Not rated.  For a lot of this movie, you might think that this might be the most tame Zatoichi.  Heck, for a little while of the movie, Zatoichi renounces his life of violence and tries to become what he considers to be a good man.  But to get to that point, he has to confess something to his potential fiancee.  Apparently, he's quite open with the fact that he's slept around a lot and might be physically ruined because of it.  Also, it's a Zatoichi movie, so there is going to be death.  You also know that there are a billion more movies in the franchise, so he's going to go kill some folks.  

DIRECTOR:  Tokuzo Tanaka

I'm breaking my own routine by pushing a blog up the priority list.  I'm leaving for vacation tomorrow and I won't remember the details of a Zatoichi​ movie.  These are the problems I'm running into.  (I would like to apologize right here.  Not only did I introduce that I was going to be a rebel, but I ended up doing the other things on my To-Do list.  Yay?)  

Man, I'll tell you, New Tale of Zatoichi would have made an amazing dismount as a trilogy of films.  The Tale trilogy?  I mean, there's the definite implication with the title New Tale of Zatoichi that this movie is meant to introduce the episodic structure that the franchise would take on.  By definition, it should distance itself from the previous two films.  But the first two films, even though The Tale of Zatoichi Continues tried to tie itself directly to The Tale of Zatoichi,  aren't really linked by any real narrative threads.  The only thing that we really get between the two is the notion that Zatoichi is always going to be underestimated for his blindness, coupled with the fact that he can't ever find peace.  And if that's the only thing that we can take away from the first two films, I can't think of a better way to put a bow on that than New Tale of Zatoichi.  

Even though Zatoichi's brother died in the last film, this is the one that feels the most personal of all of the Zatoichi movies...at least as far as I remember.  Shintaro Katsu, it seemed, played Zatoichi as a character.  The persona that he displays is the one that keeps him alive.  He's the guy who is sizing up all of the situations so when things go down, he's staying on top.  That means that his blindness is an asset, not something to be pulling him back.  (I mean, it's a bit of a cop out.  One of the things about Zatoichi's blindness is similar to Daredevil's powers.  He sees things that most people can't see.)  But the is possibly the only movie in the franchise that I see Zatoichi with that character stripped away.  This seems to be the earnest Zatoichi. 

Much of that comes with the fact that he's interacting with the character that made him the Zatoichi we know and love.  I mean, I'll keep comparing Daredevil to Zatoichi because they are mirrors for one another.  When Frank Miller introduced Stick to Daredevil (I'm fairly certain I'm remembering that right), it opened the door to the notion that a character's abilities don't simply exist because of an origin story.  With Matt Murdock getting hit in the face with radioactive chemicals (the same ones that made the Ninja Turtles, but that's a story for another day!), he was simply blinded and given larger than life sensory experiences. It doesn't explain how Matt jumps off buildings and beats up ninjas all day.  Instead, the notion that there's someone out there who has pierced the veil of how the human mind builds abilities is something fascinating.  Stick was always a mystery because he is almost outside the story like we are.

Banno, as a placeholder for Stick, actually gives us more to work with than Stick.  Because the world of Zatoichi isn't necessarily supernatural (although, we might be able to stretch plausibility), Banno still acts as someone outside the story like we are, but he's also grounded in a world that has expectations of him.  Before I go and blow too much smoke up Banno's butt, I would like to have known more about Banno's relationship with Zatoichi before this moment.  The series is now becoming infamous for being tight-lipped about anything that would create character connections to Zatoichi.   Because we know so little about Banno and Zatoichi's relationship, we have to make guesses.  We have to assume that Banno took pity on a young, recently blinded Zatoichi and taught this kid how to survive his new existence.  And from Zatoichi's perspective, seeing his aging master, he has to assume that Banno is the same man that he knew all those years ago.  Maybe there's an origin story where Banno was always a monster, but that doesn't feel like the story we're getting here.

God bless New Tale of Zatoichi for understanding the importance of an A-story and the unimportance of a B-story.  I've always gotten a little mad at Zatoichi movies for trying to cover up the lack of story beats by throwing in an overly complex B-story.  This one?  Super good.  In fact, we even have a C-story.  And whoever wrote this one?  Good for you when it comes to tying all three plots together.  The A-story is devoted to Zatoichi's relationship with Banno and Banno's sister, who is being pushed into marriage by her brother.  Now, a lot of that story seems like it wouldn't take up much time in a Zatoichi movie.  It's one of those things that builds tension between Zatoichi and Banno, two guys who should be like father and son.  But because --at least in the context of feudal Japan --it is Banno's right to determine where his sister Yayoi should go and whom she should marry, Zatoichi doesn't have much ammunition to stand up to this man. 

That B-story is a lovely continuation of something that came out of The Tale of Zatoichi Continues.  I love that the brother of the man that Zatoichi killed in that movie wants revenge for his brother's death.  He starts off completely unsympathetic.  Zatoichi gives him a chance to understand where Yasuhiko's mistake lies and Yasuhiko cuts him off.  He knew that it was probably his brother's fault that the whole thing went down.  He doesn't care.  He doesn't want the world to know that his family was killed by a blind man.  Yasuhiko starts the film as a lovely unsympathetic bad guy.  But that's what makes this B-story worth something.  Yasuhiko, because of the power of love --at least from Zatoichi's position --let's Zatoichi go unpunished.  It's a great moment, too.  Because Zatoichi promised Yayoi to be a better man, Yasuhiko allows the two to get married, even though Zatoichi lost the wager?  That's some great stuff.  I love the whole beat of bafflement when Zatoichi asks to be punished in some other way that doesn't involve death.  We know that Zatoichi would tear Yasuhiko apart.   Still, Yasuhiko chooses to go against his nature and lets the whole thing go.  It's great.  

It's why the C-story works so well too!  Finding out that Banno is a scumbag and has fallen so far from grace that he's the actual villain of the story absolutely slaps.  There's a kidnapping and it seems like Banno, the noble samurai, is the guy who is going to make everything okay.  No, none of that.  Banno is so desperate to get back into glory days, he'll rob, cheat, or kill anyone who stands in his way.  Watching Banno kill Yasuhiko, after Yasuhiko went through the wringer and came out a new man on the other side, that ripped me apart.  Yasuhiko is actually punished for his nobility, making that death something that we actually cared about for once.  I'll tell you, I cared more for Yasuhiko's death than I did for the TB samurai in the first one or Zatoichi's brother in the second one.  The movie made me care about a bad guy and I loved it.  

When we see how far off the reservation Banno has gotten, murdering the people who he swore to defend, it's painful.  The entire movie, we think that there's going to be this epic showdown between Zatoichi and Banno that's going to tear the roof off the movie.  After all, who has to be the biggest threat to Zatoichi than the guy who taught him everything he knows.  But the brevity of that fight might actually be the right call.  Banno is not the same man who trained Zatoichi.  That man was a man of honor who did the right thing, no matter what.  But part of that belief system is what made Banno such an effective samurai.  It doesn't matter that he once was way better than Zatoichi.  Zatoichi has used his talents and abilities to help the helpless often and recently while Banno simply rested on his laurels.  I can't help but compare the last fight between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Maul in Star Wars: Rebels.  

This is a top-tier Zatoichi movie.  Do I wish the franchise ended here?  Yeah.  I also regret that I have three more Zatoichi movies to watch and write about because I thought I only had one more.  We'll get there.  It's only one more disc.

Rated R for just about everything that could be R.  First and foremost, and I'm only putting it first and foremost because sometimes I don't want things to pop up in preview mode, is that it is a horror movie.  There is gore.  There is death.  It is uncomfortable.  But this also a movie about sex and relationships.  Some of those relationships shouldn't be using the connatative term "relationship" because the whole movie is an allegory for date rape.  There is also suicide and animal cruelty in the movie, coupled with a lot of language and drinking.  It has it all.  R.

DIRECTOR: Curry Barker

It's amazing that I got to see this on Peacock so quickly.  IMDB has this listed as a 2025 movie, but I think it only got the wide release at the beginning of this summer.  I was kind of stoked to see this one.  I was told that I absolutely had to see that.  Normally, that is the thing that is going to hold me back on watching a movie.  I tend to raise the bar to an impossible standard when I hear that.  But Obsession is...pretty great?

I had seen one of the very indie films that Curry Barker had released on YouTube, Milk & Serial.  I didn't know that he had made this before I watched it.  Man, this guy gets grounding his horror pretty darned well.  Like, it isn't the most realistic depiction of twenty-somethings.  But it's also not-not that either.  While horror is definitely important to Obsession, the core of this movie is about the relationships between these characters.  I feel really full of myself writing this, but I do think horror movies live or die based on whether or not you care about the characters.  But like When a Stranger Calls, it also helps when the call is coming from inside the house.  

