M
MEP
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The thread on westerns (strangely in the wrong forum) got me to thinking about other movies that western fans might enjoy. In particular, someone mentioned The Magnificent Seven which is a great movie, but also happens to be a remake of an even better movie, Seven Samurai directed by Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa had another movie which was remade as a western – Yojimbo was remade twice, once as Fistful of Dollars and later as the atrocious crime against cinema, Last Man Standing.
Both Seven Samurai and Yojimbo were definitive movies which heavily influenced the movie industry and even helped to define new genres (Seven Samurai in particular established a new set of filmic vocabulary that has become so ingrained in modern cinema, it’s hard to imagine what movies would be like today had it never been made).
There are a lot of similarities between the western and the old samurai films from Japan. Replace the wandering gunfighter with the wandering ronin and the evil mine/bank/saloon owner with an evil feudal lord or a yakuza boss and you basically have a samurai movie, but there was a lot more to it than that.
Both genres grew up during the same period of time and both borrowed heavily from each other, each of them getting more cinematically complex as they continued to generate new ideas on their own and borrow from each other. I think a lot of western movie fans would not regret hunting down some of the Criterion DVDs of Kurosawa’s early movies or find some of the old Shintaro Kastu Zatoichi movies (of which there were 26 – he was an incredibly popular character who became sort of a new folk hero archetype for the Japanese).
Some recommendations include:
Seven Samurai
Yojimbo
Sanjuro
The Hidden Fortress (one of the inspirations for Star Wars)
Zatoichi On the Road
Zatoichi 21 - The Festival of Fire
So anybody else out there like a good chanbarra movie? Anybody else know of some good Samurai movies that they’d like to recommend? An awful lot of people don’t even know about Kurosawa anymore which I find kind of sad considering how much he changed cinema in Hollywood as well as in Japan (I forgot that he also more or less defined the court room drama in Rashomon – well, early court room drama before the genre got a little more sophisticated and then later flushed itself down the drain).
sidenote: I’d avoid the Takeshi Kitano Zatoichi movie if you’re looking for parallels between chanbarra movies and westerns. It’s more of a traditional martials arts pic and the plot has more Chinese influence than Western influence (tap dancing scenes aside – silly Kitano-san).
Both Seven Samurai and Yojimbo were definitive movies which heavily influenced the movie industry and even helped to define new genres (Seven Samurai in particular established a new set of filmic vocabulary that has become so ingrained in modern cinema, it’s hard to imagine what movies would be like today had it never been made).
There are a lot of similarities between the western and the old samurai films from Japan. Replace the wandering gunfighter with the wandering ronin and the evil mine/bank/saloon owner with an evil feudal lord or a yakuza boss and you basically have a samurai movie, but there was a lot more to it than that.
Both genres grew up during the same period of time and both borrowed heavily from each other, each of them getting more cinematically complex as they continued to generate new ideas on their own and borrow from each other. I think a lot of western movie fans would not regret hunting down some of the Criterion DVDs of Kurosawa’s early movies or find some of the old Shintaro Kastu Zatoichi movies (of which there were 26 – he was an incredibly popular character who became sort of a new folk hero archetype for the Japanese).
Some recommendations include:
Seven Samurai
Yojimbo
Sanjuro
The Hidden Fortress (one of the inspirations for Star Wars)
Zatoichi On the Road
Zatoichi 21 - The Festival of Fire
So anybody else out there like a good chanbarra movie? Anybody else know of some good Samurai movies that they’d like to recommend? An awful lot of people don’t even know about Kurosawa anymore which I find kind of sad considering how much he changed cinema in Hollywood as well as in Japan (I forgot that he also more or less defined the court room drama in Rashomon – well, early court room drama before the genre got a little more sophisticated and then later flushed itself down the drain).
sidenote: I’d avoid the Takeshi Kitano Zatoichi movie if you’re looking for parallels between chanbarra movies and westerns. It’s more of a traditional martials arts pic and the plot has more Chinese influence than Western influence (tap dancing scenes aside – silly Kitano-san).
