western #9, 'the magnificent seven.' [another day, another movie.]

This movie wasn’t exactly bad. It was fine.

It’s just that when Leone adapted Yojimbo it was a gifted artist stealing from an even more gifted artist (which, while this was a more blatant example, seems to be what most art is), but in this case, adapting Kurosawa’s masterpiece into a misc. American Western is blasphemy. It’s nothing short of reshooting Citizen Kane with the cast of MTV’s The Hills.

They took a movie that was an amazing benchmark of visual storytelling, and they said “Hey, if we changed the ronin into cowboys and the peasants into poor Mexican farmers, we could make a pretty good movie.”

Dumb.

It was filled with scenes that didn’t make any sense out of the original context, mostly because they didn’t seem to be trying to make sense. Example: When one character blames his fellow gunmen for being the reason farmers care so much about their crops. Wha?

Eh, that’s ok. We’ll always have Kurosawa.