September 10: Contagion (2011 -- Steven Soderbergh)

★★★★

This is an enjoyable film, like I often find Soderbergh’s.  It is fast-paced, beautiful, lyrically edited and somewhat complex.  In structure, it reminds me of Traffic more than many of his later films have.   Like Traffic, Contagion has several stories woven around a central concern: In Traffic, it’s drugs; here, it’s the outbreak of a super influenza.   Contagion follows several stories of people touched by the epidemic, some of the stories intersecting each other briefly -- like Mitch’s and Dr. Mears’ --  while others don’t meet at all.  The main concern of the film is stopping the epidemic, and the film moves this issue forward while each of the component stories finds its own conflicts and resolutions.  I always enjoy this form of storytelling, which calls to mind Altman and PT Anderson.

I like the technical elements here, too.  The editing is so fluid that I gave myself to it and found it has such a strong rhythm that it is close to visual music.  And there is more than fluid editing because cuts frequently come at moments that draw parallels between the various stories.  One cut I remember comes after a crane shot has followed a car down a hillside curve, and as the camera completes a sweeping move, there is a cut; The cut becomes part of the rhythm of the camera movement, completing that movement.  Because of the film's many sound bridges, the editing that draws parallels between stories and cutting as part of the cinematography, I found many beautiful moment to respond to in the film.

It’s also good to see a film that recognizes the role that the internet has taken in lives today.  From Jory making narrative comments on IM to the awful character of Alan Krumwiede, an unscrupulous, paranoid, self-serving blogger, the net has its place.  And the film shows both the up side and down side of it. 

There are definitely moments here that creak a bit with too much Hollywood contrivance, and there is one big logical (or story) flaw about testing a vaccine, but Contagion is a fun, capable and even touching film.  Films like this one are why I make it a point to catch Soderbergh’s work.

Atlanta's Own

September 5: Kagemusha (1980 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★★★

September 1: The Magnificent Seven (1960 -- John Sturges)

★★★

In at least one element, The Magnificent Seven far outstrips its inspiration, Seven Samurai: the music.  Elmer Bernstein’s theme here has become THE soundtrack I associate with a western, and I was half surprised to find that it came from this film and not from Bonanza or a John Ford movie.  This bold, soaring music is the sonic version of the big, open spaces of the West.  It’s fair to call it classic, with no reservations.

The rest of The Magnificent Seven falls short of the source material, though.  Sturges tries to preserve the epic breadth of Samurai, but having to cut 1/3 of the running time of the original clearly forces some cuts in scale.  We don’t meet all the gunfighters and get to know them; they become more like shallow stereotypes or one-note-nellies than the characters in Samurai.  More to the point, we don’t see these samurai, er, gunfighters, interact with each other significantly, so there’s none of the team growth we see in Samurai.  Ultimately, we’re not as invested in these characters as we are in Kurosawa’s.  For example, Harry, who is supposed to be Chris Larabee’s old friend, only has one major dialog with the leader, and that consists of doubting him.  Harry’s one-note is to constantly question villagers about the ulterior motive that Larabee doesn’t have, but there’s not growth or dramatic outcome from it.  Likewise, Lee’s sole trope is to fret about fear through his little screen time.  He never has any real interaction with any of the team members, though his courage suddenly emerges at the end (for some reason….).  The team of The Magnificent Seven doesn’t build, and as viewers, we’re far less involved with them than we are with the samurai.

Director John Sturges makes gestures toward some of the themes in Seven Samurai, too, but his film doesn’t quite pull them together the way Kurosawa’s does.  The education-of-a-youth theme is a good fit for a western, but we don't see much of that happening here.  And although gun slingers and farmers are different classes, they aren’t as hierarchically different as samurai and farmers, so Magnificent Seven can't do much to question class with these characters.  Sturges’ men may share their stew with the villagers, who are getting by on tortillas, but the implications of that gesture don’t so much question class distinctions as point to a sense of shared humanity.  Even the love story between Chico and Petra is without the social implications of the romance between samurai Katsushiro and farm girl Shino.  And the love story here is very rushed, anyway.

The stakes are lower in The Magnificent Seven than in Seven Samurai, and the audience’s involvement with the characters less.  But it’s still a grand, fun movie with Yul Brenner machismo and Steve McQueen good looks.  And unforgettable music.

August 30: Seven Samurai/Shichinin no samurai (1954 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★★★

Thought it was about time I checked this movie out, so I settled in for half of it….and couldn’t leave.  I think this film plugged into many of the themes I like: its warm humanity, its elder-teaching-youth theme, its plot of building a team to accomplish an ethical goals.  These are things I always enjoy in a film, and I thoroughly enjoyed them here. 

I like the breadth of Seven Samurai, too.  We follow not only the seven samurai but also some of the villagers.  And like Altman would later, Kurosawa develops a character arc for many of the characters instead of just one or two.  We follow the leader, Kambei; the youth, Katsushiro; the samurai wanna be, Kikuchiyo; Kambei’s friend, Shichiroji; kendo master, Kyuzo;   the villager, Rikichi; Katsushiro’s love interest, Shino; and many others.  It takes a 3.5-hour film to do that, and the movie doesn't waste a second.  Although it doesn’t develop any of these characters in real depth, they’re all more than mere ciphers for an idea or stereotypes as the movie follows their growing together to accomplish a goal.  And there are touching moments as we learn about them: Katsushiro’s tossing money to ensure the villagers can get rice of the samurai and Kikuchio’s unintended revelation that he has a farming background, for example.  These two characters in particular also tread along social class boundaries, putting them at the center of one of the themes of the film. 

