Watch Yaji & Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims For Free

Nice effects though.

Excellent, a Must See

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Yaji and Kita: Midnight Pilgrims (2005) Directed by Kudo Kankuro.Yaji and Kita is the story of two samurai from the Edo-era. They are gay lovers with two problems. Yaji is married, Kita is a drug addict. Their lives in Edo have become a spiral of despair, so when Yaji sees an advertisement in the post for Ise, "Get back to Reality" He decides that a pilgrimage to Ise will be good for them, there, maybe Kita can get the monkey off his back.So they set off on a journey of self discovery. On Captain America's bike from the movie Easy Rider.Say what? You get that reaction a lot. This movie is a psychedelic road trip through the mind of a junkie. There are a lot of Japanese Pop culture References strewn through the movie. I mean a lot. And if you don't have a very, very, VERY good understanding of Japanese pop culture, you are going to miss out on a lot.Imagine taking a movie like Airplane or better yet, The Rocky Horror Picture Show to a small village in Nepal. A lot is going to be lost, because they don't get the reference material for some of the jokes, like when June Cleaver offers to translate for the two brothers, because she speaks Jive, or the significance of the pink triangle on Frankie's surgical gown.So, basically, you have the bastard love child of a Cheech and Chong movie, an Akira Kurosawa film, with a liberal dash of Thelma and Louise, and its gay.The lovers move along the Tokaido Road, stopping at various inns along the way. The first is the Laugh Inn. No one gets through the check point with out doing a comedy routine. The second is the Music Inn, where you get a song with each cup of tea, from a transsexual innkeeper. His daughter is very sad because her music is so bad, it causes Mt. Fuji to hide in the haze. Kita fools himself into thinking he is love with the daughter, but she is in love with Yaji.In the mean time, an inspector Kin-kin has found Yaji's wife Ohatsu murdered, and he's hot on the pair's trail.Their trails and tribulations move on, Inn after Inn, through the mundane to the surreal with all the colour and cogency of a magic mushroom trip, which incidentally, plays a big part in the latter part of the film.Is the movie good? Well, yes. I enjoyed it. I watched it several times, and got some pointers from my Japanese friend. For instance, the funny stance the school girls take when greeting Kita is the classic pose for Yakuza to assume when making their introductions. Since they are a fan club for a Mob Boss, this makes sense. You have to go into it with an appreciation for the absurd, much like when you watch spoof movies, like Scary movie, and Meet the Spartans, or Pink Floyd's The Wall.Will you get this movie? All of it, first time out? Only if you are an expatriate from Japan. But part of the fun for me has been picking up things here and there. One of the reasons that so many of the puns work in the translation is because Japan adopts words into the language when they don't have a word, so puns about Thrones, and Thrown work. Weird, huh? Is this a classic movie? I don't think so. Is it a cult movie? Yes, in Japan. Will it catch on here? I doubt it. But if you are a fan of Japanese culture, this is a great little movie. If you are a fan of Gay culture, this is a real trip. If you are a fan of both, you have to watch this movie.Visually, this movie is stunning, rich and detailed, with jarring anachronisms and wonderful silliness. The stars, Nakamura Shichinosuke, Kita (the blond Uke) and Nagase Tomoya, Yuji, (the handsome Seme) are both cute, and easy on the eyes. I think they did a good job; I got involved with their characters.This film is probably not for everyone, but if you want to take a subtitled walk on the wild side, this is the film for you.

