When it comes to my movie collection purchasing, I don’t fancy myself a gambling man. However, every now and then, something will catch my eye, give me a little smile, bare (tastefully) a little leg, and promise me a good time for a reasonable price – and, sight unseen, I succumb to temptation. Those are my blind-buys. The movies that had some quality to them that I decided were worth the few bucks’ worth of risk to add to the collection knowing nothing about them other than what I can see on the front, back, and IMDB page. Of those, these are the ones that panned out.
We’re all familiar with that old adage of “Don’t buy a DVD for a movie you’ve never seen based on the cover art and your growing affection for Akira Kurosawa’s samurai cinema as you delve into the depths of world film history as a twenty-something trying to consume all manner of classic films and see this movie and believe “man that’s cool-looking and probably awesome””
No, of course you’re not familiar with that adage, because it doesn’t exist. If it did, I wouldn’t have ended up purchasing a film that is so unlike what I’d expected, and turned out to be all the better for it. Instead of it being just any other samurai action film, many of which have issues standing out from the crowd (I’ve seen almost every Zatoichi film, and they’re all equally good and entirely indistinguishable from one another), Hiroyuki Nakano’s Samurai Fiction doesn’t just stand way over off to the side – it exists on its own plane.
What Did It Cost? – $10.00
What Sold Me?
The cover art and my growing affection for Akira Kurosawa’s samurai cinema as I was delving into the depths of world film history as a twenty-something year-old trying to consume all manner of classic pictures and saw this movie and believed “man that’s cool-looking and probably awesome”
Adages have to begin somewhere.
At the time I found this film I’d seen a handful of Kurosawa’s samurai pictures, Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy, the Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub films, was loving the Samurai Champloo anime series and Tarantino’s Kill Bill films had just come out (which the DVD cover art for Fiction drew a mind path to) – and expected this film to fall somewhere in-between some of those.
It turned out not to exist in between any of those, but between two completely different kinds of cinema altogether.
Why It Was Worth It
Around this same time I’d also been exposed to two other independent auteurs, one through a film studies class, and the other through the grapevine of friends who couldn’t get enough of Asian cinema of the last few decades: Jim Jarmusch and Stephen Chow. Jarmusch was discussed in class wherein Dead Man was viewed and read about, while Chow’s Shaolin Soccer and God of Cookery made its way through each of our hands amongst friends at some point or another.
These two filmmakers share nothing in common in my brain other than the fact that they converge together in their aesthetics and sensibilities and create Samurai Fiction. This film exists somewhere on the path from Chow’s silliness and affection for the unskilled, on to Jarmusch’s black-and-white low-fi aesthetics in Stranger than Paradise, Down By Law, and others.
It’s a corner of my brain I call The Chowmusch – and tucked away nicely and cozily in it is Samurai Fiction – all by itself. Quite the far cry from the other place in my brain where the majority of samurai pictures dwell, and certainly far from the pits of the forgotten.
In that part of my brain, this film is throwing a party with a soundtrack that has absolutely zero thematic elements to it. I don’t know who scored this, but Samurai Fiction has one of the most random and completely unpredictable scores I may have ever heard – and I don’t think any piece is ever repeated. In one scene we’ll get some lounge cello and finger snaps, sometimes it’s like if a canyon played the electric guitar, and sometimes it’s like if John Carpenter scored Top Gun. And still other times it sounds like the music to accompany a strip club scene on USA After Dark. It’s bizarre and fascinating and entirely in-line with the vibe this movie wants to put out into the world.
Stylistic and artistic elements aside, the film is also just downright funny. It isn’t Looney Tunes level schtick like Chow, but it’s everything else Chow does with humor when it isn’t a cartoon. Inept characters think they’re phenomenal, attractive women are sexy and desperate in equal measure, the love interest laughs at the hero sucking at stuff (a lot), and the villain, whom I’d swear is Adam Driver’s long lost Asian brethren, even down to the mannerisms, is only one of two competent people.
Seriously, if Japan remade the latest Star Wars films, Tomoyasu Hotei would be the first and last necessary audition to be Kylo Ren. If Hiroyuki Nakano would direct it then maybe I’d get something else I could stick in The Chowmusch.
Unfortunately, as of this post the film isn’t streaming anywhere here in the States, but a DVD copy won’t run you too much online – and then you too can have yourself a Chowmusch. And, you know that old adage about the Chowmusch,”when presented the opportunity, don’t chow little…”
Nevermind.