I was also relieved that I wasn’t put off by cultural elements of the film.  The over-the-top theatricality that I sometimes find in Japanese film generally takes me out of the movie, but that didn’t happen in Seven Samurai.  Toshino Mifune’s Kikuchiyo is big here, and I sometimes found him too big; his actions go beyond what seems the norm for the movie.  But Mifune never takes him so far out that I can’t continue to see him in the film.  The ensemble models how to respond to Kikuchiyo, and I found that easy to follow.

If Altman had done an action movie, it would have looked like Seven Samurai.  Warm, human, engaging, deep, poignant, epic and ethical. And photographed beautifully.  I know this film is seen as the predecessor for many team-action films, but it has more affective complexity than any other I’m aware of.  Seven Samurai is a wonderful cinematic achievement and testimony to what cinema can do.  And worth many hours of rewatching.

August 30: Sanjuro/Tsubaki Sanjûrô (1962 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★
It seems this film gets short shrift when people talk about it with Yojimbo, but I like this sequel better than the first.  There’s a more action in this one, and there’s humanity in its gentle comedy.  Many of the smiles and laughs come from the contrast of earnest, impetuous youth contrasted and skilled, weary experience of maturity.  And this set-up even propells the story on several occasions.  There’s a similar deft humor in the courtly ladies, who emphasize conventional correctness over expediency at nearly every turn.  But their comic relief, too, has its warm and knowing truth, recognized by Sanjuro both when he has cascades of white camellias tossed in the stream and when he quotes the older lady about the sheathed sword.  In fact, despite all its violence, Sanjuro affirms the wisdom of maturity over the earnest strength of youth throughout.  Or maybe I’m just getting old.

I find Sanjuro himself interesting here as in Yojimbo.  Unlike today’s action heroes, Sanjuro keeps his strength in check until he judges he needs it, and he is a paragon of judgment.  Of course, he could take on Schwarzenegger if he needed to, but Sanjuro prefers to work in the realm of the trickster rather than the elephant, accomplishing his goals with his wit rather than his martial prowess.  In addition to his controlled strength, this samurai is another 60s antihero, rejecting the status quo and following his own high moral code.  He has more depth here than in Yojimbo, and that adds to the appeal of the film, too.

So Sanjuro is a fun action movie with a compelling hero and a moral focus.  I was a little surprised at how much I enjoyed it.  

August 29: Fistful of Dollars/Per un pugno di dollari (1964 -- Sergio Leone)

★★

I think I read somewhere that Kurosawa had sued Sergio Leone’s company for stealing from Yojimbo to make Fistful of Dollars and Kurosawa had won the lawsuit.  Kurosawa said he’d made more from Fistful of Dollars than he’d made from Yojimbo.  No surprise that that he won the lawsuit, but a pity that the copy did so much better at the box office than the original.    

Once again, I find myself no fan of the pop culture knock-off.  The things I like most in FoD come from Yojimbo or the Westerns that precede it, things like the cinematography and the grittiness.  You hear that FoD introduced this roughness into the Western genre, but I’m thinking Kurosawa deserves that accolade more than Leone.  Kurosawa made the conceptual leap of creating the gritty, action anti-hero; all I see in Leone is following Kurosawa’s direction.

And he really does follow it.  FoD lifts whole scenes out of Yojimbo.  A man stops at a fountain for a drink in the beginning of both, and the heroes in both pal up with the inn keeper in both to find out about the bands of bad guys in both.  Citation is rife, at least in some of the more surface elements.

But when I consider the depth and involvement I felt in the two movies, I really see the difference.  FoD is more a stylistic exercise than anything else.  In the many parallel scenes and actions in the two films, scenes like the rescue of the damsel in distress have genuine resonance in Kurosawa while, in Leone, Joe just goes through the motions. There’s a deep moral motive in Yojimbo, but Joe just does the rescue;  Joe’s hair is hardly messed up in his rescue, but Yojimbo can hardly walk or even breath after he is caught.  One character clearly reaches deeper and sacrifices more for a human value that does the other.  The depth of humanity that you find in Kurosawa is lacking in FoD.

So for me, Fistful of Dollars is more a historical curiosity than a work of art that moves me, that I recognize humanity in.  Good for what it is.

August 28: Yojimbo/Yôjinbô (1961 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★
This is my second time around with this Kurosawa film, too, and I still don’t see what everyone else does in it.  I get that Kurosawa adapts the conventions of the western into a Japanese context here, and I get that the movie is technically great. 

But I still don’t respond to it the way that so many critics do.  I find it clever – shots like the low-angle ones with architecture or the bell in the background are citations from so many westerns.  And the dusty street scenes shot from behind one group looking out the other, a classic shoot-out composition albeit using guys with swords and wearing Japanese clothes.  But I find this kind of cinematic borrowing more clever than insightful or creative.  Films like Yojimbo remind me of Quentin Tarantino’s approach to film; appropriate some distinctive film flourishes from an external source (Asian B-movies on Tarantino’s part; the Western on Kurosawa’s) and then put the borrowings together skillfully so the cinematic elements make some sense to the target audience.  This citation/appropriation, to me, never rises much above “clever.”

Of course there are Kurosawa touches here that are unique to him: there’s Lady Macbeth in the character of Seibei’s wife, and there’s the humanity at the center of so much of what I like about Kurosawa.  Yojimbo offers Sanjuro’s pity for the plight of the kidnapped mother as well as the endearing figures of the restaurant owner and coffin maker.  And Toshiro Mifune puts in another amazing performance here, too.

But these touches don’t make Yojimbo for me.  Maybe I have a limited sense of humor, but the horns and 60s flourishes of the soundtrack are unnecessarily heavy-handed intrusions to me, the drum roll behind a comedy routine, and the comedy often seems based in traditions or cultural values that are too distant for me to sense and respond to. 

So although Yojimbo was a hugely influential film in popular culture, I think I’d put my money on films like Throne of Blood and High and Low.