Heh-heh-heh. Komban wa.
Okay, who loves to watch Zatoichi movies? One of our satellite channels here shows “Samurai Saturday” at some ungodly early hour of the morning. I’m usually up early enough to catch most of it, and so far they’ve always shown Zatoichi movies.
Okay, I know the plots are always very similar: Zatoichi wafts into town and gets entangled with the local yakuza, rescues some poor girl that the yakuza is victimizing, dismembers a few dozen goons and then shuffles off into the sunset. Don’t care. I love the character of Zatoichi and the little tricks he pulls to show the goons how deadly he can choose to be. I also love the cinematography of the films and how they’re shot in the Japanese countryside. I love the sword battle scenes.
Anybody else hooked?
Zatoichi is too cool. My favorite is Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold, where he travels to town to pay his respects to a man he killed in battle. The girl this time around is the dead guys sister, and a local lord who Zatoichi admires is a suspect of the theft of a chest of gold- Zatoichi himself is also a suspect.
Some of the later Z-man movies had more action, but this one had the most involving story.
Which movie was the one where Zatoichi is helping a theater troupe, it had a really odd musical number but my VCR screwed up the recording and I missed the beginning and end of it.
Was Zatoichi based on a real person? An actual Japanese myth? Or was he made up by Japanese movie makers?
I think Zatoichi was made up by the filmakers. There are enough inconsistencies that I doubt it was taken from legend, for example in …the Chest of Gold there are a few joking sequences that are based on the viewer wondering if Z is faking blindness, most other movies in the series work on the assumption that he really is blind. I think this may be something that developed as the movies were made, because …the Chest of Gold is one of the earlier Z movies.
In every one of these movies I’ve seen, Zatoichi does something to make me say, “This is the coolest guy in Japan.”
Zatoichi makes the act of subtly insulting a yakuza boss into a fine art. I love his ability to get his digs in while seeming to be humble and respectful. This must be doubly appreciated by the Japanese audience, as I believe their culture does not admire a direct, confrontational attitude. That Zatoichi! He can pour himself a cup of sake from about two feet up and cut off the pour in the nick of time, but somehow he always misses the boss’s cup and pours it in the boss’s lap. “Oh, sorry! I’m blind, you know.”
In which of his films did he do that comic song and dance for a yakuza boss about catching ducks? There were some veiled insults delicately couched in the song. And when he was done, he pulled up his robe in order to sit down, seemingly unaware that he was virtually sticking his ass in the boss’s face!
I’m resurrecting this thread because – there’s going to be a new Zatoichi movie, called, appropriately enough, Zatoichi, almost forty years after the originals. Zatoichi is played by Beat Takeshi, who is also directing (as Takeshi Kitano; he always uses one name as an actor and the other as a director).
::reading the imdb data that Baldwin kindly provided::
Tap-dancing peasants?
Seriously, that trailer looks pretty cool. I read several imdb reviews, and folks seem to really like it. Sooner or later, Video Library should carry it, and I’ll have to rent it. I’m happy to see there’ll be the obligatory gambling scene, where Zatoichi totally blows the minds of the gambling-house bosses with his parlor tricks. Yay! But I hope the film is not too gruesome overall.
Thanks, Baldwin. I hadn’t a clue this was happening.