Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

I'm a huge fan of Mad Max and it's even-better sequel, The Road Warrior. I don't like making lists, but if I did, I just might rank The Road Warrior in my top 10. I was a little worried about the third installment, 1985's Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, since you just don't hear people say too many good things about it. I was pleasantly surprised. While I think it's the worst of the series, there's a lot of really cool stuff in it anyway, and it's still worth watching if you love Mad Max like I do.

The first act of the movie follows Max Rockatansky as he finds himself in the middle of a (literal) power struggle between Auntie Entity, the leader of Bartertown, a last ditch effort to keep some semblance of civilization in the wake of the apocalypse, and Master-Blaster, the megalomaniacal dwarf-and-giant combo who control Bartertown's electrical supply. These are the movie's best sequences.

It takes a turn for the worse as Max finds himself as a savior to a bunch of child survivors of an age-old plane crash. The kids are sort of smack in the middle between the Ewoks and the Lost Boys from Hook, and just as annoying as both. It's as if the studio said to George Miller, "Hey, people really liked the Feral Kid in Road Warrior. Do more of that."

The third act picks up a bit as it finally delivers the car chase action that Mad Max movies should deliver up front. I think that was my biggest concern with the movie for the first two thirds. Where the hell are those crazy souped-up cars? Well, you just have to wait.

It's really the inclusion of annoying kids that bugs me. And the toned down violence, but I can get past that, I guess. If they all had razor boomerangs that cut the bad guys' fingers off, maybe they'd be fine.

There's a lot to like, too. Mel Gibson is great. Bruce Spence returns as a pilot, though it's unclear if he's actually the Gyro Captain from Road Warrior. It's safe to say he probably is. Like he did with Road Warrior, George Miller shoots Thunderdome to look like a radiation-burned Akira Kurosawa movie. Max is a post-apocalyptic Yojimbo. I love how vivid and detailed the Mad Max universe is at this point. Miller has deepened and expanded it with each movie, and the amount of detail in the production design is insanely impressive. This place looks funky and lived-in. And hey, how many movies can boast Tina Turner in a weird wig? Or a dwarf who rides on a giant's back who consider themselves one unit?

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is an imaginative, watchable sequel, but it seldom reaches the heights of its predecessors. For a great down and dirty, low budget exploitation film, watch the first Mad Max. For a bigger, better, more intense, downright crazy action movie, watch The Road Warrior. Thunderdome is like the family friendly, 80's Steven Spielberg version of those movies.

The Magnificent Seven

The Magnificent Seven, in addition to being a rollicking good adventure, holds a place of importance in the landscape of world cinema. Or at least, I think it does. In 1954, with his Seven Samurai, director Akira Kurosawa redefined the samurai movie genre by infusing it with the visual style and values of a John Ford western. Six years later, in 1960, Hollywood would come full circle by remaking a Japanese Western into a Western Western.

The world of cinema was getting increasingly smaller, as international films had an increasing influence on filmmakers of the time. The directors of the French New Wave looked to Hollywood auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock for inspiration. Not long after, the next generation of Hollywood directors, (Coppola, Malick, Scorsese, Lucas, etc.) would look to Kurosawa and the French New Wave. Nowadays, directors draw their influences from around the world and throughout the last century.

Directed by John Sturges, The Magnificent Seven follows the structure of Seven Samurai fairly closely, though in a faster paced, more truncated way. While Seven Samurai is an epic, The Magnificent Seven is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of popcorn entertainment. Sturges clearly has a lot of reverence for Kurosawa, and shows it in his work, with many direct nods or homages to his source material throughout the movie.

The seven in question are led by Yul Brynner, probably cast just as much for his bald head as for his screen presence (the character in the Japanese version shaves his head). He is recruited by a farming village in Mexico to form a posse to help rid them of an army of 40 bandits bent on stealing their crops. Rounding out the posse are such icons of manliness as Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson (the youngest I've ever seen him, still looks 70), and James Coburn.

The movie doesn't try to mimic Seven Samurai entirely. The seven don't all have the same motivations and personalities as their counterparts, for example. Also, the bandits are given more of a presence; rather than just being faceless bad guys, they are led by Eli Wallach.

Two of the samurai are sort of collapsed into one, in the case of Chico, played by Horst Buchholz. He takes both the role of the eager, hotheaded drifter who shoehorns his way into the group, and the young, naive kid learning the ropes who finds love with a peasant girl. I didn't really care for this. Buchholz would have worked fine as the kid, but he wasn't fit to fill the shoes of the great Toshiro Mifune, in what was possibly his most memorable and iconic role. They should have looked at that character as just as important a role as the Yul Brynner character, and found an appropriate actor.

The Magnificent Seven is as enjoyable as a streamlined remake of a longer, better foreign film can be. It's fun to watch so many superstars sharing the screen together. The score by Elmer Bernstein is tremendous and memorable, and is still referenced in Western movie scores. Also, I was glad to hear that Akira Kurosawa was a fan of the movie.

High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku)

Every once in a great while, one has that feeling while watching a movie that they are watching one of the best movies they have ever seen. It's a thrill, and naturally, the older I get and the more movies I see, the less frequently I experience this rush. But as luck would have it, there are still a whole bunch of Akira Kurosawa movies out there that I have yet to watch.

