Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

ScoobyWell Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

sucks-9 There are many things that make Samurai Fiction fantastic. The first thing: the black and white cinematography. The second thing: Instead of blood spurting, spraying, and oozing from dead samurai, the black and white image of the dying person gets a red filter over it and fades away once the man is dead. The third thing: the funky rock soundtrack. The fourth thing: The way Heishiro yells his dialogue when he has short temper. And the fifth thing: The current message of peace throughout. It is a shame that Hiroyuki Nakano hasn't been as successful with his other films as he has been with Samurai Fiction. Hopefully, that will soon change.

chaos-rampant I think the title of this review sums up SAMURAI FICTION. It doesn't approach the heart of samurai cinema (and I doubt that was among its intentions) but it transforms the form in new and interesting ways.Whether or not the title is a direct reference to PULP FICTION, the fact remains that SAMURAI FICTION tries to be the same hip, cool and stylish update of the classic chambara genre that Tarantino's movie was for the gangster genre. Whether or not it succeeds or that it's SF's intention for that matter is up for debate and down to personal taste I guess, but either way SF is every bit the fresh breath the stagnant genre is in desperate need of for years now. As a big fan of both chambaras and jidai-gekis I find myself torn between my purist self that wants to dismiss SF as having only a cursory resemblance of the genre and being too cool and slick for its own good, and my escapist self that enjoys kicking back with an unashamedly entertaining movie. The truth of the matter is that chambara has always been a dynamic genre, one that evolves in cycles that begin with movies that venture outside the mold: movies like SF. YOJIMBO in the early 60's made the traditional period dramas of the 50's obsolete overnight. Ditto for Kenji Misumi's LONE WOLF AND CUB in the early 70's. Even if SF didn't have the same power to motivate change in the genre, I applaud it for trying. SF is very open about what it is and what it's not from the credits sequence alone. Dark silhouettes practicing fencing in front of red-lit screens. I wouldn't be surprised if Tarantino lifted the sequence verbatim for KILL BILL vol. 1, he has that "homage" tendency after all. It is with this heavy stylization that SF opens and our genre expectations are instantly shifted to this conscious capsule where the samurai style meets a western form. The rest of the movie plays on this same motif. A traditionally eastern genre delivered with a very western approach. Whole sequences and all the swordfights are edited like a music video, from the tight editing to the music to the frequent use of wide angle lenses and effect shots to the actual music that is as far removed from Toru Takemitsu and his scores for Kobayashi and Shinoda as one could imagine. SF is content to take risks but they don't always pay off. The misuse of music is enough to give Dario Argento's choice of Motorhead for the soundtrack of PHENOMENA (a horror movie) a run for his money. Techno beats, heavy metal guitars and double-bass drumming are all mixed in a hodge podge of western sounds adding to the anachronism SF aims for. It's not out of purism that I didn't like them, they just didn't feel appropriate for the mood and scene although the music video-ish editing did its best to accommodate them. However the black and white photography is solid good work, the acting is nice and the comedic timing spot on. SF balances neatly on both the serious and comic with an emphasis on the latter but it works quite well on both fronts. Add to that the good swordfighting and the fact it manages to pull off the "hip" style relatively well without feeling phony and you've got a quite good neo-chambara that deserves major points for at least trying to push the envelope of a stagnant genre in different ways. Ever since the late 70's samurai cinema has hit a dead end and various attempts at cross-genre mixes tried to revitalize it to no avail. Maybe the halcyon days of the 60's are over and the chambara genre is a thing of the past as much as the American western, with the only option left being revisionism (which has also been done to death – I guess re-revisionism is due next). Maybe it will take another YOJIMBO to pull it off its legs and usher it in a new direction. SF is not quite the genre messiah and frankly I can see fans of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie enjoying it more than Mizoguchi loyalists but it's perhaps the best entry point to the genre for modern audiences with no prior experience (especially for young people who usually gravitate to the "cool" and "hip") . That's a success in itself.

lordameth I think Samurai Fiction is a truly amazing film for the way it balances artsiness with more typical film styles, for the unusual combination of traditional samurai tales with modern rock-ish music. I can't quite tell if it is meant to be an homage to Kurosawa and the like or not, but it's certainly serious enough, and good enough, to not be a parody.Normally, I don't like black and white films, but the very limited and carefully placed use of color helps this film immensely.I saw it first with no subtitles, and was quite understandably & totally lost. But now that I have seen it again, I'm glad I bought the DVD. Now, if I can only find the soundtrack...

apestars In America there must be thousands of Westerns filling up the shelves of many movie studios. The same is true of samurai movies in Japan. It's just a little piece of each culture. Not that it is the same story every time, but people watch them and feel safe to know what is going to happen (a bad guy is going to mess stuff up, there's going to be some good fights, and the good guy is going to win in the end).I saw Samurai Fiction after watching a great deal of 'typical' Japanese samurai movies (most haven't even been released in the US) and felt that the music the (with the 'western style' instruments) was a fresh addition to a long line of movies caught up in the tradition of making samurai movies 'the way one's supposed to.' The director (a former director of MTV videos for Japanese bands) also uses younger actors and rock musicians in leading roles in an attempt to appeal to the younger generations of Japan whose tastes are quickly drifting away from the older samurai generation's.All in all, Samurai Fiction is a fun movie that is easy to watch for those of us that would like a breath of fresh air from the samurai movie scene.