Blade the Immortal

It’s been quite a while since I’ve watched a film by Takashi Miike, even though I used to be a big fan of his movies — I dropped off when he started making a lot of films based on licenses. A friend of mine had seen this movie — based on a manga series — at the Fantasia film festival last year and told me it was quite good, so I was happy to see it pop up on Netflix. This is indeed quite a fun movie, and I had a good time watching it. Sure, it does suffer a bit from trying to be too close to the source material — character designs that look fine in manga/anime form, but end up looking a bit hokey in live-action — but it’s a good brutal take on the samurai movie.