Hana, Maiko Haaaan!!!, The Eagle Shooting Heroes, & Ashes of Time Redux

Hana is a samurai film from Hirokazu Koreeda, who also made the amazingly good Afterlife. This one wasn't all that, but an interesting tale of a young man plotting revenge against his father's murderer. He falls for a woman with a young son and starts to teach writing and math to the local kids. And he has to decide what's more important to himself, revenge or living his own life. Of course, it's a subtle attack on the desire for revenge above all, and one of the things that I like: pointing out ridiculousness in history that generally gets ignored by most period movies. I liked it, but it's definitely not Koreeda's best, and not as good as Mabrosi, either.

Maiko Haaaan!!! is a slapstick comedy about a noodle bowl company worker who is obsessed with Geisha, to the point of ignoring his girlfriend and taking a job in Kyoto so he can meet Geisha. And then the girlfriend starts to become one, and he starts fighting in real life with someone flaming his Geisha website. And... well, it just gets far too ridiculous and stupid. The lead was distractingly over the top in a film with almost entirely real-seaming characters (some of the things they are able to do are silly, but they undeniably live in a real world, while the lead just doesn't exist in any reality remotely near ours), there are musical numbers, and the entire movie revolves around strip baseball, which I am pretty sure is just an extremely bad translation. There were no strip grand slams that I could figure out. Boo.

The Eagle Shooting Heroes is a slapstick wuxia film made at the same time as Ashes of Time (which, although I definitely watched when I had a blog, I never actually wrote up when I saw it in November of 2002, and was, in fact, my first ever movie from Netflix). This is horrible Hong Kong slapstick, full of mistaken identities, cross dressing, gay "humor", ridiculous wirework, fake sets, and just general crappiness. It's strange to see so many extremely talented actors (really, it's almost every famous Hong Kong star of the 90s except for Chow Yun-Fat) just horribly waste their talent in service of this crap. This was a perfect excuse to watch my Ashes of Time Redux DVD, though. As it has been about 7 years since I saw the original version of the movie, and it was a particularly crappy DVD, I can't quite say how much better this version was than the original. But I almost was able to follow the plot this time. Just kidding.