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Approved.  I mean, everything is pretty darned tame in the movie.  But if you think about what is going on in this movie for even a second, yeah, the whole thing is pretty gross.  Basically, this is a movie accusing women of sexually manipulating men to do their bidding, ultimately leading men to try to murder each other.  There's some comic bits, but everything I'm reading says that this movie is meant to be take quasi-seriously.  There's some mild violence, but that's about it.  Oh, wait.  I completely forgot about the domestic abuse.  That's pretty awful.

DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg

I do not care for this.  Not one bit.

Okay, I thought that I would eventually come around on this box set.  But nothing got me more frustrated than each movie somehow doubling down on the worst elements of the previous films.  I know.  I'm alone in this loathing.  Everyone else seems to like these movies...a lot.  My reviews tend to be the only negative reviews of these movies.  Can I be more glib than normal?  I feel like people see "Old black-and-white movie" and that means that it is somehow a classic.  I know.  There's always Plan 9 from Outer Space.  But I honestly had more fun with Plan 9 than I did the Josef von Sternberg.  

Coincidentally, I'm teaching Josef von Sternberg right now in my film class.  I always had a von Sternberg slide, but I had never seen the movies.  Now, I've seen all of the movies that my slide and I can now give commentary on these films.  The thing that von Sternberg had always gotten praise for is the fact that he aimed to make every cell a work of art.  I mean, you really have to squint to see where he's coming from.  This is a dude who was all about mise en scene and I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to that.  What I watch when I watch movies like The Devil is a Woman is that it all feels a bit hokey.  It's all a cheaper version of what could be something great.  In the box set that I watched, I saw a bunch of movies that all tried to capture the wonder of foreign places that American housewives of the 1930s probably only dreamt of.  But it never really felt like anything even remotely authentic.  If anything, the takeaway I have from Josef von Sternberg is that he's more Epcot than bonafide traveller.  Golly, the broad stereotypes that these movies embrace honestly feel lazy.  

That's probably the most frustrating things about Josef von Sternberg movies.  Very rarely do Marlene Dietrich's characters feel like real people.  Instead, Dietrich leans in so hard into stereotypes and archetypes that it's incredibly hard to take the movie at all seriously.  Honest to Pete, I had an existential crisis thinking that I watched the von Sternberg movies through the wrong lens.  I thought, at one point, "This romance is so fake that all of these movies might have been satire or parody."  I just Googled it.  No, these movies were meant to be things that people watched to fall madly in love with Hollywood.  I don't get it.  Let's focus entirely on The Devil is a Woman, considering that this is technically a blog on that.  It doesn't hurt either that it feels like The Devil is a Woman is the ur-von Sternberg movie.  (Say that ten times fast.) 

The story is almost an epistolary story.  A jaded officer tells a young upstart about this woman who absolutely has him wrapped around her finger.  Marlene Dietrich's Concha, a borderline racist portrayal of a Spanish con artist, is awful for really no reason.  Now, can I admit that there are people in the world that are terrible like Concha?  Sure.  But if the role of storytelling is to create full worlds for these characters where an audience is meant to remotely relate to this character.  But do Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg want us to understand what makes Concha tick?  Honestly, I don't think there's even an attempt for this.  With the title The Devil is a Woman, this feels like a send up of the harlot character.  It's really weird, because Concha is the main character of the story.  Sure, we have to say that Don Pasqual is probably the protagonist of the piece because we are following his goals.  But the strange narrative that women use their sexuality to manipulate men is kinda gross.  And I'm not talking 2026 gross.  There seems to be some joy in showing how powerless men are over sexually attractive women.  I mean, I say "sexually attractive women."  But those drawn on eyebrows?  Sir, we must have a talk.

But since I introduced 2026 Tim, I want to have this paragraph unabashedly talk about how insane this entire thing is.  The key concept is that Concha is holding all the cards because she's so cunning.  Let's put this out here.  Concha does nothing clever.  If anything, she's almost comically honest about how promiscuous she is.  She sings a song about it and everything.  But even beyond that, there's a very gross assumption that men can't control their sexual desires.  Let's treat Don Pasqual as an abboration.  After all, if I'm adding a lot of myself into breaking down his character (because I still say that von Sternberg barely touches on any of it), I can force a reasoning for his behavior.  Pasqual is an older soldier, disappointed by his own station.  Success hasn't brought him the comfort that he expected and he meet Concha, a woman who pushes his every button.  Most people move out of his way.  She stands her ground. Cool.  I can see why, when she has her claws in him, that he continues to make toxic and self-destructive choices.  But that leaves Antonio, played by Cesar Romero (?!  That Cesar Romero?).  Antonio has the heads up on Concha.  He loathes her simply from the story that he was told.   He goes to meet her to kill her and then she asks for a kiss.  

