Now the second film we watched on Samurai Sunday was even better…Zatoichi! This is what I want from a samurai film…honour, blood, swords, ronin…you name it, they got it!
Zatoichi follows a blind swordsman around. But don’t be put off because he’s blind. He uses his other senses to kick some evil ass. In the end, the film revolves around some Yakuza hassling the people of the town for protection money and then the blind swordsman comes to their aid. Is this a common story? It’s seems that there is always the theme of taking down the man (or the bad man) in all movies and it involves the bad men taking money from little old ladies.
Anyhow, I loved the film. It was amazing. It was funny, it was serious, it had a great style to it…even the kids raking the fields tapped their rakes to the dirt in time to the music. The battles between samurai resulted in some stylized computer generated blood which was neat. The story was decent too and it kept my interest. For an introduction to a samurai film, it was top notch.
After reading about Zatoichi, I found out that he is the Japanese equivalent to our James Bond. He literally has 30+ films about the character, as well as a television series! What’s even crazier is the fact that the actor Shintaro Katsu was the sole actor who played Zatoichi until he passed away and then Takeshi Kitano took over the mantle in the 2003 film version of Zatoichi (which is the version we saw). I would be interested in seeing a few of the old Zatoichi films because of the lore that it has on the samurai culture. I wonder if my uncle Gerry has seen all the Zatoichi films while in Japan? Maybe it’s one of those things where it airs every Saturday night…
Two samurai swords up for this film. Highly recommend as part of your mandatory samurai film watching.
After the film, we ended up picking some Chinese food up from the Lucky Star Chinese place down the street from us. It was pretty good and we were all stuffed afterwards. All in all, Samurai Sunday was a success and I will definitely think about holding another one in the future.
