sucks-9 There are many things that make Samurai Fiction fantastic. The first thing: the black and white cinematography. The second thing: Instead of blood spurting, spraying, and oozing from dead samurai, the black and white image of the dying person gets a red filter over it and fades away once the man is dead. The third thing: the funky rock soundtrack. The fourth thing: The way Heishiro yells his dialogue when he has short temper. And the fifth thing: The current message of peace throughout. It is a shame that Hiroyuki Nakano hasn't been as successful with his other films as he has been with Samurai Fiction. Hopefully, that will soon change.

fuzzybeasty Labelled as 'a samurai movie for the MTV generation', this unfortunately is only half-accurate and does a great disservice to the film. When a film is labelled as 'for the MTV generation', we think of fast-cuts, jump-cuts, loud techno, a soundtrack designed purely to make money, weak-plot, and something to keep grabbing our weak attention spans every five minutes to make sure we're still interested. This film is not one of those.The soundtrack is a modern sounding bluesy/rock/techno affair which in many scenes is actually superbly in line with the events of the film. At times, some may find the music jarring with the period setting, but it never overwhelms you by getting in the way of the film or the story.The story itself starts out as being fairly ordinary samurai fare, but as the film progresses so too does the story, adding many additional layers to both the protagonist and the antagonist of the piece, as well as raising some very good and thoughtful moments.The story does not race along like a modern day adventure or action film, in fact it has the same kind of pace that you would expect from a Kurosawa piece at times, or a spaghetti western. Slow and languorous with occasional bursts of violence.All of the main actors acquit themselves more than adequately, in both the dramatic sequences and the all-important duelling scenes.This though, because of it's revisionist nature, is one of those films that will truly divide people. Some will consider a great piece of revisionism for the samurai legend, others won't be able to tolerate the modern sounding soundtrack. Neither are wrong, here it all comes down to what you expect or want from a samurai film. Although it worth pointing out that the classic samurai films also had 'modern' sounding scores when they were made, no samurai film has a truly 'authentic' soundtrack.I personally found the film to be hugely enjoyable and at times moving, and I would heartily recommend it to most people that I know.

frankgaipa Best I can say for this is the two actors (pardon my inability to figure which actor names) who come center stage in the latter half of the film, the samurai who's carrying the stolen sword and the retired swordsman with the daughter, show commanding enough presences that either could command the screen in a real samurai film. They even make Samurai Fiction's protagonist seem a little more interesting by association.The problem with guitar-based rock in films portraying this period is people don't walk, run, fight to a four-beat. I just re-watched Hidden Fortress on the largest screen with the best sound available here. Mostly it's scored with traditional wind, string, and percussion instruments. But in a few, I think unfortunate, instances, Kurosawa gave over to western instruments for the sort of "welling-up" music with which Westerners now attempt to wrench emotions their directorial skills haven't earned. I shudder to think that, besides swiping the plot, Lucas may have let Kurosawa's western interpolations inspire that awful Star Wars music. The soundtrack of Sogo Ishii's Angel Dust showed a film can be scored Japanese style-with modern instruments and techniques, and even interpolate, without being destroyed by, Western sounds. But what Ishii does is a long way from playing electric guitar unkeyed to screen movements. In the same theater as Hidden Fortress, months before I saw Toyoda's Portrait of Hell destroyed, to blindly good reviews, by a live indie band that seldom even glanced at the screen.On the other hand, I mostly liked Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus. Go figure.

regi0n2fan "Samurai Fiction": Definitely worth watching - I thought it was a little slow at first (and a little sparse and inconsistent with the humour), but it definitely got better at the end. It won't make you more of a Hotei Tomoyasu fan (boy, he looks weird - almost like a manga character... like "Jei" in Stan Sakai's "Usagi Yojimbo"), and the swordplay won't exactly blow you away, but the adaptation of the black & white (with selective colour, a la "Rumblefish") genre is excellent. Being a Kurosawa fan, I especially liked the general "feel" of the cinematography and the video transfer, as it was digitally modified to add graininess and capture that circa-1950's TOHO ambiance. Critical attention was paid to camera angles, set design, character development and mannerisms, all playing true to the Kurosawa-esque model and at the same time sparing no opportunity for the sight gag and comedic element. Yes, for the Hirosue Ryoko fans-in-denial, the female lead (Ogawa Tamaki) bears a somewhat close resemblance (slightly less boyish), but that's besides the point. The movie felt like it was part of an Ulfuls music video at times (I think it was "Guts Daze"), which was exactly what made it so good. Highly recommended.