TV/Movies Megathread

[Admiral Yi]

I watched Downton Abbey twice through.  The upstairs romances are maudlin, the downstairs romances are touching.  The man and lady of the house are a little too perfect for you class warriors, but there are plenty of dickhead nobles to even things out.

[Savonarola]

Lady Snowblood (1973)

I don't care what anybody says, any films in which they shove an eight year old girl into a barrel and roll her down a hill just to toughen her up is okay with me.

At the beginning of the Meiji era a group of fraudsters murders the new teacher in their village; accusing him of being a conscription officer.  Then they murder his child and gang-rape his wife.  She kills one of her assailants and gets sent to prison.  There she seduces one prison guard after another until one of them knocks her up.  She dies in childbirth but gives instructions to the women in prison that her child is to be an Asura Demon and exact vengeance on three surviving murderers.  The child is sent to a Shinto priest who trains her by rolling her down a hill in the aforementioned barrel, or sword fighting her with live steel.  She survives her training and then hunts down the remaining assailants and kills them in a series of increasingly exciting sword fight.

This was one of the main inspirations for Kill Bill; Tarantino even uses one of the songs from the film in Kill Bill and one of the lines in translation is "You and I have unfinished business".  I also see how he got the idea for combining Samurai films with Spaghetti Westerns; as the setup is very similar to the Lee Van Cleef Death Rides a Horse^1. even the number of assailants is the same (Kill Bill upgrades the number of targets to revenge to five from four). 

The film is a little more sophisticated than most chambara pictures.  The setting of a country in transition and how it's modernizing (and militarizing) in large part drives of the plot.

1.) And, yes, I've seen an awful lot of B movies (though nowhere near as many as Quentin Tarantino.)  Writing that I was reminded of a conversation that I had with my brother, where I described the plot to Six String Samurai and asked him if he remembered watching it.  He replied, "No, but that does sound like something we would have watched."