Awesome

Sukiyaki Western Django:

This sounds like a highly memorable movie.

A lone gunslinger rides into town, ties his horse to the hitching post, and strides down the middle of Main Street. Two rival gangs come flooding out of their respective hideouts: the White Gang on one end of the street, the Reds on the other. There's a buried treasure hidden somewhere nearby, and everyone's crazy to find it, so the lone gunman stands between the two gangs and makes them an offer.

"Witch axe gonna by it. Marvy rose? What there—if tank glut treasure, no pain."

Welcome to Sukiyaki Western Django (First Look), the English-language Western by Japanese director Takashi Miike. The all-Japanese cast, augmented by Quentin Tarantino in two cameo roles, learned their English dialogue phonetically and attack their lines as if the words were small furry animals that need to be beaten into submission. The dialogue is crammed with weird, Christopher Walken-esque line readings and bizarre placement of emphases—phrases like "You old biddy," "Dang!" and "You reckon?" become hilariously divorced from meaning.

Now, by "memorable" I don't mean to imply "good." On the other hand, the director has quite a reputation, and the Japanese have already mined this ground with some profit. For example, the famous cult film Django's trailer will explain a mystery to anyone who saw Cowboy Bebop's mushroom episode on the Cartoon Network. The anime's makers apparently felt no explanation for the reference was necessary, suggesting their audience will be familiar with the Spaghetti Westerns -- and not just the Eastwood ones.



The film Django was also apparently inspirational to the director Robert Rodriguez, whose title character in El Mariachi uses a guitar case for the same purpose as the coffin. As I imagine most of you know, Rodriguez and Tarantino have since worked together on a number of cult-movie projects (mostly bad ones); and now Tarantino is hooking up with the Japanese effort here.

That makes it dangerously likely that the film will get lost in in-jokes; but I suspect, from the description, that it will be hard to forget in any case.