Film reviews

07 June 2006

Cruising Samurai The Last SamuraiThe Last Samurai dir. Edward Zwick. Is it enough to say that The Last Samurai is everything that cinema shouldn’t be? That the filmmaker’s vision of ‘the way of the Samurai’ makes The Karate Kid look like a masterpiece of classical Buddhist philosophy? That visually it offers little more than a series of computer-generated, statistically-averaged, test-screened and exit-polled post-cards? (‘Look, a traditional Japanese village! Look, a noble Samurai! Look, a despicable cowardly businessman! Look, a clash between good traditional Japanese indigenous culture and bad modernising Western influences!) That it relies on the most hackneyed and clumsy expository devices to tell the audience the story that its manufactured images are unable to carry? That we don’t just hear extracts from the central character’s diary explaining what is going on, but we have to see him writing in it at the same time, in case it all gets too confusing? That it manages to be a perfect Orientalist text (in Edward Said’s sense of the term), all the while pretending to criticise the inimical influence of Western culture on traditional Japanese values? That it’s a remake of Dances With Wolves set in Japan? That every word, image, movement, every hair on Tom Cruise’s head is calculated within an inch of its life, so that not a single moment of spontaneity emerges to surprise the audience (or wake them up)? That Cruise does not act so much as strike a series of tableaux—bitter Tom, noble Tom, drunkard Tom, heroic Tom, culturally sensitive Tom—as if to announce to the audience by semaphore, ‘Tom Cruise is acting’? (No need for the marketing people to produce a Tom Cruise action figure—he already is his own action figure, with all the expressive range and subtlety of a fully poseable GI Joe). No, the one thing you really need to know to understand what this film is like is that its title really does refer to Tom Cruise’s character. Allan James Thomas One that got away Big Fish dir. Tim Burton. I want to love Tim Burton’s films. They have such promise. Mad desires, strange un-doings, trembling visuals, but, when will I actually love one? Patiently I wait, figuring there must be one gurgling away in Burton’s gut that will win me over. I thought Big Fish might be it! Sadly, my vigil continues. There is no nut-shell plot for this film, at least not one worth retelling. It meanders around

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