High and Low, my eighth Kurosawa film, and the first I've seen set in the present day (1963, that is), is many different films at once. A kidnap thriller, a police procedural, a morality tale, and an examination of class disparity, and it's all filled with the same compassion and humanity that Akira Kurosawa brought to everything he made.

The story opens with Gondo (the legendary Toshiro Mifune), an executive for a shoe company, who is poised to take over the company and oust the other men on the board, who want to make cheaper shoes and charge more money for them. After a meeting with these men goes sour, he gets a telephone call, where an unknown voice tells him that his son has been kidnapped and demands a ransom of 30 million Yen. It quickly becomes apparent that it was not his son that was kidnapped, but rather the son of his chauffeur. The kidnapper tells Gondo that he must pay the ransom anyway, and Gondo must now come to the decision: must he give up his entire fortune for another man's son?

The first hour of the movie is almost like a play, the drama rarely leaving Gondo's home. What is truly amazing about this first hour is the way it's shot. Kurosawa uses long takes, sometimes 5 minutes or more, each shot carefully composed to maximize the emotional impact of what the characters are going through. He shows a mastery of spacial dynamics between the characters, often making social statements just with where they are positioned compared to each other in the frame.

Then, an hour into the movie, it makes an abrupt and complete change. The action leaves Gondo's home, and the focus shifts almost completely away from Gondo, over to Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai, the star of Kagemusha), the man tasked with hunting down and arresting the kidnapper. He and his team are good detectives, and what follows is a fascinating police procedural, as we watch them solve the mystery.

Amidst all this is a very large social statement. We learn that Gondo's large, air conditioned (a luxury at the time) home is located high atop a hill over the city of Yokohama, seemingly arrogantly looking down on the poor people below, sweating and suffering during a summer heatwave. There is a sense of local resentment toward Gondo and his place in society. Eventually, we follow the detectives and the kidnapper (played brilliantly and almost silently by Tsutomu Yamazaki) into the lowest place in the city, where heroin addicts lay in the gutter and writhe in agony.

I could go on and on how incredible High and Low is, but then you wouldn't really have any reason to watch it yourself. Kurosawa is, in my estimation, the greatest filmmaker who ever lived, and this is right up there with Seven Samurai and Rashomon as one of his greatest achievements. And those are just among the ones I've seen!

Kagemusha

This review is nine months in the making. I bought Kagemusha on Blu Ray in February. It took a long time to find three hours to watch it, but we finally got around to it in May. But then, every attempt to watch it was thwarted by my PS3. And now, in late November, after replacing my Blu Ray, getting my Playstation repaired, and buying a brand new damn Blu Ray player, I bring you, with great relief, my review of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

Kagemusha is a sprawling samurai epic, set in the 1500s, following the Takeda clan, led by the feared and respected warlord Shingen. The film opens with a long, uninterrupted shot of what appears to be three Shingens having a conversation. In actuality, one is Shingen, one is his nearly-but-not-quite identical brother, Nobukado, who acts as his decoy (or Kagemusha). The third is a lowly bandit that Nobukado has discovered and saved from execution because of his uncanny resemblance to Shingen. He believes that this bandit could serve as Kagemusha better than he can.

His belief is soon put to the test, when Takeda Shingen is shot by a sniper and dies. If their enemies were to find out Shingen is dead, the clan would be done for, so the Kagemusha is made to replace Shingen. He must fool Shingen's clan, his family, and his enemies. Inspired by the kindness Shingen showed him, the double soon begins to carry on the ruse by choice, out of loyalty to the clan.

The legendary Tatsuya Nakadai plays the dual role of Shingen and his decoy. You may remember him as the gun-wielding gangster in Yojimbo, or maybe as the cold hearted protagonist/villain in Sword of Doom. He couldn't be more different in his roles here. Shingen is a smaller role, but must cast a huge shadow on the rest of the film. The decoy, stripped of any identity before the start of the movie, is never given a name. Where Shingen is regal and stoic, the decoy is crude and low born. It's kind of a The Prince and the Pauper situation.

Kagemusha is actually pretty delightful for the first couple of hours, before taking a dark turn, culminating in the true historical event of the Battle of Nagashino. Watching the decoy having to learn how to be another man, winning the love of Shingen's grandson, charming Shingen's mistresses, and ultimately earning the loyalty of Shingen's clan was really enjoyable and quite funny at times. The double is surrounded by many characters, and though they are not as colorful as those in Seven Samurai or some of Kurosawa's other early masterpieces, they are still interesting.

The pacing is slow and deliberate. There are many scenes played out in a long sustained single shot. Kurosawa also puts a heavy focus on the nonverbal interplay between his characters. It amazed me that sometimes he'd have like 10 different characters in a shot and you could just look at all of their faces and body language and feel like you could read them all. Pretty complex stuff.

Visually, Kagemusha is gorgeous and rich with detail. This is the first color Kurosawa film I've seen. I could tell from his earlier work that he composed every one of his shots like a painter would a painting. It turns out he paints them like a painting too. The colors are so vivid in Kagemusha, the reds and greens just leap off the screen.

I'm not sure if I would recommend Kagemusha to just anyone, however. It's probably not so much for the uninitiated. If somebody I knew hadn't seen any Kurosawa films, I'd certainly point them towards Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo, etc. and if they were still coming back for more, then I would show them the less accessible Kagemusha. Still, it's another great film from possibly the greatest director.