Walk: AMC Kabuki
Distance: 4.5 Miles
So, Ciwt's main go to movie theater is the AMC Kabuki located in Japantown which contains Kabuki Springs and Spa, not too far from the renowned Asian Art Museum, and overall there is a significant Japanese population in San Francisco. For all these reasons Ciwt has felt a bit out of it because she knows virtually nothing about kabuki, the art form.
As of today and thanks to the exquisite and riveting movie, Kokuho, she is feeling much better about this limited knowledge. Turns out nobody, even in Japan, knows much about Kabuki theater- or ever has since its beginnings in Kyoto, 1603. It's a very secretive art form with distinct and protected bloodlines and hierarchy. And, as presented by Sang-il Lee, the director, after a book by Shuich Yoshida, kabuki has many ruthless similarities to yakuza, the Japanese mafia. Kabuki's violence is sado-masochistic rather than direct. It is more psychologically complex and certainly more graceful, lushly costumed and exacting in physical training. Yet in both the yakuza and kabuki worlds the most subtle shifts or small deviations from tradition can be matters of life or death.
Ciwt went to Kokuho only knowing it had very high Rotten Tomatoes ratings and has been seen by over one million people in Japan. Her assumption was that the movie would be too stylized and formal to hold her and she'd probably leave sometime before the three hour running time. Instead she was spellbound from beginning to end by the visual poetry of costumes and makeup, intense acting and dancing by truly gorgeous performers, the exacting Kabuki art form itself and, yes, the violence on many levels. Kokuho is a deeply human, penetrating, heartrending, sometimes shocking reflection on what art, performance, and absolute greatness really means.
