how real do you bleed?

last week i did the artyfilm double feature with cc, taking in napoleon dynamite and the new beat takeshi film, his remake of the classic the blind swordsman: zatoichi.

to be honest, i don’t know what the hell napoleon dynamite was about. cc adores it, but i really can’t see it.

zatoichi was pretty cool, and the fight scenes were pretty fantastic. the interesting thing was that all the blood was digitally put in with cg, giving you big fat splatter effects. however, to me it ended up looking like videogame blood, like those ridiculous spurts when you’re playing bushido blade, or (worse off) mortal kombat. somehow it looks even more fake, and maybe that’s just because they don’t yet quite know how to accurately depict blood using cg?

cc says that she heard it was intentional to make it more cartoonish to lessen the impact, but i haven’t been able to find that anywhere. kitano does say, however, “‘Zatoichi’ essentially has too much action, and too many killings and bloody scenes to be seen by a general audience. I thought comical scenes would work well to weaken the sense of too much violence and give this film dynamics and balance.”

then it occurs to me: what realism are we actually comparing it to? it’s not like anyone gets to see people getting sliced open in swordfights anymore, so who knows what realistic blood looks like? all we have to compare it to is what we’ve seen in the movies, so we’re defining realism as movie realism. power of media. propaganda is reality.

on the other hand, i saw lady snowblood this weekend, and it was fucking great. it’s based on a manga by kazuo koike (of lone wolf and cub), and is also the main inspiration for o-ren iishi in kill bill. the funny thing is that there are a lot of fight scenes and bloody killing in this film, and none of it looks real. well, there’s great splattering, but the blood is classic camp ketchup colored. but the movie still kicks ass.

apparently, realism is overrated.

Posted at August 2, 2004 9:31 AM