Watched an installment in the Zatoichi series tonight (1968's Zatoichi and the Fugitives). Even though this is the only one I've seen, I can tell that Sarah's point about the formulaic nature of these movies is dead on. And that's not totally a bad thing. I enjoyed the hell out of Fugitives. While I was watching, though, it seemed oddly familiar or reminiscent. I thought it was the loose similarities to Kurosawa/Mifune movies like Yojimbo. But this site reminded me that the 1998 classique du fromage Blind Fury was loose remake of the Zatoichi story. While they're pretty dismissive of Blind Fury (hey, it's a Zatoichi fan site, whadda ya expect?), I'd say it's worth a rental. Captures the spirit of the Japanese movies -- unlike A LOT of Hollywood remakes (insert a list too long to even begin here) the folks who made Blind Fury seem to have understood what was so good about the original Zatoichi movies. Plus it features a fine turn by Rutger Hauer, bringing the same kind of charm he would later show off in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.
I was going to say that I was struck by is how much more violent Zatoichi and the Fugitives was than most anything released by Hollywood in 1968 but then I did an IMDB check and saw that Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967 so never mind on that...
yeah I never said formulaic = bad. There are classics of film and literature that are formulaic. The Astaire/Rogers movies are formulaic. Jane Austen's work is formulaic. Not that I'm comparing Zatoichi to Fred & Ginger or Jane Austen. The body count is way off, for one thing.
oh, man. every time i hear "blind fury" i confuse it with the far less artful (but more entertaining) Blind Rage (1978). if there's one thing we've learned from a hundred years of cultural exchange with the japanese: blind people are naturally superior to the sighted.
hey! my link didn't show up!
http://www.livejournal.com/users/dickumbrage/20086.html
We turned off HTML in comments to thwart the evil comment spammers. If you just paste in the URL it shows up as a link. (For some bizarre reason, comment spammers tend not to do that.)