The Samurai Trilogy (I: Musashi Miyamoto, II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple, III: Duel at Ganryu Island)

(A-)

The interesting thing about this series is that it is less about great action sequences (although it does have them) than about a man’s spiritual journey. In the first film an angry brute of a youth (played by Mifune) joins the local civil war in the hopes of becoming a samurai, but his very nature alienates him from his village until they track him down like an animal. He’s all brawn and no soul, driven to be a samurai but unaware of what that even means. A priest finally takes pity on him and starts him on his way to training to being a samurai by pretty much locking him away in a tower with a bunch of books.

In the second film he comes out of his training as Musashi Miyamoto, but he still is having trouble curbing his impulses. In this film he must learn that true strength doesn’t come from muscles but by contemplation and restraint. This is definitely the most violent of the three films, in that it starts with a fight against a samurai who uses a chain and sickle and ends with Musashi fighting off 80 samurai. What’s interesting about his journey is that as he becomes more stoic the people he is fighting become more like bandits, echoes his former life.

In the final film Musashi is trying to complete his voyage into the life of a samurai, and actually rejects violence to the point of only wanting to be a farmer, a complete turn around from the teen of the first film. Violence comes to him though when bandits raid the village, and the film ends with a dual with a rival samurai who wants nothing other than to say he beat the great Musashi. The final dual is fantastic, easily the best part of the trilogy. Here Musashi fights an equal in skill, and it is only the spiritual transformation that he has made over the course of the three films that makes him triumphant in the end.

The films aren’t all fighting though. Most of the trilogy is actually an epic composed of several well drawn characters, most important of them being the two caught in the love triangle of sorts, the two women fighting for Musashi’s affections. One, Akemi, lusts after him since she sees him as the only real man around her who hasn’t taken advantage of her, and the other, poor Otsu, being the true love of Musashi’s life but unable to partake in his life because of his dedication to the life of the samurai. It’s great stuff, and very entertaining to watch.

——Mannaja: A Man Called Blade——

(B)

This is a decent spaghetti Western, if an uninspired one. The film is pretty good, but it doesn’t really have any memorable scenes to differentiate it from any of the other westerns of the same type. Mannaja is an expert with the hatchet and tries to take out a greedy owner of a silver mine and his even greedier right hand man by playing both sides against the middle, which ultimately blows up in his face. There’s a cool scene in the beginning where he takes down a man with his hatchet in a swamp and another scene later on where he is tortured by being buried up to his head with matches holding his eyes open at noon to burn out his eyes, but otherwise this is pretty standard stuff.

——Troy——

(B-)

While having some pretty impressive set pieces this film is pretty much a “so what” kind of movie, with frequent bad acting coming from the stellar cast brought on from an over dramatic script. Every line is built up like a tagline to put in the trailer, which distracts from the real drama at hand which should have been taken verbatim from Homer. Unsurprisingly the movie is at its best the closer it sticks to the Illiad. When it goes off into original screenplay land, like the scenes where the silent slave girl from Homer becomes a major character, the film suffers. It could have been really good (the cast was definitely good enough) but as is it is just bland summer filler with a few good scenes to keep you happy.

——Zatoichi——

(A)

Any samurai picture that ends in a big Shinto tap dance number has got something special going for it, and Zatoichi is one of those films. It has its own style that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before and is extremely entertaining, with serious subplots converging with absurd situations in a completely seamless manner. Zatoichi is an old blind wandering masseur, who also just happens to be an expert swordsman. He comes in contact with a gambling addict and two geisha siblings out to get revenge and somehow through all of their stories manages to find the mysterious gang boss of the town. Blood falls like rain and there is violence galore all throughout. Plus that Shinto tap dance number I mentioned above. Definitely worth seeing this one.

