The new iPhone. I know, we’ve all seen the leak, but now it is really here. And the features are pretty damned impressive.
Just leave a comment if you want to buy one for me and I will get you my address and such.
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western #6, 'the searchers.' [another day, another movie.]
The Searchers is another movie praised quite highly by AFI. Not only was it #12 on the ‘100 Years, 100 Movies’ list, they also selected it as the greatest Western of all time.
Directed by John Ford, it was released almost twenty years after Stagecoach.
The Positives: Visually, The Searchers was really impressive. Ford clearly took great pains to find remarkable shots and angles, and it was most certainly a beautiful film from that standpoint. There were moments where I found myself enjoying the film in spite of myself, which is no small praise.
The movie, up until the last ten minutes or so, was also far more ambiguous about racism than Stagecoach. Much of the racism was named and some even condemned in the text of the film.
There was also ambiguity in the morality of the characters. Wayne’s character was a thief with legitimate rage issues, and they never apologized or demonized it, they just let the character be. That’s something I didn’t expect, and it was refreshing.
The Negatives: For one, I’m decidedly not a John Wayne fan. I wonder if perhaps it is just different sensibilities in different eras, but to me all of his characters just seem drunk most of the time. His long, drawling speech coupled with his clumsy and awkward gait and movements just come across as being a lush, not an everyman.
Also, while I commend Ford for even attempting to address the racism in society and film, he ultimately failed. The racism was so deep that even the attempt to condemn racism was racist. For goodness sake, the main villain of the film was a Commanche war chief played by a German man painted a bronzish tan color… that’s right, a painted German guy.
Also, any ambiguity the film lets sit in the air during the movie falls apart during the climax, when all the white people kill off all the Indians and live happily ever after. Hooray!
It was almost as if Ford was saying, ‘Hey racism makes me uncomfortable, it’s downright sad even. But, they are savages, so what are you really going to do about it? If they refused to become “Americans” like us, they needed to be dealt with eventually.’
I guess for me, it doesn’t really matter how well a movie is made when its messages are this ugly, whether that was the intent or not.
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western #5, 'for a few dollars more.' [another day, another movie.]
It would seem the Man with No Name and the Masterless Samurai are even more connected than I initially thought. There was already the obvious connection, in that The Man with No Name was created as an adaptation of the Masterless Samurai. However, it seems to me the similarities extend into their sequels as well.
Sanjuro, the second film featuring the character from Yojimbo, was only supposed to be a straight adaptation of a novel called Peaceful Days, but after the success of Yojimbo, the studio decided to have Kurosawa bring the character back sooner rather than later and worked his character into the center of the film.
It felt to me like the same thing happened with the second movie to feature The Man with No Name.
For a Few Dollars More felt to me like the story of one man’s revenge, and that man was not The Man with No Name. Instead, he moved back and forth in the story, like we were following him in and out of the real story that was happening.
It was if Leone simply realized he had struck gold in Eastwood’s character and wanted him in the movie, even if he didn’t have much reason to be there.
The result was that I didn’t really care much about Eastwood’s character in this one. I still loved him, he’s Clint Fucking Eastwood. Yet, in A Fistful of Dollars, all of the best scenes, the ones with the most weight, were scenes featuring Eastwood front and center. That wasn’t so in the second one.
The film was a bit more scattered as well. There were flashes of brilliance, for one, the duel during the climax was pretty great all around, directing, acting, etc. And during a showdown at the beginning, Morricone was off his ass in all his composing glory, working organ music in with… well , you’ll just have to watch it if you haven’t seen it. It was pretty amazing. Outside of those flashes of brilliance, it was pretty straightforward, and at times even dull.
However, I can’t wait for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly!
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western #4, 'sanjuro.' [another day, another movie.]
Okay, so this wasn’t really a ‘Western’ at all. It was more of a ‘Samurai Comedy.’ It is the sequel to Yojimbo, and after loving the first film so much, I couldn’t help myself. I assumed some of the themes and feel would carry over from film to film, but they didn’t. This had nothing to do with the John Ford, American Western aesthetic that Kurosawa used for Yojimbo (among others).
It still had plenty of enjoyable moments, and was certainly worth my 90 minutes… especially closet guy, I loved closet guy.
However, not a Western. Maybe I’ll add a day onto the end to make up for it.
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western #3, 'stagecoach.' [another day, another movie.]
Film #3 was the genre classic, Stagecoach. The film was #63 in the original AFI list of the greatest 100 films of the first 100 years of cinema.
Personally, I’m not really a fan.
I’m not challenging its appearance on the list by any means. I understand that the film was important in film history, if for no other reason than because it was John Ford’s first western with sound. I just find it uninteresting at best, and downright offensive at worst.
The uninteresting part of it was writing more than direction, the characters were simply all two-dimensional. The happily drunk doctor, the tough as nails marshall, the heroic outlaw who really hadn’t done anything wrong when you think about it.
The offensive part was spread all around.
There were two primary women, each fit into the mold of Madonna and the Whore, although the Madonna was closed off and kind of a bitch, while the whore had a heart of gold, the filmmakers still only had two places to put young women. That is until John Wayne rolls onto the scene and saves the poor latter woman from a life of whoredom.
I understand that when engaging film, or any art, we need to view it within the lens of its time, understanding that it was a product of a different era. That’s just not really what I am interested in doing here. I certainly want to learn about film history through all of this, but at the end of the day I am also hoping to find movies I love watching. This movie just made me sad most of the time, especially pertaining to the depiction, unsurprisingly, of Native Americans.
