Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

This was supposed to have gone up yesterday but the new beau came over early. Man, my blogging has gone to shit since I started getting laid regularly.

Back to the movie.

I was looking forward to this movie. It looked super cool. It's about two rival gangs, the Heike Reds and Geiji Whites, stuck in a stalemate over some hidden treasure in an alternate history where the Old West was settled by the Japanese. Then a mysterious drifter (wearing black leather, natch) comes to town and stirs up trouble.

Basically, it's A Fistful of Dollars with katanas. How could that not be awesome?

It completely blows. In the Baskin Robbins of Hell, this movie would be 31 flavors of wrong.

First off, the entire movie is in English...but I still had to use subtitles. Aren't there enough American actors of Japanese descent that you could cast the main roles with, instead of trying to cast Japanese speakers and have them learn the script phonetically? Now, before I get an angry letter, I'm not knocking the actors. I would have been perfectly okay with the movie in Japanese with English subtitles, or something like Serenity with native English speakers using random Japanese for emphasis. I'm sure it had something to do with the "style" of the film but it was a bad fucking decision.

I was going to make Quentin Tarantino my second point, but in retrospect he's not really part of the problem. Sure, he hams up every scene he's in and his accent changes depending on which word he's saying but this was probably like a wet dream come true for him and I can't knock on that.

So let's make point number 2 the schizophrenic sheriff. I understand that the character is supposed to be conflicted between the side that press-ganged him (the Reds) and the side that he thinks is going to come out on top (the Whites) and is a spineless jellyfish. But did you have to make him Gollum with a badge? His multiple voices got on my last Goddamn nerve. Not to mention **SPOILER ALERT** having him kill the ONE interesting awesome character in the whole movie! **END SPOILER**

I just...it makes me so mad...I want to hurt it... GAH!!!! Get out of my face, movie! I hate you!