Yoji Yamada's 'Love and Honor' R3 HK DVD June 29th 2007.

This was actually one of the oddest films to try to regularly keep track of over this past year. Initially it started making appearances in the form of it's Official Site towards the end of 2006, and nothing more than a rather plain teaser trailer ever seemed to appear - the rest of the site was dominated by reams of text, complicated by masses of links - and so it's only by seeing that there's been some superbly positive responses to the content of the film itself (and considering there's been success with fans, and companies, all over the globe) that it's one of the easiest recommendations I can make this year.

Here you go then, the most popular stop-off point for those that still have a distaste for the price of R2 Japanese DVDs and can't be bothered with the red tape and inordinate release date gaps - this was only released in Japan on DVD relatively recently too - here's your chance for an edition that's cheap and usually presented very well. It's from within HK of course, has English Subtitles of course, but it will make further stops around the world, likely appearing (as per the previous two) with Tartan both in the UK and the USA at some point down the line. For me, I stop here, pocket this edition and wait for it to arrive in order to finally get my chance to view it. Should be nice; Jason Gray picked this for the 2006 No.1 spot in his end-of-year list for MidnightEye, saying it was simply, "Perhaps the strongest entry in journeyman director Yamada's samurai trilogy...".

Pre-Order Yoji Yamada's 'Love and Honor' on R3 HK DVD for June 29th 2007 Release, at YesAsia.