——Shrek 2——

(A-)

This is one of those rare sequels that manages to be just as entertaining as the first, even if it does take a little while to get going. The opening feels a little bit like a stalled car as the film tries to refresh your memory as to what happened in the last movie while moving the plot of this film along at the same time. It’s not until Puss in Boots shows up that the movie really takes off. But when it takes off, oh does it go. The movie is wall to wall funny with plenty of wry social and cultural commentary thrown in with the fart jokes. The use of pop culture songs is even better integrated into the story of the film than the last one was. My personal favorite character was the fairy godmother, gleefully twisting the fairy tale stereotypes into a modern business sense and an overprotectiveness of her son, Prince Charming. Good stuff.

——The General——

(A-)

While this Buster Keaton comedy did have a wealth of excellent sight gags it did feel way too long, which is a quality that especially in a silent comedy doesn’t bode well for the overall impression of the film. This movie feels as long as the Civil War. Thankfully it’s pretty funny, but I feel like most of the beginning could have been cut to make more room for that funny.

——Casualties of War——

(B)

I don’t really feel like this movie breaks any new ground in the Vietnam War film genre, but with that said it is a pretty gripping story told well enough about Sean Penn going crazy in the bush and abducting a woman from her home to rape her. My one fault with the film lies in the fact that it too often sympathizes with Michael J. Fox’s character’s plight and doesn’t spend enough time dissecting what would drive an otherwise normal guy to commit such atrocities. The behavior is explained without any real understanding, which is a shame because otherwise a great movie could have been made here.

——Run Man Run——

(A)

This is easily one of the best spaghetti Westerns I’ve seen and definitely the funniest. The film starts out with an average Joe grifter sneaking into a house to steal some food. He manages to steal some food right off the dinning room table without anyone knowing, and confidently walks out the front door only to walk right into the middle of a firing squad execution. That’s pretty much the tone of the whole film, as the main character always happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with hilarious and sometimes gruesome results. At stake are the Mexican revolution and a king’s ransom of gold. I won’t tell you any more than that because you really should see this movie for yourself. It’s hilarious and a damn good Western.

——Two Champions of Death——

(B-)

A member of the Shaolin school goes out to get revenge for the killing of a student by the Wu-Tang school. The dastardly Wu-Tang school then comes back and plays cheap, trying to eradicate the Shaolin school. Fortunately for the Shaolin guy, he meets another Shaolin guy and they go out playing fair and kill a whole bunch of Wu-Tang guys (hence the two champions of death), which only pisses the Wu-Tang off more. They finally pull in all of these kung fu masters to play cheap and everyone dies. The action is pretty good, but not excellent. An average Chang Cheh Shaw Brothers flick.

——Challenge of the Masters——

(B+)

This is a pretty decent Gordon Liu flick where the good guy actually learns restraint and doesn’t kill the bad guy, but instead offers mercy and “wins over their heart”. This movie also has the coolest game ever, which is to stick these batons in firecrackers, shoot them up in the air, and then have teams of the kung fu schools fight over who can get the most batons when they fall to the ground. Not really a film I’d recommend to anyone to watch, but a quality flick nonetheless.

——The Flying Guillotine——

(D)

Nowhere near as cool as Master of the Flying Guillotine, instead this flick focuses on a group of assassins trained with the Flying Guillotine to kill for the Manchus. One of the assassins doesn’t like his job and splits, causing the rest of them to come after him. The fights are weak, the story lame, and the film seems to drag on and on despite the fact that it has flying guillotines. Stay away from this one.

——The Last Samurai——

(B+)

Ken Wantanabe=awesome. Well, actually all of the Japanese cast is awesome. Tom Cruise=sucks. Well, actually all of the American cast sucks. That’s pretty true for the rest of the movie too. Everything Japanese about it is fucking sweet, every American cliché that sneaks in weakens the film. The ending makes me want to tear my hair out, but God bless that ninja fight. God bless you ninja bastards.

——The Day After Tomorrow——

(B+)

OK, I realize that letter grade is a little high. First of all, drop that grade down a letter if you are watching it on video, and drop it once for every time you see it more than the first one. Drop it down two grades if you don’t like disaster flicks.

