Film/Text/Culture Autoblog -Summer 07

Just about the first thing I notice when watching a movie is its soundtrack. For me, I believe that the difference between a good movie and a great movie is its soundtrack. I think that a great soundtrack can be listened to and enjoyed on its own as well as an aid in telling the story. In my opinion some of the best movie soundtracks are, “Last of the Mohicans”, “Pirates of the Caribbean”, “Glory”, and anything John Williams touches. While I’m not prepared to add “Yojimbo” to my favorites list, I can’t seem to get it off my mind. While perhaps the Yojimbo soundtrack is not one I would listen to on my ipod, I do believe it was a very engaging and effective way to enhance the story of Yojimbo.
Moving on…while reading other blogs, I noticed I am not the only […]

Original post by kcannon

It is interesting to think of A Fistful of Dollars as a great departure from the early westerns and as the beginning of the modern day action-hero. The hard-boiled style was never found before Leone’s film. The film does not disguise the fact that it takes its plot from kurosawa’s Yojimbo, but it does vary in style. The character in the A Fisful of Dollars that makes the greatest difference between the two for me is the music and the sound effects. Leone is known to be very picky with his effects and his partnership with Morricone gave us what some, including Quentin Tarantino, consider to be the greatest movie ever made in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Leone is still relatively new to directing in A Fistful of Dollars, and you can see a definite growth in confidence from A Fistful of Dollars […]

Original post by onda

Alright, I’m promising myself this is the last video clip I’ll post. It’s just that when we were talking about the similarities between the arm-chopping scenes in Yojimbo and Star Wars, this clip is the first thing that popped into my head. It’s too funny not to post.
Seriously. Watch it.

For those who found it funny, there’s a whole slew of other ones like it here.

Original post by crain2mn

As I watched Yojimbo the other day, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen its style of humor somewhere before. It wasn’t until I was driving home after class that it hit me: it’s the exact same style of humor as is in the movie Army of Darkness.
What’s interesting about this style of humor is that it is more than just scene after scene of severed limbs and pools of blood. Like most films, they both feature a core-group of characters that the viewer is supposed to care about. Were this not the case, there would be no one (save perhaps the protagonist) with whom the audience could really connect.
In both films, the ability to elicit a humorous response from the violence hinges on the director’s ability to convince the audience that those being killed are utterly devoid of value.
In Yojimbo this is accomplished by depicting […]

Original post by crain2mn

After today’s class I naturally ran back home and checked out IMDB for some references of film noir. I never really got anything too good, but then I got to thinking of current pop culture references to 50’s-detective-sherlock-holmesy type icons (whew!) and came to a sort of obvious conclusion:
Dr. Gregory House from House, MD.
Ok, before everyone logs away from this page hear me out:
He solves cases (ok…, medical ones), he has a crutch of a gimp leg (and a general sour demeanor because of it), and actually… the character is (according to creator David Shore) based off of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, in turn, was actually (according to author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) based on a doctor he knew while studying medicine, a Dr. Bell, whose specialty was diagnosis, similar to Houses’. Couldn’t help but post that fun trivia, sorry if that made everyones head spin.
Anyway, here is short video (about […]

Original post by elizabethomas

Watching “Yojimbo” for the first time gave me the chance to witness, in my opinion, one of the finest actors of any generation; and for that I am grateful.  This class forces us to strip down films, and analyze parts of it that wouldn’t normally be obvious to the average film buff.  I have to say, that it was very difficult to do so for me, simply because I sat fixated on the acting of Toshiro Mifune.  It’s funny how more often than not we are so inclined to dub a performance a “great acting performance.”  However, after seeing Mifune’s portrayal of Sanjuro, other performances, which I once thought “great” seem average in comparison.    A simple facial expression by Mifune can convey so much emotion…(or a lack of emotion for that matter).  I think that when Dr. Campbell said that by watching a movie without the sound, you can notice so much […]

Original post by ellie

Alright then, so I said I have more to say about The Glass Key. And I do, but, I forgot it. Maybe it’ll come back to me? Probably not, but I’ll leave the possibility open. For now I want to talk about Yojimbo.
I found the movie to be very interesting. I wanted to first talk about the opening shot with the mountains. Before we went back over it in class, I did notice how Sanjuro seemed to be as big, if not bigger, than the mountains during my first viewing. The things that were uncovered with a further look, though, brought so much more meaning to that shot. The same with the town shot, how the buildings were almost looming over him when he entered it. It got me thinking.
[…]

Original post by malbrooks

I had a really cool moment in class today during our discussion of where Dashiell Hammett (if I spelled that wrong, a thousand apologies) fits in on the scale of literary modernism, the two ends being Virginia Woolf’s theory that literature should be a window into the conscious mind and Joseph Conrad’s idea that it should be “something something justice to the visible world.” The consensus was that our present author definitely fits more on the Conradian side of the equation, due to his almost obsessive preoccupation with not letting us into the minds of his characters and even going so far as to create a kind of unreliable narrator situation where we weren’t even sure if the surface information we were getting was right. Talk about confusing. I, of course, loved this. Even though pretty much every English teacher I’ve ever had persists in telling me that authorial intent […]

Original post by anniek

Here are some memes I found online. Enjoy.

Original post by anniek