Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix): TV Review - A Sharp Blade Skillfully Wielded

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!!

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastic animated series…but be forewarned, it has lots of nudity, sex and violence.

Blue Eye Samurai is a new adult animated series on Netflix that tells the story of Mizo, a half-white, half-Japanese samurai who sets out to exact revenge in 17th century Japan.

The series, which is created by Amber Noizumi and Michael Green and directed by Jane Wu, stars the voice talents of Maya Erskine, George Takei, Brenda Song, Randall Park and Kenneth Branagh.

I had never heard of Blue Eye Samurai until Netflix, and its AI’s infinite wisdom, used their algorithm to throw a trailer at me the second I logged onto their service. I watched the trailer and thought, “Hey, maybe this is something my 8-yr-old son and I could watch together!”

Then I watched the first episode…and holy shit this is not something my son…or any child under the age of maybe 16, should be watching at all. It is chock full of ultra-violence, sex…including some very, very weird sex, and nudity…including a cavalcade of animated cocks and balls flopping around like it’s a sausage and grapes stir fry gone awry. When this series says it is “adult”, you better believe it.

But just because the show isn’t good for kids, doesn’t mean it isn’t good. In fact, Blue Eye Samurai is terrific and one of the best series I’ve seen all year.

It is difficult to avoid ALL spoilers in a review of this show, but it’s also best to watch the show without knowing any of the spoilers. So, if you want to avoid any spoilers go watch the series now as I highly recommend it for anyone who loves samurai films and top-notch adult (R-rated) animation.

If you want to dip your toe in the water with a review containing one spoiler (which is widely known), then continue reading.

*******************************************************************************************************

*******************************************************************************************************

Blue Eye Samurai follows the journey of Miza, who is deadly samurai, but is also a young woman passing as a man. That’s the big spoiler that is revealed pretty early on in the 8-episode first season, and it is a main plot point as the season develops.

She is on a mission to kill the four white men who illegally remain in Japan after the Shogun has closed the country’s borders to outsiders, one of whom, she knows not which, is her father.

The storytelling on Blue Eye Samurai is exceedingly well-done as it seamlessly jumps back and forth between Miza’s tormented past and her violent, revenge-filled present.

Each character comes to the screen fully developed, there are no caricatures or cardboard cutouts here. Whether it be Miza’s sidekick Ringo, or her samurai opponent Taigen, or Taigen’s fiancé Princess Akemi, or Akemi’s tutor Seki, or any other of the myriad of characters they are all fully formed and believable human beings.

The fight sequences in Blue Eye Samurai are both fantastic and gruesomely realistic. Main characters suffer grievous wounds, and there are multiple savage slayings that are as good as anything you’ll ever see. That all of this is captured by animation only makes it all the cooler.

The plot of Blue Eye Samurai jumps back and forth between not only Miza’s past and present, but also Miza’s story and the story of Princess Akimi’s struggle for freedom in a male dominated Japanese culture.

The animating (no pun intended) principle of the series is a common one in our current cultural moment, namely feminism in the form of the girl power narrative.

I usually find the egregious girl power garbage in modern movies and tv to be absolutely embarrassing because it’s so often just trite and vapid pandering or blatant virtue signaling.

But Blue Eye Samurai is none of those things. It tells a compelling girl power narrative by splitting the female archetype into two. First is Mazi, the female heroine using her physical prowess on the male hero’s journey. Then there is Princess Akimi, the traditional female heroine using her feminine wiles to gain advantage in a male dominated society. That Mazi has a side-journey into traditional femininity, and Akimi one into warrior-dom, makes the characters and their archetypal narratives all the more intriguing and potent.

Both female protagonists are also deeply flawed, physically fragile and vulnerable, and make numerous errors on their journeys, which gives the story and characters a power that eludes the plethora of recent female protagonists in film and tv that are both invulnerable and perfect.

Now, to be fair, there is the usual man-hating stuff littered throughout the series, but considering the times presented and the times we live in, it is relatively benign.

