Word: yojimbo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...imagery is of comparable quality, at once awesome in its power, delicate in its irony and, finally, for all the violence of the events it recounts, eerily serene in the sureness with which it achieves its effects. At 75, with such films as Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo already installed furnishings of the modern sensibility, Kurosawa is not only the master of his own medium but, more important, of his own mind as well...
...critic, of their success. "They are part of a new tendency among Japanese directors to visualize the 'irrational' elements of the Eastern world through Western-style intelligence. Once, when a Westerner looked at Japanese movies-at Kurosawa's kamikaze-type warriors in The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, or Ozu's gentle heroines in Tokyo Story and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, or Mizoguchi's evocations of Kabuki drama in Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff-he, could tell himself, 'This is Japan!' He can't find that kind of false reassurance...
...outline suggests a standard scenario of Armageddon aftershock. Bikers have terrorized many a decent citizen in movies over the past three decades. And the sociopathic superman has emerged to defend them in distinguished westerns (John Ford's The Searchers) and easterns (Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo). What Miller has done here is create a milieu as dense and tangy as Tolkien's Middle Earth or Céline's demimonde. This is Australia as the Down Underworld, where character is revealed in the gradations between good and awful. Drawn in vivid cartoon strokes, this menagerie...
...Yojimbo [Coolidge Corner]: Toshiro Mifune, playing John Belushi, rides into town with a samurai sword for hire. He meets clint Eastwood, who plays an American actor who acts in spaghetti westerns based on Japanese classics. Mifune says "This film is better than anything you'll ever do" and Eastwood replies "Yeah, but more people will see my movies and they'll think my plots were original. You'll wind up announcing winners on the Emmy Awards." Mifune sighs in agreement and shows Eastwood how to spin a six-shooter. Eastwood show Mifune how to open a beer can with...
...story here. On the other hand, there is a lot of film here too, more than 2½ hours of it, even in a truncated "international version." The considerable pleasure of Kagemusha tends to be of the stately visual variety. The old master of Japanese cinema (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo) may merely allude to material that in younger hands would be the stuff of a passionate play. But Kurosawa's mood now is autumnal and dispassionate. What really interests him is an imagery that can only be termed timeless: the look of an army on the march, silhouetted against...