I’m not sure whether to review a movie like this or explain it. Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims, an outré genre-busting comedy from Japan, gets most of its yuks by turning samurai movie conventions upside-down and inside-out, and then painting them in garish colors. Take Samurai Hip, Sailor-Fuku Chic and Yakuza Cool, dump them into a blender, throw it at a movie screen, and you’d end up with something (vaguely) like this. It ought to have been a work of goony genius, but instead it’s a tiresome hodgepodge that goes on far too long after it’s worn out its welcome.
Even if it was a better movie, it wouldn’t be the sort of thing I could recommend without many caveats. For one, if you’re don’t already have some experience with samurai flicks—to say nothing of the dozen or so other Japanese movie / pop-culture tropes that get strip-mined in this film—most of the jokes are going to sail right over your head at thirty thousand feet. The movie spends at least as much time channel-surfing and gleefully smashing clichés together as it does telling a story, and eventually it runs out of real story and just starts throwing things on the screen and chasing its tail. It falls down about as badly as Samurai Fiction did, another movie which was funnier in theory than it was in practice.
They're wild! They're gay! They're hopping a Harley and heading on up that
endless ribbon of skyway to the shrine at Ise to get clean, get cool and get crazy!
The “Yaji and Kita” of the title are a pair of gay lowlifes from feudal Edo—Kita (Shichinosuke Nakamura), a washed-up actor, and Yaji (Tomoya Nagase), his junkie boyfriend (whose blond dye job he apparently got in infancy, according to one of the movie’s many flashbacks). The two of them kick off a pilgrimage to Ise, where Yaji can presumably go straight and Kita can, well, not. As you can imagine, the movie is about the journey, not the destination—where the two of them face up against such challenges as a barrier guard who demands they make him laugh before he’ll let them pass, and a not-terribly-intrepid detective who’s convinced Kita offed his wife and has gone on the lam.
Many faces that ought to be modestly familiar to Japanese movie lovers zoom through: Susumu Terashima turns up as a doshin, or Edo-era cop (who pulls the pair over for driving 100 kph in a Year 1735 zone); look fast for Nao Omori acting befuddled; and Riki Takeuchi has a totally over-the-top role as the “comedy daimyo”, mugging and scrunching up his face like he’s trying to turn it inside out. And throughout the whole thing there’s the same cheerful disregard for historical continuity, as when Yaji and Kita wax a hit record and have it slam to the top of the charts, or when they roar off for Ise on a chopper that’s definitely not a “rice-burner” (ha ha).
Along the way, they've got to deal with such hazards as the Make-Me-Laugh Barrier Guard,
gangster-fangirl ganguro gangs, and the entire dismal final third of the movie.
Unfortunately, it sounds like more fun than it actually is. Over time, two major problems with the movie emerge and conspire to drag it down. The first is the movie’s aimlessness—some of it deliberate, some of it just a consequence of bad planning and pacing. The sprightly pace of the first hour eventually sputters out, slows down from a romp to a slog, and left me wishing the film had ended at the ninety-minute mark. Actually, it does end there—only to start up again in a whole spurious way, with Yaji and Kita’s journey encompassing the realms beyond life and death as well. This entire last third of the film is pure, excruciating tedium: the heroes part, rejoin, and part again; one dies; the other wanders lost in hallucinations; the first is stuck in a kind of antechamber of the afterlife; and it all just drags on and on and on with no end in sight. It’s actually rather disappointing how lush the imagery in this part of the movie is—there’s some lovely and creative art direction and CGI used to depict the afterworld—and how it’s all used to do little more than help the movie thrash around all the more futilely.
The other big problem is how it deals with (or doesn’t deal with) the issue of being gay, even in a sincerely comedic way. At one point we get a monologue by Yaji which implies is that his homosexuality is a “bad habit” on the same level as his drug problems, and it’s a measure of the movie’s cowardice that it doesn’t even deal with this directly or take a stand on it. What’s the message here—it’s okay to be gay, but only if you’re a comically inoffensive caricature? It’s made all the worse, in a way, by the movie’s general innocuousness—kind of the way Bill Cosby’s best comedy records were marred (as Dave Marsh put it) by the way he painted marriage as being nothing but one giant nag. It’s a reminder of how Japan still isn’t terribly progressive in a lot of ways, and a rather jolting one in the context of this movie.
It's a shame the movie flames out and runs aground so thoroughly; it's an example of how attitude overkill
and genre-cannibalizing run amuck can't compensate for basic aimlessness at the story level.
Yaji & Kita is actually a spoof retelling of an Edo-era novel, Hizakurige (or Shank’s Mare in English), by one Iku Tohensha (also translated as “Ikku Jippensha”). It’s as much a staple of Japanese literature as Huckleberry Finn or om Sawyer is in English, and it’s been filmed about as many times as those stories have: once in the silent era, and again in the late Fifties by golden-age director Yasuki Chiba. This version’s actually an adaptation of a manga revisitation of the source material, one which took a great many liberties. The movie takes even more liberties—so many, in fact, that I wished they would have put a few back.
its the one key thing that prevents it from being a story thats successful and enjoyable - that it's all a little too japanese in a way - but, like 'funky forest', there's also potentially a point early on where you kind of give up on trying to make too much sense of it, and allow it to simply be something of an oddity that's an interesting experience. definitely makes less sense than kankuro kudo's work for other people, perhaps this films a little too self-indulgent, and yes its certainly too long, but it's very colorful, could be great fun for many to watch. as for its treatment of being gay, well i'm not living in japan but my guess is there's a chance they're playing on old-fashioned attitudes towards homosexuality and making fun of the origins portrayal of gay as being "an illness" or something equally as trivial... not necessarily simply displaying that kind of attitude in itself though.
I enjoyed this movie somewhat, the last bit was definitely boring and dragged on and on..but I did actually laugh and enjoy most of it, which is more than a lot of movies can say.
As for the gay thing, I believe you are right about Japan not being progressive. There are many issues that they are stuck in the 1700s about and being gay is one of them.
It's like the character 'Hard Gay', he's not actually a gay guy and is just a character that is highly stereotypical.. He's funny, but he's not real and a lot of the real gays in Japan hate him because of how negatively he affects them.
In some ways, Japan is further behind than the USA when it comes to the way they see gay people.. They only seem to really be accepted if they are just joking. D:
I disagree with the idea the movie didn't take a stand, Kita stumbles when he says he doesn't want to go on with Yaji because it isn't true. The whole "director's cut" sequence of the movie was Kita unable to quit drugs without Yaji, not to mention the lack of an echo when Kita shouts the girl's name at mount Fuji.