That's stupid.  I'm sorry.  I refuse to believe that Concha is so much of a force of nature that people forget to kill her.  There's no real convesation.  She doesn't let him see a different side of the world.  If anything, Antonio is singularly focused, unlike the bored and tired Pasqual.  The fact that he's ready to kill Pasqual over this woman makes not a lick of sense.  I mean, the entire movie is almost a horror movie about this woman who can make men throw away their souls with a simple glance.  That's not love.  There's nothing romantic about this movie.  I don't understand why these men are losing their everloving minds over this woman outside the fact that the movie tells us that men are meant to lose their everloving minds over her.  I want something that seems real.  I want to have one moment of vulnerability that explains why Concha is somehow worthy of all of this attention.  But, no.  The title stays, implying that women have feminine wiles that are only used for evil.  Come on.  We can do better.  Von Sternberg knows that he has Marlene Dietrich and Marlene Dietrich is associated with being a bombshell.  That's not a movie to me.  It's just her being distant and removed for an hour-and-a-half.  That's so disappointing to me.  I want substance and The Devil is a Woman doesn't even say anything remotely true.  It's just attitude and vibes the entire time.

The movie is dumb.  These movies...they're dumb.  I know I'm alone in this.  Dietrich keeps playing these shallow characters and people don't act like people.  It's reading romance novels that aren't really challenging.  There are great romances out there.  It's not like the entire genre is trash.  But there is a lot of trash in this genre and Dietrich and von Sternberg added to it.  

Rated R for nudity and, to be completely frank, just absolutely abhorrent self-mutilation.  There's also consistent talk about suicide.  Once again, Bergman at least dips his toes into the casual adultery thing.  However, for the first time in the Bergman set, those advances are rejected.  Still, despite being a movie about mourning and death, there is something very sexual about the movie, occasionally touching on incestuous motifs.  

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

I've been waiting for this one.  I mean, that's always a dangerous attitude to have before watching a movie.  And, sure enough, it bit me in the butt.  Listen, I'm the guy who didn't get into Persona and Cries and Whispers probably has a lot in common with Persona.   But while I see Persona as mostly inaccessible, Cries and Whispers is mostly a simple story that I can kind of get behind.  It's just when it gets a little bit more bizarre that I start to get critical of it.

The funny thing about me is that I usually like when things get a little weird.  Why does it bother me so much when Bergman gets to be an odd duck?  I don't know.  One of my favorite films is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  I know.  I'm very basic sometimes.  Michel Gondry lives in the oddity of film.  It's part of his visual art.  When I watch stuff like Eternal Sunshine, the mise en scene and choices that Gondry makes often enhances his core message.  When it comes to Bergman, it's almost like we get something Brechtian.  (I'm almost trying to sound smart at this point.  I don't think it is working.)  Brecht wanted to shake his audience out of complacency.  It wasn't meant to be entertainment.  It was meant to make you think.  Watching something like Cries and Whispers feels incredibly Brechtian.  The first forty-five minutes of the film are a radical way of looking at how people die and grieve ahead of death.  It borderline has no story, shy of a hint that Maria had affairs and is self-involved.  But it looks at how this sister's final moments affect the world around her.  It's haunting and beautiful at the same time.  (I use the word "beautiful" nervously because every moment of Agnes's suffering is haunting.  I just can't deny that Bergman's use of color in conjunction with death has a pleasing nature to it.) 

But the second half of the film almost dares you to maintain contact with the core of the film.  I do think that this is a movie about grief.  The second half of the film has beats that remind you that this is how grief is processed.  But the second half of the film is intentionally surreal.  Characters do things that aren't really set up for in the film.  I want to talk about Karin and the self-mutilation of her genitals.  The first half of the film is upsetting in a universal way.  When we know that someone is on their death bed, we are going to have upsetting moments that are natural.  Karin's labored breathing, coupled with her screams and almost labor pains are something that most people will deal with, in some form or another, before they leave this earth.  It is a universal thought.  I'll even go as far as to say that Karin's desire not to be touched is also a universal idea.  I, with the exception of those very close to me, shy away from touch.  But Karin using the excuse of a broken shard of glass to mutilate herself isn't really set up in any way.  Then spreading the blood over her lips?  This is something that a lesser director couldn't get away with.  That's not a compliment to Bergman.  If anything, I don't know who could get away with that moment, especially so unearned.

