A juvenile delinquent gets out of the pen and immediately embarks on a rampage of misdirected anger, most of it unleashed on an unsuspecting young woman. Shot through with the same kind of bebop bravado that Godard was experimenting with half a world away, the anarchic descent into amoral madness that is The Warped Ones (Kyonetsu no kisetsu) sounded a lost generation’s cry for help and kicked off Japan’s cinematic sixties with a bang. —The Criterion Collection
Koreyoshi Kurahara (蔵原惟繕 Kurahara Koreyoshi?) (May 31, 1927 – December 28, 2002) was a Japanese screenwriter and director. He is perhaps best known for directing Antarctica (1983), which won several awards and was entered into the 34th Berlin International Film Festival. He also co-directed Hiroshima (1995) with Roger Spottiswoode, which was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries.
He was the nephew of literary critic Korehito Kurahara, and older brother of film director Koretsugu Kurahara. His son Jun Iwasaki, a former producer for Ishihara International Productions Inc., is currently secretary to politician Nobuteru Ishihara.
He was born in the city of Kuching, then part of the kingdom of Sarawak (now a state of Malaysia) on Borneo.
While a film student at Nihon University College of Art, he became a live-in student of Kajiro Yamamoto at the introduction of Ishirō Honda. Upon graduation in 1952 he joined Shochiku’s Kyoto studio and worked… read more
A Japanese angry young man film. I'm really surprised more people haven't seen this, I loved it.
This sh*t is bananas--B-A-N-A-N-A-S... seriously... the first 15 minutes barely stop to catch their breath... seems to be compared to Godard's Breathless pretty often--I think I'd choose Warped Ones most any day of the week.
"Few films have the forward momentum of The Warped Ones: its manic will to madness, its caustic cavalcades of mocking freeze-frames, its flurries of savagely plucked chicken feathers and rude blasts of classical gas. And no other film has a protagonist quite like the barely articulate, bebop-on-the-brain raging id that is Akira (save Kurahara’s own 1964 Black Sun, in which he reappears), whose loathing for respectable society is played out like a piece of what Archie Shepp once termed “fire music”: a wordless, soul-scorching improvisation on pain and confusion and the last-ditch possibility that music may blow all the sorrows of existence away." —Chuck Stephens
Films by Fassbinder and Eisenstein are also out this week on DVD and Blu-ray.
