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Legends
of the East
By Ann Morrow
The
Last Samurai
Directed
by Edward Zwick
In the first of several aston-ishingly stirring battles in
Edward Zwick’s cross-cultural epic, The Last Samurai,
Capt. Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) fights like a man possessed,
plunging into the thick of combat again and again as though
he were exorcising demons—or more likely, trying to get himself
killed. A sharpshooter Army veteran, Algren hardly seems aware
that he’s in Japan and not the American West, where his soul
was scarred by his participation in the massacres of the Cheyenne.
Encircled by the enemy—rebellious samurai swordsmen who are
winning a decisive victory over his troops—Algren summons
the last of his strength and kills a great warrior, earning
himself the privilege of being taken alive. And thus begins
his spiritual healing.
Written with a solid grasp of history (from a story by Gladiator’s
John Logan), and directed by Zwick with genuine, if overblown,
passion, The Last Samurai is a rapturous and intelligent
melodrama about honor and redemption, or more specifically,
about what is, and what isn’t, worth killing and dying for.
And because the story is very much under the Zwick imprimatur
(Glory, Legends of the Fall), there is a
lot of killing and dying. Yet it’s mostly justified: The
film is set in 1876, and feudal Japan is roiling under the
pressures to modernize. The American barbarians are literally
at the gate, militarily pressing for advantageous trade agreements.
When we first see Algren, he is drunk, and barely disguising
his disgust at having become a medicine-show pitchman for
Winchester rifles. Algren is recruited by a Japanese emissary,
Omura (the wonderfully oily Matsato Harada), to help train
the new Japanese army in the use of modern weaponry. Algren’s
conscripts are mostly bewildered peasants, who are expected,
with the help of rifles and howitzers, to defeat the samurai,
a noble caste of warriors who are fighting to uphold the “old
ways,” an ancient code of ethics known as Bushido.
Algren is captured by Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe), the charismatic
and courageous samurai leader, who takes him to his remote
mountain retreat to wait out the winter. Like Algren, Katsumoto
is a student of warfare, and wants to know his enemy, all
the better to defeat him. But as Algren heals from his wounds,
both physical and psychic, the two men become comrades, and
Algren finds in the discipline and honor of Bushido a way
to reconcile his career as a warrior—there is never any waffling
on his true calling—with a just cause. The samurai fight only
with swords and bows and arrows, which makes their desire
to overturn the Japanese army and liberate the ambivalent
young emperor more of a noble quest than a military maneuver.
The country’s rush to Westernization is embodied by the urbane
and ruthless Omura, who rules by unofficial proxy. It is to
the screenwriters’ credit that the villain has a cause, too:
The country must be unified to resist annexation by a Western
power.
By spring, Algren has been converted to the samurai cause,
and in an unsubtle but rousing bringing together of East and
West, he rides out to meet Omura’s forces under Katsumoto’s
banner. Zwick’s unabashedly macho, sweepingly romantic treatment
of an historical impasse is carried along on a rapturous tide
of gorgeous production values. The cherry blossoms (those
eternal representations of Japanese culture) alone appear
worth spilling blood over. And the mythic costuming plays
up the samurais’ dreamlike adherence to ancient ritual. Cruise
immerses himself in this role with an abandon he hasn’t shown
in many of his movies. After the opening sequence, in which
he relies on his hammiest mannerisms to play drunk, something
clicks: Famously disciplined in his personal life, Cruise
takes to the Bushido regimen with a stern naturalism. And
his movie-star wattage is matched frame for frame by the classically
handsome and commanding Watanabe.
The climactic battle between the old ways and the new is a
shamelessly thrilling demonstration not just of courage under
fire, but also of the Bushido tenet “to know life in every
breath.” (Easy to do when each breath is likely to be your
last.) The outnumbered but marvelously skillful samurai meet
their fate with visual poetry, falling from their horses,
or falling with their horses, with ferocious grace. Though
this balletic style is borrowed from Akira Kurosawa, cinematographer
John Toll deserves no less credit for his flawlessly focused
choreography. Death in battle is glorified for both East and
West, but it is, clearly, no less violent or final for being
so. In fact, the film’s rigorous physicality manages to carry
it over Zwick’s grandiose tendencies (only slightly reined
in from the weepy machismo of Legends of the Fall),
while the mechanical and soulless slaughter of the army’s
gleaming new Gatling guns strike a truly horrific chord.