I can't imagine just watching this as a horror movie.  Like, it works as a horror movie.  It's genuinely scary and upsetting. But Barker is putting a heavy spotlight on the allegory of what is going on here.  I want to make this as clear as possible:  Bear sucks.  My God, Bear sucks.  For those people who feel sympathy for that dude, don't.  I do love that we've gotten to the part of story that the "Good Guy" trope is a big red flag.  Bear thinks of himself as the victim and the hero of this story for a lot of it.  Maybe in Act III, he finally understands that he's not the best guy in the world, especially when Nikki is begging in her sleep to be killed before the possessed version of Nikki takes over again.  There has to be a bit of a separation in that moment.  But Bear is the right level of pathetic to comment on the male loneliness epidemic.  (Note:  The Male Loneliness Epidemic is an even bigger red flag and I can't even completely separate myself considering that I thought I was probably the victim in my early 20s.) 

One of the things I may struggle with when it comes to Obsession is the fact that what Bear did seemed pretty inoccuous.  The notion of a One Wish Willow is something that is so innocent that the movie even comments on it by having Ian wish for a billion dollars.  While I never believed in superstition like throwing a coin in a fountain, the notion that someone would be punished for wishing for love is an odd choice.  Maybe that's not the crime that Barker wants to comment on.  For a minute, I thought it was an odd choice that Ian was accusing Bear of taking advantage of Nikki, especially considering that Ian knew what Bear thought about Nikki.  (We discover later that Ian and Nikki were hooking up, on-and-off, which contextualizes that conversation.)  But Bear seems to unpack early on that Nikki's behavior is the result of the One Wish Willow and sees that she's being tormented by Bear's wish.  That's the moment that makes Bear the villain and the commentary there is staggering.  

As a follow-up to this idea, I wonder about Bear's wording when it comes to the wish.  The film is called Obsession.  You would think that the actual wish would have something to do with the word "obsession" itself.  "I wish that Nikki was obsessed with me."  It's far more toxic than Bear's actual wish, "I wish Nikki was in love with me more than anyone in the world" or something like that.  It's the word "love" that is substituted that weirds me out.  Maybe all One Wish Willow wishes are perverted to the worst versions of themselves, but it doesn't feel like what Nikki gives Bear is love.  It feels like "obsession," hence the title of the movie.  

Maybe the whole movie is a cynical look at what people think that love is. The entire world of Obsession doesn't really show a world with love.  The closest thing that we can really see in this movie about love is Sarah's relationship with her father, which is strained.  I suppose we see Bear's love for his cat, but that even seems pretty mild, even for for a pet lover.  Instead, if we can glean that the wording that Bear uses to change Nikki into what she becomes, then the notion of love is a selfish concept.  It kind of aligned with the way that Bear treats the world.  Bear isn't in love with Nikki at any point in this movie.  He thinks he is.  But he's obsessed.  Despite the fact Nikki apparently had the moniker "Freaky Nikki" at one point, Bear is in this headspace where he can be the hero for this girl that he imagines is both perfect and broken.  When he makes the wish for "love", that's what he thinks that love is.  

The insane thing is how quick Bear gets scared of Nikki.  Like, the entire first and a lot of the second act have Bear trying his best to make this relationship work.  Sure, we get that montage of them having a happy relationship together.  Points to the filmmakers for having the chops to recreate rom-com imagery in that sequence.  I'm going to die on this hill saying that the filmmakers want to make a story about how toxic love is.  There is that honeymoon phase that Nikki and Bear have (which had to be incredibly quick considering that every other character can't imagine how quickly Nikki spirals).  But as the story grinds forward, Nikki gets scarier.  There has to be a practical reason for that.  After all, Obsession  is a straight up horror movie that is meant to be terrifying.  Part of the format of the horror movie is that the film needs to build to a crescendo.  Thus, the famous scene of Nikki standing there soiling herself can't be the most insane she gets.  It is a bit weird that the wish hadn't changed, but Nikki's approach to the wish changed.

Again, a lot of this has to fall under my own headcanon.  Maybe this is a commentary on the dangers of a honeymoon period.  It's weird, because the most fun part of a relationship is the obsession part.  It's the time that you are insufferable to other people.  Maybe Nikki's performance of love simply coincided with the fact that Bear was reciprocating that love appropriately.  But as small flags started going up and Bear started to look at her as a flawed person, Nikki escalated those reactions.  That's where the nightmare stuff happened in the movie.  But because this is a movie about obsession, there were never healthy conversations.

You want to know something screwed up?  I'm incredibly narcissitic with this movie.  This is one of those few movies that ended the way that I wanted it to.  I had a prediction about halfway through the movie about how this story would have ended and I didn't think the movie would have the guts to do it.  Nope.  It's exactly how the movie ended.  The movie kept on telegraphing that suicide would have to play a part in the ending.  But I was thinking, "Man, Bear is the worst.  There's no way that this movie would simply allow this character to make this self-sacrificing choice when it came to Nikki."  After all, the entire movie is a condemnation of people like Bear.  I knew that he thought that he was heroic enough (For those people who are dealing with thoughts of self-harm, suicide is never heroic.  This movie presents a very fantasy / convoluted scenario where it twists morality) to sacrifice himself for Nikki's freedom.  But when he e-brakes that decision, I started clapping.  That is absolutely Bear.  To couple the whole thing with Nikki wishing on the Willow?  And the fact that he dies immediately after?  That's what I wanted.  That's the thing I predicted and it happened.  Normally, I hate guessing the ending.  But that ending was so good and I'm incredibly full of myself.

Yeah, Obsession is pretty darned good.  It's really messed up, but it also has stuff to say.  I love when a horror movie has some meat behind it.

Rated PG.  I heard somewhere that this movie was darker than PG and I suppose I can see where that opinion is coming from.  It's really weird to think that there is a PG murder mystery that is almost tailored for a family audience.  In terms of tone, the movie feels genuinely PG.  There are a few moments that get a little darker than I think I'm comfortable in a PG movie.  There is this whole concept of death and intentionally forgetting the important things.  There's also a really scary scene with dogs that leads to a character death.  Still, it really does feel PG, so go from there.

DIRECTOR:  Kyle Balda

Honestly, I don't want to write about this. I hate starting off so many blogs with "I don't want to write about this. (Hey, I just realized that the image I chose for the movie looks like the sheep are looking in on my writing with dismay and disappointment.  Sorry, sheep.  I just don't feel like writing about your movie.)  It's just that I have to write when the opportunity presents itself or I fall behind.  I don't want to fall behind.  I want to be a good little blogger.  I'd also like to play video games until I fall asleep on the couch, but that's an almost never happening thing nowadays.  

When I saw the preview for this movie, I was honestly stoked.  I don't know what it was.  I wanted a wholesome murder mystery told from a unique perspective and, if I have to give the movie the points it deserves, it accomplished that.  It just didn't tickle me in the way that I really wanted it to.  I don't blame my wife because she's amazing at these things, but she figured it out (for the most part) even before the victim died.  She told me and I immediately said, "Yup, that's it."  Just because this is a murder mystery, I do have to make a SPOILER WARNING.  I hate doing it, but I'm going to talk about the killer and why this exact story disappointed me for a big murder mystery that (I have a feeling) is going to open the door to a franchise. 

Because it was a Nathan Fillon vehicle, my wife and I used to watch Castle.  We were big Firefly nerds and we were going to follow Captain Tightpants to whatever vehicle he was headlining.  (Note:  Castle burned us pretty hard by the time we got to the wedding, so we have yet to watch The Rookie.  I do not have regrets about this.) But while we watched Castle, I realized something pretty quickly.  I realized that you could figure out the killer by paying attention to Act I and seeing which person had the camera on them long enough to be considered more than an extra, but didn't have the camera on them long enough to be considered "Guest Star" or "Special Guest Star."  Soon, it became a competition to figure out who the killer was as quickly as possible.  The story be damned!  You could figure it out by format.  

The same kind of holds true for The Sheep Detective.  Yes, you could piece together motive and clues to figure out that Elliot was the killer.  I'll even say when he goes into the hallway to make his phone call, that was a nice touch (That we all figured out because we knew he was the killer).  But from a screenwriting perspective, you had two characters doing the exact same job: the police officer and the reporter.  In a lot of detective stories, the police officer OR the reporter act as the ways to organize thoughts.  They unpack things that other characters aren't allowed to see, giving the audience and inside scoop into what is really happening behind the scenes.  With the case of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Sherlock Holmes is almost inhuman, so you have to have someone like John Watson to translate and act as an avatar for the audience.  With Tim and Elliot, there's no need for a translator.  They're doing the same bit.  That means that one of them did it.  It made no sense for Tim to do it and they made him way too likable for a kids' audience, so it came down to Elliot.  Sorry, but it's a bit of a disappointment.  

But let's ignore the fact that a 43-year-old film blogger is dunking on the mystery that he didn't even solve before his wife did.  She's really good at murder mysteries, so I'm not even slightly offended or jealous that she did so.  It's the way it works and I'm honestly in awe of how good she is at these things.  I do want to talk about what I really dug about the movie.

Weirdly enough, the things I liked most about the movie had nothing to do with the actual crime itself.  It was a little too zany and a little too far-fetched for me.  I'm sure my little ones wouldn't have hated that stuff.  The stuff I found much more interesting is the sheep-as-commentary on the human condition stuff.  Golly, I really dug the notion that people are desperate to forget when things get bad.  Because I'm being a good boy and writing a blog instead of playing video games, I'm going to give myself permission to talk politics.  I'm not saying that The Sheep Detectives movie is overtly political (although they do have a lot to say about racism).  What I'm saying is that the notion that people will do anything to forget to justify their worldview was a bit of a kick-in-the-pants that I adored.

