Su-ton-pu!
Forgive me if this is old news in the US of A, but I had to post a brief heads-up on "Beat" Takeshi's new film,
Zatoichi. The tap-dancing, Tourettes-suffering TV comedian and director of numerous violent gangster melodramas was convinced to make this recent film (A sequel to the 26 famous "blind swordsman" films) by Madame Chieko Saito, a strip-club empresario and loan-shark from Asakusa. Aparently, the originator of the Zatoichi series, Shintaro Katsu, gave Saito the rights to the character in lieu of debt payments.
It's an astounding movie, in a lot of ways, and I think the Beatster has a lot to say about the queasy role of film as a Japanese art-form--particularly in the contrast between the realism of the medium and the abstraction of a lot of Japanese theatre arts. He constantly tows the line between real and artificial, with strange slapstick moments and a soundtrack where the activities of the actors--such as tilling a field or building a house--become the rhythm of the soundtrack. The whole thing even devolves into a bizarre, Kodo-drumming, tap-dancing, uncomfortably hip-hop finale where the film looks as if a Kurosawa film was remade by Gregory Hines.
* joshua, 4/09/2004 11:03:36 PM
