I’ve seen a couple of the old Zatoichi movies and I liked them, but I was excited for this one not because it was a Zatoichi film, but because it was a TAKESHI KITANO film. The great badass laureate does his usual writing/directing/editing deal while playing the blind masseuse with the deadly cane sword.

So I don’t know why but for some reason it threw me off that this really was more of a Kitano movie than what you expect when you see a Zatoichi movie. It’s like, what if Jim Jarmusch made a Zorro movie? It’s kind of weird. The character is very similar to how Shintaro played him, with a little more of the Beat Takeshi humor and for some reason with blond hair. But the feel of the movie itself is very Kitano. It wanders around like a dotted line in a Family Circus comic, gradually introducing a family of offbeat characters, without letting on too strong about which ones the movie is about. It has the usual Kitano sense of humanity, introducing a couple of dumb (one arguably retarded) characters and one crossdresser, without a trace of being judgmental.

Man, I felt dumb that I didn’t figure out that geisha was a man until Zatoichi pointed it out. The dude is blind and he figured it out before me. I feel your pain, Eddie Murphy.

The weirdest thing is that alot of the movie really doesn’t focus on Zatoichi at all. It keeps flashing back to tell the stories of the other characters like the two geishas and the rival samurai bodyguard (all of them interesting). Early on, Zatoichi goes to gamble on dice, and I thought it was going to be that scene from the first Zatoichi where he pretends not to know his opponents can see the dice, tricks them into cheating and then scams them out of all their money. Instead, Zatoichi just gambles. And gambles. And he stays there for days. It’s partly my own fault, because it took me longer than it should have to figure out what he was really doing: bonding with one of the gamblers, the nephew of the nice old woman Zatoichi is staying with. But this portion of the story is so long it’s kind of weird. It seems like the first half of the movie every time they cut back to Zatoichi all he does is sit there and bet. You want him to be onscreen more and passive less. Even though when he’s offscreen you definitely get involved in the other characters. (more…)

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