Branded to Kill is a 1967 Japanese yakuza film directed by Seijun Suzuki and starring Joe Shishido, Koji Nanbara, Annu Mari and Mariko Ogawa. It was a low budget, production line number for the Nikkatsu Company. The story follows Goro Hanada in his life as a contract killer. He falls in love with a woman named Misako, who recruits him for a seemingly impossible mission. When the mission fails he becomes hunted by the phantom Number One Killer, whose methods threaten his sanity as much as his life. After its release Suzuki was famously fired for making "movies that make no sense and no money". Suzuki was blacklisted and did not make another feature for 10 years but became a counterculture hero. The film drew a strong following which expanded overseas through the 1980s and 1990s and has established itself as a cult classic. Film critics and enthusiasts now regard it as an absurdist masterpiece. It has been cited as an influence by filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch, John Woo, Chan-wook Park and Quentin Tarantino. Thirty-four years after Branded to Kill, Suzuki filmed Pistol Opera (2001) with Nikkatsu, a loose sequel to the former.

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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1854: At least 22 people were killed and 35 others were injured when rebelling miners at the Eureka Stockade clashed violently with the police and the military in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Stockade)

1904: The Jovian moon Himalia was discovered by astronomer Charles Dillon Perrine at the Lick Observatory in San Jose, California, USA. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himalia_%28moon%29)

1967: At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard)

1971: The formal initiation of hostilities of the Indo-Pakistani War began with Pakistan launching airstrikes on Indian airfields, and India retaliating by invading East Pakistan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chengiz_Khan)

1999: NASA lost contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before it reached the atmosphere of Mars and disappeared. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Polar_Lander)

_____________________ Wiktionary's Word of the day:

effectually: In such a way as to achieve a desired result; effectively. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/effectually)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality. -- Joseph Conrad (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad)