Amph What was the last movie you saw? (Ver. 2)

The Last Samurai (2003) – Edward Zwick

You believe a man can change his destiny?

I think a man does what he can.

So, in the years since The Last Samurai came out, its racial politics have come under a lot of fire. Well, that’s not actually entirely accurate; even at the time, a shocking seventeen years ago now, people took issue with the appropriation of Japanese culture and history in order to tell the hero’s journey of a white man. So, this is a movie that’s grown only less beloved with time, so I feel like I should just say this up front and get it out there. I like this movie a lot.

I haven’t seen it probably since it came out or not long after so I was curious as to how I’d feel about the movie on a revisit; I remember finding a lot to criticize the first time I saw it and I’m not going to lie, it’s a movie with problems. But surprisingly, I found myself responding to it much more positively this time, perhaps because I went in expecting to be cringing a lot. The cast is really quite brilliant. Yes, this is, in many ways, a Cruise vanity project, forever silhouetting him against the sunset or lingering in a tight close up on his smiling face, but I also have to say that he’s very good here. When the movie starts, his character is an unapologetic racist and a man who has participated in the genocide of the Native Americans; he’s a self-loathing alcoholic that’s flirting with suicide. And he’s excellent at that; as his character mellows out, he gets more into movie star mode, but he has one scene near the end that is darn close to the best acting he’s ever done. Ken Watanabe is, as always, just fantastic. He’s an actor that I never tire of watching and here, in his first big American film, he already has the charisma and energy and intelligence that he’s still bringing to roles. Sichinosuke Nakamura is also excellent as Emperor Meiji, a young man in over his head, conflicted about his role, uncertain who he can trust. Hiroyuki Sanada is exceptional as Watanabe’s right-hand man; he brings an unbridled ferocity to a role that could easily be bland and stereotypical. Timothy Spall and Tony Goldwyn are also on hand and quite good as a Japanophile (not to say weeaboo) photographer and a preening U.S. Army officer, respectively. And the film is, to say the least, handsomely presented. It’s beautifully shot with gorgeous cinematography by John Toll, who presents the intricate sets and costumes and the sweeping natural vistas to great effect.

The problems with the film are mostly with the writing. I didn’t mention Koyuki when talking about the cast. She’s very good, but she’s ill-served with a very under-written role that ultimately crosses the line, in my opinion, into annoyingly bad. Much is made of the racial politics of having her fall in love with the white man who killed husband and the racial politics of her giving him her husband’s armor is even ickier in my opinion. But my objection to the romance is as much just from a writing standpoint as from a racial one; it just ill serves both characters and when it enters the movie it feels incredibly cheesy. I don’t mind the notion of Cruise’s character understanding that she’s the widow of the samurai he killed or of her slow journey to seeing him as a human being and not just a murderer. I think there’s a redemptive story line there that could work, if done with sensitivity and a real human touch; but that’s not what we get here – we get some longing looks and then a cringe-inducing scene of her dressing him in her husband’s armor and then a kiss that is the worst decision this movie makes. And, of course, Cruise’s hero’s journey is hardly ground-breaking, though I do think it fails to really fit the white savior narrative a lot of people accuse this movie of having; Cruise’s character is the one who needs saving in the spiritual sense and he finds himself as a person by learning from Watanabe’s character, not the other way around. Is the samurai culture romanticized and the code of Bushido over-cooked and the warrior-poet archetype problematic here? Yes, even though Cruise isn’t the savior, his journey to redemption through Japanese culture still has elements of appropriation, but it’s not as embarrassing as I’d feared it would be. And what the script gets right is the relationship between Cruise and Watanabe, a relationship far more interesting than any misbegotten romantic subplot.

