Last night I went (by myself) to see [link|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0442286/|The Hidden Blade], a semi-sequel to [link|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0351817/|The Twilight Samurai]. It's a semi-sequel, not because the stories are actually tied into each other, but because they deal with similar themes and ideas.

First, a bit of interesting historical trivia. The director, Yamada Yoji, is "famous" in Japan for making a series of films for middle-aged people about a man named Tora. When I say a series, I mean 48 of them - and according to a Japanese friend of mine, due to the desires of the target market, all of these films follow very similar plots, and used the same actor to play Tora-san. They stopped making the films after the actor who played Tora-san died - and I have this bizarre image of Yamada-san in his home, after the death of that actor yelling "YES!" at the wall over and over again.

Yet another digression. According to that same friend, Yamada Yoji spent TEN YEARS doing historical research before making The Twilight Samurai, and the details show. You won't find the cheesy mistakes of Cruise's worthless masturbation of a film (The Last Samurai, aka Dances With Samurai) - you get real cherry blossoms, historically accurate clothing and furniture - all in all it feels like the director had a time machine instead of the hills of New Zealand.

And now back to The Hidden Blade. While similar in plot to The Twilight Samurai, it's definitely not quite as good. This is admittedly a case of praising with faint damns - I tore the little '4' on the 1-5 scale that the SIFF handed out to us on our way in. There is a story of love across castes, although in this film the hero is in love with somebody below his caste, and not above. It is also a film about the changing role of samurai in 18th century Japan, but portrayed this time in a series of comic vignettes about training "backwater samurai" in modern combat techniques. (Don't worry, they didn't get Tom Cruise as the instructor) The hero is also down on his luck in his own way, but in a less personal way, and I had a harder time relating to this character than I did to "Mr. Twilight".

I think this has to do with a sense of cultural disconnect - much of the conflict in this film derives from ideas of honor that seem strange to me, but might be at least somewhat more familiar to somebody raised in Japan and immersed in the cultural ideas. There is a fight at the end, and resolution of most of the plots, but the character development felt (relatively) weak to me, and some actions seemed to come out of nowhere.

Still, all in all a beautifully shot film, and I did love it. Highly recommended, go see it.