Sukiyaki Western Django.

"I guess the premise of Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django goes something like this," proposes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: "Given that the Japanese samurai film and the American (and/or European) western are fundamentally the same genre, and that Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah were all drilling in the same well - and given that a lot of their movies were ripping off Shakespeare's plots in the first place, with less talking and more killing - why not boil up all those stories and elements and influences in the same pot and see what happens?"

"Whether it's score-settling culture theft, a fever dream of interlinked Wild West mythology, or simply a company casserole of way-cool cinema, this delirious spaghetti eastern could only have come from the boiling brain of Takashi Miike, the prolific Japanese auteur whose spectacularly uneven films account for the lion's share of the past decade's most utterly batshit movie moments," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice.

Updated through 9/2.

Grady Hendrix in Slate:

Asian Westerns are hardly new. Korea's The Good, the Bad, and the Weird is playing Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival, and last year, Americans finally saw the release of Wisit Sasanatieng's Thai Western Tears of the Black Tiger. Japan's Nikkatsu Studios produced their own series of Westerns as far back as 1959, and the most popular movie ever made in Bollywood, Sholay, is a "curry Western." But the most influential international Westerns came from 1960s Europe when Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and Alejandro Jodorowsky took the Western movie from America, filched some style and story points from Japan, blasted the genre with hard radiation, then sent it back to the States, both smarter and stranger, where it influenced everyone from Sam Peckinpah to Walter Hill. There's no way to get from the square-jawed, clean-shirt-wearing cowboys of John Ford's 1946 My Darling Clementine to the stubble-jawed, morally compromised cowboys of Clint Eastwood's 1992 Unforgiven without going through Italy.

"This over-the-top Far East riff on over-the-top spoofs of already over-the-top Spaghetti Westerns succeeds only because Miike's superior realization saves what would have otherwise been another smug head lodged irretrievably up its own posterior," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "Backdrops of candy-colored sunsets and out-of-nowhere snow descending on a desolate graveyard impart a majesty only feigned at by lesser homages like Tears of the Black Tiger."

"It should come as no great surprise that the first person we see onscreen in Miike's new film is Quentin Tarantino, lounging in a patently phony Western sunset landscape complete with cardboard Mt Fuji and hawk-calls and mission bells on the soundtrack - it all has the flatness of a David Hockney painting," writes Leo Goldsmith in indieWIRE. "Soon, with an unlikely swiftness, the paunchy American director gymnastically blows away some menacing Japanese heavies (spraying the two-dimensional backdrop with stage blood), before whipping up the movie's titular dish with a snake egg. This prologue (and Tarantino's campy, barely watchable performance) is mercifully brief, but it establishes the mood of the film: loud, jolly, bloodthirsty, and painfully esoteric."

"[O]ccasional triumphs aside, Miike too often seems to be not so much reinventing the spaghetti western as simply contributing a middling entry to the genre," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "And even when it's going strong, Sukiyaki continually reminds us that it's nothing more than an occasionally clever bit of dispensable pastiche."

Blake Ethridge has pix, production notes and lots o' links.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice and Toronto.

Updates, 8/29: "For a while the weird color scheme and the tongue-in-cheek evocation of various traditions of popular cinema are amusing," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But long before the final blood bath arrives the movie has made its point, which is essentially that Mr Miike has a lot of energy and an extensive collection of DVDs."

"It's not just the pleasure in recognizing convention, as that is no pleasure at all (in fact, that's how nearly all mainstream cinema survives and self-propagates)," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Rather, Sukiyaki Western Django takes the cues we recognize and ratchets up our smug acknowledgment of those cinematic conventions to such an absurd, extreme degree that one must laugh."

"Mr Miike has chosen to burden his mostly Japanese-speaking cast with English dialogue pronounced phonetically," notes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "What begins as a bizarre artistic pothole becomes, over the course of 98 minutes, a conceptual impact crater of nearly unmeasurable depth."

"In spite of a string of nifty gunfights where bullets land with a sickening squelch, Sukiyaki Western loses some of its appeal once the novelty of Miike's conceptual shenanigans wears off," writes Sam Adams at the AV Club. "Even good jokes turn into shaggy-dog stories when they run too long."

"With probably just a little help from QT, Miike has managed the best Spaghetti Western knockoff in years," writes Jeffrey M Anderson in Cinematical.

Tarantino's "scenes are excruciating but brief," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "The film's bad aftertaste, however, will linger on indefinitely."

Update, 8/31: "[F]or all its hip posturing, there's something academic about it, as it runs through gestures whose coolness passed a decade ago," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "With its genre-bending pastiche and quotes from other films, it's a textbook example of postmodernism."

Updates, 9/2: "Whatever its demerits, Sukiyaki has a virtue I've never associated with Miike: consistency," writes Vadim Rizov. "Grantly, it's mostly the consistency of stupidity and fanboy geeking-out, but I'll take it."

Also at the House Next Door,John Lichman: "While it may prove Miike's visions are best handled with a stricter knife in the editing room, Sukiyaki Western Django is exactly the continuation you'd expect and desire from the guy who got famous by making 'Deeper, deeper, deeper...' the reason some people still uncontrollably flinch."

Posted by dwhudson at August 28, 2008 10:21 AM