It wasn’t enough that we killed off entire civilizations of people, taking every part of their homeland. We also had to turn them into punch lines and story props. A Native American character didn’t have a single line of dialogue. Wait, except for the wife of a Mexican character they meet along the way, she sings in perfect spanish (inexplicably), and she is Apache.
A cheap, insincere way to pay lip service to the idea that not all ‘Indians’ are bad right? Wrong, she took off in the night and stole her husbands horse to warn Geronimo about the Stagecoach. As it would turn out, all Indians are bad. The only hope the white man has is using their tribal divisions to get them to work for you. Sort of like the Cheyenne from the opening scene who stands around like so much set dressing, while a white guy reports on his behalf that he found out Geronimo is going to attack soon. They choose to trust him, not because he is actually trustworthy, but because the Cheyenne “hate the Apaches even more than we do.”
Then, there is the climactic stagecoach chase scene where a bunch of natives chase after them shooting rifles and bows, clearly just malicious for malice’s sake. I guess we are supposed to cheer as John Wayne sits atop the coach and picks off Apache after Apache. How dare they defend their own fucking land, we’re white, we should be allowed to take a stagecoach wherever we damned well please.
It would have been a little easier to swallow if the film offered even the slightest bit of ambiguity, the slightest hint that perhaps they understood that maybe this wasn’t all ok. As it stands, I just couldn’t enjoy it. The attitudes on display are just too shameful and tragic for that.
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western #2, 'a fistful of dollars.' [another day, another movie.]
I wasn’t sure what I was going to think about A Fistful of Dollars. Directly adapting a brilliant film like Yojimbo without ever successfully getting the rights to do so is sketchy at best (Kurosawa sued and won, receiving 15% of the film’s take).
Yet, somehow, Sergio Leone is a good enough director that he made it work. There are certainly scenes and moments that just made me want to watch the original again (yes, already), but there was enough new delights thrown in that A Fistful of Dollars is a pretty good film in its own right.
There is a scene during the climax, where they use shots of only boots to set up the tension for the final gunfight. It’s been replicated and parodied so many times since that it has become cliché and is usually annoying. Yet it is done so well here that I was impressed and drawn in by it even though I live on the other side of the overuse. It was wonderful.
Eastwood really is a great Americanization of the wandering samurai character. When our nameless hero confronts the gang of douchebags in town, asking them to apologize to his horse for scaring it, he captured everything that was great about Mifune’s performance in Yojimbo. Basically, if you view it as an homage, it rocks, if you view it as ripping him off, it sucks. Eastwood’s personal character in the years since makes me lean toward homage, but I could just be blinding myself.
The one complaint about the actual filmmaking is that the dubbing was utterly terrible. I’m not sure if this was perhaps caused by the particular master used on the dvd, does anyone else know what I am talking about with the dubbing? It really was terrible, and it would be surprising if it was released that way originally, especially in a film that is otherwise so meticulously crafted. Also, the day for night shots were a little silly as well, but they were limited by their era.
However, the rest of the film is pretty great; the use of close-ups, Ennio Morricone’s score, Eastwood’s scowling mug being unleashed on the world at large.
It is still difficult to get past the fact that they totally ripped off Kurosawa, but it’s a great film otherwise.
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the black keys – tighten up.
I love the Black Keys. They make me smile. As does their new music video.
I think I need to start carrying doughnuts around in my pocket.
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new scott pilgrim trailer. [trailer park.]
I was under the weather the last few days, and I missed this. I know, that is no excuse, but the new trailer is amazing and you should watch it RIGHT NOW.
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cinematical on kurosawa.
With all this Kurosawa love, it makes sense to point to this article Cinematical published about him.
That is all.
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western #1, 'yojimbo.' [another day, another movie.]
The month of westerns is underway, and Mr. Akira Kurosawa kicked things off in style.
There are loads of popular westerns. Some are as popular and famous as the “Man with No Name” trilogy (or the “Dollars” trilogy as it is sometimes called), but there are none more so. Popular culture still offers frequent homages and tips of the cap to Clint Eastwood as the main character in three films which can be understood as the adventures of one lone wanderer, whose name we never learn.
Eastwood obviously starred in more westerns, many of them argued as better than the “Man with No Name” films, but those big three, culminating in the prequel of sorts, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, are the best known.
The first of that trilogy was A Fistful of Dollars, which will be Western #2, and that film is a punch for punch adaptation of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. It is just one of many occasions in which some of the most significant films about the American west were directly adapted from Japanese cinema.
Let me tell you folks, Yojimbo is legit. I loved every damned minute of it.
Kurosawa was influenced by Irish American director John Ford, who directed western classics such as The Searchers, Stagecoach, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The first two of those three are on AFI’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” list, cataloguing the 100 greatest and most important films of the first 100 years of cinema. He took the western theme and set it in Japan, turning cowboys into samurai.
However, while he was largely influenced by American westerns, it was he who is largely responsible for the trend in westerns to tell the story of one lone man beating the odds and a load of bad guys in the process.
Yojimbo is responsible for that trend.
The main character is fantastic. We never learn his name, although he makes a name up while looking out the window at Mulberry Fields, calling himself “Mulberry Fields, Age 30.” He is the ultimate badass, often to hilarious results.
Every scene is remarkably well shot. The score is great. And as alluded above, Toshirô Mifune, as the mysterious, masterless samurai, is brilliant. If I didn’t have so many westerns to watch this month, I would probably watch this one again pretty soon.
I can’t wait to watch more Kurosawa, and if the rest of the month holds up like day 1, this ridiculous idea will also go down as one of my best.
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