I'm a bit of a junkie when it comes to older American/Italian Westerns and older Japanese Samurai movies, I watch so many of them that they sort of blur together after awhile and I have trouble even remembering the exact titles. Most modern ones tend to fall kind of short in my opinion... I guess my take is that as production value and movie making technology increased, the actual plot and storytelling declined.

That said, I really enjoyed the fairly recently made When the Last Sword is Drawn. There are some cultural specific aspects that will likely seem awkward to non-Japanese audiences, but if anyone is a fan of such movies I'd highly recommend checking it out.

There is only Ichi-san for me :-)



The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

*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. :-(

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