As someone who is almost instinctually repulsed by girl power narratives due to their relentless ignorance regarding the power and purpose of archetypes, it is so refreshing and invigorating to see creatives get it right, which is why I loved this series.

There is a second, and maybe more, seasons coming of Blue Eye Samurai and to be frank, I am concerned…as it felt to me the first season should have been stand alone. And from what I can gather and/or project, it would seem following seasons are even more vulnerable to the cultural politics which season one exquisitely and successfully navigated. I’ll keep my fingers crossed the series doesn’t devolve into what it avoided in the first place.

One final thought, and that is that as someone who has long loved Japanese cinema, it’s a goddamn great time to be alive. Godzilla Minus One is kicking ass across the globe and here in America. Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki’s fantastic film The Boy and the Heron is garnering critical and audience appreciation (and possibly Academy Awards recognition as well). And now Blue Eye Samurai is telling a kick-ass, modernized animated version of a Kurosawa film. I feel like I’m in heaven.

The bottom line is if you love high-quality animation, Samurai stories and Kurosawa films, and can either tolerate or get titillated by animated sex/nudity, then Blue Eye Samurai is for you…it sure as hell was for me…but it’s most definitely not for my young son…not for another decade or so.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Boy and the Heron: A Review - The Master Miyazaki Returns

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.

Hiyao Miyazaki is arguably the greatest director of animated film in cinema history. His filmography, which includes such classics as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Ponyo, is a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful.

Miyazaki, who is 82-years-old, hasn’t made a feature film in a decade (The Wind Rises), and it was believed that he was finished making movies. But fortunately for us, Miyazaki is back with a new film, The Boy and the Heron, which premiered in theatres this past weekend.

The Boy and the Heron follows the travails of Mahito, a twelve-year-old boy living in Tokyo during World War II. Despite Mahito’s valiant efforts, his mother, Hisako, is killed when her hospital burns to the ground one night.

Mahito and his industrialist father Shoichi, then move to the countryside to live in the estate Hisako grew up on. Shoichi remarries with Hisako’s look-a-like younger sister, Natsuko – who becomes pregnant.

Things get typically weird from there as Mahito is pestered by an aggressive heron, and stumbles onto a hidden tower which leads him on a dark yet magical journey in the hopes of seeing his mother again and saving his step-mother from peril.

The Boy and the Heron, like so many of Miyazaki’s movies, deals with very deeply profound philosophical, psychological and existential issues. For example, grief and the meaning of life are the two pillars around which the film is constructed.  

Many of Miyazaki’s movies seem like dreams that often veer into nightmares, or like something cobbled together from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and The Boy and the Heron is no exception. There are shapeshifting demons/angels and giant, carnivorous warrior parakeets, and adorable pre/post life souls that float like balloons, and aggressive hordes of pelicans.

Through it all Miyazaki keeps his protagonist Mahito focused on finding his pregnant step-mother Natsuko and the dream of seeing his long-lost mother again, and it is that fragile humanity and gut-wrenching emotion that gives the film not only its meaning but its purpose.

As always with Miyazaki, the animation is glorious and gloriously weird. Things in Miyazaki’s world look ever-so-abnormal to the point of nightmarish. For instance, the heron is at first gorgeous, but then over time becomes grotesque. The old women, as is custom in Miyazaki films, are charming yet gruesome, witch-like characters.

The film is available in many theatres here in the U.S. either in Japanese with English subtitles or dubbed in English. I saw the film with my young son and subtitles move too fast for him to read, so we saw the dubbed version and it works well for the most part.

The cast are a collection of solid, well-known actors, such as Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Most of them are perfectly fine, with Pattinson in particular giving a quite remarkable performance that is unrecognizable.

Christian Bale, an actor I usually like, stands out though for a rather poor performance, as his work as Mahito’s father Shoichi is bizarre. At different times Bale gives Shoichi a New York accent that often stumbles into a Boston accent. All of Bale’s voice work here seems to be out of place and out of step.

