Sukiyaki Western Django

Plot synopsis:
A lone gunman travels to the town of Yuta, which is run by the warring clans of the white-colored Genji and red-colored Heike. After ignoring requests from both clans to join them, he is given shelter by a woman named Ruriko, who takes care of her mute grandson Heihachi. Ruriko tells the gunman that many years ago, the town prospered in gold mining until both clans fought over the gold and drove away the population. The Heike-aligned sheriff tells the gunman that in the midst of the chaos, a Heike man named Akira married a Genji woman named Shizuka and lived peacefully with their son Heihachi, until Heike leader Kiyomori killed Akira in cold blood, rendering Heihachi mute from the trauma. Seeking protection for her son, Shizuka became a prostitute for the Genji. Since then, Heihachi has been tending to a trio of red and white roses, waiting for the day they bloom.
Later that day, the gunman wins a challenge from the Genji henchman Yoichi to have Shizuka for the night. Before he proceeds with her, he is told by Genji leader Yoshitsune that he is reminiscent of the legendary female gunslinger Bloody Benten. Later, Shizuka warns the gunman that Yoshitsune sent some men to retrieve a new weapon for Yoichi to use on him. He tells Shizuka to take her son and leave town tomorrow. The next morning, following a tip-off from Shizuka, the sheriff informs Kiyomori of the Genjis' plans. The Heikes ambush the wagon, with Kiyomori acquiring a Gatling gun stored inside a coffin. Meanwhile, as the Genjis race toward the wagon raid, Ruriko, Shizuka and Heihachi are fleeing from town when Shizuka runs back to save the roses. She is mortally shot through the heart by Yoichi. The gunman attempts to intervene, but is forced to drop his guns before being tortured by the Genji thug. Ruriko's servant Toshio suddenly appears and throws a gun at her before she shoots and kills Yoichi and his henchmen, revealing herself to be Bloody Benten. In retaliation for the wagon raid, the Genjis destroy the Heikes' fortress.
While the native doctor Piripero tends to the gunman's wounds, Ruriko has Toshio retrieve some guns from the elderly Piringo, who reveals to him that he trained her to be a gunman and Akira was their son. Ruriko plans to settle the score with the Genjis once and for all by luring them with a chest loaded with gold nuggets in the middle of town. The Genjis are killed by the gunman and Ruriko while the surviving Heikes make their way back to town. Ruriko kills the Heikes and Kiyomori, avenging her son's death, but is fatally shot by the sheriff, who in turn is shot down by a mortally wounded Toshio and impaled with a tombstone cross by Piripero. The gunman challenges Yoshitsune in a final showdown, with the Genji leader deflecting all the gunman's bullets with his katana. But when Yoshitsune tries to deliver a fatal cut, the gunman catches the blade on his trigger guard, before shooting Yoshitsune in the head with a Derringer he had concealed under his left sleeve.
After burying their loved ones, the gunman takes a fistful of gold from the treasure chest, telling Heihachi that the rest is his. As he rides off through the snow, Heihachi looks at the roses and slowly utters, "Love". The ending text reveals that a few years later, Heihachi travels to Italy and becomes the gunslinger known as "Django". No one knows if the roses have bloomed.

Tags: western, revenge, murder, storytelling, flashback

Review:
If Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time is considered an ode to the American Western with all it's fundamental elements all packed neatly in an 3 and a half hour package of visual splendor than Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django is an ode to the Italian Western through and through with all the style, violence and sound that Leone brought to the art of cinema and Sergio Corbucci used to create his most famous work "Django".
A visual feast, Miike's tribute to Corbucci's work is the poetic equivalent of Tarantino's own tribute to the Italian Western (and some other cult genres) Kill Bill.Set around, in a strikingly offbeat way to, the 12th century Heike/Genji clan wars Sukiyaki Western Django is the tale of a mysterious gunman (played by Hideoki Ito) who comes into a nearly deserted once prospering town now controlled by the two rival groups.
For the film he combined, the typical Morricone-sque western music with that of the Japanese samurai flick in a modern just lightly rock adaptation.Sukiyaki Western Django pays homage to what is now a dead genre.
Sukiyaki Western Django, however, shows his true capability as a director and that he isn't just another run-of-the-mill carbon copy like I originally thought after viewing Audition.Sukiyaki Western Django is very dialogue heavy, but it still packs a lot of action and a lot more character deaths than is standard for this type of film.
With the first words spoken, however, it became painfully apparent what this movies main problem would be.You see, despite the fact that almost all of the cast uses Japanese as their primary language (I haven't verified this, but it's pretty obvious), the filmmaker, Takashi Miike, shot the whole thing in English.
