takeshi kitano

This past weekend, Paramount Pictures kicked off the publicity tour for its upcoming Ghost in the Shell adaptation with a global launch party in Tokyo. Cast and crew were on hand to talk about the film; exhibitions of the film’s art and costume designs were on display for those in attendance. For the rest of us, something even better was announce: the first theatrical trailer for Ghost in the Shell is here, and it is not exactly short on style.

Whenever I think about Ben Marra's comics, which is often, the one thing that always comes to mind is how well it captures the style of the VHS era. With his work on self-published titles like Night Business and OMWOT: One Man War On Terror, Marra's been doing his level best to evoke that sleazy, neon-soaked aesthetic of walking through the aisle at the local video store in the late '90s, full of boxes that haven't left my imagination in 20 years. It makes sense, then, that when it came time to re-release Takeshi Kitano's Violent Cop, the landmark 1989 yakuza film about a policeman pushed over the edge when his sister is kidnapped, Film Movement decided to tap Marra to create a new poster to accompany the feature.

I'm a simple man with simple tastes. I'm also a critic, and that means that I obsess over my simple tastes in an attempt to both quantify them and convince myself that they aren't simple. But at the same time... they are simple, and that's a wonderful thing...