Sept 1 movie: Zatoichi Challenged. We finally got around to watching the second Zatoichi movie IFC had shown a couple of weeks ago. This one has Zatoichi delivering a boy whose mother has died to the father, in another town. I must say, the addition of a cute child to the Zatoichi formula was not an improvement. Bonding scenes between Zatoichi and the child took up way too much time that could have been spent with Zatoichi kicking bad guy ass. This was probably my least favorite of the Zatoichi movies I've seen. The subplot (about an artist who is forced to paint pornographic images on fine china for the black market) probably would have made more sense if I were more familiar with Japanese cultural history.
I don't know whether we read this in a review, in an IFC factoid, or if Georg looked it up somewhere online, but apparently "zato" means both "blind" and "masseur" in Japanese. Which is interesting because Zatoichi is a blind loner who makes his living as a masseur. And "ichi" means "one," so I guess that makes him the "lone blind man" or "lone masseur."
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