The Film

In an Old West frontier town somewhere in Nevada, two warring clans battle in a search for the town's legendary gold treasure. Their war as turned a previously bustling outpost into a ghost town when The Gunman arrives. After a display of his skills with a pistol, it is clear that he is a force to be reckoned with. He soon falls in with a local prostitute, whose husband was killed when he tried to intervene in the fight. Oh, and by the way, everybody is Japanese.

Japanese director Takeshi Miike has created what I can only describe as a reverse Kill Bill. In Kill Bill, a western director (geographically speaking, not genre speaking) Quentin Tarantino infused the samurai movie with elements of Western culture. In SWD, a Japanese director has infused a western with elements of Japanese culture. This relationship is made almost explicit by the presence of QT himself in a cameo as a old gunslinging master.

SWD is a pastiche of spaghetti westerns, which is announced right in the title (sukiyaki is a kind of Japanese noodle; Django is a famous spaghetti western in which a gun runner carries a machine gun in a coffin). The man who rides in to town is Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, right down to the outfit, and, well, the fact that he has no name. The plot borrows liberally from a Fistful of Dollars, which was itself a western remake of Yojimbo, the Kurosawa samurai classic in which a lone warrior wreaks havoc in a town controlled by two warring clans, which itself borrowed liberally from earlier American westerns.

I think I'm getting a headache.

Why haven't you seen it?

Because you don't live in Japan, and you weren't watching Cinemax Extreme at 12 in the morning last Saturday night. I imagine those are probably the only two ways somebody might have encountered this.

Why should you see it?

When I conceived of the Movie Night Movie Project, I laid out a number of criteria that would quality a flick for inclusion. However, those are imperfect methods of measure compared to the one that I accidentally stumbled on Saturday night: if a movie is able to keep the Suze awake after 9 in the evening, then it is an awesome movie.

The movie caught my eye in the first place as I was flipping through the Cinemax channels late on a Saturday night for, uh, for no particular reason, because it had such a distinct look to it. If you prefer nuanced, realistic characters and a cinema verite style, then you might want to skip this one. This is a movie drawn with a bold brush dipped in a bucket of blood (that would make an awesome pull quote for the American DVD release, wouldn't it?) The characters are capital-A Archetypes. And if you don't mind watching a man take a crossbow to the throat, then I promise a good time.