Now, I don't know if there's folklore about sheep being notoriously forgetful.  George Hardy starts his book about sheep farming talking about how there is an assumption that sheep are the dumbest animals on Earth.  I don't know if that is even a thing that's said.  But the conceit, in this movie at least, is that sheep, when they are confronted by something that is bleak or uncomfortable, will willfully erase their own memories of the events that made them sad.  To make the story somewhat deep, the character of Mopple has lost the ability to wipe his own memories, so he is burdened by being the carrier of truth, unable to share reality with the flock around him.  It's really interesting and I think its the best part of the movie.

The thing that drives me crazy --and here's where the politics / allegory comes in --is that humanity prides itself on the same thing.   (Brace yourself.)  Donald Trump daily goes on Truth Social or has a press release claiming that he never said X, Y, or Z.  He rewrites the narrative to make himself the victim of every situation and he depends on his voter-base to willfully forget everything that used to make them sad.  Do you remember when QAnon regularly fought to find out about child predator rings (I write this in a blog for a movie with a PG rating?  What is wrong with me?) and now claim that the victims in the Epstein files weren't really victims or were old enough to know better?  They can't make direct connections, yet were obsessed with a pizza parlor being code for something far more sinister?  How about how Donald Trump ran on no new wars?  Literally yesterday, he claimed that he never said that.  There's footage everywhere.  

Sorry to get so up my own butt about this (This is a blog for The Sheep Detectives, a PG movie.  I hate myself right now.)  But the crux of this movie, at least when it comes to character choices for the protagonist Lily, is whether or not to let a tragedy go because it makes her happier to live in ignorance.  My biggest frustration is the fact that most people get angry at me for pointing out things that horrible in the news because it doesn't directly involve them. There is a part where the flock is following Lily and Mopple to fight back against Caleb and Ham, who are planning on slaughtering the flock for meat, and the flock outside of Lily willfully allows themselves to be victims because it is more comfortable not knowing.  They are thinking that George's death is someone else's problem that Sebastian has to remind everyone the importance of this man and the fact that they used to love him.  I adore this so much.  Added points for the fact that it seems like their ignorant bliss is going to keep them safe when all it does it make them easier victims for later.

Also, I dig the Winter Lamb as a concept for a story like this.  It's really easy to like every member of the flock, especially Lily.  Lily seems like a wholesome children's protagonist.  She's termed the Smartest Sheep in the World".  Yet, (and, again, I hear how insufferable I'm coming across) she's the representative of "I'm not racist" versus actually being anti-racist.  There is a cultural norm within the flock to treat any lamb not born in the summer as less-than.  Sebastian, a black ram, reveals that he used to be a winter lamb, explaining his separation from the rest of the flock, despite his wisdom and bravery.  Yet, Lily often --while not being outright cruel to the Winter Lamb --accepts the injustice that is aimed at the Winter Lamb.  She even catches herself saying something pretty derrogatory in front of Sebastian and has to check her own privilege.  Do I think that the flock gets over its prejudice pretty quickly, considering how ingrained that racism was?  Probably.  It is a kids' movie.  But I do like that the element is in there.

I probably liked what no one else really cared about.  If I had to show this to my little kids, would they have been okay with it?  Sure.  They would have laughed at sheep and rams hitting things hard and doing human things.  It had Wallace and Gromit vibes at times.  Maybe a little bit Babe.  I kept thinking of the movie as a PG Hot Fuzz.  There's something about cottage core murdery mysteries that people really glom onto.  In terms of mystery, I could take or leave it.  In terms of taking some pretty heavy swings with character intentions, I dug that.  But again, I'm truly insufferable.  

Not rated.  Once again, the monochrome makes the violence seem less violent.  However, there is some real escalation between this and The Tale of Zatoichi.  There is some on-screen blood in this movie.  Also, the notion of paying for women is something that is just part of the plot in this one.  Still, these are movies about violence and we can't deny that people are going to die when you are slashing a sword around.   

DIRECTOR:  Kazuo Mori

I'm actually staying on top of these this time!  Last night, I wrote two blogs and I actually finished this movie earlier today.  Do you know how much more fun movies get knowing that you aren't falling behind?   Some of you out there in TV Land probably are criticizing me for even doing this, meaning I'm taking the fun out of just watching movies.  You might even have a point.  But I'm in the camp that something that gets me writing about a topic that I'm excited about makes movie watching deeper and richer, so I'll continue writing about every movie I watch in the hopes that...you know what?  No final goal.  Who cares?

I finished my blog on The Tale of Zatoichi and noted that the first film in the franchise wasn't all that much of an origin story.   Well, it feels like The Tale of Zatoichi Continues at least attempted to give us something to connect for future entries because there's at least a mild degree of lore here.  I don't know if I love a lot of it, but I am going to break it down.

I want to talk about the elephant in the room: the antagonist of this piece.  I know that I'm coming out swinging with the thing that's bothering me the most.  But I also really don't want to risk not talking about him.  I need to talk about the way that Yoshiro is handled in this film.  I was going to preach a lot about how The Tale of Zatoichi Continues is my favorite kind of Zatoichi movie.  It has a pretty straightforward plot.  The bad guys have a very clear and time sensitive issue that directly conflicts with Zatoichi being alive.  As Zatoichi movies go, that's an absolute godsend.  Zatoichi movies love being complicated without purpose, almost in an attempt to fill the void between senseless violence with what could be construed with a story.  These are half-hour episodes expanded into full length movies.  (Well, this movie is only 72 minutes long, but I almost will never fight that.)   But because the story was going so well, the movie felt the need to introduce a second plot.  All these Zatoichi movies kind of do that.  That's okay, I guess.  But that B-plot ends up taking over the A-plot and it's incredibly frustrating.

If the original A-plot was a boss trying to hide the fact that Zatoichi discovered that his lord is insane, the B-plot was the story of a yakuza disguised as a samurai being hunted.  Like many of the Zatoichi movies, that antagonist ends up being a solid foil for Zatoichi himself.  Every other character is a bit of a henchman.  Yoshiro has some depth.  The problem with Yoshiro is that the movie really wanted a big twist at the end.  Initially, Yoshiro seems to be a bit of a scumbag, flirting with a sex worker who doesn't want any part of him because she reminds him of a lost love.  In comes Zatoichi, whom she finds attractive, and claims that she also reminds him of a lost love.  It feels like, in the moment, that Zatoichi either coincidentally has another woman with the same name who broke his heart or that he's playing a game to get the yakuza off the sex worker's back.  It's really hard to tell Zatoichi's motivation a lot of the time, so you don't know if that story is true for a lot of the film.  

But Yoshiro and Zatoichi are in the same inn for a good deal of time.  Yoshiro even plays it cool when the local samurai are looking to silence Zatoichi.  They have time on screen together.  So when the big reveal in the final 20 mintues of the movie is that the two of them were brothers who were in love with the same woman and that Zatoichi took Yoshiro's arm at some point in time is mindblowing to the point of frustration.  For a lot of this movie, while fun, it seems like this is a small story of Zatoichi avoiding samurai who are trying to kill him.   It seems like that A-story was important, but do-able.  To curveball the story about the showdown of two brothers over a woman that we've never really met is bananas.  Like, as a guy who really likes character development, I would absolutely love a story where Zatoichi and his brother have to showdown in a tiny village.  That seems rad.  But this felt like the movie needed to give this nothing character some stakes.  After all, up to the big reveal, Yoshiro kind of just felt like a scumbag character that Zatoichi could dispatch, no big deal.  Yes, it is great to give Zatoichi something to care about, especially in a movie that does more for Zatoichi's origin than the first movie did.  But it put all of the movie's chips on a twist reveal rather than actually allowing this to be a movie about family.  

It's absurd that the two of them acted completely nonchalant when they were in the inn, knowing who the other guy was.  The only reason that those two characters would act in the manner that they did was that they knew that they were in a movie.  Maybe we could pretend that the two didn't want to get into family business in front of the sex workers, but the reality of that situation was that the two would at least be bothered by the presence of the others and act in a way that would convey shared history.  It's really weird.  Also, I don't think a sex worker would mind Zatoichi or Yoshiro saying, "I don't want you with him.  He's my brother."  That's the lowest level of plausibility in a movie like this.

On a different note, I really wanted to like that this movie at least acknowledged the events of the first movie.  Even though these movies were made and released less than a year apart, a year took place narratively.  What I liked is that the movie gave me closure about what happened to characters after Zatoichi left.  One of the infamous things about Zatoichi movies is that Zatoichi pulls a David Banner (I know what I'm talking about.  It's the character's name in the television show) and never looks back at the town he saved.  But in terms of necessity, it's almost arbitrary that the events of this film took place in this town.  The only thing really bringing Zatoichi back to this town that he saved was visiting the grave of the samurai that he killed in the first film.  But that has little to nothing to do with the events of the first half of the film.  From Russia with Love tried doing the same thing with James Bond and Sylvia Trench, implying that the events of the first film mattered.  But like Bond, Zatoichi movies knew that was a little bit exhausting given the sheer number of movies that would be released after the fact.

