Shunpu den 1965
The Story of a Prostitute
A Seijun Suzuki Film
It sounds better when enunciated in Japanese than English. I had actually been searching for Koroshi no rakuin (1966) [Branded to Kill] because it was in the TIME OUT 100 films to watch… but only found this so watched it instead.
Fascinating and so much more honest than anything Britain and America were turning out in 1965. Asia and Europe were far more open to subject matter like this while the English-speaking countries either censored or banned films such as this. It’s almost like there’s a cultural divide.
Beautiful and sad and eye-opening. So cruel. So lacking in tenderness. What a life! What awful things men do to have the thing they crave most. If you haven’t already been aware of the despicable things that men do in the name of love and war, this is one to add to your I-hate-men list.
A very good film which I don’t want to see again.
‘Bourke, NSW 6th Day’
If it’s Saturday, This must be Bourke.
We three (because Becky was no help at all) packed up the house in Mumbil, NSW and headed for Day 2 at the Zoo. What a lovely day. It was a degree cooler for most of the day which was appreciated by all. My daughter and I had an encounter with a tiger which was up close and personal. We’d booked it weeks earlier. Only six people got to do the encounter on any single day, with three tigers who were rotated. The high price of the encounter was money well spent which went toward the maintenance of the zoo and would have hardly earned the zoo more than about five thousand extra dollars a week. Still, that’s $250,000 in a year.
But, oh, what an encounter. My daughter and I had the chance to be 5cms from the teeth of a tiger and feel it’s breath on my face. When it growled at me because I was really irritating her, the sound was so deep it rumbled through every bone in my body.
I’ve done and experienced many amazing things in my life from jumping out of a plane, to meeting Mel Gibson, meeting Harrison Ford, attending a recording session at Universal Studios with Jerry Goldsmith conducting with Joe Dante giving instructions, to working with Vladimir Ashkenazy and thirty or forty other amazing musicians – and this tiger experience was in my Top Five – EVER!
Took my three girls to Dubbo airport so they could fly back to Sydney while I set sail for Bourke – in car, mind you, not a boat.
This was another exhilarating adventure because I mistimed my arrival in Bourke to be after dusk and the kangaroos standing like statues by the side of the road, that you had two metres to see before you were upon them, was very disturbing. I had my heart in my mouth the last hour and this doesn’t rate in my Top Five EVER!
The roos could have jumped to my right or my left. If they jumped right they were headed to the safety of the tress. If they had jumped left that would have been a whole other conversation between bone and metal.
I celebrated arriving alive in Bourke by having two very quick beers, a short distance apart, and putting on another movie to watch.
