Word: samurais
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...true, however, that Japan had been culturally static until then. Japan's ancient imperial capital Kyoto represented the classic division of old Japanese power: court, samurai, priests. It continued to exert a great influence on the country's art. But in Edo, a more secular and even demotic imagination began to assert itself--marked, writes Singer, by "bold, sometimes brash expression...and a playful outlook on life in general." This happened because Japanese society, in the new capital, became somewhat more open to change. Not very much, but a little, and then a little more. The once despised merchants...
...less than $25) gets rivers clogged with corpses. America's wealth entitles its citizens to work themselves into a moral froth over office fellatio. America's vast First World privilege also means that its scandals are infinitely less dangerous to the man and woman in the street. America's samurai of opinion scream at one another on talk shows; political argument in Rwanda means a million people hacked to pieces by machetes...
...Japanese cinema to the West in 1950 with Rashomon, a work of tremendous moral and cinematic force whose influence on Western filmmakers is immeasurable. This was the first in a series of masterpieces from Kurosawa in the '50s and '60s, one more startling than the other: Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, High and Low; in his work, the CinemaScope frame always threatens to explode with odd tensions and latent energies. It is perhaps Ikiru, about a man with cancer who searches for meaning in life, that had the greatest impact on me. Seeing this...
...genius of Ronin is that it slyly but quite openly acknowledges the abstract state at which the action film has arrived. The title is the Japanese word for samurai who have lost their master and must hire themselves out as amoral and dispassionate mercenaries. The script, by J.D. Zeik and Richard Weisz (a pseudonym for David Mamet), applies the term to former CIA and KGB agents who are now obliged to work for terrorists and other international thugs, with no ideology to justify their exertions. It sets a bunch of them--including Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgard...
...visually compelling films integrated Japanese culture into the global movie idiom and inspired a generation of Western directors; in Tokyo. Rashomon (1950), the tale of a murder seen four ways, first brought him fame outside Japan, its title now a byword for the fragility of truth. Even as his samurai epics like Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985) borrowed from the West, particularly Shakespeare, movies outside Japan borrowed from him: The Seven Samurai is at the heart of The Magnificent Seven; The Hidden Fortress is concealed in Star Wars...