But the crazy part is that I really liked The Tale of Zatoichi Continues.  This is my sweet spot in the franchise.  I even liked both stories separately.  I just kind of wish that these movies would let these stories breathe and give each of these stories stakes.  I like the idea of Zatoichi being hunted by every man who can carry a sword from all directions.  After all, that's kind of the plot of John Wick 3.  I also like the idea that Zatoichi has to face a brother who stole the love of his life.  Those last shots as Yoshiro is dying in the dark and Zatoichi is filled with rage is super good.  It's totally unearned because we don't really understand the dynamic between the two brothers.  But that stuff is good.  It's human.  It's got meat on it.  I just wish that the film took the time to craft either story well.  These movies tend to be about an hour-and-a-half.  Yet, rather than find small moments that are simple, the filmmakers tend to be nervous about not telling enough story to fill the time, despite the short run times.  

I liked this one because I got everything by the end.  But I didn't love it because it didn't let me soak any of it in.  I can also pretend that the reason that Zatoichi is on the move for future films is because of the secret that he carries.  I don't think that's actually true considering it doesn't really come up in future entries.  But at least I have a new headcanon.

PG-13 and it all comes down to thirty seconds of weirdly vulgar photos of a guy self-named Mr. Awesome with a bunch of naked ladies.  Even though you technically don't see anything, it's still fairly alarming.  The rest of the movie is so incredibly tame.  There's two uses of a mild curse word.  It doesn't matter that these people are all jerks.  Their world is so small and petty that to list the bad behavior among them would almost be giving them validity that is wholly undeserved.  PG-13 for very little controversial footage.

DIRECTOR:  Seth Gordon

If you read my blog from Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which I posted a few minutes ago, I mentioned that I have no time to write blogs.  I stressed that my wife had fallen asleep on the couch behind me and I would write for as long as I could before either falling asleep myself or her wanting to go upstairs.  Well, my son has now sleepwalked downstairs and is on the other part of the couch.  Neither one of them adjusted for the other so now I feel slightly evil for trying to knock out this last blog entry.  Oh my goodness, if I can get this one done, then I will be caught up before I finish The Tale of Zatoichi Continues tomorrow. 

I own this movie for many reasons.  But I was shocked that I only owned it as of late.  This is one of those movies that I've just watched a bunch of times.  For a guy who doesn't really care about competition, this is one of those movies that absolutely knocks me on my butt.  I won't deny that it shares a lot of blood with my favorite fan documentary, Trekkies.  It's one of those movies where you can't help but laugh at how intense these nerds are getting.  Yeah, that may be a little bit mean.  Do you know that whole idea of that the bullied tend to bully the people below them.  I can't deny that I'm punching down more than I should be.  But, my goodness, the subjects of this documentary come across as so unlikable (for the most part) that you can't help but feel justified in your scorn for them.

I forgot my original point.  I got this movie initially to show to my Honors American Literature class.  My nonfiction book that I teach is In Cold Blood.  In Cold Blood was one of the foundational works of true crime out there.  Now, I've absorbed a lot of true crime since getting married.  There's a lot of great true crime out there.  But I also have a lot of hard and fast rules about showing kids anything that might be too controversial.  I am way more cool with reading about horrible stuff than showing movies about gross things.  I could not think of one great true crime doc that was honestly and appropriately PG-13.  There was always something that pushed the line too far.  I then remembered The King of Kong.  I didn't end up showing the class the movie, mainly because I ran out of time coupled with the makeup of the class being bored by such an idea.  But I really think that The King of Kong shares more in common with a true crime doc than a sports doc.

I don't know if Seth Gordon, the director, views this documentary like that.  I bet he wanted to show how intense something as light-hearted as Donkey Kong could be to an audience that had no idea what was going on.  Donkey Kong is really an excuse to pull back the curtain to the world of Twin Galaxies.  I'm trying to be sensitive about these guys because my wife pointed out that everyone in this doc had autism.  Yeah, that's probably true.  But they're also mostly comprised of semi-terrible people.  

One central conceit in the film is that the world of Twin Galaxies is all about obsession.  For these people, being a big fish in a small pond is the most important thing that person could be.  I know that in the last few blogs, I've dropped a Willy Loman comparison.  These guys are all unmarried Willy Lomans.  Okay, maybe they're Hap Lomans.  Each one of these people has devoted lifetimes of diverse experiences for being the best at something that, unfortunately, doesn't matter.  I'm writing this blog at 12:49 AM.  I know what it means to devote time to something that doesn't matter.  

But the reason that I'm writing this so late is because I do devote my life to things that actually matter.  I can squeeze this time in once every-so-often because I spend my entire day in service to others.  I'm going to place an awkward segue here because this is where Steve Wiebe comes in.  Steve Wiebe isn't amazing.  He's the hero of a story that doesn't have much of a bar.  For the most part, Wiebe is a good guy.  He has a family.  He's a real underdog.  He became a teacher and it seems like he's mildly liked for being a real Milhouse of a man.  (Maybe Old Gil.  Probably a combination of both.)  He's obsessive, but he also has his hobby take place of sleep instead of parenting, with the exception of the time that his kid needed to use the toilet while he was filming his record-breaking run.  Every time that Steve Wiebe gets a win, Billy Mitchell and his cronies take that win away from him.

(Also, his wife is tolerant of this guy at best.) 

Anyway, that's what the movie is really about.  Steve Wiebe is the outsider to Twin Galaxies.  He's the guy who just wanted to win at one thing in life.  Ol' Gil needs that sale!  These guys at Twin Galaxies are so insulated in their video game community that they are mortified by someone like Steve Wiebe.  Mainly because Billy Mitchell is the villain of a Disney Channel Original Movie.  Honestly, there's an Instagram account or a TikTok account that I found on Instagram where people try to act like Disney Channel villains in real life.  That is Billy Mitchell.  For those who haven't seen this documentary (You probably should), Billy Mitchell was the Donkey Kong high score reigning champ.  He gained a little bit of fame for being in a magazine because of his score and ever since then has held sway over a bunch of other nerds who can't reach his score.  He spun that incredibly small fame into a chicken wing restaurant and became a Nationalist in a few decades.  (He probably was one in 1982, who are we kidding?) 

And Billy Mitchell's evil ways are so corrupting that it makes you look at everyone in this nerd community with skepticism.  Honestly, these incels look at Billy Mitchell with such desperate need for validation that they treat this regular suburban dad --who happens to be very good at Donkey Kong --as a virus to be purged.  Like, everyone in that community just stares at him and hates him for being better at Donkey Kong than they are.  And Billy borderline sits in his chicken restaurant petting his cat, watching this man from afar.  It's fascinating.

But the insane stuff that happens in the movie is so compelling.  A squad of nerds breaks into Wiebe's house and takes apart his video game cabinet to ensure that he isn't cheating.  There's a secret distribution of video tapes to an old lady who is good at Q*Bert.  (By the way, the only wonderful human being in this movie is Ol' Lady Q*Bert, who just dismisses these nerds and plays her Q*Bert all day.) And you watch and you wonder, "Why is this microcosm of nerdery so terrible?"

As part of that, you want to see Wiebe wedgie these nerds on Mitchell's own turf.  The fact that they play The Karate Kid soundtrack "You're the Best" is because the film becomes competitive.  These nerds commit these small crimes, very much like Johnny Lawrence, and we get Steve Wiebe as Daniel LaRusso entering their worlds and bloodying their faces a little bit.  And it doesn't hurt that, considering that Billy Mitchell is a Disney Channel villain, that the movie ends like a Disney Channel movie.  The nerds look up to Steve Wiebe.  Steve Wiebe gets the high score.  And, if you Wikipedia Billy Mitchell, you find out that he cheated with his secret score and is banned from Twin Galaxies.  It's very Disney Channel, only with nerds who really live their lives like this.

It's insane that I'm about done writing all this blog stuff tonight.  I'm going to wake my wife and walk her up to bed.  But before this happens, I have to remind everyone that this happened in 2006 and 2007.  This movie feels like it was made in 1991.  It's not the filmmakers' fault.  This is just how these guys live.  Watch this movie.  It's an absolute banger of a documentary.

Rated R for a lot of violence towards women, often including gore and a copious amount of gratuitous blood.  The death abounds.  Also --and this spoils both movies --a lot of devil worshipping going on.  It's kind of the reason that all of this is happening.  I bet there might be people who are totally cool with just bodies piling up, but might have an uncomfortable moment with open devil worship going on.  The first one was R.  The second one is R.  They are probably on the same scale.  Oh!  There is one scene of drug use.  Can't forget that.  

DIRECTORS:  Matt Bettineli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett

I honestly don't know how I'm going to maintain this blog with how tightly packed my life is.  I'm --like a real idiot --on this quest to show my kids a billion great movies so they can both be more empathetic and be someone culturally knowledgable.  But add that to the fact that I watch movies when I workout, it gets hard to find time to write about the movies I'm watching.  I feel genuinely rude not hanging with my wife when we have awake time, so I have to write if she nods off.  Right now, she's asleep on the couch and it's almost midnight, so here I am knocking out....Ready or Not 2?

