. Besides that, we don’t get and never have had many presidential candidates or presidents visit here. They wrote an unprecedented story about that endorsement, check it out. It also goes into detail about us electing our first female president and what it will mean. Sherry Conable sent this link to a very unusual editorial from KSBW. Sean was 3. 2 years old and the loving father of a four year old. He was brandishing a metal rake when he was killed. So far, the audio recording of the event, the video recording, and the ames of the officers involved have not been released. There was aan attempt to get many citizens to speak to our City Council last Tuesday (1. Those attending were hoping to ask the Council for. Pay attention to this council reaction, and how much longer do we want their cold and uninvolved treatment of our community???)RUSH TO JUDGMENTThe Wharf Master Plan is on the fast track for city council approval. The viewing holes for the sea lions will be covered up. Other changes include a new landing for large boats at the wharf’s end and a doubling of the current wharf businesses by adding upper stories and infilling with a goal of more take- out food. All this with essentially no increase in parking except what can be achieved through restriping and narrowing the width of the current parking stalls. In August, while in Florida, I wrote about discovering that the Wharf Master Plan’s environmental review was on the next- day’s city council agenda. A quick email to council objecting to their lack of attention to federally protected bird species, notably Pigeon Guillemots that fly from Puget Sound to the Santa Cruz wharf each year, and also copied to astute environmentalists, resulted in a number of emails to council addressing bird and lighting issues and calling for an Environmental Impact Report (EIR). In response, obviously advised by their attorneys, the city postponed the issue and released a revised Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND) for public review focusing on the bird and lighting issues but no EIR. The review period for the revised MND started on October 1. November 1. 6th. The Planning Commission will hear testimony and vote on the Wharf Master Plan on November 1. No, that is not a typo. City Council will hear testimony and vote on the Wharf Master Plan on November 2. Consider that agendas for both Planning Commission and City Council are prepared a week in advance of the date of the meeting and you can see that staff is not waiting for the close of the public comment period before preparing their agenda report with their recommendations for approval. That’s rather arrogant towards the public in my opinion. The revised MND is still inadequate with respect to impacts on marine mammals and birds. The biologist whom they hired to weigh in on the Pigeon Guillemot and other protected bird species concludes that any significant impact on the birds (he admits to a significant impact) can be mitigated by having a biologist look at the site for nests 7 days before pile driving begins. If a Guillemot is nesting they will stop work until the end of nesting season or keep 3. Since Pigeon Guillemots’ nesting season extends from February to September, how does one visit determine anything except that there is or isn’t nesting going on that day? What if work on the first of the 8. Guillemots arrive from Puget Sound a week later in the middle of pile driving? The MND is silent on this more likely scenario. There is no mention of the nesting cormorants under the wharf. How do you feel about the potential loss of thousands of dollars of public moneys? When the city refused to undertake any environmental review for weakening its Heritage Tree Ordinance they were sued and lost and subsequently had to pay out of pocket around $3. CEQA lawyers and the appellant’s lawyers. The MND for the Wharf Master Plan is weak and will be legally challenged with the potential for a similar outcome. The public purse should not be so carelessly handled in the name of expediency. The desire to have the current council make the decision in favor of the Wharf Master Plan rather than leave the decision to the unknowns of a new council one meeting later is driving this schedule. Such a rush to judgment makes it difficult for any council member to ask for further information, clarification or careful review of public comment and staff response. For example, beyond birds, the new 8. ACZA (ammoniacal copper zinc arsenate) that led to concerns raised by the Department of Fish and Wildlife. An EIR would address such issues rather than relying on anecdotal statements. The lowered western walk- bikeway has not been properly evaluated with respect to the impact of bigger storms in a rising sea level world as requested by the California Coastal Commission. These are just a few examples. If you feel as I do that this process is a betrayal of public trust, you know where to direct your comments. The winning bid will be approved by the County Board of Supervisors November 1. February or March. Another gem we learned was that Phase II of the improvements are now in the works. Sohriakoff if citizens will get an opportunity to review the project? By the way, Soquel Creek Water District got started on the new Granite Way well last week by drilling and pouring a cement casing for that 1. Tim Fillmore at County Environmental Health had recommended? Taj Dufour, refused to answer. Cheers, Becky Steinbruner”. She has fought for water, fire, emergency preparedness, and for road repair. She ran for Second District County Supervisor in 2. PATTON’S PROGRAM. From Gary’s Two Worlds website. The article reported on a meeting at which John Laird, California Secretary of Resources, and formerly Mayor of the City of Santa Cruz, provided information on the many ballot measures facing California voters on November 8th. It is Smith’s contention that a person’s vote “counts as a statistic,” and that “the more statistics you generate, the bigger an impact it has on politicians when they’re deciding what to do.” Please let me correct the