As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
From my youngest days I have always had a fascination for the technical aspects of making movies. I first was wowed by the directors of Hawaii Five O in the original series when I saw them taking shots in rearview mirrors or Dan O, looking through the hole in a windshield of a car wreck.
That creativity appealed to me. I have never been a Hitchcock black and white nuance girl, nor the weird angled camera shots on Star Trek the original. What I appreciate is a director being able to express creatively a story in making it more than one dimensional.
I never had money, nor did we have access to all the noted movies of old. In fact, I find most Oscar or artsy shit, just that, so fucked up in the brain that only a weirdo would be wowed over it. So it has taken me all of my life to come across some noted movies which I never had the opportunity to study. One such venue was from Korea, in I splurged and obtained The Seven Samarai from Director Akira Kirasowa.
I knew his work was the base for The Magnifient Seven which I had seen and honestly was not that impressed. But that is all I knew of it and in just watching it for the first time, I was stunned.
Kirosawa was making movies in Japan, and this movie is ranked by the experts as one of thee best films ever. I do not know the list, but in my judgment in the films I have watched in the hundreds, this is the best film I have ever seen. This is a Magnus Opus, it is an epic, it has an intermission, it is like 3 1/2 hours long, but the difference is unlike that horrid Peter Jackson and that Lord of the Rings torture, this 3 1/2 hours is not wasted, it all is interwoven to the story, a human story. This is to film what the Magnus Opus of Led Zepplin is in Stairway to Heaven. The closest film I have ever viewed was Mel Gibson's Passion in being too long, but a continuous work of creative art, telling a most personal story.
John Wayne's Magnus Opus from Batjac was Big Jake, another ranging story of depth. Lee Marvin in the Dirty Dozen excelled in that woven masterpiece. What Kirasowa accomplished this in film shut downs and crafting a story like this is............to put it bluntly, the shit that Americans turned out in Hollywood adapting this Kirasowa work was costume jewelry, compared to the crown jewels of The Seven Samarai.
In watching the Magnificient Seven, it was chopped up, posing and explained nothing of what the original movie was. Where Yul Brenner is poised, Tishiru Mifune is a tactical warlord.
I do not want to give away the film for those who have not seen it, but Mexican peons in the Magnifient Seven, are vermin compared to the Japanese farmers who Kirasowa historically explains. These were a brutalilzed people who were abused by government, bandits and samarai. I was prejudiced from Magnificient Seven in what these farmers should be in peons......Kirasowa though unfolds though a stunning surprise when samarai armour is found and weapons. These farmers of rice and millet when they had the opportunity, hunted down the predator warriors and killed them all when the losing samarai lost a battle. These meek bottom rung people who had to hire killers to save themselves, were in fact murderous, vengeful and unmerciful killers, dispatching justice.
Kirasowa captures this in the battle scenes which actually shocked me in how brutal they were. But this is the spirit of the Japanese people being exhibited. If you ever saw blackbirds picking the hell out of eagles or hawks on the fly, that is the exact swarm like hornets which these farmers gathered for when one of the bandits was down and they were going to kill that bastard. It was brutal, done with rakes by the women and whatever pointy object of the men, and they repeatedly hacked to death their oppressors, once the odds were in their favor.
There was absolutely none of that in the Magnifient Seven with the peons
Not wasted were the human moments in this movie. Kirasowa takes a very long time gathering his Samarai. He invests time in the farmers in telling their human story. What was a 'charming romance" in the Magnficient Seven is a tragic human event of war, fear, love, lust and desperation in the Seven Samarai.
I honestly can never watch the Magnifient Seven again after seeing how audiences were cheated as I would just be sitting there thinking, "This is a shallow remake that has no story".
I'm still stunned in taking this all in. This Kirosawa was so gifted that you never see his tricks in telling this story. There are no clever obvious shots, but instead inventive multiple cameras, and a storyline that in moving pictures which is like ocean waves in pushing you to intimate closeness of the human, the wide intimate of what his meant to the group, the wider in what this meant to the community. He makes a Big Country picture that Billy Wilder tried and was clumsy at. Kirasowa fills space with expanse and close up and he makes it all intimate to you. That is why the movie works, why it stunned me as it made me immersed in this story so I could not step back and think this is a movie, when the movie was become a part of me.
All this in subtitles, old black and white footage, nothing high tech, and a movie that was a masterpiece while the artsy Hollywood types were trying to act like they had talent in making films.
I do not have the time, but a film like this, I would have to study over and over again, to understand the gift of Kirasowa to audiences.
I sum this up in this film is a diamond of carbon surrounded by a world of film smouldering as carbon manure.
Nuff Said
agtG
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