Can I confess something?  I barely remember watching the first movie.  I kind of / sort of remember some of the bigger beats.  Thank goodness for a very clever exposition as a "Previously on" from the beginning of this movie or else I would have wondered if I was allowed to watch the second one.  I mean, the major beats came back to me.  I kind of remember having a good time with the first movie.  But I'll tell you, Disney+ / Hulu kept dropping ads on my PS4 when I was working out that Ready or Not 2 was out and my brain went, "You should probably watch that."  I knew it wasn't going to add to my life.  I also kind of quickly figured out that this is one of those sequels that isn't going to make the story richer or anything.  If anything, it was just a celebration that a fun horror movie from a few years ago did better than expected, so they wanted to draw water from a stone to get a sequel.

I'm going to be as brutally honest as I can about this movie.  It's in no way terrible.  I will go as far as to say that I had a pretty darned good time watching it.  But I also have to say, as plain as I can, that it is absurd that there was a sequel to a movie that really went out of its way to make sure that there couldn't be a sequel.  For those who don't remember Ready or Not, like I completely forgot, Grace unknowingly marries into a satanic cult who are ruling the world thanks to their allegiance to Satan.  As part of the deal for unimaginable power, there is an initiation that happens with people marrying into the family.  They risk playing a deadly game where the cult has to hunt down the new bride in a game of hide-and-seek.  It's all a bit campy, but if the bride survives until dawn, everyone but the bride dies.  It's camp as heck, but it's also a good time.  Now, the rules are: If you survive until dawn, you are safe.  The first movie ended with a silhouette of the devil relishing the chance to slaughter the members of the cult by exploding them all, seemingly proud of Grace for being able to outwit the entire evil family.

But like with most sequels, there's this need to expand on the universe.  Sometimes I like this.  After all, I've been citing John Wick 2 as an example of how to make a vague world way more lived in.  As fun as Ready or Not 2 is, I didn't want any of this explanation of what was happening.  The filmmakers were desperate to unbury the thing that was so clearly put to rest in the first movie and almost retconned the intentions of the first film as an excuse to do the exact same thing in the second movie, only this time with a sister.  Like, we're talking cartwheels where so much explanation had to be said about other Satanists who had a stake in the events of the first movie that were never mentioned.

Now, I don't hate that this is a movie that is actively lambasting the oligarchy.  Golly, just a savage takedown of the modern Illuminati is something that makes the movie fun.  Yes, I have to shut my brain off and I didn't do the best job of that while watching the movie.,  That's a me thing.  But I love how the conceit was that there were probably other games, but the movie really really REALLY wanted to have Grace be chased by rich jerks as she took them out one-by-one.  But the reasoning and the in-world rules seem way too malliable considering how strict and rigid they were sometimes in the story.  

I don't know what it is about me that really needs movie rules to stay consistent.  Like, the entire Elijah Wood character is there to make sure that everyone keeps a strict observation of the rules.  But this entire movie hinges on the fact that the rules don't really matter because Grace didn't do anything to play the "Double or Nothing" clause that the Lawyer dispenses.  Like, the first movie --if we're playing by the horror movie trope that says "You have to do something irresponsible to justify what is about toe happen --establishes that Grace got in with the Le Domas family too quickly without knowing what marriage was all about.  It's a commentary on blind love and marrying rich.  Okay.  We get that --while she doesn't deserve it --there is a lesson to be learned by what has happened in this movie.  But Grace beat the game.  The game is over.  It feels like Grace, no matter what she does, will always be tied into this Satanic cult.  It doesn't make the story over all bad.  It just makes for a weak sequel.

But we've established that I like all the action.  As a fun horror survival movie, Ready or Not 2 hits what it needs to, outside of being incredibly stupid.  But I have to talk about the stupid things because 1) that's easy to talk about and 2) because I have thoughts.  Before I start venting, I'm finally saying, "This was a fun movie that was pretty dumb. Watch it because it's fun."  

Let's talk about Faith.  The movie's heart is based on the notion that Grace had a sister that she never mentioned.  The reason that Faith is never mentioned is because they had a falling out.  It's not terribly shocking that a character is introduced with a lot of baggage.  I actually like the trope of two estranged loved ones rekindle what made them close through surviving impossible odds together. There's a reason that we keep seeing it in film and storytelling.  It's just that...

...Faith reason for hating Grace is terrible.  The movie doesn't exactly spell out, beat-for-beat, what happened between these two sisters.  We get that the two of them grew up in the foster system and that Grace, the older sister, tended to take care of Faith.  Okay.  But Grace got a scholarship and went off to college, swearing to Faith that she was not abandoning her and that she would be back.  Okay, now, if Grace failed to come back simply because of the Le Domas thing, then Faith would have reason to really hate Grace.  But that's not what happened.  It would also make sense if Faith was somehow being abused at home.  The film goes out of its way to stress that Faith was actually completely safe at home and that their foster family were good people.  Yet, Faith acts like Grace committed the ultimate betrayal.  Is Grace supposed to be there for Faith forever?  It's a weird choice, especially considering that these two are adults at this point.

I also hate when I come up with a better ending than what the movie presents.  I knew that Faith was going to be the key bargaining chip by the end of the movie.  I think everyone knew that.  It's why Faith is in the film.  She's the princess that's in another castle.  So, there's this mildly cool "That's using your brain" moment where Faith is being used as a hostage while Grace has found basically a safe room in a storage with a thick panel of glass.  She is informed earlier in the film that there's a loophole that says that she can marry her way out of being hunted.  She offers to marry Titus Danforth so that Faith won't be killed.  Grace then makes Titus swear on Mr. Le Bail that no harm will come to Grace or Faith if Grace comes out.  There's your out.  Le Bail / Satan is all about rules (Although, I've already griped that the film doesn't know how serious to take its own rules based on the scene.)  I would have loved to see Grace come out and her intentionally stab her own toe, just to watch the Danforths explode.  After all, Grace never said, "Titus couldn't cause me harm."  No, "No harm will come to you."  That seems ripe for exploitation.  But they just wanted their Black Mass wedding.

Now, again, I hate that I think of better moments in movies.  I can't say that I hated the betrayal that Grace has at the altar.  I actually slow clapped when Grace reminded Titus that there are no rules about hurting your own family.  It's a great callback.  Points all around.  I am tepid on "Everyone jumping into the pit."  For much of the movie, the extended family were all kind of cool on the idea of getting in on the hunt.  They actually understood that, while they all wanted the ring to control the council, they just needed to get rid of Grace so they didn't die.  They knew when to fight clean and when to fight dirty.  The notion that every single one of them --minus the guy who was doing an Aziz Ansari imitation throughout --jumped into that pit with three minutes to spare, was silly.  It's a great shot and it's mildly satisfying seeing them all fight for this ring, but it doesn't align with their character.  

But the moment I'm talking about was that I wanted Faith to turn on Grace.  I thought the movie was going to end with Grace thinking that Faith had forgiven her for going away to college. I would have loved to have Faith turn on Grace and take the ring out of nowhere.  Do you know why?  It would have explained away the lame reason that Faith had for hating Grace.  That whole "Why did you leave me for college" thing?  It would have demonstrated that Faith had abandonment issues way beyond what was reasonable.  It would have explained her behavior throughout the entire movie and it might have been a nice twist.  Just my thoughts.

But, again, it's fun.  It's super dumb and that cell phone in the boiled man's pocket shouldn't have worked.  (Also, don't kill him.  If he's locked in there, no other family member could have been activated until he died.)  I don't care.  I had a good time and sometimes stupid movies are fun.

PG-13 and it's one of those where the tone of the film is in direct conflict with the content.  It feels like it is incredibly family friendly, but there are moments that lent us pause.  We watched this one with my two older kids, 14 and 12.  There was a moderate amount of sex, which always kind of shocked us because we were constantly reminding ourselves of how young the character was supposed to be.  One of these scenes involved prostitution.  There's a decent amount of swearing, including an f-bomb.  There's also some drinking and implied drug use.  We also can't forget the fact that Frank fakes being a doctor, which means that we witness some gore.  Still, PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Steven Spielberg

In an attempt to teach my kids about movies that aren't franchise movies, I keep stumbling back into Steven Spielberg.  My kids think that I'm nuts for Spielberg and I'm really not, despite the fact that the dude knows how to make movies.  But I'm fairly happy to say that Catch Me If You Can was a pretty decent hit, especially with my fourteen-year-old girl. She found the whole thing fascinating.  My son kept wanting to play Switch 2, which makes me become an old man and cringe about how this generation has no attention span.  

This might be a hot take because I still think that Spielberg's got it, but Catch Me If You Can might be Spielberg's last truly great movie, at least when it comes to the Spielberg who knows how to make a fun movie.  I honestly put "dramatic Spielberg" into another category.  I think Dramatic Spielberg only has one true classic: Schindler's List.  His other movies where he becomes a serious filmmaker are good, but they don't really have any staying power.  So what is it that makes Catch Me If You Can something that I can get excited about showing kids?

