Of Samurai and Tap Dancing
April 27, 2005 by iamdoods
If you can find the beauty in a film that mixed the swashbuckling
power of samurai and the graceful dance of tap dancing then you would find that
the Zatoichi : The Blind Swordsman will be a feast to your eyes. So did I.
Zatoichi known as a Samurai TV series in
Japan
and has been made into several films, which of course I haven’t seen. So as a
new viewer of Zatoichi, I was watchful and kept on reading the subtitles. It
was not dubbed in English.
The plot is simple. A blind masseur wonders in the late
century
Japan
where feudalism ruled every village. He comes to this village where the people
feared the gang who collected taxes from them even if they have sold their
commodities or not. The gangs are killing everyone who bothers to stop them.
Then came a ronin who moves to the village to look for a job as a bodyguard to
the gang leader. There’s also the Naruto sisters who are avenging the death of
their father, killing every person they know who are involve in their parent’s
killing and steal their possessions.
Zatoichi is the name of the blind masseur and intertwined
his life with the sisters as they stayed in the house of a farmer. He loves
gambling and doesn’t lose. And so the storytelling goes.The killings are done with CGIs and it can be noticed but is
nicely done, of course. The gore is not for the weak at heart, at times I could
not dare to look some of the violent scenes. Everything is nicely done.
The film ends with a feast of drumbeats and dancing, I mean tap dancing. Everybody was dancing, except for Zatoichi. I could not even help but noticed that the music has some similarities to the ABS-CBN summer station ID. It could have been coincidence or was it where the Kapamily got the tune?
