Word: yojimbo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pushes the actor into Wesley Snipes territory, as he plays a figure who channels both a taciturn John Wayne hero and the implacable warriors of Japanese samurai films like Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo and the Zatoichi blind-swordsman series - all of which fed on, and in turn fed, the Hollywood notion of solitary, preternatural machismo. The new movie taps Washington's coiled strength, transforms that asset into a weapon and gives him the chance to kick ass for righteousness' sake...
...Riddick and xXx has the huge, smooth head of an outdoor sculpture, a bad Buddha, and the dull eyes and mouth of a golem who's just been recklessly woken. His screen personality could be seen as surly or resentful - in the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry or Toshiro Mifune Yojimbo mode - if he displayed anything as human as an attitude. Instead he simply looms and emits fumes; he just is. He can read lines and move about, but there's no inner life to this Refrigerator; when you shut the door, the light goes out. (Read the Q&A with...
...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...
...rooting interest, and because Clint was so damn cool, he established the new mode: hero by default. The good guy was the one with the fastest gun, the meanest scowl and top billing. And that perpetual three-day beard that Toshiro Mifune had worn in the same role in Yojimbo; in Hollywood Westerns, the hero's visage was typically hairless, while villains sported a dastardly mustache. Eastwood's scruff became a fashion statement that lives today on the carefully unshaven faces of pop stars and young actors. And his surliness, transposed to the Dirty Harry Callahan character he played...
...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...