Word: swordplayers
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...office than those of any other actor in history. "I want the movies I'm in to remind me of things I spent Saturday afternoons watching as a kid and then went home and pretended to be in." The Star Wars prequels satisfied his Errol Flynn swordplay fantasies. Shaft let him be the urban John Wayne. Snakes on a Plane, out Aug. 18, fulfills his love of B-movie suspense and his endless desire to watch himself kick ass. "When I think about it," he says, "a lot of my choices are wish fulfillment...
...that is to sell the film short. Duelist?s hyper-romantic impulses and lush symphonic music, plus the backlighting, the stately swordplay, the fat snowflakes, not to mention more slo-mo shots than in a Wong Kar-wai retrospective - all these effects heroicize the enterprise, making it something to gaze upon but not enter into. Indeed, one doesn?t watch Duelist so much as window-shop for fabulous cinematic fashions. Its art direction and lovely mannequins take film style to the outr? limits...
...Christian descendants of a converted Jew in anti-Semitic times, they lack "purity of blood" and soon become targets of the Inquisition. Alatriste too comes under suspicion, and the blood, pure and otherwise, begins to flow. Like the other Alatriste books, Purity of Blood bristles with adventure and swordplay, but in this one the tone is darker, more political. Real-life figures stir the plot, including the poet Francisco de Quevedo and the Conde de Olivares, the powerful Philip IV Minister painted by Velázquez. The Inquisition, in all its appalling horror, is brought to life, as is Spain...
...eerily foretell the 2001 bombing of another famous building (Remember, remember, the 11th of September). It's more audacious still that the Wachowskis, rather than scrubbing their script clean of 9/11 references, would emphasize the connection, proposing a dapper quasi-hero who is part Zorro (with the fancy swordplay), part Phantom of the Opera (but with a jukebox in his underground lair instead of a pipe organ) and just a smidge of Osama bin Laden (but with tastes more aesthetic than ascetic...
REBEL SAMURAI: SIXTIES SWORDPLAY CLASSICS...