Other Movies

I'm a little annoyed by The Last Samurai, which I only just saw. Of course it's got to be anti-war, but its anti-capitalist line really annoyed me. As Sandy Starr says,

...The Last Samurai depicts the Western fantasy of Going Native, where a white man defects to those whom he feels bad about oppressing, and assists them in their (usually doomed, but no less noble) struggle against their oppressors. The Last Samurai's underlying message is unambiguous: Boo! to the introduction of trade, industry and mechanised transport into nineteenth-century Japan; Hooray! for the rural simplicity and quaint ritual suicides of the local samurai.

Steven Vincent wrote

Using the youthful Emperor Meiji as a figurehead, [a] clique began transforming Japan’s agrarian economy into a democratic-industrial state modeled after the West. One obstacle to modernization, however, were ultra-conservative elements among the-then decadent samurai class, whose Shogunate had dominated Japan for seven centuries. In 1877, one of these warriors, Takamori Saigo, led the so-called Satsuma Rebellion against the Meiji nationalists, only to be vanquished by a peasant army equipped with modern weapons. It’s this doomed rebellion that The Last Samurai highlights and romanticizes.

There are...problems with the film. To begin with, it invites us to root for samurai reactionaries who, had their rebellion succeeded, would have stalled Japan’s modernization and led to its eventual colonization by some foreign power. Moreover, it posits the greedy capitalist Omura as the film’s antagonist—although his main transgression seems to be the funding of railroads, telephones, modern armies and other trappings of democracy. Are we supposed to believe that a band of swordsman whose highest ideal of public service is ritualistic suicide are better fit to lead a nation into the modern age?

Then we also saw Saving Face (2004), directed by Alice Wu. Although it's another gay movie, it didn't get much press, probably because it's about 80% in Chinese, which probably makes it a harder sell than the gay angle. Not bad, though the ending was a little contrived.

And also I, Robot, which I was disappointed in. It wasn't enough of an action movie to be a good action movie, and it didn't do itself any favors by jettisoning nearly all of Asimov's ideas.