With a Samurai Rebel Yell!

Samurai Rebellion. 1967.

Ah, Toshirō Mifune. I have a great idea for a book based on you.

Yōko Tsukasa as his best friend. Masaki Kobayashi as the director. Another long slow boil until the film finally erupts into violence. Don't watch the trailer, it gives away too much. Masaki-san claims that Mifune was distracted in this movie because he had just started his own production company, but who'd have guessed?

Mifune finally starts showing his age, looking haggard with bags starting to form under his eyes, and he plays the henpecked father who retires quietly but is stirred back to life when his daimyo makes outrageous demands on his son and daughter-in-law. It's an odd romantic triangle in a sense, but it works. You have to love the Japanese sense of politeness, at least in the subtitling, when a character apologizes profusely while dying from multiple musket wounds, saying, "I can't take you to Tokyo! I am sorry. It can't be helped."

Another best of samurai film in the bag. One of the better ones for building up psychological tension.

Random Thoughts from a Sunday

First:
If you are an Asian woman with attitude to burn, wearing this shirt should provide maximum deterrence against the would-be fetishists who seem to be endemic to the Bay Area. I saw this shirt on the MUNI, and that woman had attitude to ignite a fusion reactor.

Second:
The new movie Underdog has on its promotional poster at bus stops the following:
Underdog. One Nation Under Dog.
However, I initially read it as One Nation Under a Woof, riffing on the classic by Funkadelic, One Nation Under a Groove. Seriously. This is how my mind works. I actually like my slogan better since the original by Disney could be construed as blasphemous.

I suppose if you were Irish, you might read it as One Nation Built on a Bog. One Nation Under Bog would be the Clockwork Orange slang (nadsat) version.

Besides, I'm enough of a Gen-Xer (wincing) that I can't believe they are shot the new movie as a live-action film, abandoning the classic cartoon Underdog. Sad, the continuing regurgitation of the pop culture of my childhood. This ranks alongside with the new Bionic Woman, sheesh.

Third:
I've added some new elements to the blog. I have no expectations about the Google AdSense button. I hardly expect to make any money, but I was curious to see what kind of ads they'd run. Very similar so far to what I get in gmail. Ho ho ho.

Pottering Around

Well, I finished off the last Harry Potter book yesterday, and there weren't any major surprises, except that I for some reason was expecting a higher death toll. Shame on me. It was pretty engrossing, but it's hard to determine if that was due to the desire to race to the end to get it over with or genuine pleasure. I suppose it depends on where you fall on the Harry Potter like-spectrum.

I also saw "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" last Thursday at a matinée showing in downtown Berkeley. A blissfully empty theater, but never sit against the wall where another action movie is showing because the sub-sonic rumbles from the Surround Sound were quite annoying.

I think that they did a disservice in cutting this movie. I've read that it's the shortest of the films, and that's alarming, considering how dense the last 3 books are. Surely, given the target market for these films, children, the child-like and me, they could've gone for a longer cut because it seems like it was the breathless Cliff Notes to the book (with a few inevitable minor changes), and I think anyone who hadn't read the book would be hardpressed to make sense of it all. Hasn't the Lord of the Rings films taught anyone that or is it going to be the inevitable DVD release with all the extra scenes or the director's cut to sop up some more of that marketing money? Alas.

It was disconcerting for a while until I realized that Robert Hardy, who plays Cornelius Fudge in the movie series, is also the voice for one of the main characters, Lord Malan, in my favorite new BBC radio comedy, His Master's Voice. He is quite spry for a gentleman of 81 years, for I would have never guessed his age.

One thing that they did absolutely right was the casting of the character Luna Lovegood, a 5th book character addition that adds a lot to the series. They picked the perfect unknown actress, Evanna Lynch: she has the perfect look, manner and voice. Kudos for that. She is apparently quite the Harry Potter fan with correspondence with J. K. Rowling predating her involvement in the franchise. The rest of the film was enjoyable, but marred by the necessary perfunctory treatment of most of the major characters. I await the DVD then.