Mifune in the original SEVEN SAMURAI. It was always hard to tell if my reaction
to the scene was the one Kurosawa intended to provoke in the viewer. I can imagine the audience of the time and place
taking it in as some piece of Brando-style, swarthy, blue collar insight. To me, however, it drew to mind any number of
schoolroom scenarios where somebody in class is trying embarrassingly hard to
draw attention to themselves whilst grasping at profound thoughts that are
obviously way, way beyond their understanding.
Maybe it was unintentional comedy. Maybe Kurosawa really was going for some genuine awkwardness to fit in
between the generally on-the-mark statements of the rest of the samurai. It’s open to interpretation with the original
film, but here, I’ve got to believe that the crew saw the scene exactly as I
did and opted to exaggerate it to - - dare I say - - cartoonish levels.
== TEASER ==
And frankly, that’s all more interesting. As I’ve said about villains you genuinely
hate seeing on screen, it’s hard to write characters acting stupidly in your story without your construction coming across as stupid, itself. And I’ve really been enjoying the low-key
office politics going on between these warriors. Steadfast Field Engineer Heihachi comes
across as a bit of jerk, for example, in how he teases the traitor and his
daughter about execution - - but nobody’s really going to correct him about
because it’ll harm their position with the peasants.
While we’re contrasting this with SEVEN SAMURAI and the respective
contents of each project, I have to say that the romance between
Timberlake-like novice and the peasant princess has been far better realized
here, so far. The way it was handled in
the original felt like some out-of-place bait to appeal to “teenage
interests.” It came from left
field, and felt more like they just discovered that their rookie was being an
idiot and fooling around with one of the locals. Here, it’s a much more effective romance,
with the characters actually having sharing a mutual intelligence about what
could be a genuinely nurturing relationship.
Yeah, I’ll go ahead and say it - - the part where the girl offers to
kiss his blood stains away was touching! It was a tender moment of otherwise icky intimacy;
not something grossly fetishistic like the spit swapping in MYSTERIOUS
GIRLFRIEND X.
Watch this episode, "The
Truth” here and decide for yourself, then read my comments on the previous
episode here.
Tom Pinchuk’s a writer and personality with a large number
of comics, videos and features like this to his credit. Visit his website - - tompinchuk.com - - and follow his Twitter: @tompinchuk
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