Mark Sullivan wrote:
> David, it sounds like you know a whole hell of a lot
more about Japanese
> films than I do (not that that takes much), so since
you just mentioned
> the second Yojimbo, have you seen Zatoichi Meets
Yojimbo? Any good?
I'd never even heard of it until you mentioned it. The IMDB
opinion seems to think that's it's not so good. My guess
would be that it probably isn't, as is the case with just
about any sequels that have progressed that far from their
source material.
Samurai and yakuza pics are a mixed bag...like any genre.
Taken objectively, most American westerns and noir/thrillers
are junk (anyone who thinks otherwise is probably just
nostalgically remembering the gems more than the drek)--more
so for westerns because they were churned out at a far
greater pace and for far longer. But man...all you have to do
is stumble upon a bona fide cheapie classic like Edgar G.
Ulmer's "Detour" or an idiosyncratically weird programmer
like Joseph H. Lewis's "Terror in a Texas Town" or Andre de
Toth's "Pitfall" or Sam Fuller's "The Naked Kiss", or an
admirable bit of solid genre craftsmanship like Phil
Karlson's "Gunman's Walk" or, well, Phil Karlson's "Phenix
City Story" or "Kansas City Confidential" or "The Brothers
Rico" or...I could go on. But anyway, after hitting one of
those gems, who cares about the four bad genre movies you
watched before that? It's all good.
Samurai and yakuza movies are a lot like that. Most of what's
around is mediocre to bad. But when you hit one that really
shines, you'll forget about all those.
Honestly I don't know as much about foreign genre pics as I
do about American movies (what can I say? ours are the best)
but for rudimentary off-the-beaten-path samurai pic
recommendations, I have three:
The Gates of Hell (I don't think I ever knew what the
Japanese title was, and now I can't find it on IMDB...)
Miyamoto Mushshi (with Toshiro Mifune doing his "crazy
samurai" act again...but it's a good movie despite
that)
Chushingura (When I saw it it was called the 47 Ronin, but
it's not a sequel or remake of any sort of the Mizoguchi
movie of the same name...they just both take their plots from
the same historical episode).
And, yes, Kobo Abe. Overall a strange gentleman. I've never
read him, but I did see the Japanese movie made out of his
"Woman of the Dunes." Weird is about all I've got to say
about that. I don't much understand movies made after 1960,
whether they're American or Japanese.
David Moran
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 06 Jul 2004 EDT