Word: samurais
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Made in 1957, this samurai Macbeth offers new insights into character and motivation as well as preserving the wild atmosphere of the original. When Macbeth returns from murdering the King, Lady Macbeth must pry his clenched fingers off the bloody spear--and it is with such moments that Kurosawa shows the eloquence of simple action. The classic scenes and images neither fall flat nor stick out as irrelevant set-pieces. The haggish forest spirit who replaces the Weird Sisters is as eery as they, with her boomy, slowed-down voice. Macduff's advancing army, seen through Fuji's mists, really...
...standards. Wheeler died in 1956, and Editor Harold Henderson (former Nipponologist at Columbia University) has now dipped into Wheeler's collection and selected 24 gracefully wrought, highly polished little gems. A favorite hero is the trickster figure, who appears in many guises (as a taciturn bumpkin, a crafty samurai, a modest wife, a voluptuous virgin) and unfailingly triumphs. But the Japanese joker is a special breed. A blend of Socrates and Till Eulenspiegel, he serves as gadfly to his ritualistic feudal society, sits in judgment on its fools and fakers. These stories establish him as a considerable literary creation...
...Kurosawa's best movies. The violence and the comedy are disproportionate to the story, and are never quite integrated in it. This is not to say that Sanjuro is a bad movie. It isn't. But it belongs to a lighter level of entertainment than Rashomon or Seven Samurai. The story-line itself has no less potential that that of Seven Samurai; but here Kurosawa has chosen to keep it exaggerated and farcical rather than to develop it in depth...
...Seven Samurai and Rashomon, the relationship begins as an equally gratuitous intrusion. Mifune the bandit is a whirlwind of more-than-human vital force, neither good nor evil, which attaches itself to one side of the protagonists' drama...
...amoral force is made either evil or good by the intentions of those whom he joins. In Rashomon, the intrusion of the bandit's passion challenges a stable marriage, casts doubt on each witness's version of the rape scene, and brings about death and disgrace. In Seven Samurai, the outsider joins the mission of the samurai in spite of their rejection of him, and becomes their sustaining force as they fight on behalf of the farmers...