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the good, the bad, the weird.

By • On • In scott • 2 min read

Folks, you need to watch this movie right now. Tonight, or tomorrow at the latest.

I’m serious.

It’s a gem of popular Korean cinema. The film is insanely fun from start to finish. It’s entirely possible that I could watch this movie on repeat for an entire afternoon without getting bored.

As the name suggests, it’s a humorous homage to the western genre, in similar fashion to how Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg treated zombie movies with Shaun of the Dead and action movies with Hot Fuzz. Like those films, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is good enough in its own right to be enjoyed by someone who has never seen a western before (like my wife, who loved the hell out of it), but that enjoyment grows deeper the more familiar you are with the genre. So, for Brian and I, after watching 30 westerns in 30 days, the film was riddled with easter eggs just waiting to be spotted by attentive viewers, namely us.

Yet, while the influence of the western genre was plain for all to see, Ji-woon Kim was masterful in making sure that he tilted every scene he used from classic westerns so that he was always telling his own story. He never just copied a scene or moment, he always shifted it just to the left, making a movie that is an homage to some of his favorite movies, as opposed to making a movie which is merely a collage of other people’s work.

Kim’s directing was fantastic, as was the cinematography. As we were watching, we consistently exclaimed in wonder at the high degree of difficulty of so many of the shots. There were many long, audacious tracking shots filled with so many moving parts that they were literally jaw dropping, some of which were extended helicopter shots that must have been a bitch to reset when something went wrong. There are still some shots, especially those with large explosives next to living people, which I have no idea how they did. That’s impressive in this day and age.

The action scenes were the perfect cocktail of thrilling and hilarious. That’s a tough combo to get right without losing one or the other, but this should be used as a case study in how to get it right… or perfect.

Yet, with all that action and technical wizardry, they didn’t skimp on the characters. The writing was strong and the acting was pitch perfect by all involved. All three of the main characters are on the short list of the most enjoyable characters I’ve seen in my young movie-viewing life.

It was a tall order for the primary actors, each was filling a prototypical role that could have easily bogged them down in convention, or else their performance could have gone so far off the deep end that there is no longer a connection to the archetype. Yet, each character incarnated their role with the right amount of continuity to the past, tempered by a heaping portion of their own swagger and attitude to keep things fresh. The performances were so impeccable, it makes me wonder if the aforementioned swagger and attitude was perhaps Ji-woon Kim’s, bleeding through from the other side of the camera.

So seriously, go watch this movie now!

Pretty soon, I’m going to have to write a post all about the actor who played ‘The Weird,’ Kang-ho Song, whose dominance in the world of remarkable Korean cinema is nothing short of amazing. I believe he is this generation’s Toshirô Mifune, and sadly, like Mifune, most folks outside of their native country (Japan for Mifune and Korea for Song) will live and die without learning their name. Bullshit!

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western #23, 'high noon.' [another day, another movie.]

By • On • In Uncategorized • 1 min read

This one is considered an uberclassic. A huge deal. In my experience, it was hit or miss.

First off, the huge miss… the entire film includes a terrible, overly literal theme song that basic just tells you the plot of the film. Horrible!

Other than that, the film is good through almost the entire thing. I enjoyed Gary Cooper as the lead, Grace Kelly played the hottest Quaker in history, and throughout the film the story built really great tension, both between the characters, and in general as things looked more and more hopeless for our poor lawman.

Yet, all that tension leads to a pretty lackluster finale. It was the western equivalent of the woman who waits until marriage for sex, only to have her husband fire his pistol early on their wedding night. I was left with a, “THAT is what we have been waiting for?” feeling.

I used to give old movies the benefit of the doubt, assuming that over the generations since their release, something got lost in translation. However, Kurosawa changed that. Not only was he making movies around the same time as this one, he was also making them in Japan, so there was far more translating to do, and his films were brilliant just the same.

High Noon is good, don’t get me wrong, but in my experience it pales in comparison to a bunch of these other films I’ve been watching.

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western #11, 'unforgiven.' [another day, another movie.]

By • On • In another day. another movie., scott • 1 min read

This is the first of the Westerns we have watched so far that I actually owned, so, obviously I liked this one going into it.

Eastwood responds to the Western genre that helped make his career. Even going so far as to say it basically encapsulates everything he feels about the genre.

It is slow and taut, filled with great characters played brilliantly by gifted actors.

If Cooperstown was for actors instead of baseball players, Gene Hackman would only have to screen The Royal Tenenbaums and Unforgiven back to back and he would have my vote to get in without any further conversation.

It doesn’t deal with the Native American issues, but it pulls back the curtain a bit on the rest of what lies implicit in the Western genre.

As is the case with much of Eastwood’s directorial work, the story turns the myth of redemptive violence on its head. There is always a cost.

Great movie, all around.

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western #6, 'the searchers.' [another day, another movie.]

By • On • In another day. another movie., scott • 1 min read

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 #2, 'a fistful of dollars.' [another day, another movie.]

By • On • In Uncategorized • 1 min read

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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western #1, 'yojimbo.' [another day, another movie.]

By • On • In another day. another movie., scott • 2 min read

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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