Usually, I'm a grump about "Inspired by a True Story" movies.  I know that there are often so many liberties taken with the original story for the sake of story structure that the idea that "this is true" often doesn't have a lot of weight to it.  But I was --once again! --a hypocrite about the whole thing.  The second I popped in the DVD (yeah, not Blu-Ray.  Not streaming.  DVD.) I announced, "Guys, this is a true story."   I am weirdly convinced that while Spielberg's interpretation of events may not be accurate-accurate, I feel like this is one of those "Truth is stranger than fiction" situations.  The story of Frank Abegnale, Jr.  is so insane that it becomes so much better knowing that there was a real Frank Abegnale out there and that he has tacitly agreed to the events of the story by cameoing in the film.  (He's one of the French cops who arrest Leonardo DiCaprio.)

I often attribute shows like The Sopranos for developing a love for an immoral protagonist.  I know that can't actually be the case.  After all, I love Dog Day Afternoon.  But with Dog Day Afternoon, there's a reason that we get behind the protagonists.  They are in the moral right in that situation, even though it forces them to make morally dubious choices.  I guess we can actually look at Bonnie and Clyde, but I feel like that is more historical interest.   When I watch Catch Me If You Can, Spielberg has crafted a character who should be considered morally gross.  But when I watch this character, gosh darned it if you don't want him to keep running for the entire movie.  My daughter actually yelled at the screen that she wanted Frank to keep running at the end (even if that might have undercut the point of Frank's running.)  Is it because Frank is so charming?  I don't know.  The beginning of the movie kind of makes Frank a big ol' dork.  He has no friends.  He's mildly obsessed with his con man of a father.  He is bullied.  The sympathetic part really weaves its way in when Frank pretends to be a substitute teacher to get back at his tormenters.  I think Spielberg crafted a Peter Parker for us.  Peter is kind of a square in his normal life that he needs to have this grandiose life as a pilot, a doctor, (in real life, a cop!), and a prosecutor.  

The fun part is that we're also with Carl Hanratty.  Yeah, it's fun to see Carl get mud on his face.  The fact that the movie is called Catch Me If You Can sets up an opportune environment for cat-and-mouse.  I've never liked Tom and Jerry, but the blueprint of Tom and Jerry is entertaining.  One of the few parts I remembered from this movie was when Carl finally caught up with Frank in France.  It's gorgeously shot.  I'm fairly certain it might be the most famous scene in the movie.  For all of the times that Frank gets away from Carl after almost getting caught, Spielberg needed to have the actual capture of Frank to be a visual feast.  Sure, a small town in France does a lot of the heavy lifting.  But those forged checks flying through the air as Tom Hanks bluffs his way into getting Frank to surrender himself?  It cooks.

Maybe I was too young to appreciate certain parts of the script.  To me, Catch Me If You Can has always just been a "fun" movie.  It's a good time.  It's well shot, well acted.  That kind of stuff. But there is something far more heartbreaking about Catch Me If You Can that I, as the guy who defines himself through Daddy Issues, can only appreciate.  Frank is way more messed up than I realized.  The cop element might be a bridge too far for the tone of this movie, but Frank is mentally unwell for the majority of this movie.  He was raised admiring his failed con man of a father.  (Note: I almost structured this blog entirely around the notion of "Did Frank's dad know from moment one that he was conning people before he's confronted by Hanratty?")  

One of the more touching elements of the movie is actually incredibly telling when it comes to Frank's trauma.  Frank watches his father and mother dancing in the living room as a young man.  To him, he has this image of what love and marriage is supposed to be.  His father is introduced as the honoree of the Rotary Club's award, where he repeats a very Christopher Walken-y "Two mice fell into a bucket of cream" speech over and over.  We get that, initially, Frank reads this as hard-working.  But when we meet Frank, Sr., he tells the story of how he won the love of Frank, Jr.'s mother even though he didn't speak a lick of French.  Everything about Frank, Sr. is larger-than-life.  He's got a lot of Willy Loman in him.  He's a small man convinced of his own superiority.  Like Loman, Frank, Sr. sees himself as the victim of the American Dream.  It's a government out to get him when he's just trying to make it in a world that wants to see him fail.  It's no surprise that we see Frank learn the only real lesson from his dad: Confidence.  (There's a reason that they're known as "confidence men".)  

But I never put much stock in the whole thing where Frank calls Carl on Christmas.  I mean, it's right there on the screen. There isn't much interpretation.  I just never gave it the attention it deserved.  Frank tells Carl exactly where to get him.  He wants to be done.  It's weird that, even though Leo doesn't play Frank's choices as oppressive, this persona he created is killing him. He's begging Carl to catch him.  Yes, he has a survival instinct that often takes over.  But when Carl confronts Frank in France, the sheer joy that Carl is there is a sign of relief.  He loves that Carl is playing his game, not only because it's a matter of freedom from this trap he created, but that he has a peer meeting him where he is.

It's a good movie.  Like, it's super fun.  But I also love that it's a bit dark if you pull at any of the strings.  It's a bummer that Spielberg doesn't really make movies like this anymore.  Still, totally worth a watch.

Not rated, but once again, we have a lot of violence here.  We're back in the Zatoichi age where violence is there, but we lack gore.  I would also like to add that there is a failed sexual assault in this movie and it is incredibly uncomfortable.  Still, it's the kind of Zatoichi movie that normalizes violence.  It is odd how the black-and-white makes the violence seem even more tame, despite the fact that a lot of people die in what is a small war between two clans.  Still, unrated is unrated.

DIRECTOR:  Kenji Misumi

Oh my goodness --if I can knock this out!  If I can knock this blog out, I will almost be caught up before I finish another movie tomorrow.  I was supposed to follow up this movie with The Tale of Zatoichi Continues, but I didn't think I'd have time to write this before starting that movie and I didn't want the two movies to bleed together in my head.  (Hence, why I'm watching Ready or Not 2.)  I had to go back to the beginning.  I started my quest to watch every original Zatoichi movie before this blog started, meaning that this is the longest goal that I've set for my blog.  I hate that I had to go back to the beginning because I wanted a break from Zatoichi.  But I also acknowledge that there was a very real chance that once I write about every Zatoichi movie I might never watch Zatoichi again.  Who knows?  Maybe my kids will become cinephiles and they'll want to watch some yakuza action with their dear old dad.  It's possible!

I both forgot every element of this movie and simultaenously was shocked by how much I could tell you every beat of this movie.  I have now written about Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman quite a bit.  I could have a lovely collection of essays on a homemade release of Criterion box sets if someone wants to put that out for me.  Often, I bemoan the fact that the Zatoichi movies are way too dependent on formula for the most part and they only really thrive when that formula gets ignored, which it rarely does.  I had no idea that every element of the formula for a Zatoichi movie comes from the first film.  

I expected the first Zatoichi movie to be an origin story.  Glory be, but I must have made up the origin story for Zatoichi in my head because this movie only lets us know "Zatoichi is blind" and "Zatoichi is really good at swordfighting."  In my head, the first film was closer to the first Lone Wolf and Cub movie, where we find out how this ronin gets a hold of a little kid and how those events force him to live a nomadic lifestyle.  None of that.  This movie could honestly been any of the Zatoichi movies.  Zatoichi isn't from this small town.  The only one who knows him is one of the local bosses, who wants to conscript Zatoichi into his army before they go to war with a neighboring clan.  Zatoichi is already up to his old tricks.  He's already battle weary at the beginning of this movie.  I've often complained about the fact that so many Zatoichi movies have the dice sequence.  It's the scene that keeps on happening where Zatoichi joins a dice game, fakes dropping the dice outside of the cup, and then exposes everyone in the room for cheating.  It's a fun sequence that this movie has earned and the rest of have just absorbed into the sequels.  But he's not trying anything out.  He's good at his job already. He's clearly pulled this card before because it's down to a science.  He also manipulates the local boss easily. Nothing is new to him and this is the first film.

I have to actually keep myself accountable because this is the first film of many.  I have to write about this movie as if the other movies don't exist.  As a standalone movie, it's actually mostly pretty great.  I bought this box set actually having watched the first three or four movies in a non-Criterion format.  Those first few movies seemed kind of rad.  I've always been a Daredevil fan, so I liked the parallel character.  I want to talk first about the thing I don't like that has plagued the entire series:  the exposition.

Zatoichi movies suck at exposition.  For so many of these movies, I thought it was me not knowing much about Japanese culture.   Yeah, that's not it.  I think a lot of these movies have a similar plot, so I'm going to try to explain what I could glean from this film.  There are characters who do a lot of explaining of things that happen off-camera.  Honest-to-Pete, the family dynamics of the characters in the town are never shown.  They're exposition-dumped.  So we're basically told to like or dislike people. Now, this is where my gaijin existence (I shouldn't be co-opting that) makes me a bad person.  Because I don't have much tie to experiences outside of people telling me that I should or shouldn't like characters, I have a hard time remembering who they are later in the movie.  That means that I only get attached to Zatoichi's story (or...tale?) and stop knowing what is happening with the other characters in the story.