A signpost on the lone gunman's way reads 'Nevada', the actors speak English with heavy and grating Japanese accents, some of them bear katanas and most others six shooters, the shabby ghost town the movie takes place in is distinctly Japanese in its architecture yet ornamented with dead men hanging from the town gate in typical 'far west' fashion, there's a sheriff, short blurbs about samurais, rumors of hidden treasure and a gold rush explained in a flashback.However Miike is not attempting what many other directors have tried to in the past, that is to transpose occidental concepts, their mentality or filmic tradition to the oriental or the other way around.
In Miike's vision of the genre west, the (historical naval) battle of Dannoura between the Genji and the Heike takes place close to Quentin Tarantino dressed in a poncho playing a gunfighter called Ringo and is followed a couple hundred years later by a signpost that reads Nevada and the Genji and Heike still split into warring factions.
Fans of comic books will be familiar with the myth-making idea here.It's a damn shame then that a movie as conceptually and aesthetically ambitious as Sukiyaki is let down by a terrible script, Miike's ill-advised decision to have all his actors mumble their way through their lines in distracting Engrish and the pace-clogging inclusion of at least thirty minutes of dead running time that should have been mercifully left to die at the cutting room floor.There are scenes that don't work at all (such as the unnecessary dance scene) and there are scenes that outstay their welcome by a good number of minutes.
On one hand Miike seems to go for an air of sentimental and meaningful profundity while at the same time indulging his nuttier side.The good in Sukiyaki come in the form of a commendable visual attention to detail and beautiful lighting, the blistering action and the comic book vibe he goes for that recalls the days of FUDOH and DEAD OR ALIVE.
In the opening scene that supposedly takes place concomitant with the Battle of Dannoura he whacks pistolero-style three badly dressed goons and mouths off a couple of one-liners.The scene is amusing at best but he has the show stole from right under his nose by the beautiful and intriguing set design and painted backdrops that recreate an oddly poetic and intentionally artificial rendition of the old west, perhaps recalling the dream sequence Akira Kurosawa created for Tatsuya Nakadai to stagger his way through in KAGEMUSHA or the similarly evocative painted sunsets of DODESUKADEN.
The line between Japanese samurai films and Italian Westerns (called "spaghetti" in the West and "macaroni" in the East) has been blurry from the days of Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone.
The unnamed black clad antihero rides into a previously thriving town to find it a wretched hive of scum and villainy; occupied by a handful of citizens and two warring clans, the Genji and Heike.Clad in red and white, Miike injects some heavy duty rose overtones into the film, calling out the War of the Roses, Henry VI, and a hybrid rose bush named "love" quite frequently.
At least two of the film's characters are products of Genji (red) and Heike (white) love affairs.Even with a wealth of past ideas to pilfer, SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO can't sustain itself for its full two hour running time.
These instances feel completely out of place, even after the highly stylized pre-credit sequence starring living cartoon character Quentin Tarantino.It's strange with actors speaking English as a second language (for the most part) and who muddle through some tricky pronunciations (thank goodness for the English subtitles) that the worst performance of the film comes courtesy of a native English speaker.
Tarantino's embarrassing "acting" may be brief but every second he spends on screen is excruciating.Sure to be a hit with every hipster who has never seen an Asian in a cowboy hat (allow me to recommend TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER and THE NEW MORNING OF BILLY THE KID), SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO could do with some tightening up and a complete Tarantino-echtomy..
This is further proof that cult Japanese director Takashi Miike is not for me: as can be deduced from the title, the film is a pseudo-homage to the Italian Spaghetti Westerns (though Django has almost nothing to do with it!).
In fact, the plot is yet another rehash of Japanese master Akira Kurosawa's samurai classic YOJIMBO (1961), which had actually led to Sergio Leone kick-starting the Spaghetti Western subgenre with that film's first remake A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964)!
Anyway, for Miike, this is typically violent fare  even more pointless than usual and all rather amateurishly assembled; besides, having the actors speak English results in unintentional laughter more than anything else (though Quentin Tarantino's absurd cameo is no less embarrassing: incidentally, I may well have been witness to the genesis of the picture back when these two mavericks 'butted heads' at the 2004 Venice Film Festival!).
That's pretty much what happened here.Sukiyaki Western Django takes place in an alternate universe where nineteenth-century Nevada is populated entirely by the Japanese and the only white man around is Quentin Tarantino!This is colorful (figuratively and literally) and action packed with great production values but the whole thing's just too gimmicky and cute for it's own good.
