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Yaji and Kita - The Midnight Pilgrims (Japanese)

This film is absolutely insane. The treatment is nothing like I have seen before. With a mix of period piece, with modern rap and dance numbers, the characters move from one period to another in a jiffy. The insanity of the film trying tomato itself a cult or something of sorts with showing off the wild whacky side of the characters, this film is absolutely not for everyone.

Yaji and Kita are two samurai men living in Edo period Japan who are in love. One is married, the other is a drug addict. Yaji wants Kita to kick off his drug addiction. They decide that in order to make things better they will go on a trip to Ise Sanctuary, where its presumed, everything will be made right. What happens once they get on the road is the movie and its as wild and wacky as anything your likely to see. On their way they meet various gender bending characters laced with gay jokes, romance, spoofs of films and music (and musical numbers), trips through time and space etc etc. 

The film actually started off well and pretty soon you realize that what you are going to see is nothing ordinary, but once I was about 25 minutes into the film, I started losing interest. The characters are very bright, very colorful and very vivid, and the humor is extremely off the wall, imaginative and playful. It was obvious that the film was going to be not about a story or a message, but about how a crazy film maker wants to use his creative liberty to the next level to showcase things that would have not been thought of to be shown in one single film. Frankly its hard to describe what happens when the road trip actually starts, since much of it is so out there that to hear about it out of context will not make any sense. It is definitely surreal, touching, bizarre, obscure, confusing, culture-bound - but also laugh-out-loud funny in parts, but it is so full of itself. This film is so crazy that there is a good chance it will never even find the cult status which is what it probably was aiming for when it was made. A very bizarre film that started off well, but soon it exceeded the time it was welcomed for. (3/10)

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