Karate Kill Screening
By Stephen C Walls II
On September 30th I went to go see Karate Kill,directed by Kurando Mitsutake, at the Charlotte Film Festival, I was actually really excited to go see it, and even more so after I had won the raffle for the animated movie poster,while all in kanji, that was signed by the director of the movie. Which actually may have coincidentally made my opinions biased, but I will try to keep my paper free of biased opinions, as much as I can anyway. Overall the movie was very decent. It went into a direction I had never seen coming, and it was both interesting and somewhat eerie.
To begin let me take a few seconds to tell you about the plot of the movie. Kenji, an apparent Karate master, is working a lot of jobs to send his sister to America for her dream to be an actress. After not hearing from here for over a month he quits all his jobs and goes to America to search for her. Soon after arriving he discovers that his sister has been kidnapped by some cult that has a thing about pain, torture, and killing; most of which while streaming on the internet. Long story short only Kenji and his sister live with all others dying in the rescue attempt, allies and enemies.
Overall the quality of the filming was pretty decent I only noticed a few thing that might be a problem if it became a major motion picture. One of the things I noticed was the camera angles. In only a very few scenes I noticed that the camera angle wasn't stable very much. In one scene I saw the point of view of the camera shaking only a little bit but enough to drawn my attention to the edge of the screens; where with a few seconds of paying attention you could see things come in and out of view. It's not a very big deal but if seen by a professional critic they might try to argue incompetent production or something along those lines. My guess is that they weren't using a camera stand and the cameraman at the time was in an uncomfortable position with the camera causing the subtle changes in the camera angle. Like I said it not a terribly big deal but it can be simply fixed by maybe cropping that part of the film's footage and stretching it to cover the area that was cut out, there might be other simpler or better ways to fix it but that's one of the only ones that came to me. Another thing I saw with the camera angles was sometimes during like one or two fight scenes they would rotate the camera around 360 degrees while they were filming the fight, I surely thought this was interesting. It was completely different from what I had seen in other martial arts or karate films. I think one of the reasons they did this so that fight scene or the choreography for the fight wasn't perfected or as good as they wanted it. so they rotated the camera so that it withdrew a little bit of attention from the fights probably so people would see hit not connect or some bad follow through. Also, I can't be sure whether they added the rotating the 360 degrees camera effect before or after production of the final cut. I think this was a unique and innovative way to maybe hide something they could not fix after production.
Another think I noticed a lot of was the fighting scenes. The fighting was really good and really detailed, and there's almost no gaps, fake punches, or anything really obvious like that. I would say that they were extremely well choreographed, and probably practice a lot or lot more than some other martial arts films. As a child, I loved to watch some of the old Jackie Chan movies and I mean the really old ones; the ones where he was a teenager and a young adult where they had the same maybe 12 characters that would just shift rolls over and over and over again. That was one of the primary reasons why I had decided to go see this movie, and I am really glad that it influenced my decision. In my mind the whole time I was comparing how the scenes from these older martial art films, with the acting companies, to these new modern age martial art films.