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She
must be an angel: Alba in Honey.
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Heaven
Help Us
Honey
Directed
by Bille Woodruff
Honey
packs enough clichés into its slight 90-plus minutes for a
film twice its length. This proves oddly effective, however:
The film is so divorced from reality, and moves with such
lightning speed, that nothing is ever dwelled on long enough
to become annoying.
Honey Daniels (an impossibly cheerful Jessica Alba) is the
nicest, kindest person in the history of the Bronx. Maybe
even the entire world. When someone drops their bankroll on
the street in front of her, she returns it. A part-time bartender,
she buys drinks for customers. She’s a diligent store employee,
too, wearing the required dorky uniform without complaint.
She has a cute dog. Honey’s dream, however, is to dance professionally
in music videos. A fabulous hiphop dancer, she’s not even
obnoxious about it when she steals all attention from her
no-talent club rivals. In what’s left of her spare time, she
teaches dance to the kids at the after-school center run by
her mother (Lonette McKee); she even finds a sliver of a moment
to fall for the neighborhood barber, Chaz (Mekhi Phifer).
She’s discovered by slimy video director Michael Ellis (David
Moscow), who, in a matter of weeks, puts her talents to work
for the likes of Jadakiss and Tweet. (The music video scenes
are among the best in the film—along with all the other dance
numbers.) Simultaneously, Honey takes an interest in two troubled-but-cute
kids, brothers Benny (Lil’ Romeo) and Raymond (Zachary Isaiah
Williams).
From these two plot threads, the filmmakers wind a tangled
skein of classic clichés: Busy with hiphop superstars all
the time, Honey neglects both her friends and the kids; left
to their own devices, the kids start hanging with thugs; and
the roof literally falls in on her mom’s center. As soon as
Honey puts a down payment on another building for a new center,
the slimy director gives her an ultimatum: Sleep with me or
your career is over. What’s a girl to do?
The virtuous thing, of course, because Honey is more than
just nice or kind. She’s perfect. She never changes—like an
angel, Honey has a divine effect on everyone. Her kids forsake
thug life to put on a show to save the center, and Missy Elliott
serves as a last minute deus ex machina to save her career.
It’s really a wonder she isn’t taken up to heaven in the final
scene.
—Shawn
Stone
Friendly
Ghost Movie
The
Haunted Mansion
Directed
by Rob Minkoff
OK, I’m not going to dwell on what’s become of Eddie Murphy’s
career. So what if the guy who was once touted as the soul
renaissance of the glory days of SNL is now doing kiddie
movies? Have you checked out his fellow SNL alums?
Drug addicts, suicides, Master of Disguise. . . . Besides,
I submit that there’s a need for the post-Fred MacMurray-type
family film, as time killers for crappy-weather weekends and
all.
The
Haunted Mansion is by no means a family classic. This
is not one of those movies you watch thinking, “I’ve got to
get this on our list of must-buys for the family archives.”
Slick realtor Jim Evers (Murphy) can’t resist a deal, to the
point that wife Sara (Marsha Thomason) is fed up. What’s the
point of having the kids and a nice income if you can’t enjoy
them? So she convinces Jim to forego business one weekend,
that is, just after they take care of one last listing—the
title entity, to be exact.
Turns out, of course, that the house is haunted, and that
the ghost in charge has a jones for Mrs. Evers, and it’s up
to Jim and the kids—who heretofore haven’t been too keen on
his limited attempts at parenting—to save the family. It’s
mild stuff, to be sure, but the effects are really neat, and
Murphy, when he’s playing from character, can be really fun.
Then again, the script requires him mostly to react to situations,
which is a huge downfall. It sounds trite, but this is one
of those movies that you won’t regret having seen but doesn’t
rev you up in any way, shape or form. The kids will have a
mildly exciting time, and depending on your schedule (and
the weather), this could have its benefits.
—Laura
Leon
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