Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman

Here's an interesting offering. the story follows a blind samuri who comes into a town overrun with gang activity. In the course of his daily wanderings he manages to eviscerate most of the gang members and scare off the rest. It's a modern period piece in Japanese with subtitles. Inside this movie is a really tight 90 minute touching samuri movie, but there are quite a few scenes that are of the quality we're getting used to seeing in the "deleted scenes" features on DVDs. they're in charcter and are usually amusing in some way, but they do something that interrupts the flow of the movie or breaks the atmosphere of the moment. For example there is one scene where our Incompetant Comic Relief attempts to teach several other boys how to swordfight, and they just keep hitting him in the head. Is it funny? yes. Is it what the characters would probably do? Yes. Is it Zatoichi disembowling gangmembers? No. Now, I'm not saying that all I watch this for is the violence, but the point is that the scene could have disappeared and things would keep moving instead of pausing for some nonsense. A really nice touch in the movie is a number of scenes with some tap-dancing peasants who, Stomp style, match the percussion of the soundtrack with their daily actions like working in the field or building a house. They only become a nussance during the final few scenes after Zatoichi has defeated the Ronin the gangs have hired when the whole town decides to throw some type of elaborate party where everyone is doing a Riverdance-meets-Kurosawa routine in a frameing style reminicient of the cast call at the end of a play, when even the dead characters come out for their applause. Interspersed with that are short segments where we learn Zatoichi's true identity and see the defeat of the real masterminds. Still quite the enjoyable movie, but I thought it could have been trimmed. Plus the graphics are really bad. Almost all the blood and half the time the swordblades aswell are computer generated. this makes some effects look really odd,a nd the blood is never believable except in the few cases where they use real blood. the kvetch I have with this is that Samuri dismembering people on film is practically an industry in Japan. They've been finding ways of making it look believable for forty-odd years now, there's no real reason to switch to CG. even ultra low budget films have the capacity to make us believe a man just had his hand chopped off. Come on, give us a little more corn syrup.

Total: 64