Part of what frustrates me about that moment, besides the fact that it is absolutely horrific and seemingly dropped in there for shock value, is the fact that --as slow as this movie is --almost no character work was done before this moment.  We barely know anything about Karin at this point.  We know that she's a bit closed off, bordering on frigid.  Okay, that's something.  But that is such an extreme measure for a character not to be touched that it feels wildly out of character for the film at all.  And remember how I said that Gondry uses the weird moments to focus on the themes of the story?  This moment is so distracting for me that I don't care about the role of mortality up to this point.  Yeah, we could use the genital mutilation as a reminder of birth and the role of life.  I mean, Bergman does attach a sexual component to both family and mortality in the film.  It's not too much to say that there is a sexual component to that moment.  But, ultimately, it feels divorced from the rest of the film.  In that moment, Agnes is so far from our minds that it is ahrd to imagine what that moment really adds to the narrative as a whole.  And I have to be alone here.  I know that Cries and Whispers was up for Best Picture, so I'm the only one who saw that moment and said, "Nope.  Not part of it."  Maybe I'm squeamish and I'm just kvetching because I don't like it.  But it feels so tonally weird after that moment.

The odd thing is that I find the Karin coldness to be one of the more compelling parts of the story.  Maria is overly sexual.  My interpretation of Maria, which may and probably is way off, seems to be a character whose actions may be read as familial.  But I also really believet that Bergman imbues her with an incestual element throughout.  The role of motherhood (which I have to confess I got from the Internet and is not my only thought on the matter) is something that plays out through the story, even if the matriarch of the family dies way before the events of the film.

PG-13 because apparently, this got a lot less spicy than the book got.  That being said, there is some sex and some nudity in the movie.  Over the course of the movie, there are a few scenes that really push that MPAA rating, but there's a lot of course correction to get that coveted PG-13.  The movie mostly dances around innuendo, never really going truly vulgar.  Still, a pretty borderline PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Brett Haley

This might be the fastest I've ever gotten a new year movie after the new year.  When your wife asks to watch a movie --any movie! --you say "yes."  Sure, the following combination of words often spells intellectual death: Netflix original rom-com.  But my wife read the book and really enjoyed it.  I'm going to promote reading and film watching, so I went in with it for a good time.  

I am aware that I'm in the minority of people who doesn't like a rom-com.  It's not that I dislike rom-coms.  But...like...I kind of dislike most rom-coms.  The ones that are good tend to be really good.  The bad ones are insufferable.  And then there are the majority of them, which end up being incredibly forgettable given any amount of time.  The snob in me keeps watching these movies through the lens of that admitted snobbiness.  I don't like this about myself, but I acknowledge that it is deeply a part of my personality.  People We Meet on Vacation is better than most of the rom-coms I get suckered into, but I am almost confident that it will fall into the category of "unfortunately forgettable." 

The things that work are obvious.  Things that don't work are even more obvious.  But I don't want to take any shortcuts on this, despite the fact that I still have to write about Cries and Whispers after this (which is maintaining my snobby street cred.)   The number one thing about this movie is Emily Bader as Poppy.  I mean, if you were looking for an adorakble hero that is meant to be relatable and sympathetic, you have Poppy.  From moment one, she comes across as someone with the joie de vivre that a rom-com heroine should have.  I mean, I don't know how much heavy lifting a profession can carry, but Poppy's entire job is to travel the world and write for a magazine.  If the American Dream says that you can do whatever you want as long as you are willing to sacrifice for it.  Now, if I'm writing this in the looming shadow of Hallmark romances, those sacrifices tend to cause them to spiral, making them hate the choices that they decided on along the way.  Poppy is never that despondent, despite the opening where she claims to be miserable.  But Poppy, throughout the story, is always the Poppy that we love.  We discover that her separation from Alex has caused her to lose some of her spark.  It doesn't matter because Poppy is still Poppy, just a little less bright.  Emily Bader understood the assignment.  Her bright attitude and personality perfectly juxtaposes her character to Alex, who is the Mr. Darcy of the piece.