So, at the end of the film, problematic as it is, I ended up finding it profoundly moving in an emotional way. At almost two-and-a-half hours, the film never drags, though it also never feels rushed. It takes the time to develop the characters in an organic way, but always in an energetic and entertaining way. It’s kind of remarkable, being a big-budget period piece vanity project, that it isn’t a slog, but it isn’t. And at the end of the day, I was incredibly entertained as only these kind of big budget epics can entertain and, in the same way as a lot of classic films, the problematic elements, while certainly worth thinking about and discussing in concert with viewing the film, didn’t keep me from having a heck of a good time with this movie and being emotionally manipulated in all the intended ways. No, it’s not subtle, but it’s Edward Zwick, right? I still like Glory too, guys. I probably lose some street cred for this, but I kind of loved this movie this time, even recognizing that it’s not perfect. Yeah, I’m going there. 4 stars.

tl;dr – imperfect and culturally/racially problematic, The Last Samurai is still rousing entertainment in a grand epic style; great performances all around and undeniable emotional impact. 4 stars.

 

Gone with the Wind. This is a great example of a “great film” that not only isn’t great, it’s not even good. Even leaving aside its ridiculously sympathetic portrayal of a bunch of unreconstructed Confederates, it’s terrible just on normal movie terms. It has very, very handsome cinematography, but that’s the only strength. Aside from that, it is an absolutely interminable four hours of melodramatic trash. The acting is abominable and the writing is worse. The main character is repellent, a narcissistic, selfish, spoiled child who in four hours (I cannot stress the excessive runtime enough — I had to take this in three sittings because I couldn’t take this for more than about an hour and a half), again, in four hours, doesn’t learn a goddamn thing. She ends the movie as repugnant as she started, and deserves all the contempt she gets from Clark Gable, whose dripping contempt for everyone else in the film, along with Sherman’s army burning everything down, are the only bright spots in this turgid garbage. This is another case of watching something just to have an opinion, because of all these four hours, not a minute of it was worth my time.

 

Well, with the “god as my witness” speech she goes from spoiled child to hardened, hard working matriarch who provides for the family, but other than that, I agree. The best parts for me were Gable tearing everyone to shreds and just throwing everything in everyone’s face. You literally have to slog through 90 minutes of insufferable Scarlett before you get to any Gable, though.

 

Eh, she goes from selfish, spoiled child who takes her world for granted to selfish, spoiled child who’s more unapologetic about her unadulterated narcissism because now she feels extra justified about being a selfish brat. She still doesn’t grow up in her interactions with anybody else, get over that married loser, show any consideration for anything but her own comfort. She’s disgusting at the start and she’s disgusting in all the same ways right up until Gable gives her the final, well-deserved kiss-off.

 

Johnny Angel. A noir starring George Raft as a ship captain who finds his father’s ship adrift and empty, and investigates to find out who murdered him, it has a good premise. The execution is competent but unremarkable, and it never really gets much going.

 

I love watching Scarlett precisely because she's so repellent.

 

I remember when you used to write lovely, thoughtful things like this about Elizabeth.

 

Agreed. I think Leigh's performance is phenomenally good, precisely because she refuses to ever sanitize the character or make her likeable at all. There's a level of irony in the presentation of her character and also in the overall presentation of the culture of the Confederacy. I think it's interesting that @Havac says that it's a sympathetic, romanticized presentation and also that the main character is repellent, selfish, spoiled and narcissistic. I mean, that doesn't really sound like a sympathetic presentation, does it?

The treatment of the entire culture is basically the same. The movie sets up Ashley, for instance, as this incredibly principled exemplar of Southern manners. And then it relentlessly undercuts him and makes him out to be an incredibly ineffective fool. One of the key undercuttings of Scarlett's character in the first place, by the by, is that she's in love with the simpering idiot. But I guess what I mean by the irony of the presentation is neatly summed up in that ending; the score swells majestically with that beautiful final shot, but, like Havac says, she hasn't learned anything - she's just falling back into the same delusions that have driven her the entire movie. The first time I saw the movie, I was young enough to take the notion that Scarlett had finally achieved some sort of redemption at the end seriously or that she was going to anyway; I don't anymore. She's a lost soul and always will be. It's a really dark movie; Scarlett is one of the great unsympathetic characters in cinema history in my opinion.