There, that said, I enjoyed myself immensely. I was able to ignore the huge gaps in logic, the bad acting, and the fact that the plot seems eerily similar to Independence Day (substitute aliens for freak weather and its pretty much the same script) and was able to enjoy a pretty cool little disaster flick. The tornadoes in Cali were bitchin’ and the super storm in NYC was pretty cool too. I think mostly I liked the movie because it made me think about how bitchin’ (in the “please don’t ever let that ever happen” kind of way) a super storm of that magnitude would really be. What I didn’t like was the fact that in a movie called “The Day After Tomorrow” it never really dealt with what would happen to everyone after the storm had died down. I mean, when I first saw the trailer and saw those people snowshoeing into NYC I thought the movie would be dealing with people trying to survive in the second Ice Age. Nope, none of that. There should seriously be a sequel to this movie, “The Week After Tomorrow”.

——Compañeros——

(A-)

Franco Nero is a Swedish arms dealer, Tomas Millan is a Mexican bandit, and Jack Palance is a marijuana-crazed sadist with only one hand, obsessed with his falcon and with killing Nero (who crucified Palance so that the only way he could get down was to have that pet falcon eat his hand)(yeah, you read all of that right). Millan and Nero are the unlikely duo who “team up” to find hidden gold by kidnapping a revolutionary professor. A little slow in a few parts, but otherwise this is a fantastic spaghetti western, among the best. Must see.

——Myra Breckinridge——

(F)

Very possibly the worst movie ever made. SOOO BAD. Raquel Welch plays a transsexual trying to change the world by raping being a woman who rapes a man. Other than that scene, which is pretty surreal in its own right, the rest of the movie is horrible. Bad acting. Bad script that becomes aimless at quite a few points. Pointless direction. So incredibly crappy.

——Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban——

(A-)

This is easily the best movie of the year so far (except for Kill Bill Vol. 2, but we’ll just ignore that for a moment for the sake of argument), which is saying a lot considering how much I truly hated Chris Columbus’s dreadful first two installments of the series. This movie is what the first two should have been. No longer does the film seem like a book on tape; this is a real movie. The writing is tight and focused, the direction is colorful, darker and inspired, and the young actors have finally grown into their characters. They can act, who knew? The actor who plays Harry has especially grown. In the first two films he seemed lost and confused. In this movie he IS Harry, angry teenager incarnate.

Instead of making every amazing thing into a spectacle like Chris Columbus did, Alfonso Cuarón subdues that spectacle, which of course makes everything even more amazing. It definitely helps anyway. This movie is just about perfect. If it weren’t for the seemingly rushed ending this movie would get a perfect A.

——The Cooler——

(A-)

This is a great little movie from last year with some great character work, both on the side of the writer and on the sides of the amazing actors involved. William H. Macy is a man so unlucky that he can actually cool down a hot table just by walking by it. He’s employed by Baldwin, who is a ruthless old school Vegas man who will do just about anything to keep control of his casino from the corporate bigwigs who want to Disneyfy it like the rest of the new Vegas. He has one problem though, Macy has actually found love, which has totally swung his luck around. The actress who plays the cocktail waitress he falls in love with is just brilliant, as is the rest of the cast, but her performance in particular stood out for me. A very good love story, recommended.

——In America——

(A)

This is one of those movies that should be so sentimental that it is horrible, but thankfully it’s one of those very few films that manages to avoid that and just be damn good. I’m so sorry I missed this movie last year when it was in theaters, because it’s really damn good. The story revolves around an Irish immigrant family that moves to NYC after the death of their toddler son. Most of the story should be hokey, but damn it if the two young actresses that play the daughters aren’t just brilliant actors, and damn charming ones at that. Their innocent point of view helps keep what could be a really depressing movie quite light and joyful. This is a great, great movie, one of the best movies that came out last year. Highly Recommended.

——Pickup on South Street——

(A)

There is a certain authenticity to old pulp film noir movies that I find mostly lacking in the films I’ve seen, which is really disappointing to me because I really want to love noir. It was with this movie that I found out what exactly that authenticity is that I usually find lacking. Just about all noir is plot driven, but this film is all about the characters, about making them as gritty and as real as possible. And it works. Not only does the film have all of the stylized noir elements that I love, but the characters and the actors chosen to play them are so spot on that the two elements fit together seamlessly. What a great movie. Highly recommended.