Now, I don't think this is necessarily Tom Blyth's fault, but I don't get Alex.  I think that Mr. Darcy is a fine line.  Like, Darcy is incredibly unlikable, but a lot of his unlikability comes from years of trauma.  There's so much screwed up about that guy that when Lizzie confronts him on all of his garbage, we're left with the notion that love can change people.  (Hey, I like Pride & Prejudice, okay?  I told you: snobby!)  Alex...isn't Mr. Darcy.  Don't get me wrong.  The absolute last few minutes, I like the guy again.  But Alex is kind of...terrible?  Yes, Poppy is late for their trip, which isn't good.  But Alex comes across as overly confrontational from moment one.  And there isn't a really good reason why Alex is the way he is.  It's actually oddly frustrating when Alex becomes a much nicer person, despite the fact that Poppy's behavior hasn't changed.  (Okay, to give the story a point, Poppy opens up about a vulnerable moment.  It isn't a character change for Poppy because Poppy really hadn't had a moment to be vulnerable.  He may be nicer to her because he hadn't viewed her as a human being before.  But why hadn't he?  That is also a point against Alex.) 

So the frustrating part for me, which I understand is different from the book, is the fact that Alex doesn't really shift as much as Poppy does.  If anything, Alex becomes more demanding.  Again, it might be because he's been distant from Poppy and that Poppy brings the best out of him.  I honestly was surprised by how this movie is laid out.  A lot of the movie feels like this is the story of a friendship that should have been something more.  (You know?  Friends-to-lovers?  That phrase just helped my SEO.)  Two-thirds of the movie is the will they / won't they of it all.  And you think that the movie is going to be over when, big surprise, they do, the movie decides to throw another beat in there.  And it's that other beat that frustrates me.  I hate when my students dump a bunch of summary in their writing, but I'm doing more work dancing around and idea, so a summary might actually help me a little bit.

The movie is formatted in a non-linear fashion.  The present tense has tension between Poppy and Alex, where there has been a quasi-recent falling out.  The two are bound to see each other at a wedding for Alex's brother.  The tension of the present is often diffused by flashbacks to the past, particularly summers leading up to the present day.  The flashbacks surround the trips that Poppy and Alex take together, often building the romantic tension between the two as Alex takes major steps away from being a turd.  Anyway, it all culminates when the two bring respective others on one of these trips and Poppy and Alex almost share a romantic moment when Poppy thinks that she is pregnant.  (I hear that in the book, the two sleep together at an earlier date, but I'm only here to talk about the movie.)  The fun climax of that format closes up in the present at the wedding when the two have the epiphany that they were always perfect for each other and that, despite being drastically different human beings, that they bring out the best in each other.  Happily ever after?

​But then Alex turns into a turd again.   He starts making these unreasonable demands on Poppy and there really is no consequence for that behavior.  Like, he has this reasoning for his argument that makes zero sense.  Poppy is there for a wedding.  She is heading home the next day.  The two of them confession their mutual love about an hour before the wedding.  Okay.  That's completely reasonable.  But asking Poppy to completely throw her life out the window just because she started dating her best friend.  Like, he doesn't care about her perspective at all.  I'm borderline mad for her at this point.  She goes through this whole dark night of the soul, questioning all of her choices when, really, she hasn't done a darned thing wrong.   We have this whole end-of-rom-com moment where she makes the trip to the one place she swore off (although I never really bought that character point) and literally runs after him.  We get a happily ever after in the same way that we got a happily-ever-after from Grease, where the woman has to box up her own personality for this emotionally stunted guy.  I don't care for it.  

But thank goodness for epilogues, right?  I do like that he travels with her.  We get a lot more blending with that epilogue than the movie offers.  But Poppy was willing to throw it all away for a guy who didn't shift at all.  I don't care for that in the least.  It was almost against the plot that Alex ended up not being a turd because I was not optimistic for their chances at the end.

In terms of fun, the movie is very fun.  I keep talking about how good Emily Bader is and every joke she tells lands.  The bits land.  It's just that...I don't like Alex very much.  I like what he becomes when he's around Poppy, which is exactly what the movie wanted me to think.  But it does take a lot to get Alex to a likable place.  But that's what rom-coms are all about, right?  I've already overanalyzed, so maybe I'm not the target audience.  Is it a good watch with the wife?  Sure.  Is it a great movie?  Probably not.