Anyway, I love the movie. I don't think it's overlong at all, honestly. I've seen it three or four times. Got to see it on the big screen a few years ago, which was great.

 

While I see your point, I think there's a serious risk of sarchasm that shouldn't be ignored. If they were trying to present something that undercut the image of the Confederacy, did they really succeed? When it is cited in public discussion, it's not usually to castigate. Instead, it is invoked unironically in the gauzy, glowing terms that the film presents in its most superficial reading.

 

I also love Gone with the Wind with @Rogue1-and-a-half 's reading in mind but also have to juggle my own analysis with the history of the Lost Cause and how the book was written and designed to perpetrate it. Whether Hollywood and its directors and actors are satirizing the story is up in the air (they certainly tried to sanitize it), but the book is a grossly vile and disturbing work of literature. To this day Southerners watch Gone with the Wind with Margaret Mitchell's understanding of the text, not mine.

 

I don't get the point of Scarlett as a character either. She is a survivor, perhaps a symbol of the south, but an awful person. But oh that wonderful score.

 

The Force Awakens. I seem to like this one better with repeated viewings.

 

@Rogue1-and-a-half I agree that there was some element of criticism — you can’t have Gable throwing shade at everybody without it — but I don’t think the film presents it at all well. There’s no thought-through, coherent take you can draw from it. Gable razzes the Cause, and then goes off and fights for it anyway. Scarlett’s selfishness and immaturity ruin her life, but the film seems far more sympathetic to her than not, overall, and treats her more as a tragic heroine who fails to recognize Mr. Right until it’s too late than as what she is, the villain of the piece. Nothing meaningfully penetrates the gauzy feel-good haze thrown around slavery. I just don’t think any level of irony is strong enough in the film to significantly penetrate the bubble of the story it’s working with. It ends up seeming at best confused by, not condemnatory toward, its characters and their setting, and cannot muster up any really cutting themes to undercut the story’s simpering basic positioning of its narcissistic, parasitic lead as a romantic heroine.

Each Dawn I Die. Cagney and Raft get a movie tough-guy pair-up, Cagney as a framed reporter, and Raft as the gangster he befriends in prison and who eventually helps him clear his name. It’s about what you expect from a thirties picture: a competently executed, entertaining picture that’s not exactly that revolutionary. Cagney gets a good arc as he gets hardened by prison, and Raft gets to do his thing as a charming tough guy. I didn’t find myself overly impressed by it, but it’s solid.

 

It depends on your pov. Many have found her sympathetic. I'm guessing J-Rod and southern conservatives do. Though I wonder even at that; after all, she is a "strong woman" who becomes independent by taking on the role of a man.

Scarlett doesn't really reflect southern culture, anyway. Melanie, who dies, too good for this sinful earth, is the perfect southern belle.

 

They’re both gross Lost Cause character tropes and both very Southern, Melanie, unable to adapt to *gasp* black people voting, representing Mitchell’s conception of the Old South and Scarlett the New South, where white people have to scrape and claw at the earth to get anything or w/e.

The book really changed my perception of the story / movie. The text itself is just vile.

 

Heroes of the East 1979 (again). Not much a fan of this Lau Chia-Liang tale of China vs Japan through a married couple and the Japanese wife's reactive Nippon peers who come to challenge her hubby.

My sole reason for watching this one again: I quite enjoy Yasuaki Kurata's crafty ninja Takeno who unleashes some crab style among many martial displays. He was criminally underused. Kurata-San is just awesome.

​

 

Interesting. I read the book back in college and I honestly don't remember much about it. I remember thinking that Scarlett was even less likable than in the movie because we get a bit more of her interior monologue. My memory is that the movie follows the basic plot particulars of the book very closely.

Well, again, I think our primary disagreement is going to be over just how much the movie wants Scarlett to be a likable or admirable heroine and how much it wants her to be a repugnant, if also perversely fascinating, character. But I think you're right to say the movie is confused about a lot of its themes and its characters.