record. It happens that I teach in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz, though I don’t think I ever ran across Morgan Smith. I was also elected to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors five times, and lost an election to the California State Assembly, so I have some practical experience. Believe me, when I campaigned for office, in elections that were always quite close, it became obvious to me that voting “counts.”In fact, voting can be seen as an amazing kind of “trick,” by which we, as a collective group of individuals, mobilize our small increments of individual power (our individual ability to do work) into the kind of massive power that builds dams and bridges, goes to war, and determines what the rules will be that govern our common life. We mobilize our personal power, individually, in all of our daily activities; none of us, however, using only our individual power, has the ability to accomplish any large project. If we, collectively, want to build a dam or a highway, to go to war or to make the peace, we need to act in common. And how do we actually do that, in fact? Here’s how. We agree that we will transfer most of our individual power, subject to the limitations imposed by the Constitution, to elected representatives, who will then be granted the right to “govern” us. Political science students and professors sometimes call this the “social contract.” It’s a bargain we make with each other. We give up a large part of our “personal” and “individual” power so as to be able to conjoin our individual power with the individual power of others, and by doing so, we achieve a larger, common power, capable of doing great things, and accomplishing large projects, collectively. The money we individually earn can be collected from us, as our elected representatives set taxes, high or low, and specify from where the revenue comes. But evidence suggests they were stylistically crude – more or less straightforward recordings of onstage action. The revolution in chanbara came in the late 1. Chuji’s Travel Diary (1. It was from these that the modern samurai film was born. After the Second World War, the Allied occupation restricted films promoting feudal values, putting the kibosh on this most Japanese of action genres. When the occupiers departed in 1. As popular as the western in America, films based on legendary figures such as Musashi Miyamoto or the outlaw Chuji Kunisada, or historical tales such as . But distributors in the west had their blind spots, and little of the vast, popular output of, for example, the Toei studio has ever been seen overseas. To this day, classics like Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (1. Let’s hope we’ll see some of these missing milestones being released for home viewing in the future. For now, the new Blu- ray release of Seven Samurai, and these nine other readily available genre gems, present the perfecting jumping off point. Seven Samurai (1. Director Akira Kurosawa. Poster for Seven Samurai (1. Akira Kurosawa’s monumental tale of heroism and humanism, set in the late 1. Warring States Period, is the director’s most famous work. It was joint recipient (alongside Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari) of the Silver Lion Award at the 1. Venice Film Festival, and ranked 1. Sight & Sound poll of critics to determine the Greatest Films of All Time. The film depicts seven ronin (masterless samurai) as they band together to protect a beleaguered farming community from repeated attacks by marauding bandits. The epic three- and- a- half- hour runtime, on- location shooting, and use of multiple camera set- ups for its action scenes made this release from the Toho studio the most expensive Japanese production of its day. Most impressive is the use of physical geography and natural weather conditions to enhance the drama and the attention to each of its characters’ narrative arcs, resulting in a rich and involving work that has cast an incredibly long shadow across the world. Officially remade as the Hollywood western The Magnificent Seven in 1. The Dirty Dozen (1. Bollywood film Sholay (1. The Samurai trilogy (1. Director Hiroshi Inagaki. Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1. Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1. Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1. Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1. With Toei, the largest producer of period action dramas, remaining aloof to the vogue among Japanese studios of submitting works to international festivals throughout the 1. Toho’s entries in the field that provided foreign viewers with the most open window onto the country’s mythic past. The life of master swordsman Musashi Miyamoto (1. Zen ink brush, have been immortalised on film numerous occasions, including a 1. Mizoguchi for Shochiku. However it was Toho’s first colour production, and the first instalment of Inagaki’s remakes of his earlier trilogy for Nikkatsu studios (1. Eiji Yoshikawa, which won the Honorary Foreign Language Film Award at the 1. Oscars. Along with the works of Kurosawa, the films helped forge the international status of the studio’s contracted star, Toshiro Mifune, as the most iconic of screen samurais. Strangely overlooked today, the series charts Miyamoto’s rise from the formative years of his rural upbringing to his first taste of glory at battle, then through his further training, before Duel at Ganryu Island sees him renouncing his search for fame to concentrate on his quest for inner truth, culminating in a remarkable duel by sunset. Throne of Blood (1. Director Akira Kurosawa. Throne of Blood (1. Kurosawa’s oeuvre is so well- represented among western releases, so critically regarded and so impressive, it is difficult to know which to single out for individual attention lest this list turn exclusively into a celebration of this most famous of Japanese filmmakers. One could argue equally forcefully for Hidden Fortress (1. George Lucas, featuring two peasants enlisted into the service of a notorious general and the princess of a defeated clan (and represented Kurosawa’s first feature in widescreen Toho. Scope); the western- inspired Yojimbo (1. Kagemusha (1. 