Japanese Live Action Style

Source: Amazon
It's a rare week for me when I watch a film, but it happened this week. The film in question was Blade of the Immortal on Netflix. It is based on a manga of the same name.

I've seen some other Japanese live action films before, such as Battle Royale (and others that I can't remember right now) and they're always strange. The acting is very different from my western point of view. I have trouble putting my finger around what it exactly is, but I know there's something weird in there. It feels overly dramatic and silly.

Bearing this in mind, I also feel that there's something weird in Finnish movies as well. This I can attribute strongly to the fact that I am Finnish. And combined with the fact that I feel very little for this country, might be why Finnish movies seem sub-par to me. However, I have recently started to warm up to Finnish art, music and movies. But it is still too easy for me to make fun of Finland as a country for prudes, and not a cradle of creativity and the arts. It's like when a child has made a drawing and they ask you if you like it, and you go "oh, it's... umm... very nice."

Back to Japan.

Cultural differences are most likely the biggest reason for this over-acting I feel there is. It could be that because Japan has a very conservative and collective society, they would use the freedom provided by fiction to play out emotions publically.

I must admit that I've watched very little J-drama, so I can't really say I know what Japanese acting is. It might very well be just that anime and manga are very, very poorly translated into live action films. Not to mention the ridiculous hair styles which defy gravity, or the hair colours which are almost non-existing in the Japanese gene pool.

All that aside, I did enjoy the film a lot, and samurais and immortality are two of my favourite things.

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