——Tokyo Eyes——

(B-)

This movie is only really interesting in that it is a Japanese movie in Japan with all Japanese actors, and yet it is directed by a Frenchman. You can kind of tell too, in that there are all of these little touches and odes to French cinema, things you wouldn’t find uncommon in a Breathless or Band of Outsiders. Things like how the camera lingers as teens flirt and talk about nothing at all, or how two lovers run up and down a train platform. Things like that.

The story is about a killer who doesn’t actually kill anyone, or even shoot them for that matter. When he finds someone being rude or disrespectful he puts on a fake pair of glasses and acts like he is going to shoot them and then intentionally misses so that they later become better people (a lot like that scene in Fight Club). A girl becomes intrigued by him and they slowly fall in love. Not a movie that’s anything special, but it’s pretty interesting and worth your time if ever you find it.

——Woyzeck——

(B-)

The first two thirds of this movie are kind of crappy, in that half of the time I really had no idea what exactly was going on or why everyone was acting so weird. The story is about a soldier who is being experimented on and tormented by his superiors so that he’ll slowly go crazy so that they can observe the results. Meanwhile Woyzeck’s wife is being unfaithful to him. That’s the part of the story that makes this movie not a total waste of time, since when Woyzeck finds out, that’s when the movie really picks up. Kinski’s acting in this section is just spectacular, as his madness turns into homicidal rage.

But the truly standout scene of the movie is the scene where Woyzeck kills his wife. Herzog filled the sequence in one take and in slow motion, and I’ll be damned if Kinski doesn’t give the most powerful performance of any actor I’ve ever seen here. The number of real emotions that pass across his face is just amazing. Not surprisingly it says in the booklet that came with the DVD that Kinski was never the same after filming this movie. He was so into the character that he actually went mad (or at least madder than he already was). And it shows. The end sequence is extremely startling, and on its own it gets an A+.

——Fathom——

(C-)

This Raquel Welch movie is horrible, but in a very hilarious “Am I suppose to believe this shit?” sort of way. Welch plays a sky-diving dental assistant (I’m sure this must have made more sense back in the sixties) who gets entangled in a search for a rare Chinese artifact by three different groups, none of whom are who they seem to be. Meanwhile Raquel Welch changes outfits every five minutes or so, sometimes even midway through a conversation. Nowhere is it explained where she gets all of her clothes. This is such a goofy spy spoof (or…something) that I really don’t know which bizarre parts to try and explain to you. Instead you should just see the madness for yourself.

——City of God——

(A)

This is another one of the best films of last year. Just amazing. Everything about this movie is good; the writing, the cinematography, the direction, the acting…everything. I love how the story is told through this non-linear, quick chapter-like flashback sort of way, where whenever a new character or situation is introduced a title comes up on screen and the scene zooms back in time to show how things got to where they are now. The direction is just kinetic and keeps your attention every second of the film. It’s like if a Brazilian Tarantino made the Godfather, just brilliant entertaining and gripping stuff.

——The Chronicles of Riddick——

(D)

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking going to see this. Within like 30 minutes I was ready to get up and leave. The only thing that kept me in my seat was the knowledge that I stupidly paid 7.25 to see the damn thing. The movie just contradicts itself time and time again in favor of a “good” action sequence. For instance, let me ask the following questions: On a planet with no vegetation whatsoever, covered with molten rock, where does the fresh air come from? When it has already been established that on this planet that when the sun comes up the temperature hits 700 degrees (a point only made more clear by the wall of fire that follows the sun’s rays), why is it that if your name is Riddick you can just stand in the shade and you’ll be OK? Stupid shit like that, all the frickin’ time. The costumes are beyond stupid, the acting is horrendous, and the script was under thought out by some teenage boy type mind. Instead of watching Vin Diesel pummel someone, you’ll probably be like me and just think, “What the hell is Judy Dench doing in this movie?”

——Robocop——

(A)

Greatest…frickin…movie…ever. “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.” God bless you, ultra-violent acutely aware social satire master Paul Verhoven.