Not rated, but hoooooo-weeeee!  This one is intensely R-rated in my head.  We have a lot of the violence that the first one, but this one has a pretty darned graphic sex scene with nudity.  It also...has nothing to do with the story?  Like, at all.  It's kind of just in there.  Plus, this movie doubles-down on the torture of a character.  While I shouldn't make this a separate category, the violence towards eyeballs is palpable.  It's a lot, guys.

DIRECTOR: Toshiya Fujita

There is a flaw to the out-of-five-star system.  For the most part, I don't use this system, but Letterboxd does.  The flaw of the system is that I instantly compare quality of films to one another.  The long-and-short of it all is that Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance isn't as good as Lady Snowblood, but is still a darned impressive film.

This is a film that suffers the same fate as a lot of these violent swordplay films.  There is always such a quick turnaround between feature films based on how well the first movie did.  The first film is full of story, and it's a story that is personal to the protagonist.  I mean, the first one is a revenge film.  Shy of Yuki running into a super secret second plot that caused her misery throughout her life --which a lesser franchise probably would have done --the revenge story can't be all that personal.  Instead, the world opened up.  Now, considering that this can't be a terribly personal story for Yuki, the story is pretty good.  The problem with that is that, despite the movie being a Lady Snowblood film, Yuki barely plays a part in the story.  She is in the film being wielded as a literal weapon.  She contributes nothing narratively.  There's a moment where the film attempts to make it about Yuki, but it might be the weakest part of the plot.

I hate dancing around things.  I was going to address this later, but since I'm here right now, let's just talk about the thing that bothered me.  Mostly, the story is about the government secret police trying to shut down Ransui Tokunaga, an activist trying to expose the crimes of said government.  For some really dumb reason, they want Yuki to be their spy and discover what Ransui has against them.  The thing is, they don't know this woman.  They know that she's really good at killing and that's about it.  They have her dead-to-rights and they want her to be this nuanced character?  The most obvious thing that would happen is that Yuki would discover that Ransui is a good man who is a fighter or truth and justice.  If you needed a spy to find out what Ransui had on the government, you'd absolutely need a zealot.  It seems like the movie needed an excuse for this to be a Lady Snowblood movie by putting Lady Snowblood in a situation that she normally wouldn't put herself in.  When that plan clearly goes to pot and the secret police just arrest Ransui anyway --which worked, by the way! --they stop really paying attention to their goal of Ransui and devote all of their efforts into finding Yuki, who has almost nothing to do with this story.  Yeah, she killed a bunch of dudes.  But, honestly, the way that these cops are acting, is almost an afterthought.  It seems like the reason that they're after Yuki is because the movie is named after her.  

Okay, that's my gripe.  There may be others as I cross those bridges.  But for right now, that was the thing that bothered me the most.  Oh, and the fact that Yuki just constantly exposes herself to the plague.  Okay, back to griping.  Shusuke does this noble thing for the first time in his life by treating Ransui after he's been injected with plague.  He makes this big point of the fact that no one should be coming close to Ransui and he locks himself in with this guy who has the plague.  Now, Im' not going to be the heartless dude who screams that he should kill Ransui from a distance and burn the body.  I'm not that.  I find that moment quite touching and a moment of major character growth for Shusuke.  But when Ransui dies, putting him in the water source for the town?  Okay.  Fine.  Let's pretend that's not how this works.  He could have just burned the body, but whatever.  The part that really burns me up (no pun intended) is that when Shusuke gets the plague from Ransui, he wants Yuki to help him fight the secret police.  After all that stuff about the fact that Yuki needs to stay away from Ransui, he's very cool with making physical contact with Yuki, who questions whether or not she's a carrier.  But even beyond that, Yuki ends the film handling Shusuke unnecessarily. Okay, now I think the griping is over.

Let's go back into what makes this movie kind of great.  It's my old chestnut: make the movie incredibly political.  The first film is mildly political.  This film?  Full bore let's attack the government and that the police are not your friends.  I do enjoy a good revenge film.  But I also love an "expose the bad cops" film as well.  Boy-oh-boy, does this movie love showing how evil these cops really are.  And it doesn't end with the cops.  The relationship between the police and the higher ups in power is so casually evil that you can just feel the anger behind the camera as this movie was being made.  Part of me is just really tired of watching all of these Zatoichi movies where the bad guys are all gangsters and thugs where it doesn't feel like there's consequences to killing bad guy number three.  Yuki tears these guys apart and I kept thinking, "Geez, I can't believe this movie is going this hard after a shady government."  Instead of any pretense of slow change, represented by Ransui, Yuki just tears these guys up.  It goes so hard that I had to question the final act of the movie.  

