Hello friends, sorry I have not poasted lately. We have watched Zatoichi films 2-13, of I think 27, so I haven't had much to write about. They were Good. Or, Okay. It's a formulaic series by nature and expectation, essentially a series of episodes at film-length. Zato walks into the sunset at the terminus of every film, leaving the girl he made so wet cold in her bed.
But more importantly I have a bone to pick. Somebody recommended us the film The Outsider (2018). I swore it was posted in this thread, as a piece of Japanese cinema. I can't find it now, so this is some elite level maneuvering as I can't hold you responsible. If you were trying to troll me, you succeeded!
First of all, this is NOT a japanese film although it is about Japan, which I noticed before downloading it, but it gets worse than that. Remember why people lol'd at The Last Samurai (2003)? White man carries the burden of the samurai and maintains the honor of the clan as a full-fledged member, inducted because he is just so awesome for 15 minutes that everyone can't resist, and he's also the bestest finest warrior of the whole bunch with the sickest deeds? And the story of the close of the samurai era is really mostly about this White guy? Well, crank that to 11 and you've got The Outsider (gaijin).
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The film starts in prison. It's unclear what year it is, looks like the 80s. Jared Leto is here in jail for reasons never explained. Hehas grown a huge beard and looks exactly like the priest both incarnations of the film Silence, which handled the White-in-Japan material so much more respectfully. He helps a tattooed guy in prison commit faux-harakiri to get to the prison hospital so his boys can get him out of the clink. Somehow they come back for him and he leaves through the front door, beard gone and appearance immaculate, with slicked-back hair, where a 20-year-old twinky Japanese with a 1911 hanging out of the back of his pants ushers him into a car in full view of the guards and officials. We are told it is 1954 in Osaka.
The car takes him to a fancy room. In the room is a whole yakuza mob. For helping his prison bro, they offer him a job beating a man to death with a typewriter. He does great. He's now a yakuza affiliate.
Next, the gang's drinking at a titty joint soon after when the rival gang shows up to sneer. Jared Leto smashes one of them in the face without being prompted by anyone. For this, he is given a fancy apartment and given a suit. He starts banging a high-ranking mobster's sister against orders, but nobody seems to care very much. He's offered one more job, a scarier one, which he pulls off with some retarded gun-kata where he oh-so-skillfully reverses a bad situation after staring down the barrel of a man ordered to execute him's gun for 6 seconds. In so doing he kills two members of the rival yakuza, again unordered, in a job unsanctioned by the boss.
Know what they do for this? Starting a shitstorm that ends in a gang war? Make him a full-blooded yakuza, complete with ceremony where every Japanese in the gang kneels while he walks before them to the boss. He begins getting many hours of yakuza tattoos all over his White body. He impregnates the sister of the top lieutenant with an unauthorized hapa baby, for which the lieutenant gives him his father's katana and wakizashi -- "you protect my family now. I have no balls. You are the man, White man, the ultimate man."
With this, the movie becomes a hypnotic montage. The montage goes on for about 60 minutes. He lives his mob life. Does his mob things. A few lines of dialogue in an hourlong desert of hypnotic storyboarded drawings rendered cinematically develop the plot. In the end the boss dies and Jared Leto has to kill the mob traitor with a sword in front of the enemy boss. The enemy boss and a roomful of rival Japanese yakuza let him go, to exit the life. Truly they have accepted his status as Yakuza.
He returns to a room full of the remnants of the old gang for his adulations, the hero. The best gangster. The only woman in the film, his love interest, is in the room. He is the only man who gets pussy. The WHite man. The Yakuza. The credits roll.
THANKS for this one whoever posted it. 1/10
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