(Hughes Brothers, 2010)
The first act of The Book of Eli is terrific and suggests that it will be an impressive film. The Hughes brothers find a series of eerie images to capture this world, thirty years on from the 'big flash", Denzel Washington lend his magnetism to the taciturn, efficiently murderous protagonist, and the society we encounter is just complex and different enough to be interesting.
A small settlement run by Gary Oldman (who holds power due to his knowledge of where there is water) becomes the focus and correspondingly, the film becomes less impressive. Our hero, an "outlander" who wanders the wasteland, comes to town, gets into a saloon fight - just like in a classic western - and attracts the attention of Oldman's character, who is set on finding a Bible, realising he can use it to control everyone, with or without water. Oldman sets his road gangs - Mad Max style marauders - on Denzel, and there follows an increasingly weary succession of fight scenes, chases, captures and escapes..
The first few scenes contain the best action scene in the film; Washington is ambushed by a band of hijackers, retreats into the shade offered by an overpass, still wearing his shades, and proceeds to cut his way through them in a single unbroken take, all seen in silhouette. This scene and the lengthy, violent fight in the saloon suggest that the Book of Eli is really a post-apocalyptic take on Zaitoichi (confirmed by a late twist), and when it arrives at the town, the film takes on a series of Western codes and conventions.
It has moments of wit - the value of wet-wipes as barter in a post-apocalyptic world, for instance - and is nicely shot in a dry, desaturated style by Don Burgess. Oldman is good value as the villain, but Mila Kunis has no character to play beyond a series of bullet-pointed cliches, and Denzel Washington could do this in his sleep. In fact there are moments here when, shades on, you can't be sure he isn't having a sneaky nap.
What the film does well are the tough guy beats in the lead up to the action scenes, but they are fleeting.
Showing posts with label Samurai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Samurai. Show all posts
Thursday, 23 July 2015
Thursday, 6 October 2011
HARAKIRI
A.K.A SEPPUKU
(Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)
It's only when you see a film as set upon savaging the assumptions and hypocrisies of the Samurai class - and by extention, of the Samurai genre - that you realise just how romanticised the Samurai has been by popular culture, and primarily, by Japanese cinema. The noble Warrior, living and dying according to a strictly defined code of honour, is an attractive and romantic ideal, and one many films have celebrated and underlined. But Samurai, like Knights in Medieval Europe, were trained warriors whose chief purpose was to maintain the status quo in the class structure, protecting the Rich and their interests from the mass of the people, who had nothing.
In Harakiri, Masaki Kobayashi approaches this truth. His film positively bristles with an angry contempt for the way of the Samurai. The story is folded into quite a complex double-flashback structure, following the hard times that have befallen a samurai and his family, which drive him to ask at a clan's house for permission to commit seppuku in their courtyard. Then the same happens with another Samurai; older and calmer, he seems to have another agenda. Once he has a captive audience awaiting his dramatic act, he recounts his life and reveals his real reason for requesting seppuku, and it involves revenge..
Kobayashi is a supreme stylist and this film is quite magisterial. Beautiful compositions make the most of the hard lines and grids of period Japanese rooms and brilliantly express the power dynamics in the many intense conversations captured by his camera. That camera moves in slow, slight increments, helping to build up the tension through over two hours of patient, precise storytelling. And that storytelling damns the samurai, exposing the injustice, cruelty and inflexibility at the heart of a society in thrall to such a violent and restrictive cultural phenomenon.
That would not be enough if the dramatic elements did not work in their own right, but work they do. This is primarily a tragedy, driven by the samurai code, and it contains a couple of agonising sequences: the first, almost unwatchable seppuku, performed by an impoverished young samurai with a bamboo sword, and later, the discovery of his fate by his wife and father-in-law. The performances are slightly overheated but that seems operatic through the lens of Kobayashi's surgical directorial vision, and it all leads up to an inevitable and incredible climactic explosion of violence and swordplay, which manages to be both cathartic and tragic.
Most importantly, it's a tremendous ending to an extraordinary film, a film which is moving, beautiful and riveting.
(Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)
It's only when you see a film as set upon savaging the assumptions and hypocrisies of the Samurai class - and by extention, of the Samurai genre - that you realise just how romanticised the Samurai has been by popular culture, and primarily, by Japanese cinema. The noble Warrior, living and dying according to a strictly defined code of honour, is an attractive and romantic ideal, and one many films have celebrated and underlined. But Samurai, like Knights in Medieval Europe, were trained warriors whose chief purpose was to maintain the status quo in the class structure, protecting the Rich and their interests from the mass of the people, who had nothing.
In Harakiri, Masaki Kobayashi approaches this truth. His film positively bristles with an angry contempt for the way of the Samurai. The story is folded into quite a complex double-flashback structure, following the hard times that have befallen a samurai and his family, which drive him to ask at a clan's house for permission to commit seppuku in their courtyard. Then the same happens with another Samurai; older and calmer, he seems to have another agenda. Once he has a captive audience awaiting his dramatic act, he recounts his life and reveals his real reason for requesting seppuku, and it involves revenge..
Kobayashi is a supreme stylist and this film is quite magisterial. Beautiful compositions make the most of the hard lines and grids of period Japanese rooms and brilliantly express the power dynamics in the many intense conversations captured by his camera. That camera moves in slow, slight increments, helping to build up the tension through over two hours of patient, precise storytelling. And that storytelling damns the samurai, exposing the injustice, cruelty and inflexibility at the heart of a society in thrall to such a violent and restrictive cultural phenomenon.