Hell, I had to turn on the subtitles anyway!What I would really like to have seen was director Takashi Miike attempt to make a real western with an American cast.
Apparently making fun of the westerns Sukiyaki has a lot of tragedy as it tells the story of the rival clans, in a time and place where there is not much value in human life.
I've seen movies that are parodies of other movies (scary movie),i've seen movies that are parodies of itself (hot shots),but i've never seen a movie that is a parody of parody of itself.In the beginning I thought the whole asians-in-western set up was funny.But then it came : - AWFUL 'acting' by Tarantino (i'm not sure I can call it acting) - AWFUL acting by everyone after him.They all must have skipped acting school or the cast selection was made in an AA rehab - SURREAL dialogs and questions or sentences that the viewer is not meant to understand (cause the film is too smart for the average joe.
Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) ** (out of 4) Quentin Tarantino in a Takashi Miike homage to Spaghetti Westerns is going to be enough to get a few curious people to watch but I must rip off a few reviews I've read, which called this film different but not very entertaining.
This is the real surprise (disappointment) of the present movie - it is not new.The reason for the development of this weirdly self-referential genre is that the most famous of all Spaghetti Westerns, Leone's 'A Fistful of Dollars,' was a direct rip-off of Akira Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo.' In the past two decades, Japanese film makers have tried to understand how that could happen.
SWD is entirely of its genre, and nothing new is learned from it.Instead, he tries to avoid the issue by drawing his material mainly from the major film by Leone disciple Sergio Corbucci - "Django." Big mistake.Whatever its merits, 'Django' left one seriously misguided impression on the history of the Spaghetti Western - it seems to be entirely lacking in humor.
Althgough Corbucci later revealed quite a sense of the comedic, and Leone's own films are largely comedies with operatic structures, this impression of 'Django' has stuck, and most parodies of Spaghetti Westerns have been based on the assumption that the genre is overly heavy in its themes and philosophy.
obviously it's a western, but think more "Ichi the Killer" meets "Tombstone" meets "Kill Bill" and you'll be a little closer to what this movie has to offer.all in all, if you're fan of Miike, watch it.
It's a re-working of Akira Kurosawa's classic film "Yojimbo" but instead of being set in feudal Japan, it's in a weird crossover world--part Japanese and part western--and by 'western', I mean the American Old West!!
I haven't seen Django, and actually I saw much more candid likeness to Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.The fast-paced action is well staged on a set that sponges both western and samurai ways of life.
Hire a bunch of Japanese actors that can hardly speak English and when they do, have such a strained looked on their face like they are trying to pass a kidney stone.The first five minutes of this movie is so bad, that what follows could only be worst, and it exceeded this with flying colors.I don't know what compelled me to agonizingly sit through the whole movie,but while I was watching it go from bad to worst to utterly horrid, it actually became comical, it was so bad that it went full circle.avoid at all costs..
The name is straightforward: "sukiyaki" being a traditional Japanese dish (standing in for "spaghetti"), "western" referring to the genre, and "Django" referring to the gimmicky B-movie series of westerns from the '70s which the film constantly references.
So the name literally is saying it's a Japanese B-movie Spaghetti Western.Miike takes inspiration from, and references, almost everything here: classic Clint Eastwood westerns, the anime 'Cowboy Bebop', B-movie slashers (and obviously the terrible cult classic series, "Django"), Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo', the old Japanese story of 'The Tale of Heike' and so on.
It's pretty original/charming in concept, though, and I wonder if Miike wouldn't also like to make a samurai film entirely with Americans speaking broken Japanese.
Although it's not gripping for its story, narrative or traditional story-telling, film-making qualities, Sukiyaki Western Django is pretty cool for how unique it is and its goofy Japanese angles on the subject matter.
"Sukiyaki Western Django" (aka SWD) isn't quite as bad as "Izo", but in all honesty it's not that far off.First and foremost, Miike needs to stop directing English language movies.
There are a number of very good Japanese actors in SWD, but they all end up sounding like halfwits because they speak in English for the entirety of the film.
In this hybrid flick, scene one features Tarantino taking on three Japanese gun slingers in what intentionally look like a b-movie set piece of the desert.
With this scene, the movie will either have your full attention, or it will have you making for the exit, but it's a good indicator that something eccentric is going to follow.It is for the best that Sukiyaki Western Django does not take itself seriously.
But, the overall style and art design is solid, the actors try their best and the soundtrack has some really good moments.Personally I think that Sukiyaki Western Django tries too hard.
