*laughs in blind Japanese* :-)

Most (all?) of the originals are available as part of the Criterion Collection now, which is awesome. I actually saw a western recently called Red Sun that starred Charles Bronson and Toshirō Mifune, sort of a crossover between the two genres that was pretty entertaining. Mifune played a lot of samurai roles including at least one Zatoichi film I know of.

I'm a big fan of Takeshi Kitano's Japanese gangster movies, and he didn't do a bad job reprising the role of Zatoichi relatively recently, but for me the film overall sort of suffered from the same problem I pointed out about modern western movies. :-(

Well there are certainly cross-overs since the The Magnificent Seven was an adaption of the Seven Samurai and was most influential.

I agree with you that production value replaced plot, likewise most of my favorite Sci-Fis are from the 70s and 80s.

That's because of the market needs of cinema productions to appeal to a wider and "easier" audience, in order to have a guarantied return of investment.

As a result do TV and streaming productions often offer much better plots nowadays.

Cheers Rolf
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