But I do actually kind of dig this first movie. Yeah, I know.  I'm told who to like or dislike in this movie.  It's a little weird that Zatoichi ends up staying loyal to his boss.  I honestly thought that he was going to rip through both gangs because they both sucked.  But I do dig the fact that, even though it is the first movie in the franchise, we have the "Zatoichi has met his match" trope.  There's another incredible yakuza who also has an impediment.  That dude is dying of what I have to guess is TB.  Yeah, movie one.  I have to wonder if they knew that this was going to be a franchise ahead of time because this feels like it should be Movie 5 or something.  Still, it's a great dynamic and might give the audience the most insight into Zatoichi as a character. 

If Zatoichi is a character for people to underestimate (using his blindness as a caricature to mask the deadly assassin underneath), we get to understand who he really is when he bonds with this fellow swordsman.  We know that the two will have to showdown by the end of the film, but the fact that the two view each other as the only noble characters in the entire film gives us something to look forward to.  I don't really care that the innkeeper character got a girl pregnant.  I want to, but we never saw that character, nor their interactions with each other.  But when Zatoichi sits down to fish with this guy and the two have small talk, where their deadly backgrounds are not the focus of who they are, that's a character that I can bond with.

Listen, I like black-and-white movies and I like color movies.  Do I get a little excited remembering that most of the Zatoichi movies are in color?  Sure.  But there was something very cool about the film being in black-and-white.  Like, the movie is really pretty.  Sure, it's never as well-crafted as a Kurosawa film or anything. But some of these shots look absolutely top notch.  Also, it's 1962. This movie could have been in color.  I think that Japan was weary about technicolor at this point in time, so I don't know if the monochromatic palate was a stylistic choice or a practical one.  But as a novelty, Zatoichi looks rad in black-and-white.

Oh my gosh, guys.  I think I did it.  I actually have a minute to breathe out.  I am going to fold laundry.  I am going to do the dishes.  I am going to take the trash out because, for two seconds!, I am caught up on my blogs.

Unrated, but that's because it was two R-rated movies combined into one film.  Also, Tarantino was less restricted for some of the minor things that kept the original theatrical Kill Bills (Kills Bill?) from being NC-17.  Before I write out the litany of things that make this movie incredibly offensive, know that the worst part is that it is all exploitative.  Okay, we got all the violence, gore, and death in the world, all on screen.  We have rape.  We have language.  We have just vulgarity of all kinds.  It's meant to push the limits.  Still, unrated.

DIRECTOR:  Quentin Tarantino

This is my red flag movie.

For a hot second, I thought that I was going to get away with not having watched the combined The Whole Bloody Affair.  I think Tarantino is a scumbag human being.  Golly, I do not care for this man.  I tend to be on the team of "tie art to the artist."  And it's not like Tarantino is the worst of them.  Like, he's just a jerk.  He's a jerk who is convinced that he gets  a pass to do a bunch of awful things, but nothing that is full on criminal.  At least, as far as I know.  

(I'd like to put a behind the scenes footnote here.  I have been trying to write this blog for a while now.  I keep trying to start and I keep getting interrupted.  My goal here is to write faster than imaginable.  If I lose any sense of coherence, it's because I need to get this blog done and then another blog immediately after it done.  I don't know if I have the mental RAM to get that done, but I'm going to try my best.)

The thing that bugs me about Tarantino isn't the fact that he's a fanboy.  Most of the cinephiles I know tend to point out that he has made a career off of copying other people's works.  There's actually a long history in filmmaking entirely based on copying what other people have done.  Heck, the nouvelle vague probably wouldn't have been a thing had filmmakers been concerned with being wholly original in their visual language.  I think Tarantino has always been a copycat, but it actually might be one of the more endearing things about him.  He's watched a lot of movies.  He loves movies.  When he's filling his movies full of homage, it's honestly because he loves what other people have presented before him.  He doesn't seem to hide behind others' works because he wants you to watch the source material that he's borrowing from.  When I watch him borrow, it's a kid playing with action figures, only incredibly well.  Like, I hate to say it because it seems blasphemous, but he often does the thing he's stealing from better than the source work.  

Kill Bill was the movie(s) that won me over to Tarantino because the movie is incredibly fun.  Like, start to very-long finish, Kill Bill is incredibly entertaining.  Should it be two movies?  I will talk about that in a bit.  I think so, but I'm also not completely sold on that.  But the story of The Bride carving her way through her vengeance scorecard, out-of-order nonetheless, is super engaging.  Yes, like I mentioned, Tarantino is borrowing when he's telling this story.  He's doing his own Lady Snowblood, but I don't even mind a bit.  As a guy who likes Lady Snowblood, I have to say that Kill Bill has more fun with the script here than Lady Snowblood did.  I often hate when people try to be cool and (I'm going to be brutal here) Tarantino himself is painfully uncool.  But his art is cool.  I don't know what makes it better than a lot of its mimics.  There have been so many movies where I've damned the film for trying to achieve a level of cool that Tarantino just imbues his films with.  But I'll tell you what:  These movies are cool.

Let's just say it's a fine line coupled with the fact that I'm often a hypocrite when it comes to stuff like this. 

One of the biggest frustrations of the Star Wars sequels is that JJ Abrams set up a mystery that needed to be solved only to offer a substandard, non-answer at the end of the franchise.  I'm a guy who likes the sequels.  I don't love them, but I have a good time with them.  But I do think that not coming up with a great answer to "Who are Rey's parents?" is a disappointing one.  Tarantino, for the first 70% of the movie, plants a mystery:  "What is the Bride's name?"  She's this epic mythic character of vengeance, named after her outfit when she cheated death.  She's also the Black Mamba and that's just a bit of cool.  But when the film has people say the name "Beatrix Kiddo", Tarantino bleeps the name out.  

Until he doesn't.

Why does that non-answer work when Rey Palpatine or Rey Skywalker doesn't?  Part of it is the notion of humanizing The Bride.  Tarantino knows that to make Kill Bill work, you need to be over-the-top from moment one.  We start the film with Kiddo getting the inciting bullet through the head and then transitioning immediately into the Vivica Fox fight.  (I had to look up "Vernita Green."  Now I know.)  But when we have the Vertina Green fight, it's exclusively about showing what the Bride is capable of.  Out of the gate, we know that the Bride is fallible and has rules.  She's an incredible fighter, but she's also hesitant to kill a mother in front of her daughter.  She's able to hold conversations, but she refuses to be bullied into mercy.  For the first seventy percent of the film, she is the Bride, more of a force of nature than anything else.  But the closer that she gets to Bill and the more that we learn about the Bride --both through direct and indirect characterization --we discover that Beatrix Kiddo is in there.  Yes, the name is almost arbitrary.  It makes it fun that Bill's nickname of "Kiddo" actually isn't a nickname, but a loving way to say her real name.  By the end, despite the sheer body count that she leaves in her wake, she seems way more human.  When she is confronted by the realization that her daughter is alive, we see a woman who has gone through it and may hesitate when she's right at the finish line.  When she sits down with Bill, despite the absolutely toxic trappings of Bill's world, it really does feel like she still loves him.  This is the better Harley / Joker dynamic, by the way.  Both incredibly toxic.  It just feels like the Bill / Beatrix one is more realistic.  (As silly as Kill Bill is.) 

Do you know what I realized with this viewing?  I've seen this movie a dozen times, but it's been a really long time since I watched any version of it.  I think I probably had this epiphany back-in-the-day, but it hit harder this time.  O-Ren Ishii almost feels like the big bad of the story.  Yes, she's the conclusion the original Volume I.  She's also the first kill that Beatrix has after waking up.  Okay.  Cool.  But the other members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad barely get any kind of lead up and O-Ren Ishii has the majority of Volume I devoted to her origin story and taking her own.  I give props to Tarantino for playing with the chronology of the film because it makes sense that the Bride would want to take the most dangerous of the members out first.  But if we saw that first, the movie exists in a state of anticlimax.  But this is almost a movie that should be called Kill O-Ren because Tarantino really wanted to make a movie about Japanese swordplay in Japan.

It's actually because of this that makes me want to watch these movies split into two parts.  I told you I would get to this.  I'm not completely sold on my opinion, but the tone really does shift between Volume I and Volume II.  I know.  Tarantino swears that he made it as a Whole Bloody Affair, but golly if there is a different vibe from the first half of the movie and the second half of the movie.  I'm glad both volumes exist.  It's not like I want this to be the Kill O-Ren movie.  I like that we have this long, deliberate set of challenges that The Bride has to make her way through.  (Also, I've always adored Volume I way more than Volume II.)  But when Miramax said, "Split them", I kind of like it better.

It's not to say that there's anything wrong with The Whole Bloody Affair.  Thank God I read up on the rights issues that came with why it took so long for us to see The Whole Bloody Affair.  I actually thought it was a bit silly that it took us this long to see this version because it is incredibly similar to the original two part version, minus the "Previously on" car sequence.  Now that I know it has been in the can for a long time and that most of the problems came with rights, I can appreciate seeing The Whole Bloody Affair way after the fact.  But I don't love the one change.  I mean, I should.  