This is actually kind of great, especially in the wake of the Epstein files effecting no law enforcement change. The final act has Shusuke and Yuki confronting the government folks, swords drawn.  It's kind of hilariously unbelievable because these guys are brandishing guns as Yuki just takes bullet after bullet while chopping these guys apart.  Okay.  Got it?   Before the fight starts, Shusuke is brandishing all of the evidence of the police corruption over his head.  Shusuke initially was going to use that information as blackmail to get rich.  Not so much now.  Now that he's a changed man, he lets the evidence get swept away in the breeze, treating the letter like the Macguffin that it is.  It just becomes about a bloodbath against the people who are holding power.  Why that one cop doesn't just unload his pistol into them is a mystery, but it still makes a more powerful scene than simply a man infected with plague watching a printer print up evidence.  It's like the movie understands that people don't really care about evidence and it's about action.  Still, I continue to live this nonviolent lifestyle because I want to believe that the world is a better place.  I mean, I'm constantly disappointed. 

Ultimately, there's a kind of gross wish fulfillment thing happening.  As someone who refuses to partake in violence, I watch Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance in the same way that I watch John Wick.   I know what I'm watching is kind of gross.  But also, the notion that problems could potentially disappear given some kind of stabby-stabby superhero is something that my lizard brain finds appealing.  In real life, I would have a hard time defending any of this.  But that's why these kinds of movies exist.  

​Not rated, which is its own kind of insane.  Like, this movie is the template for Kill Bill, questionable content and all.  I've now watched a lot of jidai-geki / samurai-era films.  There's a lot of Japanese swordplay.  There's bloodless violent.  There's bloody violence.  And then there's insane amounts of blood, similar to Lone Wolf and Cub.  This is Lone Wolf and Cub over-the-top bloody violence.  This is the blood that sprays everywhere, regardless of where someone is injured.  Also, the bigger problem is the rape and the child nudity, which avoids genitals but is still really icky.  Not rated, but definitely problematic. 

DIRECTOR: Toshiya Fujita

Happy New Year, everybody!  My smug rear end didn't pick up any resolutions this year because I'm already doing too much.  Maybe that's a New Year's resolution in itself: self-care.  Regardless, here I am, writing yet another blog.  I'm mildly excited about this one because Lady Snowblood is something special.  I am pretty darned sure that I've seen this one before.  Like, 90%.  I've seen Sympathy for Lady Vengeance for sure.  But I also think that I've seen Lady Snowblood because of the direct ties to Quentin Tarantino.  Like, all of Kill Bill owes a heavy debt to Lady Snowblood.  

I had the opportunity to see Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. And then Quentin Tarantino couldn't keep his stupid mouth shut about Paul Dano and it reminded me that Tarantino kind of sucks as a human being.  He's a guy who is weirdly cool with Roman Polanski's past.   I always loved Kill Bill.  I know.  It's a yellow-flag to have that as a favorite movie.  But there's something always fascinating about revenge films. I don't know what it is.  Maybe there's something sadistically satisfying about watching revenge flicks.  It's the kind of thing that, if I encountered in real life, I would shy away from it.  But maybe no one knows how to make a revenge story like the Japanese.  (That sounds inappropriate, but I'm going to stick by it because I quasi-believe it.  You can talk me out of things like this pretty easily, so feel free to chime in.) 

I want to talk about the only negative thing about the movie first because it contextualizes a lot of my thoughts on the great things in the movie.  While completely iconic as Yuki / Lady Snowblood, Meiko Kaji is a little bit of a buy-in for me.  I've now watched a lot of pretty incredible swordplay in all of my silly box sets.  (I keep asking for Criterion box sets for special occasions and the cooler ones tend to be samurai films.  It has made me accidentally a low-key expert on samurai films.) For stills, Kaji is perfect.  But the second she has to move, I really have to turn the imagination on to think that she's this killer, cold assassin.  It's just that the story asks so much from her.  She's imbued with a demonic origin story, implying that, like Frank Castle, she is a storm of fury that cannot be slowed down regardless of what challenges await her.  Now, the story confirms this attitude.  Yuki shows up somewhere.  For sure, everyone is going to die.  But most of the action sequences convey violence by the camerawork, not by insane footwork.  Honestly, she looks the most uncomfortable when she's brandishing a sword.  

