Movie: When the Last Sword is Drawn Part One

*Disclaimer: my thoughts on movies in this blog tend to follow a format.  I do not write about movies unless I have a lot to write.  They are generally broken into 2 parts.  One is a personal history with the subject matter, maybe a little learning thrown in there, and some other stuff.  Part 2 is where I focus on the movie.

Part 1

I grew up loving samurai movies and not realizing it.

I am of course referring to the mass of spaghetti westerns that my father watched all the time.  To make a long story short, basically a few Italian directors saw the masterpieces that the 1950's Japanese film industry were churning out, and decided they could adapt them for a Western(both literal and figurative) audience.  Seven Samurai was turned into Magnificent Seven.  Yojimbo was turned into Fist Full of Dollars.

Much of the intensity and focus of those spaghetti westerns comes directly from the influence of men like Kurosawa.  The directors of the Italian adaptations largely put their own spin on things, but that intensity of the moment, the drama of long camera pans lasting just a little bit longer than they felt they should, that comes from the samurai movies they emulated.  I think that is why I really don't care for many Westerns that come out today.  They've lost that intensity.  They are more concerned with getting their half-historical, half pandering plot out on the table than filming something with intensity and drama.

I think I now seek out Samurai movies to fill that void left by good Westerns.  I have watched many of the Kurosawa classics era, and a handful of more modern treatments.  I expected that the later I go, the closer it would come to the same cycle as Spaghetti Westerns.  I expected the old to be raw and intense, while the modern to be overly concerned with getting things "right" and less concerned with getting things "watchable".

I hate Kill Bill.

Kill Bill poisoned the well and caused many of the greatest samurai movies ever made(the 2000's are a revival of them in Japan) to be passed over because they were not "Kill Bill" enough.  Ironically, what Kill Bill did was pave the way for a lot of mediocre Hong Kong action movies to get brought over here, while the Japanese renaissance of Samurai movies were passed over.

Yojiro Takita.

I first saw one of his movies when I watched Departures.  Departures will be getting its own posts eventually, it is one of the best, most heartfelt movies I have ever watched.  Now that I have watched his Japanese Oscar winning "When the Last Sword is Drawn", I now realize why.  Every scene, every emotion, is INTENSE.  Just like a Samurai, Yojiro Takita has fashioned his film making into never wasting energy, never wasting emotion, never wasting a moment.

It makes me wish we had a Neo Sergio Leone making modern Westerns, but I guess that whole style is still found where it originated over half a century ago, and I have a lot of movies to go through that I had never thought to go looking for.

 Much of the thanks has to go to Netflix for bringing a lot of this stuff to view here in America.

Movie: Last of the Mohicans Part 1

The Last of the Mohicans seems a perfect movie to start all this off with.

Why?

Well this movie has quite the history with me, which will be the focus of Part 1 of my post about the movie.  This post is about my personal history and so might be boring for the rest of you, but a trip down memory lane for myself.

I have often told people that before the 2nd half of 2nd Grade, I was not much of a student.  Outside of standardized tests(which I've always excelled at), I was horrible at doing daily work.  I think I always loved learning new and interesting things, but I have always hated repetitive busy work.  At the end of 2nd Grade a few things came together that changed my life.  The reading of Greek Myths and the eventual discovery of King Arthur along with the Dragon Warrior video game ignited my interest in reading.  Once I started, I could not get enough.  There was a particular King Arthur book I checked out and re-read over and over.  It was not till 3rd Grade that I really began reading by the boatloads.

Pizza.

I love food.  Anyone that knows me knows that I'm not dead as of this typing, and that is largely because I eat.  Eating does things like provide nutrients, but also provides a sort of pleasure that if you have not eaten, then I can not describe accurately.  Try eating, I whole heartedly suggest doing it several times a year.

In 3rd grade there was a program that if you read a certain amount of books, you got a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut.  That year I read so many books that just about everyone except my mother questioned it, to them it seemed like this student who a couple of years before was slightly under achieving, was gaming the system for pizza.  No way could I be the number 1 reader in my class.

At first my teacher questioned me about the books.  Then other teachers who saw I was leading the whole grade would come and quiz me about the books.  Eventually even the principal, a man that had worked with me in my early years, came by and questioned me.  I did not realize myself just how well I remembered things I read back then, but I could rattle off facts and quotes from books that were 10-20 books down on the list.  It satisfied them all, and I was never questioned again.

So what did I read during all of this?  Well my school had this gigantic collection of "famous childhoods" semi-biographies on the shelf.  The majority of them were based on presidents and frontiersmen.  I read the childhoods of Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, but also the lesser knowns such as Ethan Allen, Will Clark, and Kit Carson.  Interestingly, they also had the Native American series of famous childhoods, and through them I was able to get a view of the other side of the frontier expansion.

One of these books I particularly liked:  James Fenimore Cooper.  I do not know if it was his strangely fun to say name, or what, but I liked his book.  I had no clue much about why he was famous, I think in the back and the beginning they mentioned he was an author about the frontier.  It was around the beginning of 4th Grade that the movie, Last of the Mohicans was released.  I actually got to go and see it when it was new because my best friend at the time was going to see it with his family and I was invited along.

You have to understand that I am much more a "read it and remember it" kind of person, and at this age this movie was really all over the place for me.  First, I have never been in a huge theater like this before.  Earlier I had my first Chinese food EVER when the family ate at a restaurant.  The scenery of the movie was amazing, there were a lot of characters to keep up with, and and... well I loved the movie as a kid, but I would have to see it a few more times once it came out on video before I fully understood everything that was going on.

I would be in "frontiersmen" mode for a couple of years.  I ran out of books in the library about that subject, and I had recently began thinking maybe baseball was something I was interested in(the Braves were the most successful baseball team at the time, and Atlanta did not have much luck in the 80's, so the early to mid 90's was a new golden age, but I'll save that for some baseball movies later).  Watching Last of the Mohicans is kind of like revisiting a very formative time in my life, one that I felt instilled in me a lot of my values.

Despite that, I do not watch this movie with rose tented glasses in my adult life, there are flaws, but that's for Part 2.