But I think those disconnects, which I do agree are there even if I find them less jarring than you do, are probably down to the fact that the movie had three directors. All the prep work, and some of the filming, was done by George Cukor, who was a guy that liked exploring female characters with some psychological complexity; most of the film was shot by Victor Fleming, a director with more romantic sensibilities, after Cukor got fired over creative differences; and they even got Sam Wood in there for a few weeks. Wood once said of Groucho Marx that you couldn't make an actor out of clay, to which Groucho later commented, "Nor a director out of wood." So maybe he was responsible for the clunkiest bits?

 

What's in the book and not in the movie is a bunch of third person omniscient narration that covers broad historical ground, but it's just Margaret Mitchell rewriting history to perpetrate the Lost Cause's narrative, and the readers of the 1930s ate it up like catnip. A lot of it has to do with the North using the "stupid" Negro vote to control the South. Black people are often described as monkeys. It's just generally upsetting throughout. I wish I could make a better argument but I don't know how to find the worst offending passages, they tended to be straight up historical lies. It made me so mad reading it I wanted to burn Margaret Mitchell's vision of the Old South to the ground. Also the book was so addictive I couldn't put it down. Both things are true.

Also yes the film is very all over the place for the reasons listed.

 

Murder, My Sweet. This is like the millionth Chandler adaptation I’ve seen, but it’s one of the best. Edward Dmytryk’s film nails Chandler’s sensibility, and the snappy patter lands coming from Dick Powell, an aging song-and-dance star desperate to transition to serious roles. Powell is a great Marlowe, and the film is sharp, witty, and atmospheric, just like Chandler. A spot-on adaptation.

 

'Darkest Hour'

It is an entertaining but not particularly endearing costume drama. I rewatched it because I finished 'The Crown' and still need an extra anglophile kick. Oldman is good as Churchill but I think we can all agree that this was one of the more blatant cases of the Academy awarding an actor for their past work. The film is a canonization effort. Churchill really is one of those figures that could use a more nuanced bio pic. He certainly had his share of unsavory aspects.

The prosthetics are great and deserve attention. Turning Oldman into Churchill was no easy feat. The face moves and looks real. There have been some horrible make-up effects in recent years. You could very well have seen Churchill look like a plastic skinned stroke victim like DiCaprio in 'J Edgar'

 

Don't Worry, He won't Go Far on Foot (2018)
An Amazon Prime Original. This is the true life story of John Callahan; whom as an alcoholic was the victim of a devastating accident, becoming a paraplegic. He discovers therapy in drawing satirical cartoons which gained him national fame. Joaquin Phoenix stars, along with Jonah Hill as his AA sponsor, Jack Black as his drinking buddy, and Rooney Mara as Callahan's girlfriend. All of the actors do a fine job in their roles. It's a movie with a very serious tone but has its share of humor to lighten the overall mood.

 

Well, Rhett obviously treats Melly with respect. And she's the one who calms him down after Bonnie Blue dies.
I can watch the movie and appreciate both its place in cinematic history and the filmmaking skill (though Prissy gets on my nerves a lot more than Scarlett does), but I can understand your point of view.
Unfortunately, I can't find the full version of Carol Burnett's "Went with the Wind" parody online. Very funny spoof.

 

For a great example of Powell integrating both his earlier musical-comedy persona and the tougher Marlowe, check out his "Richard Diamond" OTR series. Great stuff.

 

Not movie length but it is airing on the Sky Movie Christmas channel - Bah Humduck! A Loony Tunes Christmas. It came out in 2006 but I don't think I've seen it before. It's the Loony Tunes take on A Christmas Carol. Set in the current day it has Daffy Duck as the Scrooge character. Not bad so far - worth catching if you're a LT fan and haven't seen it.

 

The Invisible Man 2019.
Interesting take on the classic story. Some real scares early on. A slow burn type of tension, and Elizabeth Moss is terrific as always. Gets a bit silly towards the end and leans more into sci fi than horror. The horror worked better for me. Still a very well made film.