[Trailer] Zatoichi


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I'm willing to keep an open mind, but it does have some points against it:

1.) Shintaro Katsu is Zatoichi. Takeshi has a real uphill battle with this, but I'll reserve my judgement.

2.) Blonde hair. I could have understood if he died it white, but blonde? A blonde haired blind guy in ancient Japan? There'd be no reason for a blind guy to dye his hair. And if it's naturally blonde, then he must be a half-breed, which really complicates things in xenophobic Japan.

Much like the rewritten Catwoman movie, if you alter so much of the character why even use the same name?

2.) I read a review on another site which mentioned that the music was hip-hop or j-pop or something. While such a thing may work in a period kung-fu film, it seems out of place in a samurai film.

I'm hoping I'm wrong and this is a good film. I love a good samurai film and would love to add it to my dvd collection.
 
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Here's something someone posted at a Yahoo Group I belong to. Sorry for not putting it in official quotes, but I seem to be having bad luck with it. Sometimes it only prints a paragraph and others, just a sentence.

""Sex and the Samurai" (The Guardian's report re the Venice Film
Festival --

scroll to the middle for a rave review of Takeshi Kitano's "Zatoichi"):-

"http://film.guardian.co.uk/festivals/news/0,11667,1035574,00.html

"Halfway through the festival, however, and after a slow start, things
looked distinctly promising. And it was that old festival favourite
Takeshi Kitano, actor, writer and television personality as well as
director, who livened everyone up. If Woody Allen's Anything Else, in
which he more or less plays himself, opened the festival with a minor
flourish, Kitano's Zatoichi, which might best be described as the first
samurai musical, had the press cheering.

"Inspired by the 1962 Kenji Misumi classic about a blind swordsman that
spawned some two dozen sequels, it has Kitano as the white-haired
veteran samurai who is still capable of dispatching a dozen assailants
just by listening to their likely moves. The fights are as funny as they
are bloody but Kitano's best trick is to accomplish the shafts of humour
without turning the melodrama into mere parody. Added to that, we have
workers in the paddy fields tap-dancing in the mud and a finale that
suggests that Kitano must have seen Riverdance. The old man's last words to a delighted audience are "the more you open your eyes, the less you see" - a moral that probably fits life more than the film itself."


Okay, so the blonde hair appears to look white on the screen. However, I have to say, "Samurai musical?! Tap dancing in mud?! A Riverdance finale?!"

To quote Homer Simpson from their Halloween episode's Shining parody, "Urge to kill...rising!" :mad:
 

The Zatoichi series was a lot of fun, and the trailer's a lot of fun. Frankly, I'd rather it be in the hands of Kitano (or Miike) rather than some Hollywood funded director.
 

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