I had never heard of Kiyoshi Kurosawa before the Mubi retrospective but I'm a huge fan of his style: the spare soundtracking, heightened and sensual sound design, and absolutely perplexing and entrancing characterization. This is a martial arts (short) film, but it doesn't become that until the last 10 minutes of its half hour runtime. In the run up, it teases a virus mystery, an industrial intrigue caper, a ghost story, and a rom com, all before revealing the martial arts theme before a classic fight chain up the floors of the company building against lackeys to build up to a final boss fight (which is subverted as well). The fight scenes are extremely good, lacking the over-the-top choreography of many martial arts flicks. Well worth the watch.

Idk why people are hating on this so much. I thought it was hilarious. A quite stylish short, it detailed a CEO bum's failed quest to pull a construction worker. I honestly did not expect the route it took after that, but it was great. It was like one of those elevator games or that episode of spongebob where you work your way up to the final boss. Except in this case, the final boss is a pathetic blithering moron "protected" by an equally pathetic henchman who gets absolutely destroyed. I thought it was very funny, well choreographed, and stylistically shot, and I'm not sure why so many didn't like it. What's not to like? Was it because the so-called traditional gender roles got flipped on their head? A construction woman absolutely obliterating security guards was great to watch. Of course, this was never going to be the short equivalent of Seven Samurai or whatever but nonetheless it was very nicely done

High 7