Azumi

I saw the Japanese import Azumi on Saturday. It was a good movie with some nice action, but it was not great. It was about a young female assassin who kicks major butt despite the actress not doing it in a particularly believable fashion (that is, the actress could have been better -- I am fine with the liberties with gravity that were taken). Surprisingly, this movie ended up being about the goriest flick I've ever seen. I certainly expected some bloodshed, but there was definitely a good deal of gratuitous gore here.

OK, so what were the really cool parts?

For one thing, the two major surviving characters at the end (just about everyone dies) have just received a particularly awesome backstory for a pair of D & D characters in the same party. Hell, even if I only take one of them in a D & D party, this movie provides a seriously awesome backstory that I very much want to use either for a PC or an important NPC. (It would probably make more sense for an important NPC because Azumi has some serious ass-kicking skillz and was well beyond 1st level when the movie began, but it doesn't have to be D & D and even if it is -- I envision using this in Rokugan -- she wouldn't be the first person to miraculously lose her skills in some manner or another.) This movie was worth seeing just for the RPG ideas I got from it.

For another thing, there are some seriously sweet scenes. Azumi was playing Dynasty Warriors in a couple scenes (awesome!), and there was one particularly fighting scene with a camera that rotated rapidly around a fight (it rotated about a line in the plane formed by the ground, so the camera was sometimes coming from below the fighters and sometimes from above, etc.) multiple times. It was way cool, but I was actually starting to get dizzy from it. Nevertheless, I don't remember ever seeing this before, and the effect was quite good.

There were also some other good fighting scenes besides the standouts and there were a couple amusing moments. (The Jack Sparrow 'this time you got me' comment from a bandit was especially appreciated.)

The movie had one particularly creepy character. I'm not quite sure how to explain it, but just imagine if Michael Jackson were a primo martial artist and you've got a reasonable leading-order approximation. This guy was seriously metro.