98. Century Fox. However, this eerie restaging of Macbeth in 1. Japan is worth singling out as a counterpoint to these more action- driven pieces. With its expressive use of light and shadows and stylised use of Noh’s theatrical conventions to convey the psychological torment of its protagonist, it is regarded as one of the most successful cinematic renditions of the Bard ever made. Kurosawa would later return to Shakespeare with his 1. King Lear, Ran. Harakiri (1. Director Masaki Kobayashi. Harakiri (1. 96. 2)The first jidaigeki by Kwaidan (1. Masaki Kobayashi, about a young ronin during the early Tokugawa period (c. As its title suggests, the relatively slow drama comes punctuated by moments of extreme goriness, mercifully rendered in monochrome. Formally, the film is quite stunning, making impressive use of the peculiarities of Japanese architecture, selective lighting effects and judicious placement of its characters across the scope frame to create a striking collection of grid- like compositions conveying the oppressiveness of this highly- structured society. Toru Takemitsu’s percussive, atonal soundtrack similarly adds to the haunting air of detachment. Samurai Assassin (1. Director Kihachi Okamoto. Samurai Assassin (1. In Samurai Assassin, set in 1. Tokugawa Shogunate, Toshiro Mifune plays a roguish ronin unaware of the identity of his nobleman father, and who’s driven with ambitions of securing samurai status at a time when this warrior class is on the cusp of being abolished. He becomes involved in a plot to assassinate Ii Naosuke, a powerful official in the shogunate’s military government whose calls for opening up the country to foreign trade anger nationalists. The scene is set for the final implosion, and one which will see the age of the samurai over once and for all. This strikingly- shot dramatisation of an incredibly complex defining point in history (one tackled in a number of films, including Masahiro Shinoda’s first period drama, Assassination, in 1. The historical background, delivered in a combination of terse voiceover narration and whispered intrigues, is dense in detail. The climactic battle, however, framed in spectacular monochrome scope during a snowstorm at Edo Castle, provides more than adequate reward for patience. Directed by one of the stalwarts of the jidaigeki during the 1. Kihachi Okamoto, whose signature works include The Sword of Doom (1. Kill! Add to the mix a British director known for his work on three early Bond films, and love interest in the shapely form of Swiss- born actress Ursula Andress, and one is left with a unique transnational curio, one with little in the way of authenticity to any culture, but an enjoyable romp nonetheless. Lady Snowblood (1. Director Toshiya Fujita. Lady Snowblood (1. Meiko Kaji’s most representative screen role, as the kimono- clad avenging angel immortalised in the cinematic diptych adapted from Kazuo Koike’s pioneering manga series of the 1. Lucy Liu’s character of O- Ren Ishii in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2. This first of the two films (Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance was released the same year) is by far the best, as our titular heroine slices and dices her way through Meiji- era Japan in mute displays of bloody carnage as she seeks revenge against those who raped her mother and left her to rot in jail. Despite the early modern- era setting, the film contains many of the same tropes of earlier samurai films (albeit with a lot more bloodletting), most notably another Koike adaptation that preceded it, the seven- film Lone Wolf and Cub (1. Shogun Assassin (1. Director Robert Houston. Shogun Assassin (1. Kazuo Koike’s classic manga series Lone Wolf and Cub features a disgraced former executioner of the Shogun, Itto Ogami, who is wrongly accused of treason and forced to live as an outlaw with his infant son Daigoro following the murder of his wife. He was memorably introduced to the west with this US release, edited together from the first two film adaptations, Baby Cart to Hades and Baby Cart at the River Styx, both directed by Kenji Misumi and released in 1. Fondly remembered by a generation weaned on VHS (its graphic violence saw the film consigned to the video nasties list in the 1. American version is effectively an . Shogun Assassin certainly preserves the hyper- realistic arterial spurts and bone- crushing violence of the originals, but loses out on the moments of Zen- like stillness. The originals are undeniable classics and well worth checking out, but Shogun Assassin nonetheless remains a hugely- entertaining guilty pleasure in its own right. Twilight Samurai (2. Director Yoji Yamada. The Twilight Samurai (2. The man responsible for bringing the loveable travelling salesman Tora- san to the screen in the long- running It’s Tough Being a Man (1. As an antidote to Hollywood’s post- 9/1. Japanese feudal history in Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2. Yamada’s affable take on the samurai as low- ranking everyman, Twilight Samurai stems from a similar political standpoint as the director’s earlier comedy dramas. Its hero is a petty bureaucrat forced to react against the personal and wider historical circumstances he finds himself beset by in the twilight years of the feudal era preceding the Meiji Restoration of 1. The first of Yamada’s . As in his takes on yakuza gangster films in the late- 1. Takashi Miike’s revisionism veers more towards the stylistic rather than the socio- political end of things, in this remake of Eichi Kudo’s 1. Kudo’s work, produced at Toei and thus little- known in the west, were made during a decline in popularity in jidaigeki and marked with the era’s concern for a greater degree of gritty realism. His signature samurai action films, based on original stories, vibrantly captured the spirit of the times, with titles like The Great Killing (1.
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