The Bullet Train
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
A criminal planted a bomb on a Shinkansen, a crowded high-speed train connecting Tokyo to Hakata. The bomb will explode if the ransom isn’t paid, or if the train drops below 80 km/h. This is a landmark film in Japanese disaster cinema, starring Ken Takakura and Shin'ichi Chiba. The screenplay served as inspiration for several American films, including Jan de Bont’s famous 1994 film Speed, starring Keanu Reeves.
Jun'ya Satō
Jun'ya Satō is a Japanese filmmaker. Born in Tokyo, Satō graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956 with a degree in French literature. He joined the Toei studio and worked as an assistant to such directors as Tadashi Imai and Miyoji Ieki. He debuted as a director in 1963 with Tale of Army Brutality, for which he won the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Newcomer. While starting in mostly yakuza film, Satō eventually became known for big budget spectaculars. The Go Masters, a China-Japan co-production he co-directed with Duan Jishun, won the Grand Prize at the Montreal World Film Festival in 1983. He also won the Japan Academy Prize for Director of the Year in 1989 for The Silk Road. In his career, he directed around 40 films and wrote 15 screenplays.
