09-05-2025, 11:39 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-05-2025, 11:50 PM by Drunk Monk.)
An Edo-period samurai gets struck by lightning in the middle of a pivotal duel and wakes up on a modern day movie set. They’re filming jidaigeki, but it’s during the decline of that genre. The Samurai becomes an extra, specifically a kirareyaku, which is one of those specific Japanese terms like Kaiju. Kirareyaku are stuntmen who specialize in dying if sword fights. It means ‘role of getting cut in a fight’.
It’s a fish out of water quirky comedy, but then it takes a poignant twist about the romantic era of jidaigeki and what it truly means to follow bushido, and what that means in the jidaigeki realm. Remember samurai means ‘to serve’.
The sword fights are fun because they are bts in production. There’s an initial fight that begins the film and gets straight to the lightning. Then there’s a lot of fight breakdowns as the choreographers show the sequence to the actors and sometimes it takes multiple takes for the actor to hit there marks. Then there’s a finale sword fight that’s quite good, like a jidaigeki on steroids (which is exactly what the film wants to drive home that sense of samurai bushido.
It’s light then it gets kinda heavy and then goes off the rails with that finale fight.
Time travel by lightning requires a lot of belief suspension but some of the bushido philosophy still resonates and in a meta way, both the movie and the tv show that their making in the movie are looking to restore bushido values to culture.
It’s dedicated to Seizō Fukumoto, a real life kirareyaku who was originally cast for the sword master role but died before the film went into production. That sent me down a rabbit hole…
https://brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomForum/...p?tid=8556
Marginally D00M recommended.
Seen on hoopla.
It’s a fish out of water quirky comedy, but then it takes a poignant twist about the romantic era of jidaigeki and what it truly means to follow bushido, and what that means in the jidaigeki realm. Remember samurai means ‘to serve’.
The sword fights are fun because they are bts in production. There’s an initial fight that begins the film and gets straight to the lightning. Then there’s a lot of fight breakdowns as the choreographers show the sequence to the actors and sometimes it takes multiple takes for the actor to hit there marks. Then there’s a finale sword fight that’s quite good, like a jidaigeki on steroids (which is exactly what the film wants to drive home that sense of samurai bushido.
It’s light then it gets kinda heavy and then goes off the rails with that finale fight.
Time travel by lightning requires a lot of belief suspension but some of the bushido philosophy still resonates and in a meta way, both the movie and the tv show that their making in the movie are looking to restore bushido values to culture.
It’s dedicated to Seizō Fukumoto, a real life kirareyaku who was originally cast for the sword master role but died before the film went into production. That sent me down a rabbit hole…
https://brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomForum/...p?tid=8556
Marginally D00M recommended.
Seen on hoopla.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse