The Blind Swordsman: Zatôichi
The Blind Swordsman:
Zatôichi
by Henry Edward Hardy
Zatôichi is a humble blind masseur who is also (of course) a master swordsman. He is no saint and enjoys the simple pleasures of gambling, sake and the company of women. But when bad guys want to do badness, watch out! He cuts them down in fine style.The film follows the familiar genre of a master swordsman who travels about in humble circumstances and has some extraordinary disability. In the excellent Lone Wolf and Cub manga and movies, it is a disgraced samurai with a young son he carries around on his back. The Hong-Kong One-Armed Swordsman films are naturally about a master swordsman with one arm.
The Zatôichi character was the subject of a popular TV show from 1974-1979. This latest Zatôichi film is approximately the 25th of that name. It is the first made by and starring Takeshi Kitano.Kitano’s swordsmanship is swift and decisive and his physical control excellent. There is no sword-clashing, flourishing back and forth here; when Ichi finally draws his cane sword he strikes like a cobra: decisive, ruthless and using the entire strength of his body behind the blade.
Only one opponent marks him; the tragic ronin character Hattori Genosuke (Tadanobu Asano). Genosuke is a noble samurai fallen on hard times who enlists as a “bodyguard” with the local yakuza gang in order to buy medicine for his consumptive wife O-shino (Yui Natsukawa).
Ichi falls in with two ruthless ‘geishas’. One of whom is really a man, who is the brother of the other geisha. They are seeking revenge against the yakuza clan, which destroyed their family. A great deal of camera time is devoted to the brother who is unambiguously devoted to living as a woman even when the bad guys have been eliminated.
Kitano used color to distinguish between the various factions, and to give the principal characters signature distinguishing features such as his yellow hair and red sword-cane. And there is blood. Geysers of blood. Fire-engine red bursts of rather badly done computer-graphic blood. If you don’t like to see vast effusions of obviously fake blood this might not be the movie for you.
But for fans of the period samurai film, or anyone looking for something offbeat and entertaining, Zatôichi is not the worst film one could see.
Zatoichi – A Takeshi Kitano Film http://www.zatoichi.co.uk/
Zatôichi (2003) (IMDB) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363226/
Zatoichi (wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zatoichi
The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi/Sonatine (2004) (Rotten Tomatoes) http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blind_swordsman_zatoichi/
A version of this article appeared previously in Current Magazine and on Electric Current, http://eCurrent.com/
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
The Perfect Beauty in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
The Perfect Beauty in
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
by Henry Edward Hardy
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (Inosensu: Kokaku Kidotai, 2004) works both as a cyberpunk no-holds-barred shoot-’em-up and as a philosophical exploration of the nature of consciousness, memory, identity and what it means to be human in an artificial world. In a series of baffling crimes, an obscure series of android sex-dolls has developed a malfunction: they have started to kill their masters. When the military cyborg Batô responds to a crime in progress, he finds two murdered cops. A painfully beautiful geisha-doll android cradles the cop’s decapitated head in her arms like a baby. With perfect beauty and efficiency she tries to murder Batô as well. When he fells her with one punch of his android knuckles, she folds like a broken toy and begs him, “Help me”, then malfunctions and explodes in a most alarming fashion.
The film is visually stunning.The washed-out, grey, flat cell-animated anime characters contrast with the brilliant, super-real, anamorphically skewed candy-like cathedral light of the world portrayed through their cybernetically-enabled senses. The story is told through action and inaction, silence and violence. Much of the very laconic, cool dialogue is an obvious reference to film noir, as are the 1950s-era automobiles.
The geisha dolls are based on a series of pre-World War II dolls made by German surrealist Hans Bellmer, who made them partly as a protest against the Nazi ideals of physical culture, and partly out of an innate sense of sensuality and idealized beauty. As with Bellmer’s works, this ambiguity, that anything perfect cannot be anything human, is central to the film.
The protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi, is known at first in this movie only as a memory, a cipher. She disappeared years ago on a mission detailed in the Ghost in the Shell manga by Masamune Shirô and movie of the same name by Mamoru Oshii. Only her partner, Batô, continues to believe she is alive on the Net. We learn that what makes Major Kusanagi and Batô human, is that they love. Their sense of companionship, loyalty and identity with all life is what endows the shell of the body, whatever it may be, with a “ghost” or soul.
Google Image results for Ghost in the Shell: Innocence
Ghost in the Shell: Innocence (IMDB)
Ghost in the Shell: Innocence (Rotten Tomatoes)
Ghost in the Shell: Innocence (wikipedia)
Hans Bellmer (wikipedia)
A version of this article appeared previously in Current Magazine and on Electric Current
Copyright © 2005, 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
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Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
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