{"id":12472,"date":"2018-02-17T20:00:10","date_gmt":"2018-02-18T02:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=12472"},"modified":"2018-02-15T20:41:48","modified_gmt":"2018-02-16T02:41:48","slug":"blade-of-the-immortal-2017-takashi-miike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/12472","title":{"rendered":"Blade of the Immortal (2017, Takashi Miike)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A great swordsman defeats an entire army of thugs who murdered his sister, then is made immortal by an old woman, and this entire backstory only takes up the first twelve minutes of the movie. Miike wasting no damn time with this one, supposedly his hundredth film, though I’d like to see what list they used to calculate this, since IMDB considers Pandoora<\/a><\/em> a movie, and counts MPD Psycho<\/a><\/em> as three movies.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Anyway… fifty years later, the “itto-ryu” is a supervillain samurai clan killing all the dojo heads in the Tokyo, including the parents of this girl Rin, who reminds our man of his sister, so he agrees to take on the gang. Rest of the movie is a series of high-energy fights, one-on-one and one-on-hundreds, against badasses with a variety of weapons. I found Sukiyaki Western Django<\/a><\/em> too tiresomely goofy, 13 Assassins<\/a><\/em> too classy and Hara-Kiri<\/a><\/em> too faithful – this one’s just right.<\/p>\n

Our heroes:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Clan leader S\u00f4ta Fukushi:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Our immortal hero is Takuya Kimura (Faye Wong’s bf in 2046<\/a><\/em>, voice of Howl<\/a>, star of two separate movies called Hero<\/em>), Rin is the voice of Mary<\/a>, and the fey cult leader starred in As The Gods Will<\/a><\/em>. That leaves all the specialty assassins: <\/p>\n

Kuroi Sabato (Kazuki Kitamura of Miike’s video game movie Like a Dragon<\/em>) wears Shredder headgear, goes down first. Magatsu (Shinnosuke Mitsushima of the next Kore-eda movie) has long spiky hair and a sweet facemask. Shizuma Eiku (Ebiz\u00f4 Ichikawa, main dude in Miike’s Hara-Kiri<\/em>) is a white-haired immortal who knows how they can be killed (bloodworm poison!). Makie (Erika Toda of the Death Note<\/em> series) wields a double-edged spear and changes sides, and Shina (Hayato Ichihara, bullied boy of All About Lily Chou-Chou<\/a><\/em>) is a blonde dude who focuses on killing the girl even when the army is attacking. Chiaki Kuriyama (Gogo in Kill Bill<\/a><\/em>) is a government spy with long blonde hair, and Tsutomu Yamazaki (Goro in Tampopo<\/a><\/em>) leads the government army, which needless to say in a Miike film is no better than the murderous cult. With no main-cast crossovers between this and 13 Assassins<\/em>, it looks like Miike is trying to turn every actor in Japan into a badass killer.<\/p>\n

Maatsu:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Makie:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Willow Maclay on her blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Miike doesn’t pull any punches as things reach a climax (with a few bloated, unnecessary side plots here and there) frequently zeroing in on Manji’s immortal body as it falls apart, but impossibly perseveres. When Manji finally confronts the man who wronged Rin … he’s barely a man anymore, more zombie than alive, and there is no elegant duel between sword wielding warriors. It is merely an act of execution, a job being completed, and a loss of life. It is with blunt honesty that Miike displays this final dance not as something worthwhile or justifiable, but another violent act in a long string of violent acts that Manji has committed during his lifetime, and some day Rin will die because of his actions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A great swordsman defeats an entire army of thugs who murdered his sister, then is made immortal by an old woman, and this entire backstory only takes up the first twelve minutes of the movie. Miike wasting no damn time with this one, supposedly his hundredth film, though I’d like to see what list they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,36,144,1277,104],"class_list":["post-12472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-japan","tag-revenge","tag-samurai","tag-takashi-miike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12472"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12504,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12472\/revisions\/12504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}