This is the story of two samurai in Edo period Japan who are in love. One is married, the other is a drug addict. 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. There are numerous puns, both visual and verbal; we get bodily function jokes; gender bending characters; gay jokes;romance; spoofs of films and music (and musical numbers); trips through time and space; a search for "my reality"; drug induced hallucinations and other things I was laughing to hard, or too shocked to noticed. Its a movie made for the film makers and whom ever will click into their strange mind set. Frankly its hard to describe what happens since much of it is so out there that to hear about it out of context will not make any sense (office girls on parade? Zombie Bartender? Born to be Gay?).Its probably more fun to discover the weirdness on your own, besides its too hard to describe simply.The film is not perfect. Its over two hours and probably could be trimmed by twenty minutes. The film also gets rather bizarrely surreal and it becomes almost too much to take. There is only so much one can take in before one hits the over load button. You probably won't like or get every joke or reference, I didn't, but I have to give it points for keeping at the craziness at all costs.Still for those are open to crazed, silly/clever films that the term "off beat" is too weak a word. Actually this film is so crazy that there is a good chance it will never even find its well deserved cult.9 out of 10 for sheer originality and audaciousness. Actually it would probably be something about an 8.5 but I have to round up or down to whole numbers. If you you're into off beat films and original visions look no farther this is the real deal. If you can't handle anything even slightly off center stay away, far away.A unique cinema experience.

Three years ago I read Ikku Jippensha's novel Hizakurige, or Shank's Mare, for one of my Japanese history classes. I comparison to some of the other books in the class the long tale of Yaji and Kita was quite entertaining if a bit long. During the Edo period townsmen and rich farmers were able to travel more freely so there was a demand for travel guides. Therefore a number of guides for inns, sites of interest, teahouses, etc. began to appear. Unlike many of the writers, Ikku Jippensha took it upon himself to create a "guide" that was also a quite comedic story. It was in this miasma of budding plebeian literature and tourism that Yajirobei and Kitahachi, Yaji and Kita for short, were born. Consisting of passages in which the protagonists mock samurai, hit on girls, and tour the sites along to Tokaido Road Shank's Mare is an entertaining read not only for Japanese literature, but for those who just enjoy humorous literature as well.Now warp to the year 2005 and put the rapscallion duo of Yaji and Kita into the hands of director Kankuro Kudo. Still dressed in townsmen attire, Kita sports a bleached topknot and has a heroin addiction. Concerned about the health of his friend and lover, there are hints that Yaji and Kita were lovers in some of Jippensha's later stories, Yaji forces his drugged up friend that he needs to go to Ise in order to clean up, so they hop upon Yaji's motorcycle and make their way to Ise. They almost reach their destination when a police officer makes them return to Edo and hike along the Tokaido road to reach their destination.Like the novel, Yaji and Kita stop at a number of inns, but instead of detailed information concerning the food of each inn, the viewer is treated to middle-aged women being accosted by the God of Laughs, a girl whose singing is so bad Mt. Fuji hazes over, a gaggle of school girls, including one ganguro, who are the fan club of a mafia boss, King Arthur, a bartender and his wife who has become half mushroom, etc. Obviously the film ranges from the comedic to the outright bizarre. At some points it is so bizarre that suspension of disbelief is destroyed. However, the comedic effects of the film are able to draw one back in and make it worthwhile to sit through the two hour plus film.Definitely not for the prude, there is one scene in which Yaji stretches Kita's nut sack a few feet and then bites it and the ending theme is a song titled "I Want to be Your F*ck" by the Zazen Boys, Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims is definitely good for a few laughs and even more "Oh my God" moments.

Be sure not to miss this most irreverent "jidai-geki" (period piece) from first-time director Kudo Kankuro. Loosely based on an earlier movie about two men escaping their wives, the postmodern treatment of the subject is indeed a treat. As one critic in Japan commented, the director must have been drunk while filming -- offbeat isn't quite the word, and off-the-wall goes only so far. But if you've ever wanted to see Tetris with dead people floating down the river on rafts, anachronism at the most unexpected times, or just shut off your brain and enjoy a movie which is really impossible to follow, Yaji and Kita's Midnight Pilgrimage will not disappoint. It's half-serious way of dealing with, in the best road movie traditions, two gay lovers, one a drug addict popping blue pills, make their way from medieval Edo to Ise and then when you least expect, burst out the absurd (motorcylces, TV shows, modern-day Tokyo). The translations occasionally fell flat (since the movie includes a lot of verbal jokes in Japanese) or were just plain unintelligible, but watching the miniature Tamiya tankers roll by needs no translations. So, sit back and enjoy the ride.