I noticed the first snow of the season falling outside my window at about the same time winter hits in Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django. I normally hate winter, but I have to admit, there’s something about a warm room on a cold, still night that enhances the cinematic experience for me.

Sukiyaki Western Django is like something from another planet, with Japanese actors speaking Shakespeare phonetically while kicking the dust with both machine guns and samurai swords in hand. It’s about as close as anything has come in the past ten years to give me that feeling of wonderful disbelief so many international b-pictures of the 60s and 70s provide.

What was most pleasantly surprising was discovering that Sukiyaki Western Django isn’t some bastardization of the original Django (one of my favourite Italian Westerns), but a direct companion to that film. The only thing I felt was missing as I watched it, and hoped would be corrected even as the film drew to an end, was some variation on the classic Django theme song by Luis Bacalov.

As you can see below, they covered all their bases for this viewer, at least.

Django – Luis Bacalov
Django Sasurii – Koji Endo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Gary Hates Westerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.