Beyond that there isn’t much to complain about…it’s a Miyazaki movie after all, but it must be said that despite this being allegedly one of Miyazaki’s most personal stories, it is not among his best films. That is not to say the movie is bad, it’s just to say that in light of Miyazaki’s masterpieces, of which there are many, The Boy and the Heron somewhat pales in comparison.

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing The Boy and the Heron and was thrilled that my son, who wasn’t even born when Miyazaki’s last film came out, got to see his work on a big screen. My son and I have watched all of Miyazaki’s movies in recent years and he is as big a fan as I am. It brings me endless amounts of joy watching my son watch Miyazaki movies, as he just loves everything about them.

We’ve yet to see a Miyazaki movie we’ve disliked. My son’s favorites are my favorites too, starting with My Neighbor Totoro. After that it’s Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, Porco Rosso, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky and The Wind Rises. I would rate The Boy and the Heron below My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo, but right up there with any of Miyazaki’s other work. And it is most definitely better than any of the garbage Disney and Pixar have churned out in recent years.  

It was heartening to me to see that The Boy and the Heron was number one at the U.S. box office this weekend, which is something I never thought could happen. That both The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One, two Japanese films, would be so well received by U.S. audiences in back-to-back weeks is a glimmer of hope in an often-times dark and depressing popular culture landscape.

If you haven’t seen Miyazaki’s earlier films, you should go to the streaming service Max – and click on the Studio Ghibli portal, as it has all of Miyazaki’s films available to stream. Miyazaki’s movies are unique because they’re for both adults and children (I’d say kids 7 and up but your mileage may vary in terms of proper age to start). For kids I recommend you begin with My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo, and for adults you can start with those or with Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, and go from there…you won’t be disappointed, and it’ll whet your appetite to see The Boy in the Heron in theatres.

In conclusion, I thoroughly recommend you see The Boy and the Heron in the theatre, and appreciate Hiyao Miyazaki while we have him on earth and still making movies.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Shoplifters: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. I thoroughly enjoyed this intimate yet deeply profound and philosophical film, but be forewarned, this is a foreign, arthouse film, so those with more conventional cinematic tastes should stay as far away from this movie as possible.

Shoplifters, written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, is the story of a poor family in Tokyo who rely on shoplifting and petty crimes in order to make ends meet. The film stars Lily Franky as Osamu - father of the family, and Sakuro Ando as Nobuyo the mother, with Kairi Jo playing their son Shota and Miyu Sasaki their daughter Yuri.

Shoplifters is a distinctly foreign film in that on its surface it may seem to the less cinematically sophisticated to be innocuously mundane and even boring, but to those patient enough to peer beneath that veneer of the ordinary, they are rewarded with the discovery of a sublime universe teeming with human drama and intrigue.

Shoplifters is an original and fascinating film that explores the meaning and purpose of truth, knowledge, family and the need for human connection. Like a Russian Matryoshka doll, Shoplifters appears to be one thing, but once you look inside another and another and another layer is revealed, and everything you’ve previously seen takes on a different meaning in hindsight.

On the surface, Shoplifters is a rather deliberately paced story of an ordinary family as they endure the suffocating nature of working class poverty in modern day Tokyo. This social/cultural narrative is insightful enough all on its own, as it is a profound statement on the cancer that is 21st century capitalism, where everything is commodified, including our humanity. But as the story progresses and more truths are discovered and revealed, the viewer’s perspective shifts, and the foundation upon which you’ve made assumptions about this seemingly simple family sways uneasily under your feet.

As more truth is revealed, the social commentary of the film doesn’t lose its impact, but quite to the contrary, it becomes even more profound. The film’s cultural critique gains a staggering degree of power and profundity as it adds narrative dimensions in the second half of the film.

Shoplifters forces us to question all of the assumptions we have about the things we know…or more accurately…the things we think we know. As the film shows, the rock upon which our own moral, ethical and intellectual beliefs are built may very well be sand. Shoplifters shows us that we are swimming in a deep and mysterious ocean and yet, as the saying goes, “fish don’t even know he’s wet.”

