Word: samurais
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...BATMAN In the past, a katana, a Japanese sword, was a samurai's soul. The warriors may be long gone, but the samurai spirit lives on--particularly among Japanese professional baseball players. Take the Seattle Mariners' All-Star center fielder Ichiro Suzuki. Between games, Ichiro gives his bat the katana treatment: keeping it protected in a sealed aluminum case. After every game, he takes it to his locker and shows his gratitude for its service by going through the ritual of cleaning...
ONLY HALF-JOKINGLY he called himself the "Godfather, the Samurai, the leader, the warrior." That may sound a bit over the top for a publishing executive. But in his world of high-fashion magazines, Steven Florio, longtime CEO of Condé Nast, had a point. Expert at imagining creative ways to win and please advertisers, the charming Florio boosted the company that produces Vogue, Glamour and Vanity Fair to the second largest in the industry during the '90s, when many magazines were flagging. Florio was 58 and died after a heart attack...
...spaghetti western changed that. Sergio Leone filched the plot from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (Hollywood had already remade Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) for his 1964 Fistful of Dollars. Clint ambles into a rotten town commandeered by rival miscreants and takes both gangs down. In Fistful and the Leone-Eastwood followups For a Few Dollars More (surely the most honest title every slapped on a sequel) and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, society was run by outlaws. The moral choice was among various shades of black. Anarchy ran riot, and the only recourse was martial...
...foreigners, it's different. The American West is a fantasyland, a place of endless plains, quaint towns and tough men settling scores. Akira Kurosawa transposed the genre's tropes to medieval Japan, then saw his Eastern westerns remade in Hollywood (The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) and Europe (Yojimbo as Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine...
...products on Western screens, it will bring to Asian films what Weinstein calls a "Western sensibility." So far the slate includes a live-action film of the fable Mulan; a martial arts team-up of Jackie Chan and Jet Li; and a remake of the 1954 classic, The Seven Samurai, which transplants Kurosawa's besieged Japanese village to the outskirts of Bangkok and recasts the Japanese fighters as mercenary soldiers, three of whom speak English...