Sukiyaki Western Django

Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)
Director Takashi Miike
Written by Takashi Miike, Masa Nakamura
Produced by Masato Ôsaki,Nobuyuki Tohya
Starring  Hideaki Ito,Masanobu Ando,Takaaki Ishibashi,Teruyuki Kagawa, special appearance by Quentin Tarantino

Synopsis (by Leila)
old school style western, but all japanese-like, except it was in english. two warring gangs take over a town hoping to find gold. revenge plots abound.




MOster
FINALLY, a movie with real evidence of pathos at every stage in its production.  (I do kind of wonder if this actual originality skewed my opinion.) I don't know how much of the direction was "innovative," but it was there; and if there was a checklist of shots it was handwritten on a series of cocktail napkins, not cribbed from someone's Film 101 textbook.  Many items were intentionally over the top.  It got serious when it needed to and the crazy stuff was not silly.

Production wasn't A+, but it wasn't supposed to be.  Various levels of polish were applied to various settings with great effect; and there was even artistic purpose in the way seemingly random items were placed within the frame.  Music was used very well.

This was a great ride, with plenty of nice moments.  The plot was by no means complicated but it was by no means the typical one record in a jukebox of 20.  Hands down, my favorite thing about this movie is that with maybe three exceptions all the characters were equally despicable.  While I was a little bit let down by one detail of the big reveal, it was a necessary element in the remainder of the film.

Acting and stunt work were just fine.  While there are no Oscars here, again that's really not the point of the movie.  The point of the movie was to take a smooth ride over an intentionally bumpy track.  It made its point and I had a great time.

the Woman

cool movie. it was a little hard to follow at times, but i think that is because i was doing something else at the time. we were also interrupted nine hundred times by our offspring not napping,  and there is a lot going on in the movie. i enjoyed how it played on the similarities of westerns and kung fu movies. costumes were awesome as well. i think it was a movie made entirely of subplots, which is totally interesting. and every character with the exception of two, were bad guys. it's definitely not a movie i've seen before and it gets mad credit for that.