After I watched Shoplifters I kept thinking of the line from Oliver Stone’s 1991 masterpiece JFK, where one of the characters, frustrated with the challenge to his conventional thinking, shouts in retort, “but you only know who your Daddy is because your Momma told you so!” And so it is in our world of manufactured consent, incessant propaganda and unlimited marketing and manipulation where we are led around by our nose and suffer from an interminable myopia and narcissism. Like subjects in Plato’s cave watching shadows dance upon the wall, we all think we know what we know, but when we walk outside the cave we realize we know nothing…and have known nothing all along. In that way, Shoplifters, although it is the polar opposite in most ways as it contains no action and is very slow and plodding, is a philosophical cousin to The Matrix films.

Hirokazu Kore-eda, who has directed such notable films as Nobody Knows, Still Walking, Like Father, Like Son and After the Storm, has a deft and confident directorial touch with Shoplifters, as he never pushes the pace but rather lulls the audience into a false sense of security and suckers them into projecting their own bourgeois assumptions onto the story and characters.

Kore-eda’s masterful camera movement and shot composition draw the viewer into the family at the center of the story, as we share their intimate world we too become members and collaborators in their life of petty crime.

Kore-eda creates a stultifying sense of claustrophobia and a lack of personal freedom in this darker side of Tokyo, where much like in our current techno-dystopian world, privacy is a fleeting luxury. For example, Shota is forced to sleep in a small closet more akin to a coffin than a bedroom, Aki (a pseudo-Aunt) makes a living anonymously exposing her private life to strangers, and Osamu and Nobuyo can’t remember the last time they shared a moment alone together.

Kore-eda is one of the masters of Japanese film working today, and Shoplifters is a testament to his cinematic skill and storytelling prowess as it uses the intimate and unique working of this one family to tell a philosophically serious and politically insightful story of our troubled times.

The acting in Shoplifters is solid across the board. Sakuro Ando is exquisite and transcendant as the mother of the family, Nobuyo. Ando’s Nobuyo is at once pragmatic and ruthless but also gentle, kind and loving. Ando imbues Nobuyo with a deep and palpable wound (symbolized by a burn scar on her arm) that is forever a mystery but always lurking within her soulful eyes, that are keen enough to see the same wound in Yuri.

Lily Franky as Osuma is terrific as a man who desperately tries to be a father, but whose road to hell is paved with good intentions as he is only capable of, at best, making it all up as he goes. Osuma is a fascinating and compelling character, and it is a testament to Lily’s talent that he is simultaneously both a deplorable and sympathetic character.

Mayu Matsuoka brings a sense of wounded allure and innocent danger to the role of Aki, that in lesser hands may have been lost in the wash. Aki is the one of the group most naturally equipped to survive but also the one most vulnerable to being a victim to her own weakness. Unlike Nobuyo, Aki’s wound has no scar over it. Matsuoka does a wonderful job of creating a sense of melancholy and ennui about Aki that at times feels both dangerously combustible and also self-destructive.

The child actors, Kairi Jo and Miyu Sasaki also give excellent performances that feel genuine and grounded because they don’t feel like they are acting at all and the same is true of the grandmother, expertly played by the late Kirin Kiki.

In conclusion, Shoplifters is a film that subtly morphs and changes with every second you watch it, and as I have learned since seeing it, with every minute that passes after its over too. It is, in its own way, mesmerizing and hypnotic, enticing viewers into a story that appears to be one thing but ends up being another. I loved the film, but I love foreign films in general, and Japanese films in particular. If you are not a devout devotee of the arthouse, and in this case, the Japanese arthouse, Shoplifters’ deliberate pace, cryptic dialogue and unusual narrative will be much too much to endure. But if you love Japanese cinema or have a taste for the art house, definitely go check out Shoplifters as it is a fascinating ride, one that I’m not sure I have fully completed.

©2018