That would not be enough if the dramatic elements did not work in their own right, but work they do. This is primarily a tragedy, driven by the samurai code, and it contains a couple of agonising sequences: the first, almost unwatchable seppuku, performed by an impoverished young samurai with a bamboo sword, and later, the discovery of his fate by his wife and father-in-law. The performances are slightly overheated but that seems operatic through the lens of Kobayashi's surgical directorial vision, and it all leads up to an inevitable and incredible climactic explosion of violence and swordplay, which manages to be both cathartic and tragic.
Most importantly, it's a tremendous ending to an extraordinary film, a film which is moving, beautiful and riveting.
Thursday, 5 May 2011
13 ASSASSINS
(Takashi Miike, 2010)
While 13 Assassins may well be Takashi Miike's most accessible and conventionally entertaining film, it is still quite firmly a Miike production. Which, given the generic stateliness of the material - this is the story of a motley band of Samurai assembled to kill the Shogun's gleefully evil step-brother before he gains any real power with which to damage Japan - makes it a fascinatingly complex and almost contradictory film. For while Miike dutifully details the political machinations and manoeuvring in the lead up to the attempted assassination and also records the preparations for the ambush, his interests seem to lie elsewhere: in the insane cruelty of his villain, murdering children, and raping and mutilating women out of pure boredom - the image of one damaged plaything, her limbs and tongue all cut off, writing a note with a brush in her bloody mouth seems inimitably Miike - but also in the digital photography vividly recreating the period he depicts and in introducing characters without any information or explanation.
The last reel of the film is one long, brutal, bloody battle scene as the 13 fight 200, and here Miike's desire to undercut the Samurai genre even as his film honours and reinvigorates it is at its most pronounced. He shoots these massively involved, complex action sequences With long lenses, visually flattening the action and robbing his scenes of any depth, an oddly undynamic way of shooting some fantastically dynamic action, it might seem. But as the finale goes on and on, an orgy of sword-slashing and blood spattering set to a Symphony of sword upon sword strikes, the action becomes repetitive and even a little comic in its grotesquely sustained brutality. Thus Miike can make a point about the senseless, deadening obscenity of such violence in the genre even while indulging in almost an uninterrupted hour of it.
And that hour is admittedly filled with numerous satisfying genre moments even while Miike seems to be teasing the Samurai film; he gives half of the 13 no discernible personalities, entirely disregards any sense of physical geography during the climax, films the death of a key character from the p.o.v of another, his view obscured and askew, dying nearby, utilises some shoddy cgi, ridiculously resuscitates a seemingly dead character without any explanation and literally portrays a rain of blood at one point. But there are also some fabulous shots and brilliantly choreographed sword fights, a few memorable deaths, and a satisfying, grim conclusion.
Closer to the Action-Samurai work of Kihaci Okamoto than that of Akira Kurosawa (to whom it's been often compared), 13 Assassins is a fine surprise from Miike at this point in his career and one of the best Samurai films of the last two decades.
While 13 Assassins may well be Takashi Miike's most accessible and conventionally entertaining film, it is still quite firmly a Miike production. Which, given the generic stateliness of the material - this is the story of a motley band of Samurai assembled to kill the Shogun's gleefully evil step-brother before he gains any real power with which to damage Japan - makes it a fascinatingly complex and almost contradictory film. For while Miike dutifully details the political machinations and manoeuvring in the lead up to the attempted assassination and also records the preparations for the ambush, his interests seem to lie elsewhere: in the insane cruelty of his villain, murdering children, and raping and mutilating women out of pure boredom - the image of one damaged plaything, her limbs and tongue all cut off, writing a note with a brush in her bloody mouth seems inimitably Miike - but also in the digital photography vividly recreating the period he depicts and in introducing characters without any information or explanation.
The last reel of the film is one long, brutal, bloody battle scene as the 13 fight 200, and here Miike's desire to undercut the Samurai genre even as his film honours and reinvigorates it is at its most pronounced. He shoots these massively involved, complex action sequences With long lenses, visually flattening the action and robbing his scenes of any depth, an oddly undynamic way of shooting some fantastically dynamic action, it might seem. But as the finale goes on and on, an orgy of sword-slashing and blood spattering set to a Symphony of sword upon sword strikes, the action becomes repetitive and even a little comic in its grotesquely sustained brutality. Thus Miike can make a point about the senseless, deadening obscenity of such violence in the genre even while indulging in almost an uninterrupted hour of it.
And that hour is admittedly filled with numerous satisfying genre moments even while Miike seems to be teasing the Samurai film; he gives half of the 13 no discernible personalities, entirely disregards any sense of physical geography during the climax, films the death of a key character from the p.o.v of another, his view obscured and askew, dying nearby, utilises some shoddy cgi, ridiculously resuscitates a seemingly dead character without any explanation and literally portrays a rain of blood at one point. But there are also some fabulous shots and brilliantly choreographed sword fights, a few memorable deaths, and a satisfying, grim conclusion.
Closer to the Action-Samurai work of Kihaci Okamoto than that of Akira Kurosawa (to whom it's been often compared), 13 Assassins is a fine surprise from Miike at this point in his career and one of the best Samurai films of the last two decades.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)