Episode #23 -- Samurai Fiction

(Or: "Tara and Andrew Versus Upper Respiratory Infections")

hoo boy. This was a rough one, not because of the quality of the movie, but because both of us were recovering from being incredibly sickly at the time that we recorded the second half of the episode. We've edited out most of the coughing and wheezing, for your listening pleasure, but some of it slipped through the cracks here and there. Don't worry-- the science is still out, but we're pretty sure you can't catch something by listening to a podcast. There might be some sweet scientific grant money in it for all of us if you can prove us wrong though, so it's really a win-win, if you think about it.

ANYWAY, Samurai Fiction is a 1998 movie directed by this dude Hiroyuki Nakano, and it's kind of an homage and parody of samurai movies all in one. It was one of the things that influenced Quentin Tarantino during the making of the Kill Bills-- the opening title sequence of Samurai Fiction will look pretty familiar to anyone who's seen the first Kill Bill, and the antagonist in this movie is Tomoyasu Hotei, a well-known and regarded rock musician in Japan, who created/performed the following song, which you have almost undoubtedly heard in three thousand things by this point: