Serdar | Genji Press

The Hidden Blade is not about a secret sword technique that saves a hero in the face of terrible evil. If anything, it is exactly the opposite: it gives us a samurai, Munezo (Masatoshi Nagase) who has never drawn a weapon to kill, is more mild-mannered and unassuming than anything else, and is unhappy that his job consists of learning, badly, how to use the new weapons of war that Japan has just imported from the West. He would like nothing better than to simply put all this stuff away and live without it, but his life demands otherwise of him.

Blade is in a sense a sequel, or maybe a companion, to Yoji Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai. That movie was set in the same time period — the 1860s, when Japan was opening up to Western influences in a precarious and turbulent way — deals with many of the same social implications, and even has a parallel plot device which I will go into later. For me, though, Blade is a better movie in some ways: it uses some of the same ideas but extrapolates on them further, and examines them with less preachy sentiment. It also features one of my current favorite Japanese actors: Nagase was in Gojoe, the Maiku Hama movies and many others I’ve looked at here that I’ve taken close to heart. Here, he plays a somewhat glum Everysamurai for whom the samurai code and its attendant honor and glory seem more like distasteful burdens than ideals to aspire to.

UltraViolet is a CGI / live-action / vampire / horror / fantasy / action / adventure / sci-fi / thriller kreplach that is even more horrible than such a mish-mash description could possibly imply. If you took a New York strip steak, French fries, Caesar salad and vanilla pudding, and put them all into a blender, you wouldn’t have anything remotely approaching an edible meal, let alone an appetizing one. And yet that’s exactly what they’ve done here: they’ve taken ten different kinds of movie, all of them bad, and combined them in a way that they don’t collectively add up to even one mediocre one.

There are bad movies that people sit through for the express purpose of mocking, or getting a kind of sangfroid pleasure out of. I used to do that until I realized life was too short, and with all the genuinely good movies out there that have gone unseen, why waste my time? But UV came out, and friends of mine saw it and told me they had seen bargain-basement porn that was more interesting than this, and my response was: Surely they can’t be right. Even if I didn’t like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, it had a cult following, and at least that was explicable. This movie, however, deserves no cult following, merely an angry mob of people chasing after it with pitchforks and torches.

The shame of V for Vendetta is that it has a lot more on its mind than it knows how to handle. Here we have a film that is a stylized visual fantasy about the Individual vs. the State, a la The Matrix — courtesy of the same writers and executive producer — and that should resonate deeply with the spirit of the times, but instead it feels smug and obvious. Ostensibly the filmmakers wanted to provoke thought about one man’s terrorist being another man’s freedom fighter, but the movie stacks the deck all wrong. The end result is brazenly confused, invoking a great many things — the Holocaust, the War on Terror, etc. — without ever really building on them.

V is an adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel of the same name, and one of the odd things about the film is that its own distinct flaws further illuminate the problems I had with the original story to begin with. Moore is a visionary and an artist, but no great shakes as a political thinker, and so his story was essentially a fever dream in which a fascist and inhumane Britain gets its comeuppance thanks to a lone jester with a mask. The story’s most credible insight is that ideas are bigger than individuals, and that you can blow out a candle but not a brush fire, etc., but the movie takes even these few notions and trivializes them. The Wachowski Brothers seem to be consistently fascinated with the idea of the individual transcending the collective, but each time they’ve made a movie about it the results have been messy, to put it politely.