Takeshi Kitano's Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi isn't technically a musical, even if it does include several oddly delightful percussive interludes and ends with a rompin', stompin' taiko-drumming-meets-Harlem-tap number that rocks about twice as hard as anything in "Chicago." What it is, though, is an unclassifiable every-genre-at-once movie, in the spirit of the great martial-arts classics. Some of its violence is comic and cartoony, some of it is dire and horrifying. It's a mystery, a swashbuckler, a fable of bloody revenge, a tender tale of youth corrupted, and a tragedy about a noble samurai who takes the wrong path for the right reasons.

While the ultraviolence and the slapdash Mixmaster sensibility of Zatoichi surely aren't for everyone, it's such a big, compassionate film, so full of life and so delighted with its own excesses, that it's likely to win over all kinds of viewers (as it already has at numerous film festivals). As one Internet posting put it, Zatoichi's improbable combination of elements is pretty much what Quentin Tarantino tried to pull off, with somewhat less success, in Kill Bill.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:50 PM  |