This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Blistering performances.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

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.

Yaji and Kita is a film that, as one other reviewer wrote, was definitely written for the Japanese. It's legendarily filled with pop culture references, including plenty of ones obscure enough to throw even a native Japanese viewer, and has its share of language jokes too. While you may pick up on some of those, chances are good that most of them will pass you by completely. My wife and I caught only a handful of them, and chances are you'll catch a few yourself, but you won't get them all.But it doesn't matter. In the end, the reasons why many Japanese viewers thought this film was brilliant will be lost on most Western film fans - but like all good films, this one isn't relying on just pop culture and language to make you laugh. The film is full of outright humor that DOESN'T get lost in translation; from the very beginning to the very end, this film was making us laugh. What's lost in translation just isn't enough to stop this film from being great, great fun! I usually loathe musicals, but the musical set pieces in this film are just outright hilarious.If you enjoy bizarre humor, especially visual gags, then you'll get a kick out of Yaji and Kita : The Midnight Pilgrims. The characters are very bright, very colorful and very vivid, and the humor is extremely off the wall, imaginative and playful. There's a story underneath it, and although the film never discards it, it's really about the comedy. The film featured a fair few respected actors, and their talents help to make every small piece of this movie worth a watch - from start to finish, there are set-piece situations and running gags that will keep you laughing and smiling.We may never see this film the way a Japanese watcher would...but so what? It's great anyway!

Don't watch this movie. Or at least, if you do, prepare for disappointment. Yes, you may have heard this movie is brilliant. It may be, but you and I won't get it. This is a movie made for the Japanese, and unless you're well versed in Japanese pop-culture, you won't get the vast majority of the jokes. And I mean VERY well versed - not just an occasional J-pop fan or even a manga or anime freak. Many of the jokes in this movie are obscure Japanese pop-culture references that even the typical Japanese person won't get. Yes, the subtitles will help you follow the plot, but the plot is largely irrelevant, as most of the humor depends on pop- culture references that are impossible to convey to a foreign audience. And, as an earlier reviewer mentioned, there are a few Japanese-language puns that you won't get either. Don't worry, these wouldn't be funny if you did get them, unless you have the same quirky appreciation of puns as the Japanese. But the bulk of the humor here isn't language-specific, it's culture-specific, and even if you speak Japanese you could be left clueless. Think of it as a Japanese version of The Simpsons or Spaced - for someone who doesn't get the pop-culture references, it would be difficult to appreciate the brilliance of these shows. Yaji-san and Kita-san is probably brilliant in much the same way, but without the cultural background, it comes off at best as just bizarre, and at worst as just juvenile silliness. That said, it isn't hard to appreciate Yaji-san and Kita-san's absurdist roots, and fans of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or even Monty Python should be able to appreciate the spirit if not the content of Yaji-san and Kiya-san. In fact, for Python fans, there are even a few times when you may find yourself laughing while your Japanese friends sit and wonder what's so funny - watch for a clever reference to Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail, for example. These times are few and far between, however, and for the most of the film you will probably just find yourself scratching your head, wondering what the hell is going on.Michael

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.