This movie was good, if you actually watched it instead of being the overzealous cliché'd college film student who doesn't know anything but to kiss his or her owns ass, then hail to ya, since your ego speaks louder then words, for one this flick believe it or not is a prequel, second its from takashi miike, the only guy who makes obscure flicks that sometimes are bad but hell you don't see much of his type of movies, if you hated this flick so much then go watch something from uwe boll iam sure you two could cosy up and degrade more soon to be cult classics, as for those of you who enjoyed this flick or curious to see it then don't let these film "cretiques" who judge flicks they haven't even seen just read about, and talk nothing but negative comments on how bad the flick is then why even comment on it, i mean really if you complain so much about how a film flows, then i dare ya, to make your own.
One of only four films Takashi Miike made last year (must have been a slow one), Django is yet another pseudo-adaptation of the classic Red Harvest story of a town with two warring factions and a lone gunmen betwixt it all.
And "Sukiyaki Western Django" indeed is a great fun film, even if one might more or less know what to expect.
"Sukiyaki Western Django" is neither one of Miike's best nor his worst films.
Trust Japanese director Takeshi Miike to dream up something as outrageously funny, wicked and dramatic such as Sukiyaki Western Django, his take on what a Japanese Western would look and feel like, encapsulating genre themes, character motivations, and action done to violent perfection.
For Miike SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO serves as sardonic homage to (and a parody of) American action films since at the time he made it, it was unlikely that he would ever be able to direct a straightforward genre film for Hollywood.This film is purposely ANTI-original.
With his recent "Sukiyaki Western Django" Miike pays loving tribute to the western genre and infuses it with his own unique spin and a decidedly Japanese flair.Set in what appears to be a dusty post-apocalyptic wasteland, the story deals with a bitter rivalry between two vicious clans - the brutal Heike (whose color emblem is a bloody scarlet red) and the flashy Genji (whose banners are a snow colored white).
Momoi Kaori (Bounce No Ko Gal, Memoirs of a Geisha), who was also educated in London, is clearly at home with the English dialog and turns in a terrific performance as Ruriko.Ishibashi Takaaki (one half of 80s comedy duo "Tunnels")steals the spotlight as Yoshitsune's sexually ambiguous henchman as does Kagawa Teruyuki (HERO, Tokyo.Sora) as the cowardly and opportunistic sheriff who seems almost possessed at times.Following the heals of great modern western-themed movies and remakes of late like "No Country for Old Men" and "3:10 To Yuma", Miike's "Sukiyaki Western Django" is a fun and unique take on the western and as it's name suggests offers a clever take with a Japanese bent.
This Sukiyaki Western begins in a really bizarre way, more or less like a play with Ringo (Quentin Tarantino in a total tribute to the man with no name, with the poncho included ), a man who knew the story about the Genji and Heike clans or the whites and the reds, a story that happened hundred years ago.
I mean, it was a Miike film, it has a cameo of Tarantino, it has Japanese actors and actresses talking a strange English and itself was a tribute to the Spaghetti Westerns called, in a really unique way, Sukiyaki Western Django.
In the end we have that this actually was the story of the son of Akira, who actually saw how both of his parents were killed, having in the end gratitude with the gunman and later finding his own way to Italy (a really memorable and even hilarious final detail of the film).Finally, I really liked Sukiyaki Western Django and the entire concept makes that this is a must see film not only for Takashi Miike fans but also for all the people who loves westerns.
The title may sound like this would be a satirical comedy spoof,it sure is not, The director Takashi Miike normally has directed horror film, here he attempts a western, with a decided Japanese flavor.
Takashi Miike (I don't know the guy's previous works) is apparently a big shot director in Japan and his latest film "Sukiyaki Western Django" is an ode to Italian spaghetti Westerns and directors like Corbucci, Leone and Kurosawa.
Takashi Miike makes a samurai movie as a western.
The Japanese cast speaks in English, the music is eclectic with strong spaghetti western influences, and the material is referential and full of homage and send up.It begins with a Quentin Tarantino cameo, then switches to the story of two clans fighting over the supposed treasure in a small town.
The characters, the action, some set pieces are simply stunning, not to mention touching, there are several moments of real emotion.And make no mistake, this is a spaghetti western, and the film is a bit more fun if you know the genre.
This movie will be loved by fans of old Akira Kurosawa samurai films crossed with old westerns with a touch of Tarantino story play.
This was Miike's first all English production, and it showed.So, when I found out one of his 2007 films, "Sukiyaki Western Django", was in English, I was a bit put off.