But that's really it.  If you do that buy-in for the movie, it really works.  The thing about Meiko Kaji is that she doesn't really have a ton to do, despite being the protagonist of the film.  If anything makes the movie really thrive, it's the piece as a whole.  I want so desperately to say "setting", but that's really not accurate.  If anything, this is a movie that doesn't mind being its own thing.  Golly, it takes some big swings.  The first few minutes, I thought that this was going to be a rougher film.  I mean, again, I know about Lady Snowblood.  I know its whole rep.  Again, very good chance that I've seen this movie.  (Some people are out there wondering why I can't remember if I've seen a movie before.  I watch a lot of movies, guys.)   But between the disjointed narration, the incredible style of the film, and the intense storyline that gets incredibly meta, Lady Snowblood is way more than simply a traditional samurai revenge film.  I mean...she's not even a samurai, guys.

Before I get too lost, I want to bring my thesis to the table.  Once in a blue moon, I'll come up with a great idea for a critical response essay.  I'm telegraphing the fact that I had this thought while writing because I need to do way more research before I would ever present this to an academic environment.  That being said, I do want to stress my paper about gender and ableism, using Lady Snowblood as my foundational text.  My argument is that Lady Snowblood treats womanhood as a disability.  I'm juxtaposing Zatoichi as my counterargument.  The thing that kept all of the Zatoichi movies going was the notion that blind swordsman Zatoichi went from town-to-town and people underestimated him, leading to their inevitable downfall.  No one believed that a blind swordsman could take down a gang of thugs.  Still, movie after movie, he would swing his sword around and they'd all fall to the ground, bloodied by his cane sword.  Same premise exists in Lady Snowblood.  The umbrella sword she carries as a stand-in for the cane sword is fun.  But the real comparison is that Yuki gets incredibly close to these people that she ends up killing because people assume that a woman can't possibly hold her own against a gang of thugs.  Heck, the entire movie is almost reaffirming that notion.  After all, Yuki's origin lies in the fact that these four rape a woman for four days.  I am not trying to dismiss the grossness of the act, but I can't help but make the comparison to Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in Terminator 2.  It's the trauma that she experiences in her origin story that causes her to dehumanize herself, creating the ultimate soldier in her wake.

Now, I've never read the manga.  As comic book literate as I am, it's always been Western comics.  I've kinda/sorta dabbled in bains dessinee because I've been to France.  Here's the thing, what I love as a Westerner who has limited experience with Lady Snowblood as a concept finds the story of Lady Snowblood fascinating.  I imagine that if you were from Japan, you are probably mad that this is only an hour-and-a-half movie and she murders all four of her targets.  After all, Kill Bill takes two films do do the same thing.  In my head, the manga takes a long time for each target to be hunted down and its probably incredibly ornate.  While that might be cool, I like how the movie handles the meta narrative of it all.  I'm talking about Ryu adopting the pen name of Kazuo Koike and becoming the creator of the Lady Snowblood manga in universe. Golly, that is a cool bit of fun.  I like when a fourth wall is broken well.  With a movie like Lady Snowblood, it helps me as a Westerner get a little bit more context for the film as a whole.  Like, in universe, Yuki can't walk around because people know of her story.  Somehow, even beyond all that, we get more insight into the vague politics of the era, having the police under the thumb of the evil Okono Kitahama.

There was a moment that I thought that the movie was going to commit a crime.  It was insane that this movie tried to have Yuki hunt down four of her killers.  When movies like this present such a large premise, very much like The Count of Monte Cristo, I have to wonder what would happen if a target died of natural causes.  And for a hot second, I almost believed that this movie would have answered that question.  And, for that second, I thought the answer was: nothing.  There's nothing you can do if someone dies of natural causes.  I mean, thank goodness that's not how the story ended.  As melodramatic as it was, having a big boss who impliments disguses (I mean! That was an incredibly effective face mask for 1973) as a guy who returns from the dead?!  It did the exact thing that the movie needed to do.

AND THEN!  AND THEN!  Having Yuki deal with the consequences of killing the most pathetic of the group by getting stabbed by the daughter?  Chef's kiss, guys!  Chef's kiss!  I love that the movie doesn't let Yuki get away with anything.  It is a world that has too much blood, but just the right amount of real world consequences. 

​I love this kind of stuff, guys.  I really do.