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Post by klep on Aug 17, 2015 6:35:24 GMT -6
WEEK THREE OF SAMURAI MONTH Our Movie of the Week this week is Takashi Miike's bloody 13 Assassins, about a group of samurai who band together to bring an end to the monstrous heir to the Shogunate. Unlike Kurosawa's Seven Samurai which was focused strongly on class relations, 13 Assassins is more specifically concerned with samurai honor - what is it worth and to whom is it owed? Miike seems to end up deciding that a samurai's loyalty to his master is nothing if his master is not worthy of it. I think these days most people would agree that one's greater loyalty should be to the overall good of the people rather than any one man, so my question to you is whether Miike is accurately reflecting the attitudes of the period, if he's subverting history to give modern audiences a good time, or if he has something else up his sleeve? Furthermore, what do the obvious parallels between this film and Seven Samurai mean, if anything? I also welcome discussions of the film's final battle sequence, a 40+ minute riveting massacre.
OUR NEXT MOVIE OF THE WEEK for 8/24: Harakiri, by Masaki Kobayashi (1962) LAST WEEK OF SAMURAI MONTH Ultimately I settled on Harakiri primarily because I find it less likely that we'd cover this film or this director outside of the context of Samurai Month, whereas we'll almost certainly get to Tarantino sooner or later. Harakiri is available for streaming on Hulu Plus and on Amazon Instant Video (though it is not free for Prime members).
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Post by comicalibrarian on Aug 17, 2015 8:23:51 GMT -6
I think 13 Assassins is part of a modern movement to draw attention to and question the ideals of the samurai era. I mean, there's been a degree of that for a looooong time in Japanese film, actually - if you watch something like SANSHO THE BAILIFF, you can see how Mizoguchi is trying to apply modern values to Japan's classic system of ethics, or how Fukasaku's BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY held the real history of the yakuza up to the mirror of Japanese film and storytelling's romanticized versions. It's not a question, I think, of trying to be historically accurate; it's a question of trying to combat the tendency to idealize the past and slip back into systems that allowed and even encouraged some pretty monstrous things.
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Post by klep on Aug 17, 2015 10:00:03 GMT -6
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