The only real changes in the movie are the Previously on (as previously mentioned, ironically enough), the tease that BB is alive, and a new anime sequence --no shock! --involved with O-Ren's origins.  Listen, I originally loved the anime sequence in the original theatrical release of Volume I.  But O-Ren going after a lieutenant completely seems arbitrary to telling O-Ren's origin.  Outside of giving Tarantino something else to be vulgar about, let's pretend that the sequence added something to the story.  That sequence is so over-the-top is seems like it is breaking its own rules. In the sequence, O-Ren accidentally unloads her supply of grenades inside an elevator as the lieutenant grabs onto her ankle.  Now, there's this horror in young O-Ren's eyes that she's going to die.  The grenades weren't supposed to be unloaded in the elevator and she can't get away.  The explosion is astronomical.  After all, all of her grenades exploded simultaenously.  But instead, both O-Ren and the lieutenant are unharmed.  The big threat is now that the elevator no longer exists.  That's...silly?  Like, she was afraid that she was going to get blown up.  Let's not pretend that she was afraid of the lieutenant holding her down.  It's the same problem with Charlie's Angels.  Sometimes, there's so much plot armor that we don't know what the rules of death are anymore.

But if I'm preaching why I like this movie so much, I should mention that it really bugs me how gross Tarantino is in this movie.  There's a lot here that might be used better given another director.  After all, if you distill the marrow of Kill Bill, it is about a mother who takes back power from the godlike patriarch who stole it from her.  Cool.  You can absolutely look at the movie like that. But Tarantino is so exploitative that it never feels like this is a win for women.  Let's look at Buck.  We've seen in movies where a woman is about to be raped by a creep when she turns the tables on him.  In this, The Bride destroys the two men before they can do anything to her.  But that's not actually true.  We find out that Buck has been raping Beatrix for two years and it really is treated as an afterthought.  That moment colors what the rest of the film looks like.  Instead of being the story of a self-actualized woman, it become often about a hot lady dispatching a bunch of people because it's cool.  I don't know.  It bugs me a bit.

Still, I started by saying that this was my red flag movie.  I may not advertise how much I love this movie because I'm filled with a bit of shame. But I can't deny that I really like the movie.  Tastes are tastes.  

I'm changing things up.  I have The Complete Films of Agnes Varda box set.  At first, I thought that this meant only the feature length films.  Nope.  This includes the short films as well.  Since I'm painfully a completionist, I'm watching all of these short films as well.  But I also know that I can't write an essay about each and every one of these movies.  So instead, I'll do some blurbs about each one as I watch them.  So I'll keep updating as I go along.

Les 3 boutons (2015) -I think I like Varda's early work a lot.  I've talked about this in Varda by Agnes and Visages / Villages.  It just seems like it was trying less to be art and simply was art back in the day.  Again, I don't mean to poo-poo.  Varda has more artistic merit in her pinky than I'll ever have.  To a certain extent, this movie felt like some of her earlier work.  It had a narrative.  It had a confusing narrative, but it was a narrative.  But in the mix of visuals, I kind of lost the point of it besides looking pretty and being artsy.

Ô saisons, ô châteaux (1958) -There is something incredibly satisfying about this.  There's an innocence to Varda as she's making what ultimately is a comissioned travel film. She seems worried about upsetting those who are hiring her while trying to maintain an artistic integrity and it is near perfect.  Yeah, it's a travel promo film.  It's the equivalent of a town asking for an extended infomercial.  But it works so well.  But not as well as...

Du côté de la côte (1958) -...this.  In the same year, she's hired for basically the same job with the French Riviera.  Then she just goes bananas and makes her own art film that happens to be emotionally about the French Riviera.  When the folks who hired her saw that she claimed that the best view is from the grave, were they all excited about it?  This is Varda that I adore.  She's spunky and adorable and has social commentary, even when she's hired for travel videos.

L'opera-mouffe (1958) -I'm living with a very pregnant lady right now.  She doesn't go around the streets of Paris making little art films.  This one is pretty.  Maybe things in black-and-white get a little bit of a pass compared to things in color.  I'm not normally a fan of strictly experimental cinema, but this mostly works for me.  Maybe because it is so hypnotic and relaxing that one can't help and view the movie through the lens of calm.  It's sad at times.  I lost myself in my own mortality watching this one today.  There was this old woman who looked so rough and the camera just stayed on her for longer than was appropriate.  I then realized that this lady, along with almost everyone involved in this movie, was probably dead.  But that old lady also has this specific form of immortality because film snobs like me will watch everything that Agnes Varda has ever made.

Les dites cariatides (1984) -Varda still has it going on in 1984.  I think it is when film goes digital is when I get off the Varda train.  I think she picks her shots so beautifully when film costs money that, when it is disposable, she doesn't quite get that same sense of grandeur.  She has a specific subgenre of experimental art film.  It's almost a documentary, but with little done in terms of informing.  Varda shows all of these women carved into stone and tells the story of the inspiration of these pieces.  But the point of the documentary is not to have you leave and tell your friends about what you learned, but to experience the same sense of awe that Varda does while looking at these moments.  The 2005 update doesn't really deserve its own section.  That's just someone's slideshow of statues.  But it shows what can happen when a filmmaker really pays attention to the small stuff.

T'as de beaux escaliers, tu sais (1986) -I almost didn't write about this.  I'm actually kind of amazed that I found an image of this.  It actually is probably from another movie.  It's funny.  Varda says that this isn't an advertisement; it's a documentary.  It's both. It's an excuse to say that Varda really likes film and I have no problem with that.  It's what I really like and to claim that this is my favorite of Varda's shorts is a bit too much fan service.  Doesn't mean that I don't like it.

Le lion volatil (2003) -Man, Agnes Varda --especially older Agnes Varda --was a sassy old lady.  In the introduction to this piece, she spills all the tea about how her producer disappeared with all of the money that was meant to make this short into a feature length film.  I'm already starting to see some of the weaknesses of Varda in 2003.  She wants this to be this heady piece about love around this neighborhood, but it all feels a bit forced compared to the other stuff we've seen.  It's cute and I like the fact that it has a narrative.  But it also wears 2003 really hard.

Elsa la rose (1966) -My goodness, I don't want to write about this right now.  The odd part is that I really like a lot about this short film.  I just wrote about Les creatures, where I feel like Varda is trying to be artsy.  Instead, we see honest-to-goodness art here.  She's in the zone with this one.  Maybe she does better with earnest reactions versus trying to reconstruct something.  She is making this almost as a commission.  She took the love between these two people and didn't try to fabricate something.  Elsa is romantic without being sappy.  She talks about art and her husband still embraces her with the skills that he already possesses.  It isn't perfect.  It's a little chaotic, but that's part of the narrative.  

Uncle Yanco (1967) -I always assume that I'm going to be annoyed by Varda's experimental stuff.  It mostly feels put on (trust me, I'm going to be writing a lot about this pretty soon).  But this is that sweet spot.  It comes from the fact that you can feel Varda's appreciation and love for her subject in this one.  The eponymous Uncle Yanco is Scrappy Doo in the best possible way to Agnes Varda's Scooby.  It's insane that both of these are in the same family...even though Yanco makes a point to say that they aren't actually related.  Still, this is a charming short and this is Varda's experimental stuff at its best.​

Black Panthers (1968) -I love when Varda gets out of her own way.  Yeah, I know that we're at the height of Varda's talents.  But I can just feel Varda getting wrapped up in the wealth of actual content that she needs to respect.  It's not like Varda's fingerprints aren't on this.  There are some very Varda elements happening in this documentary.  But the subject matter comes first to her.  There's such a respect for her subject and that's what makes "Black Panthers" compelling.

Reponse de femmes (1975) -See, I found this one more interesting.  It's really that tightrope that Varda rarely pulls off.  This is avant garde as can be, but it also doesn't forget its focus.  It's both a damning condemnation of misogyny coupled with a masterclass in efficient purpose.  Does it get a bit much with all of the nudity?  Yeah, kind of.  But Varda's going for a bit of shock value to get her audience to really listen to her message.  It's pretty incredible.

Plaisir d'amour en Iran (1976) -I both like and dislike this (kind of like the movie its associated with).  In many ways, it's borderline a deleted scene from One Sings, the Other Doesn't.  I will say that I find Apple far more interesting in these six minutes than I did the entire film of One Sings, the Other Doesn't.  It takes a lot to make Apple relatable because she doesn't really hold relationships with anyone who really challenges her.  If anything, her relationship with Suzanne gains weight because we see her in a place and a time that brings down her walls.  Also, the notion that Varda uses Iran as a backdrop so effectively is lovely.

7 P., Cuis, S. de B....(A Saisir) (1985) -Okay,I get that the short films will be more avant-garde than some of the full-length narratives.  There are things that I really like about this .  (Note:  It will never be my favorite.  It's a bit "so what" for a lot of it.)  I do like that we kind of look at the nuances of family within a period of 28 minutes.  But also, there are some images that are trying so hard to be weird that it almost pulls from the things that are more effective.  Still, I can't deny that the images are actually cool.  It's trying too much to do different things and I don't know it nails any of it.